Stephen Dyer, education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio, has analyzed the latest state report cards. The state’s Governor, John Kasich, is pro-charter, pro-voucher, and pro-market forces. He is no friend to public education. The legislature is the same. They want more schools that are privately managed. As we saw in a post yesterday, Ohio has a parent trigger law, and (as I posted yesterday) the State Education Department has hired StudentsFirst (founded by Michelle Rhee) to inform parents in Columbus about their right to convert their low-performing public school to a charter or hand it over to a charter management organization. Given the statistics in this post, the odds are that the parents will turn their low-performing public school into an even lower-performing charter school, with no hope of escape.
Yet when the state report cards came out, public schools overwhelmingly received higher grades than charter schools. Dyer explains in this post that “The Ohio Report Cards are now all out, and the news is worse for Ohio’s embattled Charter Schools than it was last year. Charter Schools received more Fs than As, Bs and Cs combined. Their percentage of Fs went up from about 41% last year to nearly 44% this year.” Think of it, nearly half the charters in the state earned an F grade, yet the state wants MORE of them.
Dyer also found that the public schools in the Big 8–Ohio’s urban districts–face more challenges than charters, yet still outperform the urban charters. He writes:
In further analyzing the Ohio Report Card data released today, schools in Ohio’s Big 8 urban centers (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) scored higher on their performance index score (the closest thing Ohio has to an overall performance assessment at this point) than Charter Schools, despite having substantially higher percentages of children who were economically disadvantaged. A staggering 51% of Big 8 urban buildings have more than 95% of their students designated as economically disadvantaged (the Ohio Department of Education only says buildings have “>95.0” if their economic disadvantaged number is higher than 95%).
So, despite having more than half their buildings with, for all intents and purposes, all their kids economically disadvantaged, Ohio’s Big 8 urban buildings actually perform better, on average, than Ohio’s Charter Schools, which were originally intended to “save” children from “failing” urban buildings.
Dyer also notes that “Of the top 200 PI [Performance Index] scores, 10 are Charters, 190 are districts. Of the bottom 200 PI scores, 21 are districts and 179 are Charters.”
When Dyer looked at Value-Added Measures for districts, the public school districts still outperformed charters, showing more test score growth than charters.
The puzzle in these results is why Ohio policymakers–the Governor and the Legislature–want more charters. The answer, as we have observed again and again, is that sponsors and advocates for charters make large political contributions to elected officials. They have become a potent special interest group. This is a case where results don’t matter.
The question is, who will save poor children from failing charter schools? Or will Ohio recklessly continue to authorize more charter schools without regard to the performance of the charter sector?
I should point out here, as I have in the past, that I think school report cards with a single letter grade, is one of the stupidest public policy ideas in the “reform” bag of tricks. There is no way that a letter grade can accurately reflect the work of a complex institution or the many people in it. Think of a single child coming home from school with a report card that contained only one letter, and it gives some notion of what a simplistic idea it is to grade an entire school in this way. Nonetheless, this is the system now in use in many states (pioneered by the master of ersatz reform, Jeb Bush), so I report what the state reports.
Even with all the “creatively disruptive” math they use, massaging and torturing numbers and stats as they subject them to ever fiercer enhanced interrogations, the charterites/privatizers fail by—
Their own metrics!
It doesn’t matter to them. But they don’t share these inconvenient truths with the general public.
Here’s a painful but perhaps necessary reversal of language: should we start referring to all Ohio charters as “factories of failure”?
After all, when it’s all “for the kids” and “no excuses” are allowed, shouldn’t we expect them to ‘fess up their abject failure to meet their own standards?
“I reject that mind-set.” [Michelle Rhee]
How did I know she would say that?
😎
Forwarded this post (and some others) to candidates running for office in Ohio.Hope others do the same.
Mother Jones Sept./Oct. issue on Common Core, “…the third largest shareholder of Pearson is the government of Libya…”
Maybe now that it’s become a political issue something will happen, but frankly I doubt it.
It’s been 15 years this has been going on:
“The candidates clashed over whether Mr. Yost has been aggressive enough in going after millions spent by quasi-public charter schools that have in many cases underperformed their traditional public school brethren.
Mr. Yost cited examples of identifying criminal activity with charter schools, but again said he doesn’t have the authority to force collection of the money he’s identified is owed to the state.
“We don’t have a vote on the law,” he said. “The money and the rules (Mr. Carney) is complaining about are matters for the legislature, not for the auditor. I believe we do need some changes under the law, and I’m hopeful my colleagues in the legislature…can have a dialogue about those changes that need to happen.”
Mr. Carney, his Democratic challenger, said some of the worst-performing charter schools have received the most money.
“It’s not about figuring out how to repay campaign contributors, but that’s what it’s become here in Ohio…,” he said. “Our experience with Mr. Yost is he’s not been willing to stare down some of the same people who have made significant contributions to him.”
Yost is probably right. I don’t think he DOES have any authority to act. I don’t know who does. The legislature would have to draft a law giving someone in state government power to act, but they’re obviously not planning on doing that since many of them are taking campaign contributions from the worst actors.
http://www.toledoblade.com/Politics/2014/09/15/3-candidates-for-State-Auditor-have-debate.html
In Ohio, if you have anything to so with public ed and vote republican, you are dumber than a box of rocks. And I’m no dyed in the wool democrat.
>When Dyer looked at Value-Added Measures for districts, the public school districts still outperformed charters, showing more test score growth than charters.
It’s quite ironic for reformers and pro-charters to see they get bitten by VAMpire, eh?
It should not be surprising. This has been known for some time, the failure of the charters. Known even before this latest big push for them.
Politics vs scholarly research.
The surprise would have been if charters succeeded. Their promoters, hedge funds, are colossal productivity failures.
When they’re selling something, hide your wallet….. unless you’re a politician, then open that billfold, wide!
Calpers learned the lesson and divested of hedge funds. Meanwhile the AFL-CIO in N.J., has asked for an investigation into why financial fees on pensions, went up 300%, in the past year (today’s Truthout),
This is my favorite example of “regulation” in Ohio. It’s the form you file to close a charter school.
http://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/School-Choice/Private-Schools/Receiving-a-Charter/DeletingGradesRescindingCharter.pdf.aspx
I mean, come on. This is supposedly a public school! They don’t even have to tell anyone in the community they’re closing the place, or “deleting a grade”?
What happens to the kids who go there? They’re just shuttled off to the ‘ol reliable safety net, the public school system? How is that fair to anyone involved in this? It isn’t even fair to the charter school students. As far as I can tell, this complete and utter lack of regulation and recklessness benefits ONE group of people, the people who want to open and close charter schools, just willy-nilly, wherever.
I’m relieved they order the public school to retain the student records, at least. That was very responsible and adult of our lobbyists. I’d hate to have the whole effort and investment just disappear without a trace.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The truth we won’t hear from the corporate owned and controlled media:
“Of the top 200 PI [Performance Index] scores, 10 are Charters, 190 are districts. Of the bottom 200 PI scores, 21 are districts and 179 are Charters.”
The 1% buy expensive selective hearing aids for politicians, making them deaf to accurate information.
The part of your post that caught my eye was the last paragraph, especially the comment that it “is one of the stupidest public policy ideas”.
“I should point out here, as I have in the past, that I think school report cards with a single letter grade, is one of the stupidest public policy ideas in the “reform” bag of tricks. There is no way that a letter grade can accurately reflect the work of a complex institution or the many people in it. Think of a single child coming home from school with a report card that contained only one letter, and it gives some notion of what a simplistic idea it is to grade an entire school in this way. Nonetheless, this is the system now in use in many states (pioneered by the master of ersatz reform, Jeb Bush), so I report what the state reports.”
Sitting around recuperating from surgery, I was thinking of this simplistic misuse of data to evaluate complex institutions and endeavors like education and reflected back to the Vietnam War. Every night on the network news, another stupid public policy was used, not by reformers, but by the US government, and that was the body count to reveal on a daily basis that the US was winning the war.
I’m not sure what the final, official tally of war dead was, but if we use just this statistic to evaluate the outcome of the war, somewhere around 58,200 casualties for the US vs 1,1000,000 for North Viet Nam and the Viet Cong, the only reasonable conclusion would be that the US did in fact win the war.
Just as the body count cannot, or perhaps we should say “should not” be used to evaluate something as horrific as any tragic armed conflict, neither should an endeavor as complex as education be reduce to a single “letter grade”.
This year, because of the stupid new CC testing in Utah, it is expected that most schools in Utah will be “graded” D or F, and yet the governor still wants schools to be graded: http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/58378936-78/grades-state-tests-board.html.csp