The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank that authorizes charters in Ohio, sponsored an evaluation of charters in that state by CREDO of Stanford. CREDO is led by Margaret (Macke) Raymond and has completed many charter evaluations. Critics gripe that CREDO is funded by the charter-loving Walton Family Foundation and that Raymond is the wife of conservative economist Eric Hanushek, but it has nonetheless gained a reputation for balance and nonpartisan judgment.
Stephen Dyer here reviews the findings of the latest CREDO study of Ohio charters. There are good charters and bad charters, but on the whole, the findings are negative for students in charters. Over 40% of charters are doing very poorly. The students in these schools fall farther behind every year.
“Overall, kids in charters lose 36 days of math and 14 days of reading to their traditional public school counterparts. Of the 68 statistically significant differences CREDO found between charters and public schools, 56 showed a negative charter school impact, and 12 showed a positive one.”
Dyer points out that the state spends more than $900 million a year for these disappointing results. This money is taken away from community public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Overall, kids in charters lose 36 days of math and 14 days of reading to their traditional public school counterparts.”
Ugh. Using bad formulations isn’t any more palatable when public school advocates do it than when charterites do it. Can anyone tell me what a “day of math” or “day of reading” looks like? It’s all based on test scores again, and these test scores are somehow magically broken down into “days of instruction”. But that assumes that education is the filling of a student’s head with information/skills, that we can know what information/skills every single kid should have and that we can measure just how full every single student’s head is with the requisite knowledge/skills. Just ugh!
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36 Days of Math, 14 Days of Reading, 12 Days of Our Lives, 10 Days of Thunder, 8 Days a Week, 1 Day of the Dead.
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F,
Now that was funny!
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Don’t forget Groundhog Day…
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And pi day.
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…and a partridge in a pear treeeeeeee…
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I’ll take it. The ed-deformers came in on accountability edumetrics, & theyll go out that way, hoisted by their own petard.
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Even with all the squishy [I am being polite] data furnished by charters, handled with kid gloves by those disinclined to accentuate the negatives of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement, portrayed in a study paid for by a charter member of the rheephorm establishment, you get the following from the linked piece:
[start quote]
• “… the better the student at the start of the year, the worse they are served in charter schools compared to what they would have learned” in a traditional public school.
• “… recent efforts across Ohio to improve the quality of charter school performance are only dimly discernible in the analysis. Overall performance trends are marginally positive, but the gains that Ohio charter school students receive even in the most recent periods studied still lag the progress of their (Traditional Public School) peers. More work is needed to ensure that charter schools are serving their students well.”
• “Despite exemplars of strong results, over 40 percent of Ohio charter schools are in urgent need of improvement: they both post smaller student academic gains each year and their overall achievement levels are below the average for the state. If their current performance is permitted to continue, the students enrolled in these schools will fall even further behind over time. The long-term prospects for their students dim with every year they remain in these schools.”
[end quote]
So even by their own very narrow metrics we don’t have to wait ten years [thank you, Bill Gates!] to know that—
[start quote]
Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. This report is concerned with only one of the many causes and dimensions of the problem, but it is the one that undergirds American prosperity, security, and civility. …[T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. …
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. … We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.
😱
[end quote]
(emoticon mine)
Link: https://www2.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html
A NATION AT RISK. 1983. Who knew the authors could so presciently predict the effects of charters and vouchers and privatization?
😏
“A caricature is putting the face of a joke on the body of a truth.” [Joseph Conrad]
😎
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This just illustrates that even by their own squishy standard they fall short so they should just shut up. I share your disgust, Krazy, I too can find no definition for their meaningless terms. Some things just can not be quantified, the rheeformers do not understand that.
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> “Overall, kids in charters lose 36 days of math and 14 days of reading to their traditional public school counterparts. Of the 68 statistically significant differences CREDO found between charters and public schools, 56 showed a negative charter school impact, and 12 showed a positive one.”
Well explains why charters are providing disservice to students.
Should this be in PARCC math question? I wonder what kind of people are suggesting otherwise.
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P- Poor ROI. Something the Waltons and other corporate guys can identify with. Now, when can (we) public school teachers teach the reformers about schools, how to run one and what the really best, best, practices are, etc.?
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Unless ed reform in Ohio was exclusively sold as “creating a charter system” then ed reformers actually have a much higher bar to meet. They sold this as “improving public education” and it’s state policy. It applies to both public schools and charter schools. That means the promise was not just “create charter schools” but also “improve public schools”.
Because they’ve lowered the bar to “creating a charter system” and then use public schools solely as a basis of comparison and completely ignore the effect on public schools doesn’t mean the public has to adopt their new lower goal.
This is state public policy. It isn’t the Fordham Institute agenda (supposedly). The state actors have a duty to improve public schools. That’s what they sold to the public. The question isn’t whether charter schools are better than public schools. The question is how does ed reform improve public education in this state, because every school in the state is subject to ed reform.
I know I can’t expect a private “choice” organization like Fordham to fund a study on whether ed reform is in fact improving Ohio’s public schools, but I do think I can expect the state people I’m paying to justify how this particular approach they’ve all adopted is benefiting students in existing public schools.
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This charter-focused analysis isn’t good enough:
“students in small towns lose almost an entire academic year of learning in a charter, for example”
The “small towns” had a public school when this experiment was launched. What’s the net effect for ALL students in the small town charter experiment, charter AND public? Better, the same, or worse for the students in the public school?
To me, it’s either a measure of how little ed reform leaders value public schools that this isn’t even discussed or an indication that they’re making some crazy assumption that public school systems remain the same when you open a whole new system alongside them. They don’t. At what point do they plan on looking at that? Does it matter at all to them?
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Don’t confuse me with facts, my mind is already made up. That charters fare no better than public schools has been documented for a very long time – even considering test scores which they are supposed to improve.
When money is involved, facts which do not support the money making schemes are inconsequential to those who make money by pushing their strategies.
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I think all the states are different though. In my personal opinion, there’s a lot of skepticism among the public in Ohio because no one has addressed the transparency/governance issues.
They’re still not addressing it. The state department of education basically jumped in front of the legislature to head off regulation 6 months ago. They promised to start regulating at the agency level, but they don’t have the statutory tools to regulate. They can’t do it effectively. The statute wasn’t written to give them sufficient oversight or authority. That was deliberate.
I don’t think schools can be regulated solely at the state level anyway. There are too many of them. There’s a reason schools were regulated locally, by the district and county or city. It makes sense and it works better.
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I meditate each morning and afterward I usually have the need to write. It is weird how that works, but anyway this is from this morning Tuesday 12-9-14.
VERY ROUGH DRAFT JUST QUICKLY TYPED
Dear Governor Cuomo and fellow like-minded minions,
Your hyperbolic statement of public schools being the last monopoly is incorrect. A better analogy is that you and others like you who are making demands of teachers teaching children in public education is analogous to a slave owner demanding his slaves pick more cotton faster than is humanly possible or face punishment for no wrong doing of their own but rather inhumane demands and treatment. The technology of the cotton gin didn’t reduce slavery as it was hoped by the inventor but rather ramped up the desire for profits…more slaves and increased the level of inhumane demands and treatment for greed of excessive profit. This profit in no way benefitted the enslaved population.
We the Citizens of the United States who teach children in the public school system are not some outsourced industry to some newly industrialized nation where the citizen workers are being exploited because the workforce is abundant and workers are easily replaced once any exploited worker is injured or dies trying to keep up the inhumane pace.
Yes there is a breakdown in the system…we realize this as the teachers of children. This is after all the GREAT EXPERIMENT WE CALL THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. We the Amazing citizens of the Amazing United States. Today’s educational system isn’t about educating faster and cheaper like exploited labor sewing in a sweatshop. This is about educating human children better not faster and cheaper. Time has come to reallocate resources for new models of public education that values the human capital of teachers who pay to educate themselves as instructed by the rule book with Master’s degrees and seeking continual opportunities to learn, grow, and improve as educators.
We started out with a public education model to educate all in the 1800’s, and now we want that to evolve into a 21st educational model that isn’t about cheaper and faster, and that lays waste to those students who need more and deserve more. From the accelerated student to the challenged student, to the accelerated student with their own learning needs and all in between all students deserve more than the system is allowing these children, yet expecting the same accomplishment from all of these children.
They don’t all begin with the same physical needs, emotional needs, and educational needs.
The system created by No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top has attempted to create a future workforce that feels it is not enough as a human and deserves less as a person, worker and so he, she, they, don’t ask or expect protections in the workplace and society as a consumer. That is who you Governor Cuomo and others like you are training and what you are training into existence with the laws you have adopted.
We are the citizens of the Amazing United States of America, our children are citizens and they deserve smaller class sizes, appropriate models of comparison to the schools that people pay $40,000 dollars a year or more to send their children to as examples of the best ways to educate children. Is my tuition waiver to a charter school going to cover the cost of $40,000? But your child will get that education and you want to make mine cheaper now by paying the human capital less. (We do most of the living, breathing, buying and dying that make the economy move.) And if for some reason this is counter than yes by all means take more money from the top earners to change this picture.
We aren’t exploited laborers working with a piece of metal…slow down the assembly line Henry Ford…We are teachers working with children and in both cases our work deserves to be valued and justly compensated.
(Technology is used to improve the process not dehumanize the process, cheapen the process but rather enrich the process)
(If you have power and influence nothing in this process matters because you can buy your way through it with tutors or influence over the system itself)
BUT for the vast majority of us we can’t buy our way into that club of influence. We need a real education that provides real opportunity and not admittance to exclusivity. ALL CHILDREN CAN LEARN AND WANT TO LEARN AND LEARN DEEPLY, INTENSELY, PASSIONATELY, at a sophisticated level.
To those of you who think this is a poor hyperbolic analogy let us recall that THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARIES from the streets of Boston to the House of Burgesses compared their plight as colonists of England to slavery and that was for paying taxes that were less than those paid by the British in mother England.
Sam Adams was a hypocrite after the American Revolution because he condemned those participants in Shays Rebellion for doing the same things the Sons of Liberty did leading up to the American Revolution. So Governor Cuomo you have reached the point of power like the early revolutionaries and now you want to deny the pathway to others. Your ancestors and mine hailed from Italy on a boat to make something more of themselves with the opportunities in America. Some of those same ancestors like my grandfather died in WWII to preserve the opportunities for future generations to come like his daughter and grandchildren nieces and nephews. He didn’t lose his life so those who came after him would have the same struggle he had, hard work yes but not extinguishing opportunities.
All children deserve more and to learn how they learn best. Testing that screens learners for how the learner learns best to create well educated, involved, citizenry of excellence. Not some smoke and mirrors version of testing that doesn’t improve students and education but rather relegates them to the sidelines sooner much like the communist test of the COLD WAR ERA that all of us who grew up during the 70’s and 80’s were appalled by as we learned about it during history class or while listening to a biography of an athlete from the SOVIET UNION or WARAW PACT countries during the Olympics.
We teachers are creating leaders with skills to lead themselves (AS IN KNOW BE LEAD)
We teachers are creating leaders with skills to make the world, humane, effective problem solvers, and creators of a world where problems are engineered out or minimized before the creation is manifested. We are creating our world…
It isn’t about profit or perfection it is about the journey of excellence.
My words are to inspire the next leg of this journey if you are reading this what can you do to help create a manifestation of this school of excellence into existence.
Famous people are quoted to inspire us daily and one such quote is
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
Students and teachers are experiencing the antithesis of this quote when they should be trying and failing and learning and growing to bring the best into the present.
Cuomo has teachers chasing their tails like the private sector has employees running a race that sucks the life out of humans. All this exhaustion and defending to prove we are worthy of humane treatment as employees and consumers, who are trying to do our best to maintain our families and communities. Many maybe even most feel unable to put energy to protect what generations before us fought for and what our generation should be rebuilding and expanding to ever more humans, a decent way of life where we are respected along with the ideals espoused in our pledge to the flag, the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution.
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Alternative Tweet to copy and paste—-link leads back to this post
Stephen Dyer reports Public Schools in Ohio Outperform Charters
According to Stanford study 82.4% poor-job rating
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At a time when Ohio is slashing its Education budget, it is infuriating that it is also spending more than $900 Million dollars for charter schools that are clearly not performing as well as a whole as their public school counterparts. To have money leave the public schools to go to charter schools where “students are falling farther behind every year” is wrong. Reform is needed in our public schools. According to the data in this report, creating charter schools does not seem to be an effective way to do it.
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And, after Kasich and legislature have diminished the funding to public local school districts, they and the Ohio Board of Education are happy to remove the 5 of 8 rule which will no longer require districts to provide 5 of 8 of school special classes such as art, music, phys ed, nurses, and other non-academic services.
Many are standing up against the Common Core also. Kasich doesn’t seem to listen. He is running around trying to run for President. Spread the word: don’t vote for this man for anything, esp President!!!!
http://ohioansagainstcommoncore.com/video-ohio-children-ask-will-you-governor/
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