Stephen Dyer, former legislator and current Fellow at Innovation Ohio, writes:
As you know, I’ve contended for years that if charters receive money and kids from all over the state, their overall performance should be compared with the overall performance of all Ohio school districts.
However, as an exercise, I decided to look at Ohio’s urban building performance versus that of charters. And despite the fact that Ohio’s urban buildings typically have 24% higher rates of disabled students and nearly 25% higher rates of minority students, Ohio urban buildings perform about the same as charters. And this is despite the fact that the 90 lowest performing charters aren’t included because they’ve been carved out of these comparisons by the Ohio General Assembly. http://bit.ly/2hw3fhB
In the report that is linked, he expands:
Ohio’s urban buildings perform just about the same as Ohio’s charter schools.
Here’s the issue though:
Ohio’s urban buildings typically (my short hand for median) have a 26 percent higher rate of disabled children and a 23 percent higher rate of minority children than charter schools.
A remarkable 94 percent of all major urban buildings have more than 95 percent of their students classified as economically disadvantaged. Meanwhile, 65 percent of charters fit that bill.
Yet despite these greater challenges, Ohio’s major urban buildings typically have nearly identical attendance rates, slightly less chronic absenteeism and just about equal report card performance, looking at percentages of A, B, C, D, and F grades. Charters have slightly higher percentages of As, Bs and Cs, and lower percentages of Ds and Fs, but the difference is statistically insignificant.
So despite the fact charters have fewer demographic barriers to success on our test-based report card and about half of their kids don’t even come from the urban districts, charters are still unable to perform significantly better than their major urban counterparts — the most challenged group of schools in the traditional public school system.
Only about 260 of Ohio’s 370 charters are included in this comparison. It’s clear that the other 90 — mostly dropout recovery schools located in urban districts — are among the worst-performing schools in the entire country. So the percentage of poor charter grades is likely far higher than the comparison I’m currently making.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Urban building” is a strange way to refer to a public school. Even so, this is an excellent attempt to show that the urban building/public school is working with students that charters avoid and that the overall performance of charter schools with “cherry-picked” students is nothing to brag about. It remains a serious problem that school “performance” is reduced to an A-F grade.
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Perhaps it’s connected to the way so-called reformers also talk about “seats” instead of “students,” since it’s so much easier to deal with inanimate objects than actual human beings.
But as we know all to well, that “being human” thing is really tough for so-called reformers, and they have a hard time simulating it.
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“Yet despite these greater challenges, Ohio’s major urban buildings typically have nearly identical attendance rates, slightly less chronic absenteeism and just about equal report card performance, looking at percentages of A, B, C, D, and F grades. Charters have slightly higher percentages of As, Bs and Cs, and lower percentages of Ds and Fs, but the difference is statistically insignificant.”
More mental masturbation with bogus information.
When will we begin to realized it’s all a big smoke and mirrors trick to deflect from the real problems with charter operators, their desire to steal public funds from the backs of public school children and deposit those funds into their bank accounts in one fashion or another.
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Despite all the evidence that illustrates that public schools are effective, representatives continue to push for more privatization. Many of the so called representatives do not work for the interests of young people in the state. They represent the 1% and corporations that work to destroy public education.
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Ka-Ching!
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Fordham misleads on this. They have never refuted what Dyer points out, but they continue to claim Big 8 urban charters can only be compared to Big 8 urban publics although they must know it’s not true.
It’s shocking to me that a national think tank gets away with this. It’s obviously untrue- if every public school district in the state is sending kids to charters than obviously charters aren’t pulling exclusively from Big 8 districts. Those two things can’t be true at the same time.
To deny this is nuts, yet a NATIONAL lobbying does deny it and they’re still quoted in every Ohio newspaper piece about education and they have HUGE influence in the legislature and the Kasich administration.
How can they be credible when they won’t admit this basic fact?
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The worst part of this is how urban publics don’t get credit for the work they do. If charters pull 50% of their students from outside urban districts then urban districts are actually doing much better than charters. They should be recognized for that.
It’s really a shame that we’ve decided to promote this untruth to the detriment of one set of schools and the promotion of another. That’s not fair. It’s not fair to the kids in those schools, their families, or their teachers. My God, the LEAST ed reform could do is give the much-maligned public schools credit when they earn it, but The Movement is more important than those schools, those kids, or those teachers.
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I can sort of forgive the public for believing the hype- this stuff is complicated and no one understands Ohio’s ever-changing school ranking system anyway, but what is lawmakers’ excuse?
For goodness sakes. Read something. Do your own work. Why are they relying on this lobbying group? It’s just laziness.
We have committees and subcommittees galore on education in Columbus. Do they read anything? If Dyer can do this in his spare time why can’t our thousands of state employees?
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All I can think of re: current situation…PLASTIC!
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It is amazing to listen to my neighbors declare their outrage about the “lower” grades of our system. When I explain it’s all a meaningless ruse, they look at me like I’m losing my mind. “But we used to get grades of A and B and now we’re getting Ds and Fs.” When I say it’s the grading system that changed, not the teachers or student’s achievements, I get even more derision. To them it’s a reason why Trump/DeVos makes sense. We are lost.
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