Bill Phillis, retired deputy commissioner of education in Ohio, is a staunch advocate for the state system of common schools, which is guaranteed in the state constitution. He founded the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy. The question in Ohio, as in many other states, is why Ohio legislators continue to fund failure.
He writes:
STATE REPORT CARD: CHARTER SCHOOLS NOT EVEN A CLOSE SECOND TO REAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS
The original promise of charter and voucher advocates: Charters will out-place school districts.
The data show a different outcome.
There is no data available from private schools to make a comparison.
Scott DiMauro, President of the Ohio Education Association, in a November 3 commentary in the Ohio Capital Journal shared a comparison of charter school report card results with real public schools. The results show that charter school kids are the real losers.
Do state officials care? Apparently not.
State Report Cards Should Be A Wakeup Call For Ohio’s Charter, Voucher Hawks
Scott DiMauro
I remember taking home my report cards when I was in school. I was a pretty good student; my grades always reflected my passion for subjects I loved, and more importantly, provided some real-time feedback on areas where improvement was needed — Time management, for example, was a skill I had to learn over time. During my years as a high school social studies teacher, I strived to give that same kind of useful assessment to my students when I was putting report cards together for them.
The state puts report cards together for school buildings and districts, too. In spirit, at least, they have the same mission, quantitatively assessing where our publicly funded institutions across the state are succeeding and where there is room for growth. And not surprisingly, after a year and a half of serious challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the latest round of state report cards shows there’s some extra room for improvement, with about a 10% drop in Performance Index (PI) scores for Ohio’s traditional public schools from the 2018-2019 school year to the 2020-2021 one. Chronic absenteeism also climbed to 17%, up from 7.5%, during that time.
But, over that same period, charter schools in the state saw a 25% drop in PI scores – a 2.5 times greater loss than traditional public schools. And chronic absenteeism in those institutions soared from 22% up to 45%, meaning nearly half of all charter school students in Ohio missed a big chunk of the last school year.
While the Ohio Education Association applauds the change in state law that removed letter grades from the state report card system, it is clear Ohio’s charter schools are not making the grade. As a teacher, I’d give them a D-minus at best.
This should be seriously alarming to Ohio’s taxpayers, who see their money taken from their local public schools to fund these poorer performing alternatives. The PI drop for KIPP, a charter school in Columbus, was 66% — more than double the decline seen in Columbus City Schools.
The seven biggest PI drops in Ohio charter schools were Breakthrough Schools in the Cleveland area, which are often touted by charter advocates as shining examples of success, with PI scores plummeting 77% to 84%. Charter advocates often complain about comparing all school districts’ performance with charters, but last year, 606 out of 612 public school districts in the state lost scarce resources to charter schools.
Recent test score data on Ohio’s private, mostly religious schools — which receive millions in taxpayer funded vouchers — is not available to make a comparison, since those schools are not subject to any of the same accountability standards as public districts.
Now, if some lawmakers get their way, the situation will get exponentially worse for the 90% of Ohio’s kids who rely on public education. House Bill 290 — known as the “Backpack Bill” — would create so-called “Education Savings Accounts” that are just universal vouchers with even less accountability. Even with these vouchers, most families still couldn’t afford tuition at the private schools in their communities, and for those that do go to the private schools, Ohio taxpayers who foot the bill don’t get much bang for their buck. The Cincinnati Enquirer revealed last year that nearly 90% of all voucher students do worse on state tests than students in traditional public schools in the same zip codes.
The data paint a troubling picture. Vouchers and charters take critical resources and weaken the public schools that serve the vast majority of Ohio’s children while delivering worse educational outcomes for our kids. What’s worse is that now we have a school funding system worth investing in — the Fair School Funding Plan. Failing to fully fund that system while pouring more resources into the worse-performing charter and voucher system is wasting an extraordinary opportunity to once and for all fix the way Ohio funds education for the 90% of students and families who attend Ohio’s public schools.
Ohioans need to tell their lawmakers to oppose House Bill 290 and focus on their constitutional responsibility to fund Ohio’s public schools to ensure a high-quality education for all of Ohio’s kids.
State report cards should be a wakeup call for Ohio’s charter, voucher hawks – Ohio Capital Journal
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This is being covered in local Ohio newspapers but you won’t find any mention of it on any of the ed reform echo chamber sites.
They simply don’t put out any negative information on charter schools. If you’re a parent and you’re reading exclusively ed reform echo chamber content you will not know that charters performed markedly worse in the pandemic.
This is Fordham, who supposedly employ “analysts”. The information they got back in Ohio was negative for charters (and vouchers) so they didn’t pull it out.They used the total scores. If it had been POSITIVE for charters and vouchers they all would have been reciting it.
I urge everyone to read within the echo chamber. See for yourself. Look for a single negative mention or portrayal of any charter or voucher program or any individual school. You won’t find it. What you will find is exclusively negative portrayals of public schools EVEN IN cities that are 1/2 charters or vouchers.
This “movement” is a joke. It’s ridiculously and consistently skewed against public schools and towards charters and vouchers. They either don’t read their own work or they’re so far into the echo chamber they’re incapable of recognizing bias.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/commentary/six-takeaways-ohios-latest-school-report-cards
One positive thing about Ohio is that even though state government is completely captured by the ed reform echo chamber, local media are not as convinced of the inherent superiority of charters and vouchers and the rest of the agenda.
Periodically, at least once a year, we get real info on Ohio’s “choice” sector. It never, ever measures up to the hype.
It leads to an amusing disconnect. The ed reform echo chamber will be lobbying for more charters and vouchers in Columbus while the media coverage of the ACTUAL “choice sector” goes on around them. It’s led to the public being much more skeptical of ed reform claims on privatization than the ed reform promoters themselves are.
We have 20 years of experience with this crew in Ohio. The only people who still swallow their claims whole anymore are they lawmakers they captured and their own lobbyists.
We just finished watching a fraud trial of a “choice” operator where I live. She was convicted. It’s much, much different on the ground than it is in the echo chamber.
So if you’re in an ed reform captured state, take heart.The public is not as gullible as the promoters. They figure it out.
Ohio taxpayers should be incensed by such embracing programs that have no value add to education while it enriches the bank accounts of conservative donors. Privatization is a gigantic “pay to play scheme.” The backpack plan sends middle income tax dollars to the wealthy to supplement tuition payments they would have made anyway. It is a reverse Robin Hood scheme.
How is LeBron James doing with his I Promise school? I know the school had its first graduation last year. Test scores do not matter in the real world, but graduation number do. I’ve read about some of the challenges the school has had, and I anticipated there would be many. When schools serve the most vulnerable students without cherry picking, there are so many out of school factors that influence outcomes. I would like to know how the school is doing, particularly after all the challenges from Covid.
But wait!
Wait for the white paper from the Fordham Institute pointing out that red-haired children with last names beginning with a T who attend the Charter School for Excellence in Skimming Taxpayer Dollars into Private Profits in Buckeye Bottom, Ohio, outperformed any other group in that entire village of 200 people–“proof” that we need to “stay the course” with standardized testing and dismantling our system of traditional public schools. Can’t argue with “data”! LOL.
can’t argue with manipulated data: surely the mantra of the tech age
The ELA tests on which the entire deformer “accountability” scheme is based are invalid. Let me demonstrate ONE reason why:
Consider the Grade 9 Common [sic] Core [sic] “standards.” There are 46 of them. A given “test” of these “standards” will have about 30 or so multiple-choice questions. So, fewer than one question per “standard.” But suppose that there were 46 questions, one per “standard.” The “standards” are a puerile skills list that pretty much leaves out all all subject-area content. Each “standard” is incredibly broad and vague. So, for example, you will have a “standard” that says that students will understand the multiple meanings of words. Note that this refers to the multiple meanings of words GENERALLY and to understandings of the multiple meanings of words GENERALLY.
Now, write me ONE short multiple-choice question that VALIDLY tests for the GENERAL ability to recognize and understand multiple meanings–not the multiple meanings of one word in one random passage, but of words with multiple meanings generally in texts generally, for that’s what the “standard” covers.
Impossible, right? This cannot be done, just as you cannot build a perpetual motion machine or square the circle.
And so it is with almost all the “standards” and almost all the questions on these in the ELA tests. It’s as though you tested for whether an entity was a human being by asking if his, her, its, or their name were Bob. Sorry, not Bob. Not human.
So, the tests do not validly test what they purport to test for. They are a scam. Their use is numerology–a quack pseudoscience.
“So, the tests do not validly test what they purport to test for. They are a scam.”
AMEN
How about a TEST based avatar?
An emoji that accurately represents the standardized tests given by the states already exists. It’s a pile of dung.
I should have asked, WHAT about a
TEST based avatar, AKA a DEGREE?