Ohio's Charter Schools Just Don't Work, Part V. But Can They?

Today is all about solutions.

Over the last several days, I've taken a look at Ohio's charter schools. How they cost kids in local school districts significant sums of state funding while performing far worse academically. How the excuses explaining Ohio's charter school issues don't hold much water. How even urban buildings perform better in many cases that Ohio's charter schools overall. And finally, yesterday, how even the highest performing charters in the state don't outperform the state's highest performing school districts, nor do they outperform the state's highest performing urban buildings and the state spends barely a fraction of its charter funding on these high performers anyway.

Let me say that I'm not developing the quintessential list of fixes. I'm putting together what I think will help the charter sector improve the quickest and best way. We're going on 20 years of charters in Ohio. We've had little if any true reform of these things over those now three decades. We can't afford any further delays.

There needs to be a three-pronged approach to fixing Ohio's ridiculed charter school sector.

Close down failed charter schools earlier
In the 2013 CREDO study on national charter school performance, the authors determined that "the use of the option to close bad schools represents the strongest available tool to improve overall sector quality ... the impact on quality that accompanies closure is more dramatic and enduring than efforts to improve the current stock of schools."

What does that mean? It means closing failing schools quickly will quickly improve the overall performance of the state's charter school sector. However, in Ohio, a charter can stay open for 6-7 years (depending on grade) before it's closed. And the failure is a very low bar -- getting a report card F grade in certain categories. So a charter can stay open if they get Ds every couple years.

There's a pretty straight forward solution to this issue. The state gives a two-year "honeymoon" period where charters don't receive report card grades for its first two years of existence. In addition, once the school is determined to be failing, it gets to stay open for the year before it closes. Eliminate some or all of these three years and schools would have 3-4 years to prove their worth. That's plenty of time. Given our state's limited resources, we just can't be pumping millions into these schools. As the CREDO authors observed: "we do not see dramatic improvement among existing charter schools over time."

So something closer to 4-ish years should do the trick. And Ohio has a couple loopholes in place already that would simply need closing.

I would also advocate for a tougher closure standard, in accordance with what CREDO found that

"in many places, the standards of performance are set too low, as evidenced by the large number of underperforming charter schools that persist. The point here is that, as with students, setting and holding high expectations is an important feature of school policies and practices. More focus is required of authorizers and charter school governing boards to set high performance and accountability standards and hold charter schools to them."

Develop a charter school funding formula that allows high-performing charters to thrive while not adversely impacting the opportunities for children in local public school districts
This is the (literally) $1 billion question. How to fund these schools that don't get local revenue so they can succeed? Well, some would argue they should get local revenue. However, there are a host of issues with that premise. For example, would their local capacity be deducted from their state aid amounts, as local public school districts' are currently? And what about the charters that take kids from more than one district? Whose local revenue would cover that school's cost?

However, judging from state expenditure data, Ohio's charter schools may have enough to spend about the same in the classroom as districts. Except they don't. Because they spend a ton more per pupil on non-instructional administrative costs. If Ohio charter schools spent the same per pupil amount on administration that districts did, they would have enough to spend the same on instruction as districts, even without local revenue.

The issue then is whether that instructional spend is adequate for kids, and there's real question about that. But be that as it may, Ohio's charters are receiving enough money now that they could be spending the same on instruction as school districts. They just don't.

The key to funding both charters and local public schools is this: an accurate formula that reflects the real cost of providing high-quality educational opportunities to children at the school they are attending. In the charter sector, Ohio's charters get paid based on what the child's home district would have been for that same child, trouble is that that expenses are far less in charters. FOr example, they pay their teachers about 60% less and don't pay for busing. Yet they are paid by the state as if they paid their teachers 40% more and busing.

Ensuring an accurate measure of cost in both sectors will mean that the right amount of funding will flow to the child based on where the child goes to school, not where they live. There should also be substantial bonuses for charters that are doing a good job. So the overall structure works like this: fund low performing charters at the level where you can't make huge profits off failure, while funding high-performers at a level that would ensure their continued success.

Ensure absolute accountability and transparency of Ohio's charter schools
Charter schools have a conundrum. They are funded almost exclusively by public funding. Yet they are run by private entities, either non-profit or for-profit companies. However, this structure leads to concerns that they really aren't public schools at all, simply publicly funded, privately run schools.

If charters want to be considered public schools, then they need to act like it. Have open meetings that everyone can attend. Publish all their financials. Be as open for public inspection as any public school. If it walks like a duck, right? Unfortunately, right now, charters simply don't walk or quack like public school ducks. And they should.

These three principles should drive any reform effort. And the current measures in the Ohio General Assembly meet many of their goals. Yet, we still are largely dodging the closing failures quicker and funding issues. And to achieve true reform for our kids we simply must deal with these issues.

In future posts, I will give my thoughts on each of the measures currently being considered -- the most promising of which is Senate Bill 148.

But for now, let it be known that I believe charters can work in Ohio. They have worked. But spending almost $1 billion is simply an unwarranted extravagence, according to the data. We could have a far more effective school choice program for this state at a significantly lower price tag, freeing up resources for interventions we know work on a large scale.

This is our charge. Make charters work. Those that don't, shut them down. Those that do, let thrive. And let's stop having this sector that educates barely 10% of our students eat up 90% of our education policy discussion. It's time to move on.

The world, as our children will shortly learn, is not this patient.

Ohio Charter Schools Just Don't Work, Except When They Do, Part IV

For the first three parts of my series on Ohio charters, I've dealt primarily with the charter sector's overall failings. How about a half billion dollars goes to charters that perform the same or worse on state report card measures. Or how the excuses some charter school proponents posit for these failings don't explain the issues. Or how even looking at how charters perform against big urban school buildings, their performance is lacking.

However, while the sector overall is lacking, there are some high-performing charters in Ohio. Not many considering that we're nearly spending $1 billion on charters. But they are out there. However, what is fascinating is this: About 40% of them take less than 1/2 of their students from the state's urban core. And when looking at the highest performing charters and comparing them with the highest performing urban buildings, the urban buildings hold their own -- doing better than the charters on report card measures and only slightly better on proficiency test scores.

In other words, even though there are high performing charters, their performance isn't quite as good as the highest performing public school buildings in the state -- even those in the state's urban core (which I define as the so-called "Big 8" of Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown). But let's look at the high performers and see what seems to be working for them.

First of all, what I'm calling "high performing" is a school (or district) that scores above the state average Performance Index Score (which measures straight proficiency test results) or grades at an A or B on overall student growth. These criteria are more stringent than the proposed "high performing" language in House Bill 2. Looking at these tougher metrics, already you can see the fundamental story: Far fewer charters than school districts meet them.

In fact, more than double the percentage of school districts meet this "high performing" criteria I've designated. Once again, this points out just how far behind Ohio charters are on the whole.

But since we've already dealt with the performance failures of charters, let's examine how those 111 high-performing charters perform.

While high performing charters do outshine the vast majority of charters overall, high performing charters do not perform better than high performing districts overall.

As I've mentioned in several posts now, it's important to realize that Ohio charter schools get 55% of their kids from Ohio's urban core. The remaining 45% do not come from there. In fact, more kids go to charters in Ohio's Appalachian counties than Dayton and Cincinnati combined.

So it is absolutely fair to examine charter and district performance outside the state's urban core. For if the charter sector takes money and students from every Ohio school district, it is only fair that their performance be compared with every school district.

And, in fact, the state's highest performing charters share this same issue. That's because there are 44 of the 111 high performers that take less than 1/2 of their students from Ohio's urban districts.

While the state's highest performing charters do not outshine the state's highest performing school districts, they do outshine the state's urban districts overall, accumulating far smaller percentages of Fs and far greater percentages of As, Bs and Cs on the state's report card.

One interesting note, though, is that while high performing charter performance is clearly superior to urban districts on the report card, they score 10 points lower on the state's Performance Index Score. So the dominance is not complete.

Another fascinating piece of information is this: charters that take at least 95% of their students from the urban core outperform the urban core overall on both the report card and Performance Index Score. So the dominance is most complete over urban districts from charters that take nearly all their kids from urban districts.

This is really interesting because it suggests that these high-performing charters have figured something out, namely how to increase performance of our state's urban youth. And that could be a very important and key finding.

See why I haven't given up on charters yet? There's potential here.

However, not all is sun and roses. That's because these high-performing charters, while outperforming urban districts overall do not outperform the highest performing urban buildings.

So while it appears a few charters have figured out how to improve the achievement of Ohio's urban kids, so have many of Ohio's urban buildings -- a fact we don't acknowledge enough in my opinion.

As can be seen, the state's highest performing urban buildings (about 1/3 of the state's urban buildings) and the highest performing charters are pretty well aligned. But clearly Ohio's highest performing urban buildings receive a greater share of As and Bs than high-performing charters, who receive higher rates of Cs, Ds and Fs.

In addition, Ohio's high-performing urban buildings have a slightly higher Performance Index Score.

The performance differences aren't enormous, but they're there. And this points out perhaps the most important thing to be gleaned from the few charter school successes in this state: A great school is not exclusive to charters or public schools. It is not either type of school that will determine success; it's who is in the school that matters, both in terms of staffing and students. Students who want to learn, are supported at school and home and have dedicated, smart and creative educators leading them will do well. And it doesn't really matter if this is happening in a charter or public school. All I care is that it happens. And right now, it's happening far more frequently in Ohio's public schools than its charters. That doesn't tell me to kill charters. It tells me we need to re-focus and invest in the charters that do well while pulling back from those that don't.

I'll leave you with one final chart that shows Ohio's huge problem in one pie chart that demonstrates how much of the charter school pie Ohio's highest performing charters receive.

What you see is that about 3/4 of the Ohio charter school spend goes to charters that are not high performing. And less than 10% of the spend goes to high-performing charters that take 95% or more of their students from the state' urban districts.

What's this mean? It means we could double the investment in high-performing charters and still have about a half billion dollars to invest in universal pre-school, all-day kindergarten, wrap around services in our neediest communities, or any one of a number of tried-and-true solutions to education challenges.

We are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on charter schools that aren't doing anyone much good.

Our kids deserve much better. The question then becomes,"How can we make these work?" It is, in many ways, the $1 billion question in Ohio education policy. My fifth and final installment will seek solutions to the issues facing Ohio's charter school sector.

Tomorrow: Okay. Now what?

Ohio Charters Just Don't Work, Part III

Now that I've shown how state data indicate that Ohio's charter schools simply aren't up to snuff with Ohio's school districts, costing children in those districts millions of dollars a year, and that the excuses posited by some in the charter school community just don't hold water, I'm going to spend some time today looking at building-level data.

This is the data charter school proponents have argued for years should be the only comparable data when look at charter and public school performance.

Even though the state does not track which kids go from which public school buildings to which charters.

And the funding comes from the district, not the district building the kids leave.

And charters are considered districts in state law for funding and accountability purposes.

And charters are considered Local Education Agencies for federal funding and grant making purposes.

The primary reason I look at district-level data in my comparisons is pretty simple: when a kid leaves a district for a charter, the money that flows to the charter for that kid's education comes out of every child's state funding pot, not just the pot going to the most failing building in the most failing district. So it's not punishing the most failing building in a district --it's punishing every building and child in the district, even the best of both.

But for argument's sake, let's look at charter and public school building performance. What you'll see is even in the light most favorable to charters, public schools outperform charters overall. Period.

Ohio’s charter schools perform worse overall than all local public school buildings, including those in the Big 8 urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) – the areas where charters were supposed to offer better alternatives. Charters register lower percentages of As and Bs while having higher percentages of Ds and Fs than local public schools.

 Remember that 45% of charter school students do not come from Ohio's urban core -- one of the myths dealt with in yesterday's post.

It is exceedingly unfair cherry picking for charter schools to take money and children from every district in the state, yet only have their performance compared with the most historically struggling schools in the state.

Yet even when comparing performance with the state's urban buildings, it's not a great story for charters. Urban buildings get higher percentages of As and Bs and lower percentages of Ds and Fs than charters.

Even when one looks at individual performance breakdowns by report card category, the tale isn't a whole lot better for charters.

 As you can see, charters are particularly poor at graduating students in four years (five-year rates aren't much better).

It's not as if the urban districts are performing swimmingly either. It's just that even with the urban schools' struggles, they pale in comparison with the struggles charter schools have had graduating children in four years.

Student growth is clearly the best category for charters, but even that category isn't that great. Yes, the charters do better than urban districts. But once again, don't forget that 45% of children in charters do not come from there. And when compared with non-urban buildings, charters are woefully underperforming, even in this, their best category.

Probably the next most important report card category is closing achievement gaps. Charters get higher percentages of Fs than even urban schools, while receiving lower percentages of As, Bs and Cs combined.

So overall, charters are clearly doing worse than the 3,000 or so buildings 45% of their students come from, while barely keeping pace with the buildings 55% of their students come from in one category on the 9-category state report card.

As I discussed yesterday, demographics do not explain charter struggles either. And the building-level data demonstrate it, just like district-level data do.

One thing that's remarkable about Ohio's urban buildings is just how many of them have an exceedingly high percentage of poverty.

 More than 1/2 of all urban buildings in Ohio have 95% or more of their children living in poverty. Meanwhile, 40% of charters do.

Yet despite the much higher concentrations of poverty -- a factor that research indicates should lead to significantly worse performance -- Ohio's urban buildings actually outperform charters on the state's Performance Index score, which measures a school's overall proficiency test results, by 6%.

The results are all the more remarkable when you see that an even higher percentage of students are in these high-poverty concentration buildings in Ohio's urban districts. About 55% are. Yet the proficiency results show that students perform better in environments that research indicates should be producing worse results than charters.

In fact, in one peer-reviewed 2010 study, it was discovered that "When lower (socioeconomic) students are grouped in a lower (socioeconomic) school, their lower educational outcomes can be exacerbated.”[i]

Yet in Ohio's urban districts, that exacerbation still results in better performance on state tests than charters, whose buildings don't have nearly the high-poverty concentration.

So what does all this mean? It means much the same as the district-level data -- Ohio's charter schools are not performing as promised overall. And even looking at their performance in the most favorable light possible shows serious shortcomings in the overall performance of the sector.

Does that mean charters should go away? No. There are a few doing exceptional things. And that will be the focus of tomorrow's installment.

Tomorrow: Ohio charter schools don't work, except when they do.

---

[i] Perry, L. & McConney, A. Does the SES of the School Matter? An Examination of Socioeconomic Status and Student Achievement Using PISA 2003 Teachers College Record Volume 112 Number 4, 2010, p. 1137-1162 

Ohio Charters Just Don't Work, Part II

Yesterday, I went over how charter failures hurt kids in local school districts, as well as how much worse Ohio charters perform compared with those districts. Today, I'm going to deal with some of the excuses for charter school failures.

Claim: Charter schools struggle because their populations are so much more challenging than districts'.

Fact: While charter schools do have higher percentages of students in poverty and minorities, they have smaller percentages of special education children.

But here's the deal: Charters do worse on the report card than districts with greater challenges. So that means that while charters' poor performance compared with districts overall can perhaps be explained by more challenging populations, districts with greater challenges are doing better. So charters are not, on the whole, doing a better job serving our state's most challenging students than districts with more challenges than the charter faces.

Here are the performance comparison between charters and districts with greater percentages of poverty, special education and minorities.

In every category, districts with higher percentages of poverty, special education and minorities have a greater percentage of As, Bs and Cs.

So, again, charter schools do have higher percentages of these challenging populations than districts overall, except special ed where the typical Ohio district has a higher percentage. But even districts that are facing greater challenges, Ohio districts outperform charter schools and their less challenging populations of students.

Claim: Charter schools should be only compared with Ohio's urban districts because they have similar populations.

Fact: Ohio's urban districts face greater challenges than Ohio's charter schools. Here are the percentages of poverty, special education and minorities in both sectors:

As you can see, charters have slightly higher poverty rate, but far fewer special education children and far fewer minorities than the urban districts.

Yet despite urban districts' greater overall challenges, urban districts actually score higher on the state's proficiency metric -- the Performance Index Score, which is most influenced by demographic challenges.

In addition, 45% of the children in Ohio charter schools do not come from the state's urban core. So it is not really fair to compare overall charter performance, only 55% of which comes from the state's urban core, with the overall performance in the state's urban core.

Tomorrow: Even building-level data shows that Ohio's public schools do better

Ohio Charters Just Don't Work, Part I

Over the last month or so, I have been busily compiling data and reports for Know Your Charter -- reports I frankly hoped would give, well, hope to the idea that Ohio charter schools shouldn't be a national joke. I'm embarrassed that my state's education system -- any part of it -- is subjected to ridicule and scorn. I know Ohio's a great place to live and raise a family. But all the data -- and I mean all the data -- demonstrate emphatically that Ohio's charter school system overall is the exact "debacle" national observers have claimed. But it's not just a debacle for kids in charters. It's also really bad for kids who aren't in charters -- a story not often told, let alone known.

Over the next few days, I will sift through the data for you to emphatically demonstrate the problem Ohio has, its scope and, ultimately, solutions that can make Ohio a leader on high-quality charter schools, not the state where quality goes to die.

Today represents Part I of this effort.

For the last three years at Innovation Ohio, we have written reports based on state data that looked at how much money and how many students went from which districts to which charters. The results the previous two years showed that far more kids go to poorer performing charters than better performing charters. Well, this year (which we posted at Know Your Charter) was no different, except for the scale. Now the amount of money going to worse-performing charters is more than $430 million, and if you include charters that perform the same, it's now more than $500 million that goes from the same or higher-performing districts to the same or worse-performing charters.

Here is what the data show:

1. Out of the $774 million that were transferred from districts to charters with state report card grades , 56% – or more than $430 million – went to charter schools that performed worse overall than the district that transferred the money. If you include districts that performed the same, nearly 2 out of every 3 dollars went to charter schools from a district that performed the same or better, at a cost of $504 million.
2. Local taxpayers had to subsidize $180.3 million to cover the money transferred to the same or worse performing charter schools.
3. Districts were more likely to lose money to charters that underperformed on all 8 report card categories and not a single transfer occurred where the charter outperformed the district on all 8 report card grades.
4. When districts and charters were both graded in every category, 97% of the time districts outperformed the charters. Just 1.8% of the time did a charter outperform districts in the majority of the categories.
5. There were 461 school districts – accounting for more than ¾ of all of Ohio school districts – where all the kids attending charter schools were transferred to equal or poorer performing charter schools. That adds up to 19,042 kids and $136.6 million. Meanwhile, every district lost at least some funding to poorer performers, with only 17 districts losing less than half their children to poorer performing charters.
6. In 84 of 88 counties, more than half of children attended poorer performing charters, and in 43 of Ohio’s 88 counties, all the children going to charters attend charters that perform the same or worse than local school districts.

Here it is in a pie chart. You can see just how much money goes to worse-performing charters. It's not good, especially because charters have been sold as higher quality options for parents and kids. In Ohio, they generally are not.

What's even more amazing is when you see how many times the transfers went to worse-performing charters.

This means that nearly 5000 times, the transfers (which means all kids going from a district to a charter, whether that's 1 or 1000) went to worse-performing charters. And, more importantly, look at how many kids go to worse performers:

This is not good. But don't worry, it's worse than it looks. That's because the funding that follows these children to worse-performing charters means that districts have less state funding to educate the children who remain in the school district. That means one of two things: Districts become more reliant on local property taxes, which is unconstitutional, or, as happens in 86 Ohio school districts, every kid loses funding, even including local taxes. Here are the top 25 districts that lose overall per pupil funding because charters take so much more than the state would have given the districts for the same kid that not even the district's local revenue can make up the difference:

And here are the top 25 districts whose state share drops the most because of the charter deduction. In other words, these are the districts who could make the strongest argument that charters cause a greater "overreliance on property tax" -- a no-no, according to the Ohio Supreme Court.

As you can see, charter funding has a profound impact on funding for kids in school districts. The great, untold story of the Ohio charter school experience has been its effect upon the 90% of kids who are not in charter schools. This funding system is a major problem. And despite the fact that the charter school reform measures currently pending in the Ohio General Assembly are strong and (especially Senate Bill 148) historic, the fact that they do not deal with funding reform leaves a gaping hole in Ohio's charter structure -- a hole that must be filled, not just hidden with good camouflage.

Tomorrow: Ohio Charters Just Don't Work, Part II: Charter school excuses debunked