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?

State Defines "High Performing" Charters

One of the things most charter school reformers agree about is that whatever Ohio's charter school reform looks like, its few high-performing charters should be allowed to thrive. However, there's been some debate about how a high-performing charter should be designated. While it certainly should be tied to the report card somehow, the question is should the grade be A, B, or C? And in which of the 9 report card grade categories should they be considered?

Well, the Ohio House Education Committee took the first stab at it with yesterday's Omnibus Amendment to House Bill 2. I've commented at length about the changes in an earlier post. But I wanted to spend some time examining this question about what is a high-performing charter school.

The Amendment definition is a charter that receives a C or higher grade in both Performance Index (proficiency) and Value Added (student growth). A school that receives those grades would qualify under the amendment to accept preschool kids. 

Whenever I've done it, I've considered a charter that gets an A or B on growth measures and/or scores above the state average PI score to be high performing. That generated 111 of 348 charters. The Amendment definition captures 57, or about half as many, which means the C in both categories is a tougher standard than mine. 

What's stunning is this: If we considered only As and Bs in both categories, that number would drop to 11 schools. Out of 348. Wow. So, while I would prefer the A or B option, it wouldn't capture enough charters to mean much.

But what you can see is that while the C designation is indeed exclusive for charters, for local public buildings and districts, that standard is rather pedestrian, with 70% of districts qualifying as high-performing under this standard. Remember that all Ohio school districts lose money and children to charters and about 1/2 of all charter kids don't come from the big 8 urban districts.

And there are also some incongruities. For example, Menlo Park -- a gifted charter in the Cleveland area -- has among the highest Performance Index scores in the state, but because their growth is a D, they won't be considered high performing by the state.

One more interesting point is this: Looking at which charter school operators have the greatest percentage of the schools qualify as high performing.

According to state and national data available on http://www.KnowYourCharter.com, the Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland had the highest percentage of its schools qualifying. Meanwhile, White Hat Management -- run by mega-political donor David Brennan -- has the lowest percentage (of those who had any), with the notorious Imagine Schools chain a close second worst. I don't count Summit Academy (none of whose 26 schools would qualify) because they deal exclusively with a special education population and their special ed growth measures are pretty good overall -- only 3 of their 26 schools earned below a C on the last report card.

Another point of interest -- 3 of the 6 operators with the highest percentage of high performing schools are for-profit operations. Those three are Mosaica, Constellation and National Heritage Academies (J.C. Huizenga's controversial operation from Michigan).

Freestanding operations are schools that don't have an operator running them.

Suffice to say that it looks like the C standard will capture a decent amount of charter schools and leave out the worst-performing schools. And that's a good start.

UPDATED Stanford CREDO Director: Free Market Doesn't Work in Education

This post has been updated to include Dr. Raymond's complete comment on the effect of markets in education. The quote was taken from the City Club's podcast, which hadn't been posted when this post was first written.

I was all prepared to summarize what Dr. Margaret Raymond had to say about Stanford's latest study from its Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), which Raymond heads, at today's City Club of Cleveland event.

How only in Cleveland does it appear that Ohio's charter school sector is providing meaningful, positive benefits to kids. Or how CREDO's methodology works (averaging kids in traditional public school buildings and comparing these "virtual" kids' performance with real charter kids). Or how Ohio's charter school sector has been making very minimal improvements over the years. Or that the state's charter reform initiatives over the last few years haven't had much impact on charter school performance. Or that Cleveland charters are doing a good job educating poor, minority kids. Or that 93% of Ohio charter schools' proficiency scores are below the 50th percentile in the state. Or that 44% of charter school kids are seeing low growth and performance.

But then, in response to a question from the audience nearly at the end of the event, Dr. Raymond dropped this on the crowd: She said she's a "free market kinda girl", but after decades of looking at the nation's charter school sector, she has come to the conclusion that the "market mechanism just doesn't work" in education. Here;s the podcast from the City Club. Her market comments start at 50:18. Here is the remarkable commentary:

I actually am kind of a pro-market kinda girl. But it doesn’t seem to work in a choice environment for education. I’ve studied competitive markets for much of my career. That’s my academic focus for my work. And (education) is the only industry/sector where the market mechanism just doesn’t work. I think it’s not helpful to expect parents to be the agents of quality assurance throughout the state. I think there are other supports that are needed… The policy environment really needs to focus on creating much more information and transparency about performance than we’ve had for the 20 years of the charter school movement. We need to have a greater degree of oversight of charter schools. But I also think we have to have some oversight of the overseers.

Considering that the pro-market reform Thomas B. Fordham Foundation paid for this study and Raymond works at the Hoover Institution at Stanford -- a free market bastion, I was frankly floored, as were most of the folks at my table.

For years, we've been told that the free market will help education improve. As long as parents can choose to send their kids to different schools, like cars or any other commodity, the best schools will draw kids and the worst will go away. The experience in Ohio is the opposite. The worst charter schools in Ohio are growing by leaps and bounds, while the small number of successful charter schools in Ohio have stayed, well, a small number of successful charter schools.

Raymond made the point too that parents are not informed enough to be true market consumers on education. Websites like Know Your Charter can help with that educational aspect of the parental choice, better arming parents with the necessary information to make a more informed decision. But to hear free market believers say that 20 years into the charter school experiment its foundational philosophy -- that the free market's invisible hand will drive educational improvement -- is not working? Well, I was stunned to hear that.

Raymond also made the point that the states that are seeing the best charter school performance are states whose charter school authorizers are focused on quality and have robust accountability measures -- in other words, well-regulated. Yesterday, when the CREDO report was released, it was discovered that if online and for-profit charter schools are taken out of the equation, Ohio charters don't perform all that bad. Problem is that more than 57% of Ohio charter school kids are in those schools. In fact, at Know Your Charter, we found that less than 10% of Ohio's charter school kids are in schools that score above the state average on the Performance Index Score or have an A or B in overall value added.

The point is that there are a few very high-performing charters in this state, like the Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland, or the Toledo School of the Arts, or Columbus Preparatory Academy. While these schools represent a smattering of Ohio's 400 plus charter schools, the state's failing charter schools are legion.

Here's another sort of bombshell from me, to counteract the free market one: I'm not convinced that the free market can't work for education.

But it can only do so if the public is fully informed, parents are armed with good information and make well-informed, thoughtful decisions while the state and its authorizing groups focus like a laser on quality, not quantity, of choice. The way Ohio's charter school laws are currently drafted does not allow that to happen. Sites like Know Your Charter can help, but the state needs to have a better mechanism in place to ensure that parents and kids can make truly informed and good decisions for their future.

It's not like buying a car where if you buy a lemon, you can just go try another one. It's a pain, but not the end of the world.

If parents choose a lemon of a charter school, their children may never recover.

That isn't a pain.

It's a tragedy.

In Ohio, Quality Should Be Job 1

In a recent post by the Fordham Institute, Aaron Churchill takes Bill Phillis -- the legendary public education defender who ran the campaign that ended up having the state's school funding declared unconstitutional four times -- and Join the Future to task for daring to compare Charter School with School District performance.

Note: All calculations in this post come from the new State Report Card, located here.

The rest of Churchill's column makes cogent points about focusing on what works and eliminating what does not. And on that, I completely agree with Churchill. That is the argument I have been making ever since I first spoke about this issue on the floor of the Ohio House.

Unfortunately, though, I have to disagree with a couple of his arguments.

1) "Both authors make spurious comparisons that ought to be dismissed. Both make the mistake of comparing the performance index scores of charter schools to school districts." 

This argument is often made by Charter School advocates. And, frankly, I understand what they're saying: Charter Schools are typically small, one-building operations. Comparing their performance with much larger, diverse districts is unfair, right? Well, except that eSchools like ECOT and the Ohio Virtual Academy -- Charter Schools both -- are bigger than all but about a dozen Ohio School Districts. And there are 161 Ohio School Districts that didn't have 1,000 kids in them last year. So not all School Districts are hulking leviathans.

Most importantly, though, is that Ohio law treats Charters as if they are School Districts for funding and accountability purposes. They are paid like School Districts. They are considered Local Education Agencies for federal funding purposes, just as School Districts are. They are required to have Superintendents and Treasurers, just like School Districts. They have boards that oversee them, just like School Districts. They are, under law, School Districts.

In addition, only one School District did not lose money or students to Charters last year. And 47% of all kids in Charters last year did not come from a Big 8 Urban School District. If Charters take kids and money from every School District, why should they only be compared with 8 of them, especially when 47% of the kids do not come from there?

When you compare Charter with School District performance, the comparison is really not very good for Charters. As Churchill himself points out:

Recent blogs by William Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding (posted on Diane Ravitch’s website) and Join the Future highlight the academic woes of some of Ohio’s charter schools. Phillis writes: “The Department of Education’s ranking of schools and districts reveals that 83 out of the bottom 84 schools are charter schools.” Join the Future exclaims “Out of the bottom 200 districts, just 21 are traditional public schools, the remaining 179 are charter schools!”

2) "At a school building level, 139 of the bottom 200 schools were district schools. Both district and charter schools are therefore guilty of weak results on the state’s “performance index” score."

Well, sort of. I agree that the bottom 200 buildings in the state on Performance Index are populated by both District and Charter buildings. However, Churchill misses the point. Of course there are more District Buildings in the bottom 200, assuming you use Building rather than District-level data to make the comparison. There are, after all, 3,050 Traditional School Buildings in the state that receive the Performance Index rating. There are only 262 Charter Schools that receive a Performance Index Score. There are nearly 12 times as many District Buildings as Charters. Math, as much as performance, dictates that many of the lowest performing Buildings would be District Buildings.

Why do I mention this? Well, because the 61 Charter Schools that do rate in the bottom 200 represent a little more than 23% of all Charter Schools rated by the Performance Index. That means nearly one out of every 4 Charter Schools in Ohio rate in the bottom 200 of the more than 3,300 District and Charter buildings that receive the Performance Index score. Put another way, one in 4 Charter Schools rate in the bottom 6% of all Ohio School Buildings -- Charter and Traditional -- on the Performance Index.

One more thing: The average Performance Index score of the bottom 23% of School Buildings (710 total) is 79.54. The average Performance Index score of the bottom 23% of Charter Schools (the 61 in Churchill's calculation) is 62.57.

Again, this is not to say Charter Schools should be eliminated. What I am saying is that Churchill has a point; it's time to talk about the quality of these things. We have far, far too many unsuccessful Charter Schools in Ohio, especially given that we're going to be spending upwards of $1 billion a year on these schools over the next couple years.

Yes, we must ensure that quality Charters are able to thrive in this state. Unfortunately, though, the average school run by the Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland -- routinely the highest-rated Charter group in the state -- was cut by about $200 in the most recent budget.

I welcome Churchill's call for a new approach to Charter policy in Ohio. However, we must confront how Ohio's Charters have, for the most part, failed so frighteningly frequently. This phenomenon helps explain why the high fliers have been so stifled. And it also explains why some School Districts have struggled. For when kids in Districts like Columbus and Cincinnati who don't attend Charters lose about 25% of their state revenue to the Charter School funding system, isn't that as important an impediment to their success as anything else?

Politics and Education's Volatile Mix UPDATE

Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett resigned today after emails were leaked recently that showed his staff -- while he was commissioner in Indiana -- changed their state's report card system and a prominent donor's Charter School went from a C to an A.

Bennett's resignation indicates there may have been more to this story than even that. But I'll leave it to the facts that come out in the ensuing days to determine that. What I'm really chilled by is how this story unfolded.

The first I heard of this story was a couple days ago. And it sounded an awful lot like what goes on in Ohio with David Brennan and other big money Charter School operators here. Their sway over Ohio politicians is well documented here and here.

However, I saw shortly after the story broke that Bennett explained his actions to Rick Hess (of the conservative American Enterprise Institute) here. And the explanation at least sounded plausible. The new report card system did not properly calculate test scores for schools that did not have 11th or 12th grades, like the Charter School that Bennett's department worked so hard to help.

Now Bennett's quick resignation makes me wonder if this is all to this story. I was a reporter with a pretty good BS meter, after all. And, in fact, according to Ann Hyslop's blog, I have good reason to have my radar on.

But let's just say, for argument's sake, that Bennett's explanation is exactly what happened.

If Indiana was able to fix a problem with a new accountability tool because a well-connected Charter School operator told them there was a problem, does it mean they are rigging the system for that operator? Or does it mean they are fixing a flaw in the system?

Coming from Ohio, where Charter School operators do stuff like this a lot, has so built up my cynicism about this stuff that rigging becomes my immediate reaction. But what if David Brennan pointed out something that was a problem with Ohio's new accountability system that happened to benefit his schools? Would that make the problem NOT a problem? And would the system get fixed? Or would the politics dictate a scandal?

I think what this incident points out is just how poisonous education policy has become thanks to big campaign contributions. Everything officials do now is questioned if it benefits big contributors, even if the change is potentially good.

Let me call it the Ohioification of Education Politics. In Ohio, this practice of rewarding big campaign contributors is so ingrained that it is second nature around here. So big political contributors like Ohio Charter School operators keep getting more and more money while school districts' coffers are consistently drained to do it. Tell me something I haven't known for 15 years, right?

This is why School Choice advocates who fight for quality school choices in Ohio are up in arms and face such a struggle to make necessary changes to the education policy landscape here. If Bennett had done what he did in Ohio, there would have maybe been a story or two somewhere, but there is no way he would have resigned. No way. His story would have been enough to keep him on the job.

But in Florida and Indiana, where the politics haven't been nearly as big, centralized and entrenched as Ohio's, that's too much. Don't worry, though, give those states a few more years and a couple David Brennan types and pretty soon people like Bennett will be able to survive such accusations.