Cleveland Charter Schools Once Again Proven Outlier.

A newly minted study from the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) -- an outfit connected to Stanford University -- shows what we have known in Ohio for quite some time: Charter Schools in Cleveland are doing better than charter schools elsewhere in Ohio.

As part of CREDO's study on Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), which found that for-profit CMOs are doing worse than non-profit CMOs, CREDO found that the Breakthrough School network in Cleveland provided a benefit of 148 extra days in math and 120 in reading. While there are serious academic questions about CREDO's methodology for determining these "days" of learning (for a good back and forth, look here), the CREDO study confirms what has been known here for a long time -- Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland are Ohio's gold standard.

This is why I've contributed to the chain and attended several of their fundraisers. My son won their Superhero race one year, in fact.

The issue is they only run 10 out of the 373 charter schools listed in the Ohio Department of Education's charter school operator database. Yes, CREDO found that other Ohio operators are doing a good job, but, again, a small percentage of Ohio's charter school students are in those schools.

The study did re-affirm what I've been saying for years -- that David Brennan's White Hat Management is awful at running schools, though pretty good at making lots of money. Their Life Skills Academies -- a dropout recovery group that has trouble graduating even 8 out of 100 students -- are particularly awful.

Here's another issue, and it's one I've brought up before. Breakthrough doesn't take all of its kids from Cleveland. Yet their performance is almost always compared with Cleveland Municipal Schools'. Breakthrough takes just shy of 20 percent of their kids from outside Cleveland. And they require large amounts of paperwork to be filled out by parents, which kind of self-selects for involved parents -- the single greatest predictor for kids' academic success.

Many of the non-Cleveland kids come from Warrensville Heights and East Cleveland -- districts that struggle with state tests like Cleveland. But the fact remains that Breakthrough has a far smaller percentage of kids from Cleveland than Cleveland schools do, and they have kids whose parents are willing to fill out lots of paperwork.

Yet they're compared with Cleveland kids whose parents may never have stepped foot in a school since their own high school days. This has been a burr in my saddle for years, despite my tremendous respect and support for what Breakthrough's John Zitzner has done in Cleveland.

The other interesting thing from the CREDO study is they only looked at CMOs that run several schools. That means they didn't include Altair, which runs the nation's largest K-12 school -- the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow and its 15,000 students. Though given the Ohio Department of Education's recent ruling, that number may be closer to 6,000.

But how poorly would CREDO have found online education to be (which it found to be the worst of all charter school types) if ECOT's putrid performance were included?

I know it's encouraging to hear that some charter schools in Ohio are doing a good job. That's never been something that hasn't been said, though. In fact, I've pretty much always said this. The issue is with a nearly $1 billion a year program, we should be getting a better statewide bang for the buck rather than just a couple handfuls of schools mostly in Cleveland.

Put another way, is it worth kids in Columbus and Cincinnati losing about a quarter of their state funding each year and Ohio's public school kids overall losing an average of about $250 a year in state money due to charter school funding so that a couple dozen successful schools can operate mostly in Cleveland?

Again, the role of state lawmakers is to look out for all Ohio kids, not just the small sliver that have found a successful experience in alternative education programs. We need state leadership who is willing to put as much blood, sweat and tears into figuring out how to improve the educational experiences of the 90 percent of Ohio schoolchildren who are in Ohio's public school districts as they currently do for 10 percent who do not.

Bizarro World: Ohio Wins Big USDOE Award for Charter School Oversight.

Every once in a while, I'm gobstopped. Really and truly. Yesterday was one of those times. That's when I found out that Ohio had received the nation's largest award from the U.S. Department of Education for Charter School oversight.

Considering that study after study after report after comment has indicated that Ohio has among the nation's weakest charter school oversight regimes, I was left scratching my head. According to the USDOE evaluation,

"Ohio has established high and exacting accountability expectations of authorizers (including evaluation against standards) and, inferentially, schools. This is critical to their plan and the priority of high quality authorizing permeates this and other sections of the application ... Overall, a very clear and carefully planned strategy."

More outrageous is the reviewers said there were "no weaknesses noted."

Huh?

What about the Bellwether report from December that found:

"Part of the problem has been Ohio’s incoherent charter-school law—a law that has too often failed to put students’ best interests first. Instead, in too many ways, it has protected powerful vested interests, smothered schools with red tape, starved even the best schools, and tolerated academic mediocrity. But fixing Ohio’s charter law is no easy task. The law itself is roughly 40,000 words and has been amended nineteen times since its enactment in 1997. It contains many peculiar exceptions, loopholes, and restrictions."

Or what about the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, who recently reiterated that Ohio's authorizer laws make Ohio the "Wild, Wild West" of charter school authorizing?

Or what about the comment made later in the reviewer comments that found that "The numbers [on authorizers] are very aggressive and not adequately informed by data, especially Past Performance."

I mean, WTF?

How about this little chestnut:

"There is insufficient data to determine the extent to which the academic achievement and academic attainment (including high school graduation rates and college and other postsecondary education enrollment rates) of charter school students equal or exceed the academic achievement and academic attainment of similar students in other public schools in the State over the past five years."

Huh?

Here are the last 9 years of state report cards that allow the public to do that exact thing -- compare charters with local districts and schools. Or how about www.KnowYourCharter.com, which has compiled all that info into one site?

What are these reviewers talking about?

How about this:

"Included in the strategy is demonstrated evidence and willingness to close poor performing schools (p. 22)

According to ODE's own school closure data, only 24 charter schools have been closed under the state's closure law, which was passed in 2005. Of those, 17 were closed between FY2009 and FY2011. Only 7 have been closed under the statute since FY2011. The state has ordered that 56 charters close for several reasons since FY2000. However, only 18 of those happened since FY2011.

To give you an idea of scale, there have been 209 charters shut down since the program began. The state only had anything to do with 81 of those, or less than 40%, with only a handful in the last 5 years.

Where is this so-called willingness?

Try this nugget:

"There is an effort to aggressively replicate successful schools and models that serve at-risk students, primarily in the Ohio 8."

Huh?

This would be news to the Breakthrough Schools in Cleveland, by the way, when according to emails recently released, the head of the Charter School division at ODE thought Breakthrough -- the state's highest performing charter group -- was ruining the Ohio charter school potential.

The Ohio 8 are the big urban districts in Ohio -- Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown.

I can only assume this is a reference to the so-called Youngstown plan, which will replace the elected school board with a CEO who could then turn all schools into charters. But Youngstown is not the area where the high performing charters reside.

Again, where is this aggressive effort to replicate charter groups like Breakthrough?

I'm not saying Ohio shouldn't take the money. My concern is whether Ohio sufficiently misled the USDOE about what's going on here and whether ODE, which is now without a charter school oversight head because the old one manipulated data, is going to ensure this funding goes to schools like Breakthrough and not the old, poor performing, politically connected charter operators.

You can't possibly read this story in the 74 -- Campbell Brown's education reform group -- and square it with the massive award Ohio received.

What's weirder? Try this. Macke Raymond -- the director of CREDO, which looks at charter school performance around the country -- this year told Ohio folks , "Be very glad you have Nevada, so you are not the worst."

Guess who also got a federal award this week? That's right. Nevada.

So the two worst performing charter states in the country got awards from the USDOE to increase the number of charter schools in those states.

How, exactly, does this improve the overall quality of the nation's charter schools?

Let's Not Get Too Excited ... Yet

Yesterday, my respected colleague at the Fordham Institute -- Chad Aldis -- posted a blog that painted quite the rosy picture of Ohio's shift toward charter reform. And while the steps that the Ohio Department of Education is taking seems like a shift, I'm less apt than my friend to get overly excited here.

This isn't an indictment of Chad. He's been a fighter for reform recently, especially about authorizer transparency. But I'm less excited about the department's stance than he.

First of all, the closures ODE initiated only happened because a sponsor shut down and the department took over sponsorship of these schools. So the department is acting like a fairly responsible charter sponsor. And that's nice. Except ODE only sponsors 21 of 400 charters. So there's that.

Again, having the department tell 4 charters they're going to be shut down is nice, but those 4 represent 1% of Ohio charters. When they shut down two schools last year for non-academic issues, that was nice too. And the three sponsors ODE warned against opening any new charters last April? They oversee less than 10% of all charters in Ohio.

Perhaps this speaks to the benefits of a Massachusetts-like charter regime where the only sponsor is the department of education, instead of the scores of sponsors Ohio has. But I digress.

The state's current charter reform legislation -- as I've said many times -- is the most bold and courageous charter reform effort offered in 3 decades by Ohio Republicans. Yet it still does not address the two most pressing issues: funding and tightening closure standards.

I chalk that up to Ohio being a national laggard on these issues than a real legislative shortcoming. But it demonstrates just how far we need to go as a state.

And I've said before that I'm encouraged that ODE has changed language on its website to call it "Quality School Choice", as well as the efforts Chad mentioned in his blog.

My bottom line is this though: the three sponsors whose crackdown Chad touts still oversee schools that educate about 8,600 children. And 2 of the schools Chad mentions as closing were open just a few weeks, while the other 5 accounted for $9.6 million of the nearly $1 billion spent last year on charters. That's barely 1% of all the money spent on charters last year.

As for how long these closed schools were open, the V L T Academy and Cleveland Community School had been open since the 2005-2006 school year. Imagine Cleveland and Imagine on Superior have been open since 2010-2011. Villaview has been open since 2006-2007. Those schools still ended up having 9,450 children go through their doors over the years. And they still may not be closing because the schools can appeal the state's ruling.

Closing down a couple schools here and there is a good step, but hardly the crackdown that's necessary. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found recently that the best way to improve a state's charter sector is close as many poor performers as possible, and quick. More than 1/2 of the money spent on Ohio charters last year came from the same or better performing districts.

Ohio E-Schools are a disaster. Look at this chart showing how E-Schools are dragging down overall charter school performance based on how many report card ratings the charter is better or worse than the district that sent them their kids.

And let's not forget that local taxpayers have to subsidize charters that perform the same or worse to the tune of $180 million because charters get so much more state money than their students would have received in their home districts that those districts have to fill in the gap with local revenue.

These are the big issues. 

When ODE starts going after the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow -- who took all  $100 million or so it got from districts that performed better, or White Hat schools, which got 1 A, 5 Bs and about 70% Ds and Fs on the state report card, or the E-Schools in general, which educate about 40,000 kids and receive more than 95% of their funding from higher performing districts, or the sponsors that oversee 50-60 schools rather than 4 or 5, then I'll call it a crackdown.

Some perspective. 

Since 2000, 197 charter schools have been shut down -- about 13 per year. Of those 197 charter school closings, 101 were done voluntarily. Only 24 were due to the state's closure law. Sponsors ordered the other 72, but only 8 were explicitly for academic reasons. Primarily, sponsors have closed charters for lack of financial viability or failure to comply with their contract.

So these closings and warnings that ODE has recently announced during its "crackdown" don't even constitute a half-year's worth of charter closings, historically.

I'm not saying what ODE is doing isn't valuable. It is a step in the right direction, though a creakingly small one. 

I am saying that we should pump the breaks on the crackdown talk until ODE is given the authority to actually crack down on the poor performing charters that have drained so many resources while poorly served students for far too long. The current legislation would be a nice step toward doing that.

But until then, I fear it's spitting in the wind.

Charter Day in Columbus

Today is one of those news days I loved as a reporter -- lots of news, and really important news at that.

First off, Bellwether Education Partners released a study funded by the Fordham Foundation, which to their great credit has funded two high-quality reports that have called out Ohio charter schools. The report gave 10 policy recommendations for fixing Ohio's broken charter school sector. Lots of good recommendations in there -- coming down hard on failing schools, operators and sponsors, focusing on quality rather than quantity of choices.

My only real beef with it was the suggestion that we need to put local money into charters too so that the "inequity" issue can be resolved, as well as some of the transportation and building funding issues. Including charter schools as part of the Ohio School Facilities Commission funding scheme has issues, like what's the local match? School districts have to come up with local money to fund part of the project. Would charters get their whole project paid for? The fairness of that, when districts (for whom the fund was originally developed during the DeRolph school funding case) had to match it seems a quagmire.

I understand the need to provide some building assistance, though, because without that, charter schools are forced to get in bed with big-time operators that are focused on profits, not kids.

I also struggle with the transportation issue. Charter school kids are transported by school districts at no cost to the charter. Some districts transport a lot of kids to charters. There may be a few charters that take kids from outside a district, so I can understand the need to maybe provide some transportation to them. But again, it's fraught with issues. What do you do, for instance, with open enrollment kids going between school districts whose parents do the driving? Again, there are equity issues galore.

Ultimately, it's awfully difficult to understand why we need to put more money into a sector that already gets almost $1 billion to educate 130,000 kids when folks on both sides of the issue now agree the sector doesn't work.

I would prefer to see the direct state funding of charters, coupled with rigorous quality controls and differentiated funding for excellence could be a way to fix this funding issue. Funding charters is a tough thing to do. But it can be done. And better than it is today. Especially with the state's expected budget surplus this next year.

I don't even mind the transportation or building recommendations nearly as much if I was assured as a taxpayer that it would actually go to successful charter schools, not schools that graduate 2 of 155 kids, as one Ohio charter school currently does.

About an hour later, we at www.KnowYourCharter.com put out a report that showed that 511 of Ohio's 613 school districts got less state funding per pupil last year than the minimum charter deduction required under state law. This means that local revenues have to subsidize these charter school payments.

And when you consider that brick and mortar charter schools spend more per pupil than school districts -- all revenues considered -- you start to see the issue with funding charters. Keystone Local Schools Superintendent Jay Arbaugh and Lorain County ESC Superintendent Greg Ring joined me at the news conference today.

They relayed the tale of how shocked their constituents are when they find out how charter school funding works in this state, and its adverse impact on the 90% of kids not in charter schools.

What we've seen the last week or so are reports that are pointing Ohio leaders in a direction to reform charter schools. I was encouraged to see state Rep. Andrew Brenner and state Sen. Peggy Lehner -- both Republicans -- remark after Bellwether's presentation that they will fight for these recommendations in the legislature.

But overcoming the millions of dollars contributed to Ohio politicians by adults that run poorer performing charter schools will be a monumental task.

For the first time in years, though, I'm optimistic it can happen.

Charter schools can work. They are neither the panacea nor devil's work folks claim. They're not working in Ohio. They can. But it will take education and leadership to overcome three decades of Ohio political habit on this issue.

So let's kick the habit.

Together.

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.

Ohio CREDO study: Charters' Generally Negative Impact

The quadrennial CREDO study from Stanford has become a sort of gold standard for charter-public school comparisons. They use sophisticated statistical techniques to draw helpful comparisons between the two education sectors. And while they are only looking at reading and math test scores (which brings inherent limitations), the analysis is as clear-eyed as you'll get on this contentious issue.

Well, the Fordham Institute paid to have CREDO look at Ohio's charter school sector. And in its report released today, CREDO says about Ohio's charter sector what it's generally said during its quadrennial look -- it ain't good. Kudos must be given to Fordham for paying to have CREDO come into town. While we have differed on policy over the years, I do find Fordham to be among the more credible and sane voices on this issue in Ohio from the pro-charter side. They know there's a problem and want to fix it. And for that, they deserve credit.

Back to the study. 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. 

There appeared to be a few positive impacts in middle schools and a couple other places. But, overall, the results were really not good.

Here are a few quotes: 

• "... 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."

Over the next several days and weeks, many will parse out these results and focus on the few areas where Ohio charters seem to be doing particularly well or poorly (students in small towns lose almost an entire academic year of learning in a charter, for example). But I want everyone to remember that more than $900 million went to Ohio charters last school year. And about 1/2 of kids in charters do not come from Ohio's urban core. And that the average Ohio student loses more than $300 a year because the state removes so much to pay for charters.

And I want you to ask yourselves a simple question: Is this level of commitment worth it? For taxpayers and, most importantly, our kids both in charters and traditional public schools? 

It is time to fix this behemoth before it continues to harm both the students in Ohio's schools as well as the well-meaning dreams of education reformers.

More Evidence Ohio Charter Experiment Failing

Piggybacking on the evidence from yesterday's release of a report I authored at Innovation Ohio, which demonstrated again that the vast majority of kids in Ohio charter schools came from better performing traditional public school districts, US News & World Report's rankings of the country's best high schools provides another sobering picture of Ohio's 16-year-old charter school experiment.

Not a single one of Ohio's 97 charter high schools outperformed the state average in reading and math. Meanwhile, 167 of the 735 traditional public high schools did that. So that's an amazing 167-0 score. Not a single charter high school in Ohio rates in the top 115 high schools in the state -- the lowest rank given by U.S. News.

This confirms what Stanford's CREDO study demonstrated last year -- that the average Ohio charter school student loses a full marking period in math and half of one in reading to their traditional public school counterparts. And, CREDO showed Ohio is only one of four states where charter school performance has declined during the last four years, due in large part to the state not being more aggressive in closing the failing schools.

Remember that nearly every district in this state loses children and money to charter schools, including the finest districts in the state. So the argument that one should only compare charter performance with the poorest performing public schools is flawed. You can't take money and children from every district, then demand to be only compared with the most struggling. That's having your cake and eating it too, and it doesn't serve the needs of kids.

Excuses can no longer suffice. Action must be taken.

Ohio's charter schools are in desperate need of reform. There are some that are successfully educating kids. And charters have an important role to play in Ohio's educational landscape. But far, far, far too many are simply collecting taxpayer dollars and making the adults who run them wealthy.

It is incumbent upon the state's leaders and policymakers to wake up and make the changes that must be done. And do it before this $900 million program continues to grow in bloat and failure.

Our kids are counting on us.