Ohio's School Districts Outperforming Charter Schools at Historically High Rate on Performance Index Score

Under Ohio law,  the state's performance index score is the primary determinant of whether a charter school will open in your community. The score is a weighted measure of student standardized test scores -- scores notoriously linked to student demographics.

The state's scores have dropped overall during the last several years as new tests and standards have forced schools and students to adjust their learning. However, what is clear from an examination of Ohio's historic performance index results is that Ohio's public school districts have been much better at adjusting to the changes than Ohio's charter schools.

In fact, the last two school years -- while representing the two lowest median performance index scores for school districts -- represent the two largest relative score differentials between districts and charters ever recorded.

What's that mean? It means that while Ohio's school districts have dropped, charters have dropped more, making the score disparity between the two larger than ever. The 2015-2016 school year saw districts outperform charters by nearly 50 percent. Last year, it was closer to 45 percent.

For several years, the gap had been narrowing -- especially after the state effectively removed the 90 worst performing charters from qualifying for the performance index score after the 2011-2012 school year.

However, while Ohio's school districts saw a quick, two-year 13 percent drop in performance index scores, charters saw a 27 percent drop during that period -- more than double the relative dip.

Again, the reason I'm harping on performance index scores, though I agree with my charter school advocate friends that the scores are too closely tied to demographics, is because performance index scores are the primary reason charter schools can open in school districts. If school districts score in the bottom 5 percent of districts on performance index, charters can come to town.

However, it is abundantly clear that in the vast majority of cases, those charters will produce performance index scores that are often far worse than the districts whose scores are so troubling to lawmakers they allow competition to ostensibly improve the community's educational options.

If performance index is the measure by which we are determining this need for district competition, what does it say that the alleged competitors score so much worse?

Suffice it to say I get why charter school advocates are now trying to move away from proficiency based accountability regimes. Call me cynical if you wish, but I wonder how much of this move by charter advocates is about the fact that charters overall just perform more poorly than their district competition?

The Quiet Importance of Ohio's Performance Index Score

Many in the charter school advocacy community have been pushing to have the state only judge charter schools by their so-called "value-added" scores -- the amount of student growth shown during the year on the state's battery of standardized tests. Among the advantages these advocates stress is how the value added scores tend to be less influenced by demographics than straight proficiency scores.

Value added measures have real limitations as well, including many critics who claim value added scores are equally problematic for accountability purposes as proficiency scores.

However, proficiency scores continue to be among the most important single state report card indicators. Why? Because according to state law, if a school district scores in the bottom 5 percent of performance index scores, charter schools can come to town. Performance index is calculated by weighting scores depending on how high or low students score on state proficiency tests.

So despite charter school advocates' admission that what testing critics have said for years -- that proficiency scores are closely tied to demographics -- and their insistence that value-added scores be the primary determinant of a school or district's success, these advocates have been silent on this fundamental provision of state law that determines whether a school district will have publicly funded, privately run schools competing for students and dollars.

Here's one reason why they may remain silent on this issue: Charter schools, which are meant to provide options to parents in districts with poor proficiency scores, have even worse performance index scores than the bottom 5 percent of districts.

According to the current list of "challenged school districts" put out by the Ohio Department of Education (the list was frozen after the 2013-2014 school year as Ohio transitions to its A-F report card), there are 24 districts that qualified then for charter schools under the performance index performance criterion. There are an additional 15 that qualify because they were part of the original pilot program (Lucas County schools) or are a big 8 urban district (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown).

The median performance index score for those 24 "challenged school districts" was 83.058 (out of 120 possible) in 2013-2014. Do you know how many charter schools outperformed that score on the last report card? If you guessed 23, you'd be right.

That's 23 out of 265 charters that had performance index scores recorded by the state -- a staggeringly low 9 percent of Ohio charter schools. That does not include the 90 or so dropout recovery schools, which do not receive performance index scores, but that routinely rated as the worst performing schools in the state prior to receiving their far more lenient report card. For example, in the last year dropout schools received performance index scores (2010-2011), they scored 10 points lower than their non-dropout recovery counterparts.

The amazing thing is there are fewer charters that currently outperform Ohio's lowest performing school districts than there are currently "challenged school districts" due to their poor proficiency scores!

More than 94 percent of money being spent on Ohio charter schools with performance index scores goes to charters currently with worse performance index scores than the school districts whose scores were so bad state lawmakers called them "challenged" enough to allow charter schools to come in to offer "better" options ...
6 percent of the time!

What do you suppose will be state lawmakers' response to this conundrum -- the alleged solution is even worse performing than the problem it was meant to solve? If you guessed nothing, you're cynical. But you're probably right.

This is also why I continue to compare district performance with charter school performance.

Sorry guys.

School districts' performance on the very measures charter advocates criticize the state for using to judge their favorite schools' performance is being used by the state to determine if charters should open in certain communities.

Yet that same state metric would designate more than 9 of 10 Ohio charter schools a "challenged school district" in desperate need of competition.

For those of you who would charge this comparison is unfair because performance index scores are overall lower today than they were in 2013-2014, applying the same performance index standard for a "challenged school district" today would result in nearly 6 in 10 charters scoring worse.

Again, the designation of a "challenged school district" remains how that school scored in 2013-2014.
But regardless of which criterion you use, charters overall just don't pass muster.

ECOT's Dubiously Claims it will Close in December

Call it a hunch, but I'm betting dollars to donuts that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow's claim in a court filing today that it will close in December if a case doesn't go its way is a bluff to get the Ohio Supreme Court to rule for the school.

According to ECOT's filing, the state's $60 million clawback of taxpayer money ECOT was paid for kids it couldn't prove it had during the 2015-2016 school year will force the school to close in December.

Here's the thing, though. The money "crunch" ECOT is claiming will kill it in December should be there right now. In other words, if that $2.5 million per month deduction the state is taking from ECOT was so onerous, it would have forced the school to close already. Yet the school's already paid back $5 million of their misbegotten money.

But the fact is this: Even with the school's $30 million payment to ODE this school year (ODE split the $60 million into two years of monthly payments), they will still be receiving $73 million, or $5,183 per student from the state. That's still more than what 52 percent of Ohio's school districts receive from the state.

I remind you that ECOT doesn't have buildings, HVAC, busing, lunch ladies, etc. Yet the state pays them more per pupil than more than 1/2 of school districts that do have those costs.

Only in Ohio.

Anyway, that $73 million ECOT would still receive would allow them to pay their teachers, give $2,000 laptops to every student this year (which they do NOT do) and still clear a handsome profit. Just not quite as handsome as its politically connected founder, Bill Lager, is used to receiving. And that's assuming it actually has 14,000 students, which is a dubious proposition given the state's continued inability to find that the school has anywhere near as many kids as it bills taxpayers for educating.

How else do I think it's a bluff? Because according to ECOT's own academic calendar, (at left) they are not just preparing for life after December, but they already have their summer school session laid out for 2018.

I've gone over all this before. But suffice it to say that if ECOT closes in December (which I'm not buying right now), it likely will be because the train can't provide enough gravy. As with most everything about ECOT, the issue won't be about whether it can educate kids. It will be about whether it can further fatten the wallets of the adults ECOT enriches.

Ohio Stars (Again) in National Report about Charter School Fraud

Man, I am getting sick of this. How many times do national publications have to do the Ohio Department of Education and Ohio General Assembly's work for them before real changes are instituted here about charter schools?

This time it was USA Today and Pro Publica that broke the news yesterday that Ohio charter schools consistently bill the state for students that simply are not there. And you know who knows about this and does nothing? The Ohio Department of Education. How do I know this? Because the data Pro Publica used was from the Ohio Department of Education!!!!

My God. ODE knows on certain days a handful of kids show up at a dropout recovery school that is charging taxpayers for educating hundreds of kids? Yet they do nothing. Not. A. Thing.

This isn't all ODE's fault. From the very beginning, state regulators' authority over charters has been neutered by an Ohio General Assembly that has been in the pocket of the guys who profit off the absent kids in our state's charter schools. Don't believe me?

How about this in an Akron Beacon Journal story from 2014:

"In 2003, legislation sponsored by then Rep. Jon Husted, now the secretary of state, created a buffer between the Department of Education and charter schools by placing control in the hands of “sponsors,” or “authorizers,” who generally were school-choice advocates.

They, not the Ohio Department of Education, were in charge of approving new charters, and enrollment surged from 30,000 in 2003 to 125,900 today. And they have an incentive to open more schools rather than close them because their revenue is based on the number of children in the schools they oversee."

Husted, who now wants to be Governor, wasn't done.

A 2005 report completed by the Ohio Association of Public Charter Schools found that

"The most ambitious evaluations of charter school characteristics and performance in Ohio come from a series of reports produced by the state’s independent Legislative Office of Education Oversight (LOEO) from 2000 to 2004.

LOEO’s most recent report, issued in December 2003, specifically focused on academic performance and accountability of charter schools, and found that many Ohio charters fall significantly short of meeting their promise to improve academic achievement. By and large, LOEO found that charters were doing no better than traditional public schools, and that a large minority were doing substantially worse than comparable district schools.

I ask you, dear reader, what is different from the LOEO analysis from 2003 and the analysis completed more than a decade later by the generally charter school supporting Center for Research on Educational Outcomes that found 40 percent of Ohio's charter schools were in "urgent" need of improvement and kids in Ohio charters often did far worse than their local public school counterparts?

Nothing.

We've known Ohio's charter schools in general were in trouble from the very beginning of the program. Yet little has changed in terms of overall charter school performance or oversight. This is what drives me crazy about many in our state's newfound concern over charter school performance.

Where have all these people been living? Ohio's charter schools have always been worse performing, scandal ridden and profit centers for people motivated to buy nice houses in far off places, not educate kids.

What USA Today reported is nothing new.

Perhaps things would have been different if Ohio's charter schools had continued to be evaluated by a strong state oversight agency like the LOEO.

Well, charter school cheerleader Husted couldn't have that.

So, in the landmark House Bill 66 -- the 2005 state biennial budget bill that began Ohio's recent obsession with tax cuts -- soon-to-be-House-Speaker Husted had inserted into the House version of the bill an amendment that killed the LOEO. Tellingly, the Ohio Senate took out that amendment, but it was reinserted into Conference Committee.

So the state agency that had been sounding the charter school alarm for the first years of the program -- and could have shamed Ohio lawmakers into action sooner -- was dead.

ODE got the message. Loud and clear. Cross charters and you die.

So they don't cross charters. At least not in major ways. While the department's current effort to claw back $60 million the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow owes taxpayers for overbilling them in the 2015-2016 school year plus another $20 million from last school year is a hopeful sign, ODE's weak response to ECOT's effort to become a dropout recovery school is simply more of the same.

I guess I'm just exhausted, though. I started working at the Akron Beacon Journal in 1997 -- the same year the state adopted its charter school law. Over the last 20 years, I have seen every major non-partisan, objective examination of Ohio's charter schools come to the same conclusion: they simply don't, on the whole, offer better options for kids and parents.

Of course a few do. But ladies and gentlemen we have now spent nearly $11 billion on charter schools since I entered my professional life. And we have maybe 40-50 charters that account for a small fraction of that $11 billion that are worthy of being compared with Ohio's local public schools.

That's a horrible return on taxpayer investment. When will legislators and political leaders in this state act to really fix this. Not just nibble around the edges, or hope that non-profits with powerful financial motives to not fix it instead ignore those motives and fix it. But actually purge the innumerable scofflaws from our state.

This is embarrassing. Not because we had a charter school fraud story published in a national newspaper. But because this story has been written about Ohio's charter schools for 20 years.

And our elected leaders simply do nothing. Yet we keep electing them.

First $1 million of controversial $71 million federal charter school grant doled out.

After two years of fits and starts, the Ohio Department of Education has finally given out some of the $71 million federal charter school grant meant to grow high-quality charters in this state.

Unfortunately, as I have reported at Know Your Charter, nearly 1/3 of the federal money spent previously in Ohio went to charters that closed shortly after receiving he federal grant money, or never opened at all.

When Ohio surprisingly received the nation's largest single grant in 2015, it was a stunner because it came on the heels of several reports and scandalous actions that further cemented Ohio's status as a national laughingstock for charter school oversight and performance. It also didn't help that the official at ODE who filled out the application -- David Hansen, the husband of Gov. John Kasich's chief of staff -- resigned shortly after the money was awarded because he cooked the books to make Ohio's situation look better than it actually was.

As a result of this scandal, the feds held up Ohio's money for months as they and ODE went back and forth about the kinds of additional oversight needed to make sure Ohio actually sent the money to charters that weren't about to go under or would never open.

The three recipients of $350,000 each are brand new charters this school year: the Southwest Ohio Preparatory School in Cincinnati, South Columbus Preparatory Academy in Columbus and United Preparatory Academy East, also in Columbus.

The two preparatory academies are sponsored by St. Aloysius Orphanage, which Cleveland wants to ban from sponsoring schools in their city, but is considered an "effective" charter school sponsor by the state of Ohio because it has so many dropout recovery schools that get much more lenient report card ratings.

The other school is sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, whose VP of Policy and Advocacy, Chad Aldis, sits on the ODE advisory panel that oversees the implementation of the federal charter school funding.

Here's hoping this money helps turn the tide and starts growing Ohio's quality school options. But given Ohio's long history on this issue, I'll take Reagan's approach to the old Russian proverb: 

Trust, but verify.

Ohio Receives $35 million Federal Reading Grant

Some good news on Ohio's education front. The U.S. Department of Education has given the Ohio Department of Education a three-year, $35 million grant to improve reading among our state's most at-risk youth.

About 95 percent of the money will be distributed to local schools to deal with the challenges they are facing with reading, according to the ODE news release.

This is providing at least some of the funding necessary for the state's Third-Grade Reading Guarantee to work. While there has been much hoopla over the TGRG from politicians, as with most Ohio education initiatives, funding didn't really follow the rhetoric. Yet despite the fact that the TGRG is essentially an unfunded (or very underfunded mandate), nearly 94 percent of Ohio's school children met the guarantee last school year.

Now that the state will be able to bump up the funding commitment to the TGRG, perhaps our percentage can increase even more than the 0.5 percentage overall increase we saw last year.

Ohio Now at Historically High Reliance on Local Taxpayers to Pay for Schools

Twenty years ago, the Ohio Supreme Court issued the first of four rulings determining that the way Ohio paid for schools was unconstitutional because it relied too much on local property taxes, putting kids in Ohio's less wealthy districts at a decided disadvantage. That school year -- 1996-1997 -- saw the largest difference between state-local share of education in history at 55.02 percent local, 44.98 percent state.

Twenty years later, after two decades of narrowing the gap and even overcoming it in the 2010-2011 school year, Ohio once again has achieved that exact state-local split.

According to the Ohio Department of Education's latest revenue data, Ohio has once again provided 44.98 percent of the funding for Ohio's school children, with the local taxpayers having to come up with 55.02 percent.

If you don't include the $935 million transferred to charter schools last year, that local share percentage jumps to more than 57 percent for local school district taxpayers.

This means that after four Supreme Court cases and 20 years of arguments, Ohio's legislature has done, essentially, nothing to address this most important of issues. In fact, if you include lost state revenue to charter schools and private school vouchers over the last 20 years, the legislature has actually made the reliance on local property taxes worse since the first case was decided.

There is only one thing the Ohio Constitution says the legislature has to do: fund schools. And for 20 years, this General Assembly hasn't performed its only basic function.

How sad for our kids.

Starting in the 2012-2013 school year, the Ohio Department of Education split the local revenue data it had always collected into local revenue and "other non-tax revenue". However, that designation had previously always been included in the local revenue calculation. So in order to do a longitudinal analytic comparison with years prior to 2012-2013, I added the "other non-tax revenue" with the local revenue, as ODE had always done prior to 2012-2013.