Study: Charter schools in state still struggling

Charter COLUMBUS — schools in Ohio haven’t improved in recent years, Stanford University researchers have found, despite all the recent debate and efforts to make this state’s nationally scorned charter schools teach kids better.

“There is little to no progress in Ohio charter school performance,” concludes a new report released by Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO), when comparing Ohio’s charters today to those 10 years ago, as well as those four years ago.

Though charters here made progress in helping students learn to read over time — closing a small gap between them and traditional schools — they did worse in math and fell further behind.

It would be a discouraging finding for charter backers, who have viewed the much-maligned sector as improving the last few years as tougher state laws have kicked in and some of the worst schools have closed. But many of those changes are still too new to have moved the numbers in the Stanford study.

The report also gives charter backers a big win by making a major distinction between typical charter schools and online ones.

Most charter schools — the “brick-and-mortar” schools where students come to a school every day — look great in the new findings when they are compared to traditional public schools handling similar students. These charters helped students read better than traditional schools did with similar students, and barely did worse in math.

The big problems are with online charter schools, which lag so far behind everyone that they wipe out any gains for charters overall. Online charters did worse in both reading and math — far worse in math — than other schools. It was as if students at online charters in Ohio skipped 47 days of reading classes in a year and 136 days of math classes.

“The poor performance of online charter schools drags down the overall charter impact,” the report reads.

The Fordham Institute, a national education advocacy group active in Ohio, sponsored the study, as well as a similar one CREDO did for Ohio in late 2014. Fordham, a right-leaning organization, supports charters and school choice efforts, while also pressing for quality schools.

Fordham analyst Aaron Churchill trumpeted the way “brick-and-mortar” schools fared in the report. “We ought to recognize the great work they’re doing — and do more to help them become even stronger,” he wrote in a post for Fordham’s website.