Last week, a new Ohio Report Card was unveiled with a new approach to evaluating schools, and upon first glance, it appears that Ohio charter schools may be doing better than they did under the older, supposedly “easier” system.
The new Report Card grades schools and districts based on nine criteria, for which they receive an A-F letter grade.
Charter schools received the same average letter grade as traditional school districts in just two categories: value-added scores for gifted education and for students in the bottom 20%. However, only 2 charters received gifted scores, rendering that measure statistically meaningless. Value added scores measure actual test score growth versus what expected growth would be.
Yet charters overall still woefully underperform districts overall. And it is pretty dramatic. More than 41% of charter school grades were F. More than 60% of Charter School grades were D or F. Only 20% of their grades were A or B.
District grades were much better. Only 11% were F and 20% were D or F. Meanwhile, 53% of districts’ grades were A or B — about evenly split between both grades.
Charters got mostly Ds and Fs while public districts got mostly As and Bs.
Districts outperform charters in every category but the two mentioned earlier (and again, only 2 charters received a grade in the Gifted category). The difference is most stark when comparing graduation rates — the average charter gets an F in four-year graduation rates and a D in five-year rates. Traditional public districts average Bs in both.
What’s even more amazing is this: these charter data do not include 85 Dropout Recovery schools (about 25% of the 347 Charters in operation last year), which have been separated out in the new Report Card. These schools, historically among the poorest performing in the state, do not receive letter grades on the new Report Card.
They are exempt.
We will look at how dropout recovery schools were exempted and how they perform (spoiler alert: it’s not good) in a future post. But in the meantime, the take-away on charters is that even by excluding 85 of the poorest-performing charters by exempting dropout recovery schools from letter grades on the Report Cards, Ohio’s charter schools still underperform traditional public schools on nearly every measure. And yet they are set to receive up to $124 million more state funding this year thanks to continued expansion and policies that shift more pubic dollars away from traditional districts.
And they do this all while spending nearly twice as much as districts on non-instructional costs, effectively removing 6.5% of every non-Charter School student’s state money, providing fewer opportunities for the nearly 90% of children who attend Ohio’s traditional public schools.
The state’s new report card is out now, and there are some positive changes to the format. While many of the aspects of the report card continue to emphasize relatively raw test scores, which are notoriously predicted by demographics, there are new measures that for the first time de-emphasize the importance of demographics on school performance.
mock-up of new report card
The most obvious are the categories looking at how gifted students, special education students and the lowest performing students grow in a district. These measures illuminate for the first time whether schools have served the extremes in their populations — the very talented as well as the very challenging. [Read more…]
In 1991, Perry County high school student Nathan DeRolph filed a lawsuit against the State of Ohio for failing to provide him and every child in the state a “thorough and efficient” system of public common schools. Six years later, in a landmark Ohio Supreme Court case, the Court ruled that DeRolph was right; the way Ohio funded its schools ran afoul of the Ohio Constitution. The central bone of contention in the case was the “overreliance” on property taxes to pay for schools. Relying on property taxes, which produce extremely different amounts of money based on a community’s wealth, further accentuates existing inequities across communities, the Court reasoned.
So the Court ordered the state legislature to beef up the state support to its public schools enough so that districts would not have to rely as much on property taxes to pay for its operations.
After three more rulings asserting that the state had failed to do that, the Ohio Supreme Court decided to drop the case in 2002. Here’s what happened:
Click for full-size image. Data from ODE Interactive Local Report Card, federal funding excluded.[Read more…]
Yesterday we profiled ten school districts who were seeking new operating funds in yesterday’s special election. All were facing budget deficits, heightened thanks to state budget cuts. All had made significant cuts in recent years, and sought levy funds to restore programs or prevent additional cuts.
All ten attempts failed.
Even by historical standards, this is a shockingly high failure rate. Typically 35% of requests for additional funds succeed.
Most of these districts will be back on the ballot in November, which represents the last chance to get a tax change in effect for 2014. Unfortunately, their task will now be even harder.
In November, the same levies will now cost homeowners up to 14% more thanks to a change — enacted in the state budget and signed into law by Governor Kasich — that eliminates Ohio’s longstanding property tax rollback.
If these districts fail again in November, the consequences for some will be dire. As we outlined yesterday, three will no longer offer all-day, every-day kindergarten. Four will have eliminated non-core course offerings, eight will have reduced bus transportation and none will have imposed steep – as high as $750 per student – fees for activities and sports.
Governor Kasich has long suggested that voters reject new levies, and Senate President Faber said he hoped the elimination of the rollback would make levies harder to pass. But they have also reduced state support for education (schools will get $514 million less in 2014-15 than they did in 2010-11).
From the example provided by these ten districts, it is becoming clear that the consequences of these policies are incredibly troubling.
Ten school districts appear on special ballots today, as they seek new operating money in some cases for the third, fourth or even sixth time as prior attempts have failed. Voters in Clark County have not approved new operating revenue for Tecumseh Local Schools in eighteen years.
What these districts have in common with one another and the other 603 public school systems in Ohio are deep and sustained cuts in state support for education during the Kasich years. The last state budget provided $1.8 billion less for education, and the current budget continues to underfund schools to the tune of over $1.3 billion compared to what the state says they need. IO has calculated that 3 in 4 Ohio school districts will have less state funding in 2014-2015 than they did in 2010-2011.
Field Local in Portage County is coping with $1.6 million less annually, including a reduction of $1.2 million from the tangible personal property tax, while Clark-Shawnee (Clark) reports losing $1.5 million in two years.
As a result of these cuts, and declining tax collections during the recession, all ten districts have faced budget deficits, forcing them to make deep cuts in the past few years. [Read more…]
The impact of the budget is being felt throughout Ohio as two more abortions clinics are expected to close their doors.
The state budget requires abortion clinics to have transfer agreements in place with local hospitals and forbids public universities from entering into this agreement. This regulation is largely designed to make it harder for clinics to operate. In reality, women experiencing medical emergencies can be treated at any hospital, not just the hospital with which the clinic has a transfer agreement.
Earlier this summer The Center for Choice, in Toledo, was forced to shut its doors after if was unable to renew its transfer agreement. Later this week Capital Care Women’s Center is expected to close when its transfer agreement with University of Toledo Medical Center expires. The clinic does not anticipate being able to renew its transfer agreement. This will leave Toledo without an abortion clinic, forcing women to drive to Columbus, Cleveland or Akron is they are in need of an abortion.
Another clinic, Capital Care Network of Cuyahoga Falls near Akron, closed in April after failing a state health and safety inspection.
This leaves Ohio with three clinics in Columbus, three in Cleveland, two in Cincinnati, one in Akron and one in Dayton. While none of these clinics rely on a transfer agreement with a publicly funded hospital, one clinic in Dayton and one near Cincinnati currently has a waiver in place for their transfer agreements. Renewal for these waivers is pending at the Ohio Department of Health. Given a separate budget provision that allows the Director of the Ohio Department of Health to rescind a waiver at any time for any reason, it may be difficult for these clinics to continue to operate.
White Hat’s David Brennan
The Ohio Supreme Court announced last week that it would let stand two lower court rulings that said Charter Schools run by White Hat Management have a right to know how White Hat is spending the money the public sends to them.
Charter Schools have sponsors that oversee their operations, as well as boards that are appointed but function similarly to other school boards. Many times, these sponsors and boards contract with for-profit firms to run the school, giving them as much as 97% of the taxpayer money they receive from the state. The state takes the money it was going to send to local school districts and gives it instead to the Charter School, which it turn gives it over to the for profit operator, like White Hat, which is run by political powerhouse David Brennan.
The problem, as we’ve reported at IO before, is that the amount taken from the district and given to the Charter School is almost always more than the district would have gotten for that student, and in nearly every instance, the money goes to a Charter School that performs worse than the district that is losing the student and money.
This decision to let the lower court rulings stand is a victory for transparency in Ohio Charter School law, yet not completely. [Read more…]
Yesterday it was reported that the Kasich administration was initiating a push to raise awareness about Ohio’s alarmingly high infant mortality rate.
Ohio has the third-worst infant mortality rate in the United States and that rate is going up while the national average is declining. Today, nearly 8 in 1000 Ohio babies die in the first year of life – and the number is significantly higher among African-American babies.
However, we also learned yesterday that the Kasich administration has no plans to promote awareness of benefits available under the new national healthcare law that could make treatment available to more women and children. As a result, nonprofit groups will be left to get the word out about benefits. West Virginia plans to spend 18 times as much per capita on outreach. [Read more…]
On Friday, the Ohio Department of Jobs and Family Services released unemployment figures for the month of June. Grabbing headlines was the announcement that Ohio lost 12,500 jobs last month, the second largest decrease in the nation, only behind Tennessee.
What should be concerning to the public and policymakers is that June’s number is another data point in a growing trend of sub-par economic data for Ohio. An analysis of Ohio’s unemployment data shows that from June of 2012 to June of 2013, Ohio only added 16,000 total jobs in the last year, an increase of 0.3 percent, ranking Ohio 47th nationally.
By comparison, Ohio’s twelve month job growth is far below the national average of 1.36 percent and just a tenth of the rate at which Idaho has added jobs over the same period. In fact, only three states — Wyoming, Maine, and Alaska — experienced slower job growth over the last year than Ohio.
[Read more…]