Charter schools - a failing experiment

87 Percent of Ohio's Charter Schools Fail To Meet Minimum Standards

By karoli 

(Click on the headline for this article to read more)

Success Academy suspends students to force performance grades higher - Democracy Now For all of the ballyhoo over charter schools, no one is actually dealing with the fact that they're failing, not only in Philadelphia but across the country. When do our elected officials get a clue?
Via the Education Opportunity Network, a stunning statistic:

Republican state legislators enacted a law in 1997 allowing charter schools to locate exclusively within the boundaries of the “Big 8” systems.

Sixteen years later, charters statewide performed almost exactly the same on most measures of student achievement as the urban schools they were meant to reform, results released under a revamped Ohio report-card system show. And when it comes to graduating seniors after four years of high school, the Big 8 performed better.
[...]
But what started as an experiment in fixing urban education through free-market innovation is now a large part of the problem. Almost 84,000 Ohio students — 87 percent of the state’s charter-school students — attend a charter ranking D or F in meeting state performance standards.
[...]
Eighty-six percent of charters rated in this category scored D or F, compared with 90 percent of Big 8 schools. Just over 17 percent of Big 8 high schools ranked A or B in graduating students in four years, compared with about 7 percent of charters.

Pennsylvania is pouring $729 million into their charter schools. That's $729 million that isn't going to regular public schools. Even with that funding loss, public schools are somehow managing to perform as well or better than charters. The same is true in Ohio, and indeed, is a trend nationwide.