A new study of Ohio's charter schools, paid for by the corporate education boosters at the Fordham Foundation, performed by CREDO which is funded by the Walton Family, and performed by the wife of a conservative economist found that:
Overall, kids in [Ohio] 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
It's a catastrophe for Ohio's charter industry, in fact it is so bad, the conservative author of the study had this to say:
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.
When conservatives are saying Free market don't work in education, it seems everyone but Ohio's lawmakers are coming to the consensus that the charter school quality crisis must be dealt with, and dealt with now.