ODE has just released their partial school report card. It doesn't contain any final grades, but it does tell us whether schools made adequate yearly progress, and the news isn't pretty for Ohio's charter school movement.

Of the 352 charter schools listed, 58.2% of them failed to meet their adequate yearly progress (AYP) metrics.

If a student attends a school in any of Allen, Warren, Erie, Hancock, Lake, Madison, or Tuscarawas counties, not a single charter school made adequate yearly progress. Indeed, out of the 36 counties that have charter schools, 24 counties had schools that combined for more than half their charters failing to meet their adequate yearly progress.

County	Not Met AYP	Met AYP
Allen	100.0%	0.0%
Warren	100.0%	0.0%
Erie	100.0%	0.0%
Hancock	100.0%	0.0%
Lake	100.0%	0.0%
Madison	100.0%	0.0%
Tuscarawas	100.0%	0.0%
Stark	83.3%	16.7%
Trumbull	75.0%	25.0%
Summit	73.3%	26.7%
Montgomery	72.4%	27.6%
Mahoning	71.4%	28.6%
Hamilton	67.9%	32.1%
Richland	66.7%	33.3%
Clark	66.7%	33.3%
Fairfield	66.7%	33.3%
Morrow	66.7%	33.3%
Franklin	65.3%	34.7%
Butler	60.0%	40.0%
Lucas	58.8%	41.2%
Lorain	54.5%	45.5%
Marion	50.0%	50.0%
Columbiana	50.0%	50.0%
Greene	50.0%	50.0%
Cuyahoga	42.0%	58.0%
Portage	40.0%	60.0%
Licking	25.0%	75.0%
Muskingum	25.0%	75.0%
Seneca	25.0%	75.0%
Champaign	0.0%	100.0%
Wayne	0.0%	100.0%
Scioto	0.0%	100.0%
Coshocton	0.0%	100.0%
Hardin	0.0%	100.0%
Jackson	0.0%	100.0%
Van Wert	0.0%	100.0%
Grand Total	58.2%	41.8%

There's a lot of students in a lot of schools, in a lot of counties not being served by the "choices" they are being presented with.

The Shanker Institute has just released a policy brief titled "The Evidence on Charter Schools and Test Scores", which finds

The available research suggests that charter schools’ effects on test score gains vary by location, school/student characteristics and other factors. When there are differences, they tend to be modest. There is tentative evidence suggesting that high-performing charter schools share certain key features, especially private donations, large expansions of school time, tutoring programs and strong discipline policies. Finally, while there may be a role for state/local policies in ensuring quality as charters proliferate, scaling up proven approaches is constrained by the lack of adequate funding, and the few places where charter sectors as a whole have been shown to get very strong results seem to be those in which their presence is more limited. Overall, after more than 20 years of proliferation, charter schools face the same challenges as regular public schools in boosting student achievement, and future research should continue to focus on identifying the policies, practices and other characteristics that help explain the wide variation in their results.

Charter Review