Mark Stewart, Columbus

Over a three-year period, I was an administrative employee for Ohio’s largest online charter school. It was an instructive experience. Going in, I held the view that charter schools, as envisioned by Albert Shanker and other early advocates, had a place in the educational landscape. They could, I believed, serve as experimental public schools where motivated educators could try innovative ideas to improve authentic student achievement. After the charter movement was hi-jacked by profit-motivated privatizers and public school opponents, however, I joined the growing chorus of critics who denounce the erstwhile promising charter experiment.

My experience convinced me that Shanker, Diane Ravitch, and many other charter school opponents are right. While a handful of charter schools do well academically, performance in the vast majority has been disastrous. Moreover, charters negatively impact struggling public systems by draining millions of dollars away from underfunded public schools across the state. That might be acceptable if charter schools outperformed public schools, but in fact, the opposite is true.

I worked with many dedicated, although poorly paid, teachers and administrators who sincerely wanted to help struggling students succeed, but the enterprise is set up to maximize profits, not educate students. Curriculum amounts to little more than an online workbook. Class sizes in the high school are so large that teachers and students have very little one-on-one contact. Little actual teaching takes place. As a predictable result, the school’s results on state measures were, and continue to be, dismal.

Charter school proponents have had their shot. The experiment failed. People outside of the educational community are finally beginning to recognize the damage caused by privately run charter schools that are virtually unaccountable to the taxpayers, or anyone else for that matter. It is unconscionable that individuals are becoming rich on taxpayer money and at the expense of students across Ohio. The millions diverted from public systems into the hands of profit motivated charter operators, as well as their failure to provide quality educational experiences for students, is causing serious damage to one of the most important pillars of democracy in Ohio and the United States, public schools.