Research by the nation’s most reputable outside examiner of state education systems confirms that Ohio’s charter schools bring up the rear, nationally, when it comes to performance. And it appears to be getting worse.

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University works “to support educators and policymakers in using the insights that come from sound research to shape program and policy development.” In 2009, CREDO examined how charter schools performed across the country. The research found the gap between student growth at Ohio’s charter schools and traditional public schools was the nation’s worst.

Other findings included:

• Ohio’s charters were one of 5 states to have a “significant and negative” impact on reading for Hispanic children, and one of 7 in math.

• Ohio’s charters had a positive and significant impact on students in poverty in both reading and math.

• Overall, Ohio’s charter schools were more greatly outperformed by their traditional public school counterparts in math growth than in any other state.

• And even though Ohio’s charter school students outperformed the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests, the impact of those tests on students was found by CREDO to be negative. In other words, the students would have done better in a traditional public school.

So while it did contain some positive news, the 2009 study found that, overall, Ohio’s charter school students were further behind their traditional public school counterparts than in any other state.

CREDO Finds Ohio’s Charter Schools Have Gotten Worse

Last year, the center updated its analysis with a report examining 26 states and found that Ohio was one of only four states where charter schools got worse in the intervening four years. The research found that Ohio’s charter school students were a full grading period behind in math and a third of a grading period behind in reading, compared with their traditional public school counterparts.

Why was there so much improvement in other states’ charter schools? One major reason was that states started shutting down bad performers. In fact, CREDO ran simulations that showed if states shut down charter schools that had significantly worse student growth than traditional public schools, the quality of the remaining charter schools would go up significantly.

Here is the table showing how many charter schools would be closed nationally based on the following scenarios.

In situations where the poorest-performing charter schools are closed, there is a dramatic increase in the positive impact on the remaining charter schools:

The CREDO data doesn’t show much improvement in charters over the years. As the authors put it:

“… the charter sector is getting better on average, but not because existing schools are getting dramatically better; it is largely driven by the closure of bad schools.” 

If a charter is struggling today, it will likely continue to struggle in the future, despite the greater freedom of governance enjoyed by charter schools.

However, Ohio charters are allowed to stay open upwards of six years before they can be shut down, and some (like dropout recovery schools) can effectively stay open without any real fear of being closed. The state’s closure standards are so lax that only 24 charter schools have been shut down under Ohio’s closure law – and only 7 in the last three school years.

Ohio’s leaders could heed CREDO’s research and move more quickly to close the worst performing charter schools. That would serve the double benefit of wasting less taxpayer money while significantly improving the overall performance of the state’s remaining charter schools.