March 25th, 2015

KYC Analysis: Performance Comparison of Individual Charter Schools and Local Schools

Introduction

When the Ohio Charter School Accountability Project launched http://www.KnowYourCharter.com, the site compared data on the performance of Ohio charter schools with that of Ohio’s local school districts. We did so because each individual charter school is considered a school district and when money is transferred to a charter school, it comes from the local school district’s overall pot of money for its schools, not a particular school.  In other words, kids in every school in a district – not just the lowest performers – lose revenue because of the way charter schools are funded under state law.

Recently, the Know Your Charter website has been updated with data on individual local schools. (Click on the School Performance tab on the home page – https://knowyourcharter.com/school-performance/) And while it is difficult to say what financial impact charter schools are having on Ohio’s individual local schools, the performance comparisons once again demonstrate that the academic achievement of Ohio’s charter schools overall falls behind  local school districts – performance that can’t be explained by charter schools’ demographic challenges. And while there are some very high performing charters, they are too few to make the sector’s overall performance match that of local schools.

Overall Performance

Generally, Ohio’s charter schools perform worse than all local public schools, including those in the Big 8 urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) – the areas where charters were supposed to offer better alternatives. Instead, they register lower percentages of As and Bs while having higher percentages of Ds and Fs.

As the data show, charter schools receive smaller percentages of As and Bs than even Big 8 urban schools. They receive about the same percentage of Fs as non-urban schools   receive Cs, Ds and Fs combined.

And when looking at performance index scores – the combined measure of students’ proficiency, the contrast is even more telling.

Once again, the Big 8 urban schools outperform the state’s charter schools, whose overall scores are dwarfed by local schools — especially non-urban schools.

It is important to recognize that 47% of children in charter schools did not come from the Big 8 urban districts in the 2012-2013 school year.

On overall student growth measures, charter schools do slightly better than urban schools, but still are greatly outperformed by local district schools overall, and especially the non-big 8 urban schools.

But it is on graduation rates where Ohio’s charter schools’ performance is especially abysmal. Only 4 out of 59 charter schools that received grades for four-year graduation rates earned an A or B on that measure. The average graduation rate in a charter was 53.9%. The average urban school was 70.2%.

And, finally, on closing achievement gaps charter schools once again lag the rest of the state’s individual local schools. And while they have slightly higher percentages of As and Bs than urban schools, they also have a slightly higher percentage of Fs.

On performance, Ohio’s charter schools overall are simply failing to live up to their promised level of success. They lag even the most struggling local public schools in the state. And as the data at Know Your Charter indicate, their poorer performance is not explained by tougher demographic challenges.

Demographics

It has long been established that student performance is inexorably linked with poverty rates. In fact, the relationship is almost perfectly correlated – statistically speaking. However, Ohio’s charter schools seem to buck this finding, but not the way one would think. For despite having lower poverty rates than Ohio’s Big 8 urban schools, they are outperformed by those same urban public schools in several important measures.

Despite the fact that Big 8 schools have a 6% higher poverty rate, on average, they have 10% more As, 20% more Bs, 4% fewer Ds, and 3.5% fewer Fs on the state report card than charter schools. And on graduation rates, Big 8 urban schools have about 4 times the percentage of As, double the percentage of Bs and a 17% lower rate of Fs than charter schools.

Also, Big 8 urban schools have a slightly higher average performance index score – the measure that should be most closely related to poverty rate – despite having 6% higher poverty rates.

Not only is the average poverty rate higher in Big 8 urban schools, but it is more concentrated as well. Well over half of all Big 8 urban schools have poverty rates of 95% or higher (the Ohio Department of Education only states that schools have “>95.0” poverty if they are over 95%). Charter schools have a 37% lower rate of high-concentrated poverty schools. There are so many high-poverty schools in Ohio’s urban areas that the median poverty level among all Big 8 schools is “>95.0”.

Because poor children in Big 8 urban schools are more concentrated among their high-poverty classmates, their overall performance should be quite low. As was found in a 2010 peer-reviewed study, “When lower SES students are grouped in a lower SES school, their lower educational outcomes can be exacerbated.”¹

Yet, once again, Ohio’s Big 8 urban schools actually outperform charter schools on graduation rates and the performance index score (measuring proficiency) despite their 37% higher rate of high-poverty-concentration schools. Charters do outperform Big 8 urban schools on some student growth measures, but only barely on the percentage of As, even on Cs and are actually outperformed by Big 8 urbans on Ds. As for closing achievement gaps, Big 8 urbans receive a higher combined percentage of As, Bs and Cs than charters, with lower percentages of combined Ds and Fs.

Conclusion

The addition of individual school data at KnowYourCharter.com tells the same story as the district level data –namely that Ohio’s charter schools are badly outperformed by even their urban counterparts. And despite poverty concentrations that research shows should lead to clear underperformance of urban schools compared with charters, urban schools actually outperform charters on nearly all the major state performance measures.

These data demonstrate clearly that the reform measures currently working their way through the Ohio General Assembly need to continue to be strengthened so that children in all schools have the opportunity to succeed.

1. Perry, L. & McConney, A. Does the SES of the School Matter? An Examination of Socioeconomic Status and Student Achievement Using PISA 2003 Teachers College Record Volume 112 Number 4, 2010, p. 1137-1162