In light of Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Richard Ross’ recent appointment of a 3-member panel to advise him and the Ohio Department of Education on the evaluation of Ohio’s charter school sponsors, the Ohio Charter School Accountability Project (OCSAP) has examined three possible ways that Ohio’s charter school sponsors could be fairly graded. Effectively evaluating charter sponsors is critical because many of the new and important charter school reforms being discussed by Ohio lawmakers revolve around making charter school sponsors more accountable. If they aren’t accurately graded, any reform could be doomed to failure.

What is clear from OCSAP’s analysis is that the vast majority of Ohio’s charter school students are in schools that are overseen by sponsors with poor student achievement track records. Like Ohio’s nationally-ridiculed charter schools, Ohio’s charter school sponsors have a scant few high performers and a trove of poor performers.

OCSAP has examined three different ways to evaluate sponsors: taking an overall grade point average of the charters they sponsor, creating an index based on how many of the students they oversee are in high performing charters for key segments of the state report card, and the third is to have the state use the same methodology on charter school sponsors that it’s going to use in arriving at an overall grade for school districts. The analysis lists sponsors by highest- to lowest-rated in each methodology.

Review the full analysis: 3 Ways to Evaluate Charter Sponsors