Our latest report details the regional impacts of charter schools on local school districts and communities. The report — Putting Good Money After Bad — demonstrates that local school districts have had to substantially support Ohio’s mostly failing charter schools with hard-earned local property tax revenue.

Since 2012, local taxpayers have subsidized charter schools at a cost of more than $1 billion, while more than 3 out of 4 times the money goes to a charter school that performs worse on state accountability measures than the district that is subsidizing the charter school.

In the report, we detail the local and regional impact of charter schools on local school districts and kids. Among those are the following:

• Local taxpayers in the 2014-2015 school year had to subsidize charters to the tune of $416.4 million
• More than 3 in 4 state dollars sent to charter schools in the 2014-2015 year had their state funding go to charters that performed no better on the state report card than the local school district from which students transferred
• On more than one of three occasions, students left a district for a charter where the district outperformed the charter in every comparable graded report card category. In Central Ohio, that rate was even higher at two out of five.
• The average Ohio school district outperformed the average Ohio charter school by two out of the five comparable report card grades they typically shared. In Northwest Ohio, that rate was even higher.
• Regionally, Southeast Ohio – where the state’s school funding lawsuit originated – had more than 90 percent of the charter funding go to charters that performed no better than the local school districts – the state’s largest regional discrepancy.

View the Report: “Putting Good Money After Bad: A regional breakdown of how local property taxes end up subsidizing mostly substandard Ohio charter schools“