No surprises in the worst 100

No surprises in the worst 100

A story in last Sunday’s Vindica- tor reported that all of the districts in the Ohio Department of Education’s list of the worst 100 in the state are charter schools. That comes as no surprise.

As we have said before, the charter school movement in Ohio was a perversion of what charters were supposed to be. Community schools, as they are called in Ohio, were billed as an experiment that would prove that channeling state money to private operators would create better schools than their public counterparts.

The second part of the classic equation to justify charter schools was that free-market competition would force public schools to improve. All boats would rise if the state poured money into the charter-school pot.

Full steam ahead

But the Legislature that funded charter schools wasn’t going to wait for the results of an experiment. Too many legislators were tied to two things. First to an ideology that held that charter schools were intrinsically better than “government schools.” Second to the purse strings of for-profit charter entrepreneurs who were more than willing to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in political campaigns in anticipation of a 100-to-1 payback.

Oversight of charters schools was woefully inadequate, with an educational service center in Toledo, for instance, empowered to grant a charter to a school in Youngstown. It was as if some people in Columbus (and Toledo, Youngstown and Akron, too) didn’t want local prying eyes to interfere with the magic that charter schools were about to perform.

There are hundreds of charter school success stories in states where they were done correctly. Predictably, there are only a handful in Ohio.

And yet there is little evidence that anyone in Columbus has learned anything from more than a decade of abject failure.