Federal grant funding for so-called "high-performing" Charter Schools still go to schools whose state report card grades are D or F in 3 of 10 cases.

I’ve written a lot about how Ohio’s Charter School sector has epically failed Ohio’s school children for decades. Yet the federal government keeps shoveling money to them for some reason. The first $49.2 million of that grant funding has been opened up to 59 of 258 graded Ohio Charter Schools (only 20% of “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools qualify, but I’ll deal with them later).

According to the state law about this federal grant, Charters that have a 4 or 5 star rating on Academic Progress and a 3, 4 or 5 star rating on overall test scores, or a meaningful increase in test scores over the last 3 years are eligible.

All but a couple of the qualifying Charters met this first of 4 criteria.

Great, right? I mean, these are supposed to be the kinds of Charter Schools we want to grow — high performing Charters.

Here’s the deal, though.

There are 7 graded metrics on the state report card. So while these Charter Schools — less than 1/4 of all Ohio Charter Schools — do have good grades in these two categories, they still really struggle in the other 5.

And Ohio School districts — 1/3 of whom would qualify for these federal funds if they were Charter Schools — do far, far better on those other metrics. How much better?

A sampling:

• Ohio’s qualifying Charter Schools still have 30% of their grades as 2 stars or 1 star — Ds or Fs in regular grading parlance. Meanwhile, 30% of Ohio’s qualifying School Districts’ grades are 5 stars — A’s for you and me.
• Only 12 of the 59 qualifying Charter Schools received grades in college, career and military readiness. All but 3 of those 12 schools scored 1 star for that component. Meanwhile, 72% of Ohio’s qualifying Public School Districts received a grade of 3 stars or more on that component.
• Only 1 in 5 Ohio Charter School students attend a “high-performing” Charter School under this definition. Meanwhile, every other Ohio Public School District student does (including every child attending the Cleveland Municipal School District1).

As you can see, Ohio’s Charter Schools — even the so-called “high-performing” ones don’t perform nearly as well overall as similarly rated Public School Districts.

This is a tactic Charter School proponents have tried for years — let’s only base “high-quality” Charter School designations on 1 or (maybe) 2 of the 7 graded metrics. Why? Because they know if “high-quality” designations were based on all 7 metrics, they’d be screwed. Only 6 of 258 graded Charter Schools received the 5-star overall designation, for example. Another 32 received 4 or 4.5-star ratings. So less than 15% received overall grades of A or B.

Meanwhile, 48% of Ohio’s Public School Districts received overall A or B grades.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t honest-to-God, high-performing Charter Schools out there. There are. But, man, it’s just a handful of them. Maybe a couple dozen or so, tops.

So, I guess, let’s giving $49.2 million to schools that produce failing grades on 3 of every 10 measures rather than the schools that produce the highest grades on 3 of 10.

Makes sense.

Oh yeah. And let’s give them 214% more state funding per pupil too.

Because more money doesn’t matter.

At least that’s what the school choice advocates always used to claim (but may be changing? We’ll see.).