Closed Charters Offer Lessons for All Schools

At the end of this school year, two Ohio charter schools — one in Toledo and one in Youngstown — will be forced to close under a new state law that draws a line in the sand when it comes to poor academic performance.

The law says that public schools that are independent of a community’s public school district must close if they are stuck in “academic emergency” for three years (or four, depending on the age of students the school serves) and if no progress has been made on math and reading test scores in two out of the three years.

Supporters and opponents of charter schools cheered the law. Charter advocates are sick of good charter schools being lumped in with chronic low performers, while critics say better accountability for charters is overdue. After all, the whole idea of charter schools was to experiment and to try to outdo the local public schools. Those that aren’t doing that aren’t serving their purpose.

Still, if closing a school for bad performance is a good form of accountability, doesn’t that beg the question of whether closing low- scoring traditional public schools would be a good move, too?

That’s a question House Speaker Jon Husted, of Kettering, is asking. Speaker Husted’s research shows that 14 traditional public schools also would be closing at the end of this year if the charter- school law applied to them. Two are in Dayton — Wilbur Wright and Fairview middle schools.

In a way, these particular schools will close anyway. Both are slated to move into new buildings that will be built during the next three years. It probably wouldn’t make much sense to have a law that could board up a new school that the state and district spent millions to construct.

Besides, Dayton’s interim Superintendent Kurt Stanic said the real concern is what happens inside a school. Shuttering buildings to make a dramatic statement just creates logistical headaches, he said.

“Where would I put all those kids?” he asks. “You have to improve student by student, class by class, and the school will improve. There is no simple answer.”

That may be true, but a still harder question is what to do with a school that scores badly for years and is not showing any improvement.

Even state Rep. Clayton Luckie, a former Dayton school board member and a frequent Democratic critic of charter schools, said there should be drastic action taken against chronically bad traditional schools. He favors “reconstitution,” which removes the principal and lets the district reorganize a school with new teachers and often with a new curriculum.

That sounds good, but in Dayton there isn’t strong evidence this sort of effort will guarantee better results. The city school district three years ago reconstituted Orville Wright and Fairview elementary schools. Both got new principals and new instructional plans, and a big chunk of the teaching staff was replaced.

But on this year’s state report cards, both schools are scoring lower on state tests overall than they were before the change. (If, or to what degree, the student population has changed over that period is also worth knowing.)

Ohio is right not to replace underperforming traditional schools with underperforming charter schools. Its demands on charter schools go a step further than even the federal No Child Left Behind law, which has enough wiggle room to allow low-scoring schools to keep operating even if they aren’t showing any significant test gains after eight years.

Drawing a line in the sand for traditional public schools is a good idea, too. Figuring out the best way to sanction chronically bad schools to help kids best will take more work.

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