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OEA Releases 2006 Charter School Report

Posted on: Thursday, 3 August 2006, 12:00 CDT

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Aug. 3 /PRNewswire/ -- The 2006 Charter School Report of the Ohio Education Association (OEA) notes that enrollment growth is slowing down or declining for older charter schools. The OEA found that more of these privately run, publicly funded schools have slipped into Ohio's academic watch or academic emergency categories since last year.

The 2006 report, compiled by the OEA research department, reflects OEA's commitment to track experiments and trends in the Ohio public education system, including charter schools or any other initiative that could affect our public schools.

Since 1997, Ohio has been involved in a public policy experiment known as charter schools. This experiment has grown from affecting only a few school districts in Lucas County to one that affects nearly all of Ohio's 612 school districts with an annual price tag of nearly one-half a billion dollars of your state tax dollars. In fact, the state has paid charter school operators more than $1.7 billion since their inception while academic results continue to plummet. Findings from the 2006 report include:

* 297 Charter schools are currently operating in Ohio, enrolling more than 72,000 students. * One of every 25 public school students attends a charter school. * Overall, charter school enrollment for the 2005-2006 school year increased 15 percent over 2004-2005 levels, reflecting slower growth than the 40 percent average annual increase of the previous four years. * For the 2004-2005 school year, 71 percent of charter schools were placed in either academic watch or academic emergency, up from 57 percent for the 2003-2004 school year. * Local Report Card results show that traditional public schools outperform charter schools in each of the state's 21 proficiency and achievement tests. * Charter schools will receive $487 million in state foundation payments for the 2005-2006 school year and, by the close of the school year, over $1.7 billion dollars since the program's inception.

The report concludes with the following call for a legislative probe of charter schools: "We hope members of the General Assembly will read the report, probe its underlying data and conclusions and adjust the charter program in a way that promotes better academic performance, a narrowing of achievement gaps, more thorough testing of charter school students and a genuine look at how charter schools have affected public school funding. Without that re-evaluation this experiment will continue to put a generation of public school students and charter school students at risk."

A copy of the report is enclosed and can also be found on the OEA site at http://www.ohea.org/.

The Ohio Education Association represents 130,000 teachers, faculty members and support professionals in Ohio's public schools, colleges and universities.

Ohio Education Association

CONTACT: Michele Prater, Media Relations Consultant of Ohio EducationAssociation, +1-614-227-3071, or +1-614-378-0469

Web site: http://www.ohea.org/

Source: PRNewswire

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