As we wait to see what the Ohio General Assembly presents as charter school reform, Steve Dyer has taken a 3 part look at why Ohio's charter schools just don't work.

You can read part one, part two and part three in full, but here's a brief synopsis of his findings.

Part One

...the amount of money going to worse-performing charters is more than $430 million, and if you include charters that perform the same, it's now more than $500 million that goes from the same or higher-performing districts to the same or worse-performing charters.

Part Two

Charters do worse on the report card than districts with greater challenges. So that means that while charters' poor performance compared with districts overall can perhaps be explained by more challenging populations, districts with greater challenges are doing better. So charters are not, on the whole, doing a better job serving our state's most challenging students than districts with more challenges than the charter faces.

Part Three

Ohio’s charter schools perform worse overall than all local public school buildings, including those in the Big 8 urban districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) – the areas where charters were supposed to offer better alternatives. Charters register lower percentages of As and Bs while having higher percentages of Ds and Fs than local public schools.

Remember that 45% of charter school students do not come from Ohio's urban core -- one of the myths dealt with in yesterday's post.

It is exceedingly unfair cherry picking for charter schools to take money and children from every district in the state, yet only have their performance compared with the most historically struggling schools in the state.

Dyer looks at a whole range of metrics to compare charter schools to traditional public schools, including sub groups. Charter schools simply do not work in Ohio. A key test for any charter school reform effort will be if they close down the bulk of the failing schools and create an environment where only quality charter schools can develop. We're still highly skeptical.