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Close failing charters quickly

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Close failing charter schools quickly. That's the message from the latest study. The NTY times reports on a new charter school study that ought to send policy chills down the spines of those advocating for more failed choice

The charter school movement gained a foothold in American education two decades ago partly by asserting that independently run, publicly financed schools would outperform traditional public schools if they were exempted from onerous regulations. The charter advocates also promised that unlike traditional schools, which were allowed to fail without consequence, charter schools would be rigorously reviewed and shut down when they failed to perform.

With thousands of charter schools now operating in 40 states, and more coming online every day, neither of these promises has been kept. Despite a growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better — and often are worse — than their traditional counterparts, the state and local agencies and organizations that grant the charters have been increasingly hesitant to shut down schools, even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end.

As the Governor advocates for even greater charter school expansion in Ohio, where the experiment has failed even more catastrophically, there needs to be a serious look at closing down failed charters quickly. As the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University study noted

It debunked the common notion that it takes a long time to tell whether a new school can improve student learning. In fact, the study notes, it is pretty clear after just three years which schools are going to be high performers and which of them will be mediocre. By that time, the charter authorizers should be putting troubled schools on notice that they might soon be closed. As the study notes: “For the majority of schools, poor first year performance will give way to poor second year performance. Once this has happened, the future is predictable and extremely bleak. For the students enrolled in these schools, this is a tragedy that must not be dismissed.”

We're not just wasting tax payers dollars that could be better spent in higher performing traditional public schools, we're wasting educational opportunities of students who are attending these failing charter schools.