Will Anyone Stop Charter School Corruption?

http://www.nationofchange.org/will-anyone-stop-charter-school-corruption-1404056939

In the face of lagging academic results, higher dropout rates and the aroma of crony corruption, what do Ohio charter promoters do to improve their performance? Amp up their marketing. As another recent Beacon Journal report found, “State audits suggest that some Ohio charter schools spend more than $400 in public money per student to attract them away from public schools.” Using keywords such as “free, flexible, one-on-one and find your future,” Ohio charter school companies are “advertising on television, radio, billboards, handbills and even automated telephone messages to entice students away from public schools.”

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In the Quaker State, charter schools have long competed for funds with traditional public schools on an uneven playing field that exempts them from serving the full range of student abilities and revealing financial details of their operations to the public. Despite all this freedom from regulation, according to the Pennsylvania School Board Association, “Charter schools continue to academically underperform traditional public schools, with less than half of the brick and mortar charter schools meeting acceptable benchmark scores … None of the cyber charter schools met the mark. Nearly three-quarters of traditional public schools, however, earned passing scores in the first year of the new measuring system.”