Ohio School Districts' Remarkable COVID Recovery

Ohio's school districts' improvement far outstrips Ohio's Charter Schools -- 1 in 4 of which are performing 20% worse than they did pre-COVID. Only 2 of Ohio's 607 school districts can say that.

Amid all the recent doom and gloom reporting about our children falling behind because of COVID, Ohio’s public schools have done a remarkable job recovering significant amounts of those losses. In fact, 55 percent of Ohio school districts’ Performance Index Scores — the state’s amalgamation of districts’ proficiency test results — are within 5 percent of their pre-COVID scores. Remarkable still is that 43 districts actually have higher Performance Index Scores than they did before COVID. The top 25 improved scores I have listed below:

And while districts still have lots of catching up to do, the apocalyptic predictions of a “lost” generation of students coming out of COVID is beyond hyperbolic.

Ohio’s Charter Schools, on the other hand, have a far longer road to tread. First of all, 1 in 5 Ohio Charter Schools can’t have their pre and post-COVID Performance Index Scores compared because they no longer exist or they didn’t exist pre-COVID.

Be that as it may, nearly 6 in 10 charter schools that can be compared are performing 10 percent or worse than they were pre-COVID. Only 3 in 25 Ohio School Districts are that far behind. Worse still, 1 in 4 Ohio Charter Schools have Performance Index Scores 20 percent lower or worse than pre-COVID.

Only 2 of Ohio’s 607 school districts can say that.

While there are some charters that are doing much better than they did pre-COVID, far more are doing much, much worse. I’ve listed the 24 charters that did better than they did pre-COVID below:

And here are the 24 worst-performing charters. No school district is more than 22% behind their pre-COVID Performance Index Score.

This is typical performance in Ohio’s Charter School sector: a few high fliers, but the vast majority do far worse than even the lowest performing Ohio school districts.

For example, Youngstown City Schools — the district Ohio Republicans decided was so poor performing they had to bring in the state to rescue it — has a 14.7 percent lower Performance Index Score than pre-COVID.

While not great, that’s still a better result than 40 percent of all Ohio Charter Schools. It’s also better than 6 of Breakthrough Schools’ Charters — widely considered the highest-performing charter school group in the state. Breakthrough runs 10 charters, yet 6 of them have further to go on the COVID recovery path than Youngstown — considered for years to be the most struggling Ohio school district.

In fact, Youngstown’s COVID recovery is far better than even the vaunted KIPP Columbus’ 25 percent lower score.

This is bad news for those seeking to privatize Ohio’s and the nation’s public schools. Because if their solution to the post-COVID testing struggles are actually worse than the public schools, how can they with a straight face suggest these solutions?

Because it’s not about the kids and their needs.

It’s about the adults and their political desires.

But I digress.

Before you withstand the pro-charter advocates’ whining about “unfair” comparisons, remember than 575 of Ohio’s 607 school districts lost at least some students to Ohio’s charter schools in the 2020-2021 school year.

In addition, here’s a remarkable piece of information from that same dataset that the pro-charter school folks won’t tell you: More than half of all Ohio Charter Schools take fewer than 85 percent of their students from one district. Not even 3 in 20 Ohio Charter Schools take 95 percent or more of their students from one school district.

Yet pro-charter folks only want their performance to be compared with the same 8 urban Ohio districts (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown), even though 47 percent of all Charter School students don’t come from those urban districts.

If you’re going to take money and students from 575 Ohio school districts, you don’t get to have your performance measured against 8 of them.

Sorry, guys.