Each year the Fordham Institute's Ohio team analyzes the academic performance of schools in Ohio's Big 8 cities (the largest eight urban districts). We examine things like the number of kids in schools rated A, B, C, D, or F, the number who attend schools that meet (or fail to) value-added, performance over time, etc.
This year we partnered again with our friends at Public Impact, who just finished the fuller report, Ohio Urban School Performance 2009-10.
There are several interesting trends worth lifting up, some of which are the fact that:
- Only two percent of charters and two percent of district schools had high growth and high achievement ? an even lower percentage than last year. While urban charters tended to show stronger growth than their district counterparts on average, neither sector showed particularly strong achievement, with only seven percent of charters and four percent of district schools in the highest tier of the Performance Index.
- Among schools with low achievement and low growth in 2007-08, charters were far more likely to improve by 2009-10, with 23 percent showing enough improvement to make moderate achievement and above expected growth, compared with only two percent of district schools. Still, most of 2007-08's struggling schools remained low-performing in 2009-10. Seventy-one percent of these charter schools and 90 percent of these district schools remained within the bottom Performance Index tier.
- In both Cleveland and Dayton, charters outperformed their district counterparts. In Columbus, district and charter results were comparable. In the other five cities, district schools outperformed charters.
- Urban charter schools showed stronger value-added growth than their district counterparts, with 79 percent of charters making expected or above expected growth in reading, compared with 68 percent of district schools.
And while we lamented in yesterday's special Ohio Gadfly that achievement is stagnant in Ohio's Big 8, there are at least a handful of schools in Ohio's Big 8 that are both high-achieving in reading and math (as measured by Ohio's Performance Index score) and whose students grow by at least a year's worth of progress. These schools are worth lifting up. (Note: These only include schools serving some mix of grades 4 through 8 and which have value-added scores.)
Kudos to these schools for serving their students well and for reminding us that quality urban schools do exist and are making a difference.
Read more of our thoughts in yesterday's special Ohio Gadfly, and check out our website for more on the 2009-10 Ohio report card results.