The Times has a frontpager on Ohio's charter schools, of which more than half received a "D" or "F on the state's most recent set of metrics. "Fifty-seven percent of its charter schools, most of which are in cities, are in academic watch or emergency," reports The Times, "compared with 43 percent of traditional public schools in Ohio’s big cities." And what's gone wrong? "Behind the Ohio charter failures are systemic weaknesses that include loopholes in oversight, a law allowing 70 government and private agencies to authorize new charters, and financial incentives that encourage sponsors to let schools stay open."
On the bright side, in this case, these schools are accountable to the public, and so we have data on their failures and can actually do something about their decline. So this would seem to be a positive outcome: Various new schooling experiments are being tried, many are failing, and were going to close down the catastrophes. What's strange, though, is that I keep hearing that a total absence of public oversight mixed with financial incentives for schools to stay open -- and continue making money -- will fix education totally. Yet those two things appear to behind the failures here. Sometimes this world is so topsy-turvy sometimes that I just don't know what to think.
