One of the key concerns Dropout Nation Contributing Editor Michael Holzman raised earlier this month in his piece on Cleveland’s failures to provide high-quality education was that the plan developed by Mayor Frank Jackson to expand the number of charter schools serving kids in the city was fatally flawed. Why? Because Ohio’s failures on the authorizing and oversight front meant that the charter schools throughout the state were doing an even worse job of improving student achievement that even the worst traditional public schools.

transformersThese issues were raised once again last week when Stanford University’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes released its latest review on the subpar performance of Buckeye State charters. It is high time that reformers, both in Ohio and across the nation, force politicians and others to overhaul the monitoring of charter authorizers, take steps to shut down failing charters, and build the conditions for expanding high-quality charter schools that can help all children succeed.

Let’s start with one of the few bits of good news: Cleveland’s charters are actually performing well compared to traditional district schools. As CREDO reports, the average Cleveland charter school student attending school between 2008-2009 and 2012-2013 experienced two-hundreds of standard deviation gains (or 14 days of additional learning progress) in both reading and math over a traditional district counterpart. Given the Cleveland district’s woeful performance in improving student achievement, it makes sense for the district to proceed with its efforts to move away from the traditional district model.

But the success of Cleveland’s charters is the only good news to be found in CREDO’s latest study. The reality remains that Ohio’s reputation as the Wild West of charter school authorizing, as coined earlier this year by Alex Medler of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers in an interview with the Plain Dealer, remains intact. And it is doing damage to the children attending the state’s woeful charters.

The average student attending a Buckeye State charter between 2008-2009 and 2012-2013 trailed behind a traditional public school peer by an average 14 days in reading and 43 days in math. This means that the average charter school is doing worse in improving student achievement for the children in their care than a mediocre traditional district. Even worse, charters in Ohio’s big cities are doing worse by kids than the already-woeful urban districts, In Dayton, where outfits such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are engaged in charter authorizing, the average charter student did no better than a traditional district counterpart in reading and fell behind in math by 7.2 days. Even worse in Columbus, the average charter school student made no progress in reading and fell behind a traditional district counterpart by 21.6 days (or more than a full month of school).

The woes of Ohio’s charters extend beyond big cities outside of Cleveland. The average charter school student in suburbia trailed behind a traditional district peer by 7.2 days in reading and 21.6 days in math, while a charter school student in a rural district trailed behind a traditional district peer by 36 days in reading and 100.8 days (or nearly more than half a school year) in math. While the Buckeye State’s charters focused on middle school did spectacularly for kids — with the average charter middle-schooler making 36 days of learning gains in reading and 43.2 days of gains in math, neither charters focused on elementary school kids or those working with high-schoolers improved student achievement for the average kid compared to traditional district counterparts.

When you break it down by both how well schools are improving performance over time (or growth) as well as on overall achievement, the numbers are just plain dismal. Forty-four percent of Ohio’s 147 charters surveyed by CREDO — that is, 65 of them — are doing abysmally in improving achievement over time as well as having less than half of students reaching the 50th percentile of absolute achievement statewide. These are schools that have been performing poorly for at least five years and likely longer than that. They should be closed. And yet, like failing districts such as Cleveland, remain open for business, damaging the futures of children.

Put simply, Ohio’s charters are performing atrociously. One can dare say the Buckeye State’s charter school sector performs worse than those in the rest of the country (including Louisiana, the latter of which where the average charter school student is making 50 more days of gains in reading and sixty-five more gains in numeracy than traditional district counterparts). Which is absolutely, positively shameful and unacceptable. We can’t help children, especially those from poor and minority households as well as to families in rural communities and suburbia, escape from woeful traditional district schools to charters and other providers who do even worse by them.

It isn’t just about Ohio’s children, of course. As your editor noted earlier this year — and has done so for the past three years — poor-performing charters do damage to efforts to expand the array of high-quality school choices our children need and deserve. It is bad enough that bad studies (such as one that CREDO issued a few years ago) and worse scandals involving charter school operators such as Family Urban Schools of Excellence (which earned infamy this year for financial mismanagement of the Jumoke charters in Connecticut) cast the movement in a bad light. The real damage of failing charter schools have even greater consequences for the expansion of choice everywhere. Those reformers who justify keeping such failure mills open by saying that they are better than unsafe traditional district counterparts are just making excuses — and that’s just as bad as the rhetoric offered up by traditionalists.

At the heart of the problem starts with Ohio’s charter school authorizers — including traditional districts — who have been far too willing to allow shoddy charters to remain in operation long after it is clear that they should be shut down. Just 18 of the Buckeye State’s 355 charters were shut down in 2011-2012, according to CREDO’s data; a mere 93 were shut own between 2008-2009 and 2011-2012, while another 104 were opened in that same period. Considering the low quality of charters in the state, authorizers should focus on shutting down more charter schools than less.

One reason why authorizers are so unwilling to shut down failing charters: The money. In addition to collecting three percent of a charter’s per-pupil funding, authorizers can also provide services to charters and collect a fee for them. This doesn’t align with the standards for high-quality practice set out by National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and others looking to improve the quality of charter school authorizing. Because authorizers have greater incentives to keep laggard charters around in spite of their woeful performance, they aren’t shutting them down.

But the problem doesn’t lie with authorizers alone. The fact that Ohio allows for 69 outfits (including districts along with nonprofits such as Fordham) to engage in authorizing means that there are too many players overseeing charters. In fact, nearly a third of the authorizers (20 altogether) are so lowest-performing that they aren’t being allowed to authorize new operations. [They are still allowed to oversee the existing charters.] In Cleveland alone, nine authorizers (including the traditional district) are in charge of charter school quality. This allows for charter school operators to engage in forum-shopping, hooking up with the authorizer most-likely to engage in shoddy oversight.

Meanwhile the Buckeye State’s education department doesn’t do a good job of weeding out the worst authorizers. While it is required to rank authorizers based on their performance and collect annual reports from them, state law doesn’t actually compel the agency to shut down the worst of the lot on an annual basis in order to improve quality in the long run. Even the rankings are useless: Thirty-nine of the authorizers are excluded from the annual quality rankings because they authorize dropout recovery charters and other specialized charters, or because of other exceptions.

Certainly the Buckeye State has taken some steps within the last year to address the low quality of charters and authorizers. But those steps aren’t enough. Gov. John Kasich should immediately push for the legislature to pass a law allowing for the immediate shutdown of the worst-performing charter authorizers as well as close down the worst 65 charters throughout the state. Putting an end to authorizing by traditional districts — which is akin to giving McDonald’s permission to decide whether a Wendy’s can open next door — should also be done. At the same time, Kasich should also propose the creation of a statewide charter school authorizing agency that can approve schools from existing high-quality charter school operators that can replace those that are being shut down; this will east the transition for those families who will be affected by those closures.

Reformers both in and outside Ohio must step up the pressure on politicians and authorizers alike. This includes shaming authorizers who don’t shut down failing schools quickly enough as well as those who are more-concerned about making money off failing operators at the expense of children. At the same time, reformers must address another reason why so many charters don’t make it: The lack of capacity, both operational as well as academic; this is important because we must continue to encourage families, community groups, and educators to launch charters alongside large-scale operators. There’s no reason why the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation cannot launch as charter school fund that assists new start-ups in building the capacity they need to succeed for the long haul.

These steps don’t apply to Ohio alone. As the Center on Reinventing Public Education has exhaustively pointed out over the last month, Michigan is also struggling mightily on the charter school and authorizer quality front. In Detroit alone, the shoddiness of authorizing has led to a wide array of unconscionably low-quality choices for children and families who need high-quality education the most. Reformers must also put pressure on politicians and the Wolverine State’s charter school sector to shut down shoddy schools and authorizers; charter school players should follow the example of the California Charter Schools Association, which has continually called for the shutdown of failing charters. More importantly, we have to move away from the less-than-thoughtful idea espoused by hardcore school choice players such as Jay P. Greene of the University of Arkansas that we should just leave charters and choice players alone. Strong accountability is critical to sustaining the expansion of school choice, in building an infrastructure for choice that helps all families, and in moving away from a traditional district model that fails our children.

Ohio’s shoddy charter school oversight must come to an end. The Buckeye State’s children deserve better than this. As do all of our children in failing schools everywhere.