Charter Schools are unique public schools that have tremendous flexibility in how students are taught, while still being held accountable for meeting the government achievement standard. These schools are often for low income/disadvantaged students and receive government funding, yet are alleviated from certain being regulations that govern a traditional public school system. Ohio passed its first charter school law in 1997 and it has been under constant evaluation ever since (Russo, Alexander). According to the Ohio Education Association, “for the 2010-11 school year, 325 charter schools operated in Ohio. These schools enrolled 100,000 students.” Although these schools are designed to create a better environment than traditional public schools for students, they are plagued with problems …show more content…
Fifty-eight of the schools received an F rating. This essentially means that not enough of the students are meeting the minimum passing standard or learning at the expected pace for their grade level (Bush, Gilchrist). The No Child Left Behind Act allowed each state to set its own proficiency standards. These standards are designed to measure the success of a school in teaching its students, but these standards may not always best suited for the state’s charter schools. Data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study of 1998–99 show that schools towards the lower end of the achievement spectrum are not necessarily failing in respect to overall learning or impact on its students. Schools that are home to a much larger number of disadvantaged kids are way more likely to have low achievement scores rather than low impact/learning scores (Downey, Hughes, et al.) This shows the difficulty in measuring the achievement of the students when they are often begin school often substantially behind where they are expected to be for their grade