HBO’s Last Week Tonight turned its attention last night to the world of charter schools, showcasing how many of the 6,700 publically-funded-yet-privately-run schools across the country have failed to deliver a quality education, despite being touted frequently as a better alternative to public schools. Host John Oliver spent a good deal of the segment focusing on two states with some of the worst charter school track records in the country: Pennsylvania and Ohio.
“Ohio’s charter’s law was for decades so lax that even charter advocates have called it the Wild West,” stated Oliver before throwing to a clip of Ohio Governor John Kaisch comparing charter school competition with the competitiveness of pizza shops offering various amounts of pepperonis.
“It’s a little hard to hear the man who just defunded Planned Parenthood talk about the importance of choice,” riffed Oliver to an audience reaction of boos directed at Kasich.
Oliver continued by pointing out the lack of oversight with charter schools in Ohio, quoting a state audit that revealed that charter schools misspend public dollars four times more often than any other type of taxpayer funded agency. Some of the specific examples provided show how for-profit companies are able to siphon money out of the school while delivering abysmal educational results.
Online charter schools are also called out in the Last Week Tonight segment due to their lack of accountability when tracking student attendance.
“Some kids might need online education, but it’s got to be monitored better,” said Oliver. “One major study found that compared to kids in traditional public schools, students in online charters lost the equivalent of 72 days of learning in reading, and 180 days of learning in math during the course of a 180-day school year. And 180 minus 180 is, as those kids might put it, is three.”
While some of the charters in Ohio are performing well, the state of affairs in general seems pretty dour based on the information and research provided. If there’s any silver lining, Oliver points out that it’s the fact that Nevada seems to be performing worse than Ohio, so we’re technically not the worst state when it comes to overall charter school performance.
The Ohio-centric portion runs from around 9:15 to 17:05 in the video below, but the entire segment is worth watching as a whole for those interested in the educational system of Ohio:
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