Ohio Charter Schools graduate students at a rate that's lower than all but 1 Ohio Public School District, likely costing our kids billions of dollars in lost potential income since their inception.

Does anyone even notice these things anymore? I’ve been writing about how bad Ohio Charter Schools are at graduating students for literally years and years and years.

Yet they still suck at it something awful.

According to state data released this week, Ohio Charter Schools graduated 3,243 of 4,676 potential seniors in 4 years. That’s a 69.4 percent graduation rate. The only Ohio public school district with a lower rate than that is Dayton at 68.6 percent.

That’s it.

The average Ohio Charter School graduates 76 percent of their students in 4 years. Only 4 Ohio public school districts — Dayton (68.6), Canton (72), Lima (72) and Jefferson Township (72.7)— have lower rates than that.

“But wait!” you say. “Ohio’s Charter Schools have more challenged student populations, so of course they’re worse!”

Setting aside the irony of excusing poor performance in Charter Schools for demographic challenges while not excusing the struggles of similarly challenged Ohio public school districts, that claim is just bullshit.

The average Ohio Charter School has a 91 percent economically disadvantaged student population. Sounds high, doesn’t it?

Here’s the thing: 200 Ohio school districts have higher rates!

That’s right. About 1 out of every 3 Ohio school districts has a rate of economically disadvantaged students that’s higher than the average Ohio Charter School. Setting aside how frightening it is to come to grips with that sobering fact, want to guess what that group of schools’ graduation rate is?

Try 92.4 percent.

So the 200 Ohio public school districts with higher poverty rates than the average Ohio Charter School graduate students at a 35 percent greater rate than the average Ohio Charter School.

Put another way, if Ohio Charter Schools were as good at graduating high school students as the poorest 200 Ohio public schools, 1,059 more students would have graduated Ohio’s Charter Schools last school year. While those raw numbers look bad. here’s something worse: High school graduates make $350,000 more over their lifetime than non-high school graduates if they’re men and about $280,000 more if they’re women. Assuming a 50-50 split between those 1,059 students who should have graduated but didn’t because Ohio Charter Schools are so bad at graduating students, that’s $333.6 million in potential lost income …just for the class of 2025!

Ohio Charter Schools have always been this bad at graduating students. So it can be stated fairly that since their 1998 inception, Ohio Charter Schools have cost Ohio students and youth hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in potential lost income because they do such a piss poor job of graduating their students.

And that failure has obvious side effects: worse health outcomes, fewer income taxes, less community engagement, etc.

You see why I’ve been writing about this consistently for so many years?

It’s literally costing our kids and communities billions of dollars in lost potential. Yet we keep shoving record amounts of money to these schools, which we also know spend more than $1 in every $4 on administrators rather than kids.

So is this result really that surprising?