Today, KidsOhio and School Choice Ohio jointly released a guide for parents and students, Get a Jumpstart on College & Your Career: High School Classes Can Count for College without Costing You a Dime.

The brochure showcases four opportunities for students to earn from a few credits up to two years of college credit or more while they are in high school: 1) Early College High Schools, 2) College TechPrep, 3) Post Secondary Enrollment Options, and 4) Advanced Placement.

“Our state and national college attainment goals are to increase the number of degrees awarded in Ohio from 75,000 in 2009 to 100,000 by 2017 and to reclaim the United States’ top rank among nations,” said Ann Bischoff of KidsOhio, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education policy organization. “If we are going to meet these goals, we have to bolster college-going among low-income students and would-be first generation college-goers.”

One way to increase college success is to educate more Ohio students about opportunities for earning tuition-free college credit while in high school, known as dual enrollment. Not only does dual enrollment alleviate a financial burden for families, but it also exposes students to the real-life demands of college. This exposure builds confidence among would-be first generation college students about college-level work.

“The students who need these options the most are the ones who are last to find out about them,” said Sarah Pechan of School Choice Ohio. “Students are excited about the chance to ‘kill two birds with one stone’ and earn both college credit and high school credit for a single class. This brochure is the first place where all of these options have been compiled into one source.”

To download a copy of the brochure, click here. To request copies, please call School Choice Ohio at 614.223.1555 or KidsOhio at 614.228.6400.

To read the brochure, click here.

To provide context for the RAND report, KidsOhio.org gave a presentation of key facts related to charter schools in Ohio. Among them:

• Over 88,000 Ohio students (5% of public school students) attend one of 321 Ohio charter schools
• 66% of Ohio charter school students are economically disadvantaged, compared to 74% of students in Ohio’s Urban 8 school districts and 36% of students in traditional school districts statewide
   
• Nearly 30% of Ohio charter school students attend an internet-based “e-school”

To view or download a copy of the slides from the presentation, click here. Please return to our Web site for additional materials from the event in the future.

The study was intended to examine the characteristics of students who transfer to charter schools, the effects of charter schools on test-scores and educational attainment for charter school students, and the impact of charter schools on the test scores of students in neighboring traditional public schools.

Researchers examined three years of Ohio data. The most recent year of analysis (2007-2008) included 246 schools-more than for any other location in the study. Out of the research came a number of key findings about Ohio charter schools and their students. In Ohio, the report claims: 

• Students who transfer to charter schools tend to be lower achieving upon entering a charter school than their former peers at traditional public schools. Among the other locations included in the study, only Texas shared this trend.

• The academic performance of charter middle and high schools is not significantly different from that of corresponding traditional public schools.

• When schools with kindergarten as the entry-level grade are included in the comparison, charter schools are substantially lower performing than the corresponding traditional public schools.

• The lower performance of these “K-entry” charter schools may be due to the poor performance of virtual charter schools serving those grades. (RAND recommends that these results be interpreted cautiously.)

• The academic performance of charter schools varies more widely than that of corresponding traditional public schools. This discrepancy was not found in the other locations included in the study. RAND points out that closing the lowest-performing charters would raise the average performance of Ohio charter schools overall.

• The wide variation may be due in part to the diversity of charter school authorizers in Ohio and to the state’s funding system for charter schools.

• As in other states, charter schools have trouble raising achievement among students in their first year of operation. RAND adds that opening a new school is challenging-charter or otherwise-and that charter schools tend to improve over time.

For the full-length report, click here. RAND also provides a useful summary of the report here.

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