Troubling Results for Oakland Charter Schools

Although charter schools were intended to be an educational antidote to the city's struggling traditional public schools, many of the city's charter schools aren't outperforming their district-run counterparts, and on average, performed worse last year in statewide results, according to an Alameda County grand jury report released this week.

The grand jury, which looked into Oakland Unified School District's oversight of the city's 37 charter schools, found that 19 scored below district averages for both charter and traditional schools in mathematics in statewide test results. And 17 charter schools scored below the district average in English. The panel reported that 15 charters scored below the district averages in both categories.

Measured against the state, the results are more troubling: 62 percent, or 23 of the city's charter schools, scored below state averages in math, and 65 percent, 24 schools, scored below the state averages in English, according to results from the 2015 California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress, which replaced the API scores of previous years. Many of the schools performed similarly on past API tests, the report stated.

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