State education leaders are celebrating over the annual report cards, which analyze data from last school year for all public districts and individual buildings as well as charter schools, but not private schools. Statewide English language arts and math proficiency are at five-year highs for K-12 public schools, but officials say there’s still work to do.
"Every subgroup that we have made progress over this last year in literacy. Every subgroup. I don't think we've seen that for a long time as a state. And so that is really good news," said Ohio Department of Education and Workforce Director Steve Dackin in an interview. "And we had progress in math. Our chronic absenteeism rate went down significantly. And we got two-thirds of our graduates are earning post-secondary readiness credentials."
Check K-12 public school district and school building report cards here.
Statewide English language arts proficiency or literacy reached a five year high of 62.2%. Math proficiency reached a five year high of 56.4%.
A total of 61 K-12 public school districts out of 607 earned the top rating of five stars. No districts had under two stars, and only 38 had two or two and a half stars. The largest was the four star group, with 160 districts. Chronic absenteeism—defined as a student missing over 10% of the school year, or more than 18 days—dropped from 30.2% in the 2021-2022 school year to 23.9% last school year.
But around 38% of students are still not proficient in English language arts, and 44% of kids are still not proficient in math.
“Obviously, there are schools who are not doing as well as we like for them to do, and that's both public, charter, and so forth. But in the aggregate, we're moving the needle forward," Dackin said.
Ohio's "big eight" urban districts got between two and three stars:
- Akron City: three stars, with early literacy getting one star but progress and college/career/workforce/military readiness getting four stars
- Canton City: three stars, with graduation and early literacy getting one star
- Cincinnati Public: three stars, with graduation getting one star but progress getting four stars
- Cleveland Municipal: two and a half stars, with graduation, early literacy and college/career/workforce/military readiness getting one star but progress and gap closing got four stars
- Columbus City: two and a half stars, with graduation and early literacy getting only one star
- Dayton City: two stars, with graduation and early literacy getting one star
- Toledo City: two stars, with graduation and early literacy getting one star
- Youngstown City: three stars, with early literacy getting one star but college/career/workforce/military readiness getting four stars
There are 52 schools that have a notice in red at the top of their report card page that reads: “the spring 2026 test results for this school have been invalidated.” DEW started an investigation after two Columbus City high schools reporting testing issues, such as last-minute answer changes or struggling students suddenly correctly answering difficult questions. Dackin describes these as statistical anomalies affecting only around 8,500 of the 2.4 million tests administered.
"It's a really, really small percentage of tests. But nonetheless, they were significant outliers," Dackin said. "I sent a letter to every one of those schools, asking them to report back to us what you know, take a look at their data and explain to us what's happening behind that data."
Of the 52 schools the state flagged for potential further investigation, 15 are traditional public school buildings and 37 are charter schools. The reports from those schools are due Friday.
