Ohio Stars (Again) in National Report about Charter School Fraud

Man, I am getting sick of this. How many times do national publications have to do the Ohio Department of Education and Ohio General Assembly's work for them before real changes are instituted here about charter schools?

This time it was USA Today and Pro Publica that broke the news yesterday that Ohio charter schools consistently bill the state for students that simply are not there. And you know who knows about this and does nothing? The Ohio Department of Education. How do I know this? Because the data Pro Publica used was from the Ohio Department of Education!!!!

My God. ODE knows on certain days a handful of kids show up at a dropout recovery school that is charging taxpayers for educating hundreds of kids? Yet they do nothing. Not. A. Thing.

This isn't all ODE's fault. From the very beginning, state regulators' authority over charters has been neutered by an Ohio General Assembly that has been in the pocket of the guys who profit off the absent kids in our state's charter schools. Don't believe me?

How about this in an Akron Beacon Journal story from 2014:

"In 2003, legislation sponsored by then Rep. Jon Husted, now the secretary of state, created a buffer between the Department of Education and charter schools by placing control in the hands of “sponsors,” or “authorizers,” who generally were school-choice advocates.

They, not the Ohio Department of Education, were in charge of approving new charters, and enrollment surged from 30,000 in 2003 to 125,900 today. And they have an incentive to open more schools rather than close them because their revenue is based on the number of children in the schools they oversee."

Husted, who now wants to be Governor, wasn't done.

A 2005 report completed by the Ohio Association of Public Charter Schools found that

"The most ambitious evaluations of charter school characteristics and performance in Ohio come from a series of reports produced by the state’s independent Legislative Office of Education Oversight (LOEO) from 2000 to 2004.

LOEO’s most recent report, issued in December 2003, specifically focused on academic performance and accountability of charter schools, and found that many Ohio charters fall significantly short of meeting their promise to improve academic achievement. By and large, LOEO found that charters were doing no better than traditional public schools, and that a large minority were doing substantially worse than comparable district schools.

I ask you, dear reader, what is different from the LOEO analysis from 2003 and the analysis completed more than a decade later by the generally charter school supporting Center for Research on Educational Outcomes that found 40 percent of Ohio's charter schools were in "urgent" need of improvement and kids in Ohio charters often did far worse than their local public school counterparts?

Nothing.

We've known Ohio's charter schools in general were in trouble from the very beginning of the program. Yet little has changed in terms of overall charter school performance or oversight. This is what drives me crazy about many in our state's newfound concern over charter school performance.

Where have all these people been living? Ohio's charter schools have always been worse performing, scandal ridden and profit centers for people motivated to buy nice houses in far off places, not educate kids.

What USA Today reported is nothing new.

Perhaps things would have been different if Ohio's charter schools had continued to be evaluated by a strong state oversight agency like the LOEO.

Well, charter school cheerleader Husted couldn't have that.

So, in the landmark House Bill 66 -- the 2005 state biennial budget bill that began Ohio's recent obsession with tax cuts -- soon-to-be-House-Speaker Husted had inserted into the House version of the bill an amendment that killed the LOEO. Tellingly, the Ohio Senate took out that amendment, but it was reinserted into Conference Committee.

So the state agency that had been sounding the charter school alarm for the first years of the program -- and could have shamed Ohio lawmakers into action sooner -- was dead.

ODE got the message. Loud and clear. Cross charters and you die.

So they don't cross charters. At least not in major ways. While the department's current effort to claw back $60 million the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow owes taxpayers for overbilling them in the 2015-2016 school year plus another $20 million from last school year is a hopeful sign, ODE's weak response to ECOT's effort to become a dropout recovery school is simply more of the same.

I guess I'm just exhausted, though. I started working at the Akron Beacon Journal in 1997 -- the same year the state adopted its charter school law. Over the last 20 years, I have seen every major non-partisan, objective examination of Ohio's charter schools come to the same conclusion: they simply don't, on the whole, offer better options for kids and parents.

Of course a few do. But ladies and gentlemen we have now spent nearly $11 billion on charter schools since I entered my professional life. And we have maybe 40-50 charters that account for a small fraction of that $11 billion that are worthy of being compared with Ohio's local public schools.

That's a horrible return on taxpayer investment. When will legislators and political leaders in this state act to really fix this. Not just nibble around the edges, or hope that non-profits with powerful financial motives to not fix it instead ignore those motives and fix it. But actually purge the innumerable scofflaws from our state.

This is embarrassing. Not because we had a charter school fraud story published in a national newspaper. But because this story has been written about Ohio's charter schools for 20 years.

And our elected leaders simply do nothing. Yet we keep electing them.

First $1 million of controversial $71 million federal charter school grant doled out.

After two years of fits and starts, the Ohio Department of Education has finally given out some of the $71 million federal charter school grant meant to grow high-quality charters in this state.

Unfortunately, as I have reported at Know Your Charter, nearly 1/3 of the federal money spent previously in Ohio went to charters that closed shortly after receiving he federal grant money, or never opened at all.

When Ohio surprisingly received the nation's largest single grant in 2015, it was a stunner because it came on the heels of several reports and scandalous actions that further cemented Ohio's status as a national laughingstock for charter school oversight and performance. It also didn't help that the official at ODE who filled out the application -- David Hansen, the husband of Gov. John Kasich's chief of staff -- resigned shortly after the money was awarded because he cooked the books to make Ohio's situation look better than it actually was.

As a result of this scandal, the feds held up Ohio's money for months as they and ODE went back and forth about the kinds of additional oversight needed to make sure Ohio actually sent the money to charters that weren't about to go under or would never open.

The three recipients of $350,000 each are brand new charters this school year: the Southwest Ohio Preparatory School in Cincinnati, South Columbus Preparatory Academy in Columbus and United Preparatory Academy East, also in Columbus.

The two preparatory academies are sponsored by St. Aloysius Orphanage, which Cleveland wants to ban from sponsoring schools in their city, but is considered an "effective" charter school sponsor by the state of Ohio because it has so many dropout recovery schools that get much more lenient report card ratings.

The other school is sponsored by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, whose VP of Policy and Advocacy, Chad Aldis, sits on the ODE advisory panel that oversees the implementation of the federal charter school funding.

Here's hoping this money helps turn the tide and starts growing Ohio's quality school options. But given Ohio's long history on this issue, I'll take Reagan's approach to the old Russian proverb: 

Trust, but verify.

Ohio Receives $35 million Federal Reading Grant

Some good news on Ohio's education front. The U.S. Department of Education has given the Ohio Department of Education a three-year, $35 million grant to improve reading among our state's most at-risk youth.

About 95 percent of the money will be distributed to local schools to deal with the challenges they are facing with reading, according to the ODE news release.

This is providing at least some of the funding necessary for the state's Third-Grade Reading Guarantee to work. While there has been much hoopla over the TGRG from politicians, as with most Ohio education initiatives, funding didn't really follow the rhetoric. Yet despite the fact that the TGRG is essentially an unfunded (or very underfunded mandate), nearly 94 percent of Ohio's school children met the guarantee last school year.

Now that the state will be able to bump up the funding commitment to the TGRG, perhaps our percentage can increase even more than the 0.5 percentage overall increase we saw last year.

Ohio Now at Historically High Reliance on Local Taxpayers to Pay for Schools

Twenty years ago, the Ohio Supreme Court issued the first of four rulings determining that the way Ohio paid for schools was unconstitutional because it relied too much on local property taxes, putting kids in Ohio's less wealthy districts at a decided disadvantage. That school year -- 1996-1997 -- saw the largest difference between state-local share of education in history at 55.02 percent local, 44.98 percent state.

Twenty years later, after two decades of narrowing the gap and even overcoming it in the 2010-2011 school year, Ohio once again has achieved that exact state-local split.

According to the Ohio Department of Education's latest revenue data, Ohio has once again provided 44.98 percent of the funding for Ohio's school children, with the local taxpayers having to come up with 55.02 percent.

If you don't include the $935 million transferred to charter schools last year, that local share percentage jumps to more than 57 percent for local school district taxpayers.

This means that after four Supreme Court cases and 20 years of arguments, Ohio's legislature has done, essentially, nothing to address this most important of issues. In fact, if you include lost state revenue to charter schools and private school vouchers over the last 20 years, the legislature has actually made the reliance on local property taxes worse since the first case was decided.

There is only one thing the Ohio Constitution says the legislature has to do: fund schools. And for 20 years, this General Assembly hasn't performed its only basic function.

How sad for our kids.

Starting in the 2012-2013 school year, the Ohio Department of Education split the local revenue data it had always collected into local revenue and "other non-tax revenue". However, that designation had previously always been included in the local revenue calculation. So in order to do a longitudinal analytic comparison with years prior to 2012-2013, I added the "other non-tax revenue" with the local revenue, as ODE had always done prior to 2012-2013.

Shocked. Shocked, I Tell You. ECOT Owes Taxpayers MORE Money.

Put this in the Perfectly Predictable bin. Looks like the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) could only account for about 81 percent of the students it billed taxpayers for "educating" last school year. And this was in a year when ECOT should have been extra careful because the year before it could only account for 40 percent of the students it billed taxpayers.

So now the school, which produces more high school dropouts than any other school in the nation, owes another $15 million ON TOP of the $60 million it already owed taxpayers. All I can say is the school should be grateful the state isn't going back for the previous 15 years of enrollment figures because if they did, ECOT would likely be shown to have fleeced Ohio taxpayers to the tune of more than a half billion dollars.

All while top state officials spoke at their graduation ceremonies -- ceremonies that included not even four out of 10 kids who were eligible to walk across the stage.

This comes on top of the news that not a single of the $103 million that went to ECOT last year from Ohio's public school districts came from a district that the school outperformed  on the state report card. And nearly one in four dollars sent to ECOT came from a school district that outperformed ECOT in every available measure.

A few more nuggets:

• A spectacularly low 2.9 percent of ECOT's 2010 graduates had a college degree within 6 years of graduation. Only New Miami Local in Butler County had a lower rate among Ohio's 613 school districts.
• An even more spectacularly low 0.3 percent of ECOT students attained an industry recognized credential. Most of the 24 school districts with the same or lower rates are districts like Hudson and Dublin that are wealthy and whose students are geared toward college, as that group's 40 percent rate of attaining college degrees within 6 years indicates (as noted above, ECOT's rate as 2.9 percent)
• Their Performance Index score -- the accumulated index the state uses to determine  proficiency -- was lower than any district
• The school's student growth index was -39.5. A score between -1 and 1 is considered a year of growth
• ECOT -- a virtual school without walls, buses, lunch ladies, or janitors -- received $7,291 per pupil in state funding last school year -- an amount greater than 85 percent of school districts. And if they did not educate 19 percent of their students as the Ohio Department of Education now claims, their per pupil funding for the kids that they did "educate" jumps to $8,923 -- an amount greater than 96 percent of Ohio school districts

This school is an embarrassment to this state. And even to this nation. The Ohio General Assembly has allowed this hog to wallow far too long. It's time to shut down this school. I'm sorry. I'm sure some kids have been saved at ECOT. I'm sure some parents love it. It's these parents and kids who should be most upset with ECOT's continued bumbling and malfeasance, though, not we who report its existence. 

All I lost were my tax dollars. 

But every time ECOT does something like this, it harms these students' diplomas and what I'm sure was a lot of hard work. But remember this is not these kids' or parents' fault; it is the fault of Bill Lager -- the politically connected ECOT founder and for-profit operator who Ohio's taxpayers have made a millionaire many times over; it is the fault of the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West, who could instantly solve this issue by canceling its oversight of the school, but instead has pushed to give the school an easier report card; and it is the fault of compliant politicians who thought it was more important to keep a campaign finance gravy train going than it was to stand up for kids.

State Auditor David Yost, for example, has been coming down hard recently on ECOT. But here's what he said just two short years ago (remember, I and we at Innovation Ohio reported as far back as 2011 that ECOT and Ohio's other eSchools were a problem):

"It's not your failure that defines you. It's the success that flowed from your decision to enroll in ECOT ... You tell them I'm the employee you're looking for. I'm organized and I'm disciplined and I get the job done because that's the way we do it at ECOT."

ECOT gets easier report card. Old one shows 1 in 4 ECOT dollars come from districts that outperform them in EVERY measure.

Now that it appears the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow -- the state's largest online school and the nation's largest producer of high school dropouts -- will be classified as a dropout recovery and prevention school (without a hint of irony) by the Ohio Department of Education, it is useful to look at just how dreadful ECOT's performance has been.

In the 2016-2017 school year, ECOT received $103 million in state money meant for kids in Ohio school districts, but which went instead to ECOT. Not a single penny came from a district that performed worse in more report card categories than ECOT. Only $2,204 of the $103 million came from a district whose performance was the same.

But here's the amazing stat: More than $25 million of that $103 million came from districts that outperformed ECOT in EVERY SINGLE COMPARABLE REPORT CARD CATEGORY!

That's right. One out of every 4 dollars going to ECOT comes from a district that in every way outperforms ECOT -- the largest single chunk of state funding transfers to the school.

Yet with this dropout designation, they will be allowed to remain open and unaccountable for many more years. And in an absolute indictment of Ohio's horrific dropout recovery laws, ECOT will now become one the state's highest performing dropout recovery schools.

This is just embarrassing. I hope the legislature takes note and addresses this shameful performance, not just by ECOT, but also the state's regulatory scheme that has allowed this school to thrive when all manner of data tells us to shut it down.

Ohio Urban Buildings Face Greater Challenges, Perform Same as (likely better than) Ohio Charters

I know that some have criticized me and others for comparing the woeful performance of Ohio's charter schools with the performance of all of Ohio's school districts. They claim it's unfair to compare the two (even though just about 1/2 of all the students and money going to charter schools in the 2016-2017 school year came from districts outside Ohio's 8 major urban districts -- Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown), even boldly saying that taking outside students into account is "preposterous".

And while I've stated for a long time that under Ohio law, charters are considered districts for funding, accountability and federal grant making purposes, and that many of the highest performing charters in the state take significant portions of their kids from outside the urban district in which they reside, I don't wish to litigate this battle.

So, as an exercise, let's grant the advocates their point for a moment and look at urban district buildings, shall we?

Here's what we find:

Ohio's urban buildings perform just about the same as Ohio's charter schools.

Here's the issue though:

• Ohio's urban buildings typically (my short hand for median) have a 26 percent higher rate of disabled children and a 23 percent higher rate of minority children than charter schools. 
• A remarkable 94 percent of all major urban buildings have more than 95 percent of their students classified as economically disadvantaged. Meanwhile, 65 percent of charters fit that bill.

Yet despite these greater challenges, Ohio's major urban buildings typically have nearly identical attendance rates, slightly less chronic absenteeism and just about equal report card performance, looking at percentages of A, B, C, D, and F grades. Charters have slightly higher percentages of As, Bs and Cs, and lower percentages of Ds and Fs, but the difference is statistically insignificant.

So despite the fact charters have fewer demographic barriers to success on our test-based report card and about half of their kids don't even come from the urban districts, charters are still unable to perform significantly better than their major urban counterparts -- the most challenged group of schools in the traditional public school system.

Only about 260 of Ohio's 370 charters are included in this comparison. It's clear that the other 90 -- mostly dropout recovery schools located in urban districts -- are among the worst-performing schools in the entire country. So the percentage of poor charter grades is likely far higher than the comparison I'm currently making. 

But I digress.

The bottom line is this: Ohio charter advocates want to only compare charter school performance with major urban district buildings.

Though I disagree with that approach, even if you grant the advocates the benefit of the doubt and do that comparison, Ohio's major urban buildings (who struggle far too mightily and should greatly concern us) still hold their own with their "free market" competitors, despite the 90 worst performing competitors not even being included in the competitors' ratings. Imagine, if you will, how much better Ohio's major urban district buildings would perform overall if the state would not count the bottom 24.3 percent of performers, as they currently exclude for charters. Yet urban district buildings do this while typically facing a more challenged student population.

Oh, and one more thing: Children in Ohio's urban districts are nearly twice as likely to be in a building that's classified by the state as "high performing" than children in charter schools.

So, about those major urban district buildings.

Greater challenges. Same (likely better) performance. Better chance of being in a high quality building.

How, exactly, is Ohio's charter school sector providing the meaningful, quality urban education reform we'd all like to see and were promised would come 20 years ago?