Beleaguered ECOT gets another Innovation Grant

In the latest round of Straight A Fund recipients, ECOT came out another winner, it appears. They weren't the primary recipient of the $625,000, the way it was during the first round when it got $3 million. Instead, they partnered with Finneytown Local in Hamilton County.

Finneytown, according to payment reports from the Ohio Department of Education, lost a bit more than $18,000 to ECOT last school year. ECOT cleared $99.3 million from school districts last year -- more than $6,800 per pupil (far more per pupil state money than the average traditional public school receives).

So to keep the running total, since last year's budget, ECOT was awarded the state's largest Charter School funding bump from Gov. John Kasich's new education funding plan, as well as significant casino revenue and two Straight A grants. That means that ECOT has received an 11% per pupil funding bump since Kasich's education funding plan was announced.

Since ECOT's report card ratings are extremely mediocre and its graduation rate is an abysmal 35%, something other than academic excellence must be at work.

ECOT founder William Lager has made $368,000 in political contributions since April of last year. So that begs the question: Has ECOT really been doing a great job, or has its founder done a better one investing in politicians?

Charters Least Efficient Straight A Recipients

These posts are starting to get old for me. I really hope that our state leaders start doing something about this stuff soon.

Anyway, in the latest Straight A Fund round (Ohio's version of Race to the Top, sort of), there was a $2.075 million award given to a group of Charter Schools in order to "implement a data and assessment system that will help improve student achievement." Now I'm all for that, I guess, but here's the kicker: Of the 37 grantees, no award will realize a smaller amount of cost savings relative to the taxpayer investment than this Charter School proposal.

Each award has a cost and anticipated cost savings attached to it. The Charter Schools' proposal was $2.075 million, with an anticipated savings of about $117,000 -- or 5.7% of the cost. The average savings of all the 37 awards was more than 250%, or nearly 45 times greater than the Charter Schools' proposal.

Here are some examples: The Central Ohio ESC will implement a system that will better match students with adults as they prepare for college and career. The cost savings will be $43 million on the $8.8 million investment. Or an initiative done through Columbus Public Schools in cooperation with Johns Hopkins that will see a 1313% return on the $677,000 investment.

For full disclosure, I was a Straight A reviewer for the first round of applications. And my major criticism of the process is that I couldn't give passing marks to an applicant for fiscal sustainability if the applicant was going to use the money to create additional revenue streams. The only thing I could consider was how much money would be saved. So the fund is essentially incentivizing schools to make permanent cuts in their programming.

So I'm not overly enamored with judging these recipients based on their rate of return. However, am I the only one who finds it curious that the "bloated" public sector recipients have such a better return on investment than their "efficient" private sector counterparts?

If you've been reading this space with any regularity, you shouldn't. But it still makes me wonder why the heck our state leaders are so blind to the obvious -- that Ohio's Charter School system is simply not working, not for our taxpayers and certainly not for our kids.

It's time to seriously reform the reform.

ECOT State Windfall

I just posted about Casino money distributions and it got me thinking: Not only did ECOT get the largest dollar increase ($4.4 million) of any Charter School in this last budget (that's regardless of any pupil increase), but the school received another $3 million in Straight A money (again, not tied to how many additional kids it was gaining). Add another $744,000 in Casino money and we're looking at about $8.1 million in additional state funding for this school just since July.

That means that, according to the initial Charter School projections from the 2013 budget cycle, ECOT was to receive $6,471 per pupil prior to this budget. Add the budget's increase, as well as the Straight A money, and the additional $54 per pupil the $744,000 casino revenue means (based on $744,000 divided by ECOT's current student population of 14,100), and ECOT is set to receive nearly $600 more per pupil today than they were last year. And remember, this has nothing to do with whether they have more kids. This is based on changes in state law alone.

I and others have written extensively about ECOT's real problems educating children -- a lower performance index score than any school district and a 4-year graduation rate that's a little less than 1/2 the rate of Cleveland. Equally well documented has been the fact they have zero problems contributing to politicians. 

So I'll leave it up to their chief spokesman, Nick Wilson, to explain why this school that doesn't have transportation or building costs receives more state money per pupil than all but a handful of traditional public school districts:

"We spend less than half (of what urban districts spend in state and local money combined) and achieve average to above average results,' (Wilson) said. 'That’s how I would view it.'"

Is this the best we can do?

I think online education holds enormous potential to individualize education to a level only dreamed of prior to its advent. I want online education to work. I believe it can under the right circumstances because I've seen it.

However, any school that accepts average to above average results given this enormous state investment is something that should outrage Ohio taxpayers. I don't care what school you are.