HB 2 Working. Progress Still Slow.

There has been a growing swell of media and other reports detailing how HB 2's greater charter school accountability provisions are leading to more charter schools being closed. The Ohio Department of Education said recently it expects as many as 19 charter schools to close.

Don't get me wrong. I'm glad that HB 2's greater accountability is forcing charter school sponsors to pay closer attention to their schools' poor performance. That's good.

But closing 19 schools is only the fifth-highest number of charter school closures since 2000. Here is the number of closed charters by year, according to ODE's October 2015 school closure database:

And according to the latest charter school closure database released by ODE, only 2 have closed so far this year.

I was at the State School Board meeting last week where the board refused to sponsor a failing charter in Cleveland that hadn't followed the proper procedure to receive ODE's sponsorship. That was a nice step to see.

However, it was just one school. And while holding the line on one failing charter is something to be celebrated, there are nearly 400 charter schools in Ohio, 40% of which are in "urgent need of improvement", according to pro-charter national groups. That means about 160 are in such academic trouble they are being noticed by national charter advocates.

And while HB 2 seems to be doing its job, it is only touching about 12% of the charters charter school advocates have identified as being in "urgent need of improvement." And without HB 2, nearly twice as many charters closed in FY14.

This is important because according to the Center for Research on Educational Outcomes at Stanford University, the states that have the greatest charter sector improvement were the ones that moved swiftly to close the worst performing schools.

This is why I urged the legislature to strengthen the state's automatic closure laws, rather than trying to get charter school sponsors to do their work for them. Only 73 of 400 Ohio charter schools receive an A or B on either overall proficiency or student growth on the state's report card.

There are significant numbers of failing charter schools in Ohio. HB 2 is a huge improvement on our state's old regime, especially on transparency and accountability issues. However, it gives you a real sense just how much Ohio's charter schools struggle to know that even HB 2's massive, important and sweeping reform only gets us to about 1 in 8 charter schools that charter school advocates say are in urgent need of improvement.

So let's ease up on the "HB 2's got this" talk. We've got a ways to go until Ohio's charter school system turns into the true quality-based reform measure our kids deserve.

No parades yet.

I Screw Up. And Admit It!

Well, do I feel embarrassed. A couple weeks ago, I posted that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow failed to graduate more students than all other Ohio school districts combined.

Well, that was wrong.

See, the problem was with Excel's autosum feature. It's supposed to add all numbers in a column so you don't have to scroll through all the cells to figure out which cells you want to add. Trouble is, if there isn't a number in the cell, it will stop at that cell. So, for example, if you want to add all the numbers of students who were eligible to graduate high school in Ohio, but one school district (Put-in-Bay, I'm looking at you) didn't have any, the Ohio Department of Education puts an NC in that cell. Then autosum won't include any numbers above that cell.

Most Excel pros know to double check autosum for this reason. And I do all the time, but for whatever reason, even though it was telling me only 25,000 or so students were eligible to graduate from all Ohio high schools last year -- a number that is obviously low -- I just went with autosum.

Dumb.

Anyway, here are the real figures: There were 121,275 students eligible to graduate from all of Ohio's school districts last year. Of those, 108,373 did graduate. That means 12,902 did not.

ECOT failed to graduate 2,918 students. So they failed to graduate nearly 1/4 of the total of all who failed to graduate from Ohio's school districts. While remaining troubling and awful (and still more than any other single school in the nation), that's not more than all districts combined.

So I apologize to my readers for getting that wrong. I try not to make mistakes here. So far, this, I believe, is the only data error I've reported in this blog's 5-year history.

So I am sorry.

Oh, and thank you to Howard Fleeter -- Ohio's great school data guru -- who caught the problem. I am in his debt.

ECOT Preens about Graduating Less Than 40% of its Kids Next Week

I came across this amazing news brief in Gongwer (paid service) today:

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) announced that it anticipates graduating more than 2,300 students on Sunday, June 5 at the Schottenstein Center on the campus of Ohio State University. This will make it the second largest graduating class in ECOT history.

As the 16th commencement, ECOT notes it is repeating a trend for the last four years by including a graduate from each of the 88 counties in the state.

Graduates will also be able to apply for jobs right from their phones. Through an ECOT app, students and parents can apply for various job openings for Ohio businesses across the state.

ECOT noted that, "Coupled with the new career technical education (CTE) program, which began in the fall, high school students will be even more prepared for the future ahead. CTE courses are designed to engage students for relevant, real worldlearning experiences. Upon graduation from the CTE program, students will have had the opportunity to earn college credit, certification for various industries and on-the-job training."

"With graduation right around the corner, college or the workforce awaits our ECOT graduates," said ECOT Superintendent Rick Teeters in a statement.

With over 18,000 students having graduated from ECOT, and with an enrollment now of over 17,000, ECOT says it is one of the largest online K-12 schools in the United States."

Of course, ECOT ignores the fact that the class that won't graduate dwarfs the graduating class. In fact, the New York Times found that more kids fail to graduate from ECOT than any other high school ... in the United States!

But the real amazing thing is their discussion of Career-Tech education. In Ohio, there are five categories of Career Tech Education, which are as follows:

• Category 1: WFD in Agriculture and Environmental Systems, Construction Technologies, Engineering and Science Technologies, Finance, Health Science, Information Technology and Manufacturing Technologies

• Category 2: WFD in Business Administration, Hospitality and Tourism, Human Services, Law and Public Safety, Transportation Systems and Arts and Communications

• Category 3: Career Based Intervention Programs

• Category 4: WFD in Education and Training, marketing, WFD in Academics, Public Administration and Career Development

• Category 5: Family and Consumer Science Programs

Why do I mention this minutiae? Because it's important to see just what this "real world learning experiences" ECOT declares actually are. Looking through ECOT's state funding report, you can see which categories their students are being funded by the state to take. ECOT has 2 kids taking Category 1 courses -- what most of us think of Career Tech training (plumbing, carpentry, welding, etc.). ECOT has 6 kids taking Category 3 courses. And they have 303 students taking Category 5 -- what I grew up knowing as Home Economics.

I'm not knocking Family and Consumer Sciences, which is a legitimate endeavor, complete with a national association. But let's stop pretending that ECOT is teaching kids how to bead a weld or plumb a house or make sure support beams are appropriately plumb.

They're teaching Home Ec.

Oh, and thanks to new changes in state funding laws, they're getting $380,847 to do it.

So ECOT is bragging about graduating a bunch of kids while ignoring that more won't graduate than any other school in the nation, and they're bragging about all this great Career Tech programming they are offering, which is basically Home Economics taught over a computer.

You'll forgive me if I'm not really excited about ECOT's dizzying proclamation.

Gov. John Kasich to blame for Ohio Auditor's Mockery of Ohio Dept. of Education?

Lost in Monday's announcement by Ohio Auditor David Yost that Ohio's Department of Education is "among the worst, if not the worst-run state agency in state government" is an obvious question: "Why?"

Well, may I offer an answer -- a failure of leadership in the governor's mansion. Why do I say that?

Because John Kasich is now on his 6th State Superintendent of Public Instruction -- two of whom had to resign amidst scandal. Here's the list:

1) Deb Delisle -- Kasich bullied her into resigning, which ended up OK because she was appointed the Assistant Secretary of Education at the U.S. Department of Education and became among the most respected Assistant Secretaries in history.

2) Stan Heffner -- He took over, but only lasted a few months after the state's inspector general found that he had been lobbying for a private education company he wanted to work for.

3) Michael Sawyers -- He served as interim Superintendent while Kasich searched for a replacement.

4) Richard Ross -- Kasich's former education czar, who infamously once told a room full of Appalachian superintendents that their communities weren't as poor as they claimed, was the longest serving Superintendent. His term was rocked by scandals, as it was found that he was going behind the State Board of Education's back on the Youngstown Plan and he oversaw the David Hansen scandal.

5) Lonnie Rivera -- Served for a few months as Department head, though long enough to pen a response to the federal government's questions about Ohio's charter school grant application that netted the state $71 million to increase high-quality charters here.

6) Paolo DeMaria -- Current State Superintendent who has made several questionable assertions about various education policies.

So, that's 6 superintendents in 5 years. Remember that Kasich's predecessor had two in 4 years, keeping his predecessor's superintendent for his first two years in office.

Notice I'm not mentioning the State Board of Education in this post. Technically, the superintendent works for the board. But in this era of hyper-politicization of the department, it's clear that this choice is the Governor's.

Let me ask you all out there a question: If you had 6 bosses in 5 years, how well do you think your operation would run?

ECOT Fails to Graduate More Students Than All Ohio School Districts ... COMBINED. CORRECTED!!!

I'm not much for anonymous comments to blogs and newspapers. Anyone can pop off and hide beyond anonymity. So I probably won't ever know the anonymous poster here who mocked my ignorance of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) in 2009 and suggested that ECOT -- the nationally ridiculed Ohio virtual school -- actually does a good job because they graduate 5% of all Ohio high school graduates.

Here's the posting from my Courageous Tormentor:

"How pathetic that you state that you didn't know much about ECOT at the time, even though ECOT had been in existence since 2000. 9 years of being blissfully ignorant of the largest online school in the state. Really? It seems to me that you took an interest in Ecot only when it became politically expedient. There is a reason that 5% of the entire state's graduates come from Ecot, and it's not because they were getting the quality education from their home schools."

In 2009, I was still relatively fresh to the charter school thing, having been involved primarily in the David Brennan saga because I was a reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal -- Brennan's hometown newspaper. I had heard of ECOT, but until I took to the road in 2009, I didn't know it in detail.

My focus that year was on fixing the funding system for the 1.7 million kids who aren't in Ohio's charters -- a legislative mandate that had been failed to be addressed for about 30 years. When the bill was done, the work won national awards from non-partisan education policy observers. The hearings I held, though, were dominated by charter talk. So I learned a lot more about charters during those hearings.

However, it isn't my actual "pathetic" admission of learning something that troubles me the most about my Courageous Tormentor. It's this idea that because ECOT graduates a bunch of kids it's doing a good job. While ECOT may account for 5% of Ohio's high school graduates, it accounts for about 1/4 of the total number of students who didn't graduate from all of Ohio's school districts combined. more students who don't graduate than (drumroll please) all Ohio school districts combined! If ECOT were the 610th Ohio school district (under Ohio law, charters are treated as districts), it would account for about more than 1/2 1/5 of all non-graduating seniors in this state.

There were 2,918 ECOT kids who didn't graduate in four years, according to the latest state report card, and 1,852 who did. Statewide, school districts failed to graduate 2,626 and graduated 27,748.

That's simply astounding.

So while my Courageous Tormentor may believe that because ECOT has a lot of graduates ECOT works, perhaps the reason there are more ECOT students who fail to graduate so many students than all Ohio school districts put together is because it is ECOT, not my Courageous Tormentor's reviled home schools, that have utterly failed them.

New York Times: ECOT causes more dropouts than any school in nation

When I was Education subcommittee chairman of the House Finance and Appropriations Committee in 2009, I held a series of hearings around the state about Gov. Ted Strickland's sweeping education policy and finance reform bill. One of those hearings was set in Southeast Ohio -- the heart of Appalachia.

During the course of the hearings, George Wood -- a principal in the Federal Hocking school district -- was asked a pertinent question by my ranking member at the time Seth Morgan. Morgan asked Wood if he knew there would be no additional money, would he take back the kids from failing charter schools.

Wood (who is now Federal Hocking's superintendent) said, without a second of hesitation, "Yes. Let me save the kids." Wood was so concerned about the education kids in his district weren't getting in charters that he would take them back without any funding. There was only one school he called out by name that evening -- ECOT.

I admit, at the time, I didn't know much about ECOT. But the whole world knows about it now. That's because the country's newspaper of record -- the New York Times -- has revealed that ECOT causes more dropouts than any other school in the country. And the guy running it -- William Lager -- is making a ton of money doing it.

Is it shocking that Lager is one of the largest political contributors in the state? Of course not.

My issues with ECOT are no secret. I repeat them in the Times story.

I won't re-hash Ohio's sordid affair with Mr. Lager's cash cow. However, I will say this: It's time for ECOT to close. This school -- the nation's largest run by a for-profit entity -- is a national embarrassment. Their excuse for failing to graduate even 40% of their kids -- that they receive tough kids to educate -- is the exact argument urban districts made 20 years ago at the charter school movement's birth. And it was that argument that drove many into the warm embrace of the "no excuses" movement.

ECOT takes kids from nearly every district in the state, yet it wants to only be compared with urban districts, whose far greater challenges would crush Lager's feeble operation.

The bottom line for me is this: it is a crime that what Lager is doing isn't illegal.

I was beyond encouraged by state Sen. Peggy Lehner's response to the Times. Lehner is the chairwoman of the Senate Education Committee.

".. at some point, you have to say your model isn't working, and if your model is not working, perhaps public dollars shouldn't be going to pay for it." 

Exactly, Madam Chair.

Exactly.

Guy Who Claimed Charters Don't Cost Districts Money Named State Superintendent

Paolo DeMaria, who rather infamously made the claim in 2012 (video part 8, starting at 7:30) that the way Ohio's charter schools are funded doesn't impact school district bottom lines because school districts have both fully state funded kids and fully locally funded kids, is the state's new Superintendent of Public Instruction.

As anyone who looks at a school finance report knows, all Ohio public school kids receive both local and state revenue. Don't believe me? Ask you local school district whether your kid is fully state funded or fully locally funded. You'll get a crazy look (or crickets on the phone).

The impact charter funding has on local districts is real and significant. Which is why legislators now understand that they have to fix the way Ohio funds its charter schools so it doesn't have as much of an adverse impact on kids not in charters.

Will DeMaria go along with this recent commitment? Or will he continuously, erroneously suggest that kids who go to charters don't impact districts financially? In 2012, his word was gospel. Now, after several years of new thinking on the issue and partnering across ideological lines, DeMaria's out of step.

DeMaria also is of the opinion that more money doesn't improve student performance. This is a classic fallacy employed by many in the free market reform movement. The problem is it compares dollars spent with increases in test scores, claiming that if test scores don't go up at the same rate as the spending, then clearly spending more doesn't matter.

However, dollars are different from test scores (for a detailed explanation of this difference, read this peer-reviewed article). So, for example, if a district spends 200% more today than it did 10 years ago, but test scores are stagnant, that doesn't mean anything. Why? Because the test scores can only go so high, especially given how closely tied they are to poverty. The article I mentioned above explained that according to DeMaria's calculus, test scores would have to be nearly twice as high as the maximum a student can receive in order to equal the same percentage increase as the funding.

In other words, you won't ever see the same percentage increase in test scores that you do in funding. Because they're not the same types of numbers.

DeMaria knows his stuff. There's no question about that. He has the respect of the education policy wonks in Columbus. However, as you can see with his previously cherry picked (or made up) use of data, he has a nasty habit of juicing the ball, depending on his audience.

And while that means he survives well in public service, that's concerning as a matter of public policy.

In his new role as State Superintendent, it will be interesting to see if he manipulates data to further agendas, or whether he'll use his considerable knowledge to make an honest assessment of the state's school system. Given the department's recent history of glossing over data to further agendas, this is a legitimate concern.

I'm hoping for the best.

But I've seen his worst.