Latest ECOT Taxpayer Outrage: School Won't Turn Over Public Records.

The nation's largest for-profit charter school won't turn over public records to the state agency charged with holding them accountable. And they're doing it with the blessing of the Ohio General Assembly.

In what can only be called a wickedly brazen flexing of political muscle, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow -- stinging perhaps from its defeat earlier this week in court -- has refused to turn over public records to the Ohio Department of Education.

And it appears that Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger and his newest front man, State Rep. Kirk Schuring, R-Canton, thinks it's ODE's problem, not ECOT's.

I swear.

"I told them I was disappointed that they wouldn’t delay just one week to allow me to at least see if there was a way to come to some kind of reasonable agreement

The "them" Schuring is referring to is ODE, not ECOT. So Schuring -- with whom I served in the General Assembly and always seemed a pretty reasonable guy -- is disappointed that ODE is trying to determine whether his constituents' tax dollars were improperly spent in a school that received $108 million last year. That's about $10 for every Ohioan.

ODE has decided to give ECOT another two weeks to come up with its record that, again, are public.

As for the ECOT argument that this is unfair or something, I refer you to what ODE's lawyers wrote earlier this week about what ECOT's own truancy policy states:

"...it is crucial that the student logs in, checks e-mail and participates in coursework regularly (25 hours per week minimum) each week in order to avoid consequences."

ODE has been trying to determine just how often kids actually participated in online coursework since February. Yet ECOT still stalls. Why can they get away with this? Imagine if Columbus City Schools tried this same, 6-month stalling tactic during their scandal.

I think the last few paragraphs of the Dispatch story about ECOT's latest stall explains everything.

"From 2010-2015, ECOT founder William Lager has given more than $1.2 million in disclosed campaign contributions, the vast majority to Republican lawmakers.

Speaker Rosenberger was the keynote speaker at ECOT’s graduation ceremony last month, and he was introduced by Sen. Bill Coley, R-West Chester. 

Gov. John Kasich spoke at ECOT’s graduation in 2011, while Ohio Supreme Court Justice Terrence O’Donnell spoke in 2013 and state Auditor Dave Yost spoke in 2015. Senate President Keith Faber, R-Celina, spoke earlier this year to an online charter school rally at the Statehouse.

ECOT Superintendent Rick Teerters, who earlier this week warned that the state’s attendance auditing efforts could shut down the school, today urged supporters to contact state lawmakers and the state Board of Education to 'let state leaders know what ECOT means to you.'

'In your letter, please express your disappointment that the Ohio Department of Education is taking actions aimed at closing e-schools,' Teeters said. 'With these changes, ODE is trying to take away your voice. That is wrong.'

Teeters reassured parents and students that the school would open this year as planned 'even while we fend off these attacks on school choice.'"

This is what political contributions buy you, apparently. The ability to collect nearly $1 billion since 2000, graduate not even 4 out of 10 students , have more kids fail to graduate than any school in America, and be paid more state money per pupil than 85% of Ohio's traditional school districts, which have to pay for buses, buildings, HVAC, etc. -- expenses you don't have. All while paying teachers 20 percent of all the taxpayer money ECOT receives.

Only in America.

 

BREAKING: Accountability Wins, ECOT Loses Legal Hearing. Nation's Largest For-Profit School's Future Unclear.

A Franklin County judge has ruled that the Ohio Department of Education can try to figure out whether the $108 million it sent to the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow last school year was overpaid by tens of millions of dollars.

Well, that's a relief.

ECOT sued the state last week to keep it from determining whether students were actually participating in their educational program, rather than just receiving it. ECOT's Superintendent called the ODE effort "underhanded" in an email over the weekend -- an email in which he confirmed that if ODE followed through on its efforts to ascertain ECOT's actual participation it could force the school to close.

So now ODE can find out if ECOT should have been paid $108 million, or a substantially smaller amount. At stake is nothing less than the existence of the country's largest for-profit charter school -- the size of which made even the staunchest charter school advocates blush.

For years, I've been pointing out ECOT's horrific performance record, its out-of-whack funding scheme and its political heft.

Even though more children fail to graduate in time at ECOT than any other school in the country, Gov. John Kasich, Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger and former House Speaker Bill Batchelder all spoke at ECOT's graduation ceremonies.

Wonder if there's any regrets?

If ODE finds the same results it did last year at Provost Academy, then as much as $86.4 million of the $108 million sent to ECOT last year may have to be repaid.

Extending that over the course of the school's existence could mean that as much as $723 million of the $903 million sent to ECOT since 2000 went to pay for kids ECOT can't prove it ever educated.

It's not like that leap is unthinkable. After all, it's first year of existence, Ohio Auditor of State Jim Petro found that ECOT was paid $1.7 million for kids it couldn't prove it had.

ECOT's lawsuit revealed that the year after that finding, ECOT struck a deal with ODE to be paid for kids it offered instruction to, as long as the student finished their first assignment (among other ways).

Again, as encouraging as it is to see ODE take on the state's largest charter school, it is a reminder of just how well-earned Ohio's national reputation as a charter school backwater had become until recently.

And how many hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars have been wasted.

Accountability 101: If State Counts ECOT's Kids, School May Close. Exactly.

If the Ohio Department of Education tries to verify that students at the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow are online 5 hours a day, ECOT Superintendent Rick Teeters told email recipients, "they would likely force us and other e-schools to close our doors."

Exactly.

It's called accountability.

At issue is ECOT's whole business model -- getting paid $7,127 per student (more per pupil state funding than 85 percent of Ohio's traditional school districts) to simply offer 920 hours of curriculum to kids, not actually prove they are educating them. ECOT received $108 million last school year from the state, and has been paid nearly $1 billion since it opened in 2000.

This is nothing less than an existential fight for the nation's largest for-profit charter school.

ODE wants to verify that the kids it's sending taxpayer money to educate actually logged on and off enough to justify the $108 million expenditure. ECOT claims in a lawsuit filed last week that ODE doesn't understand its technology, which is so apparently groundbreaking that it allows kids to be educated effectively without logging in.

As Special Counsel to the Ohio Attorney General Douglas R. Cole put it in his filing responding to ECOT's complaints,

"Under a plain, common-sense reading of the community school (charter school) funding statutes, ECOT is required to track. and ODE to reimburse for, actual student participation. Finding otherwise would render numerous (Ohio Revised Code) provisions ... meaningless, and, as a more fundamental matter, the statutory scheme would not make sense."

How else do regulators determine student participation in online educational experiences except through logging in and out of the system? It's sort of like saying that a student in a traditional setting is "participating" even if the student shows up to school for a few minutes every so often. ECOT is arguing, essentially, that it should be paid in full for educating kids that barely show up simply because ECOT would let them in if they ever did show up.

It'd be one thing if ECOT's performance indicated this novel approach actually worked. However, as has been documented over and over again, ECOT's performance is among the worst of any school in the state, and it can't even graduate 4 out of 10 kids.

So the returns aren't great.

According to the Dispatch article about the ECOT lawsuit, we may have a hearing as early as today to decide whether ODE can proceed with its quasi-audit of ECOT's kids. So we may have clarity about whether this count moves forward very shortly.

But if ECOT is forced to close because ODE is simply checking to make sure the school is educating students the state has already paid to educate, that says something about how ineffective ECOT has been.

And it explains, once again, just how lacking Ohio has been on charter school oversight. For it appears that all ODE had to do to overcome ECOT's significant political clout was to simply ask them to prove their kids actually participate in an educational program.

And you wonder why Ohio's charter school regime has been so mocked.

Ohio Department of Education Lets ECOT Print Money

Buried inside today's Columbus Dispatch story about The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow suing the state is a perfect example of why Ohio's become a national joke on charter school oversight.

ECOT is suing the state to prevent it from determining if taxpayers have overpaid tens of millions of dollars to the nation's largest, for-profit school.

According to the Dispatch article, a preliminary check this spring found that "most log-in times from these files did not substantiate 5 hours per day of login time for the students reviewed." So despite the political largess of its founder -- William Lager -- it looked like ODE -- finally emboldened by the wide-ranging charter school reforms of last year's House Bill 2 -- was about to uncover some serious problems.

However, the most amazing thing we learned from the story in the Columbus Dispatch is that ODE and ECOT apparently cut a deal in 2003 after ECOT was found by the State Auditor to have been  paid $1.7 million in taxpayer money for kids it wasn't educating.

Here's the deal.

Ready?

Instead of having to have kids log on to their computers for 920 hours in a school year, ECOT just had to provide them with 920 hours worth of course material. Whether the kid EVER logged on didn't matter. What mattered was whether ECOT made the material available.

Can you believe that? What a sweetheart of a deal for ECOT. They were paid $104 million last year in taxpayer dollars meant for 564 of Ohio's higher performing school districts (more than $900 million since it opened).

And all they had to do to earn nearly $1 billion is provide kids with 920 hours of learning, not make sure they did it??

And, according to documents released by ECOT, ODE was cool with this?

I don't know what's more offensive, that ECOT can do this or that ODE signed off on it.

Once again, I implore my friends in the quality-based charter school community here and around the country to speak out against this outrage committed by both ECOT and ODE. Loudly.

Want to know why Ohio's gained a nationally ridiculed reputation over charters? Look no further than this amazingly horrible oversight.

Can it be said in any other state that simply offering school to kids means you should be paid for educating them, even if they never enter your door?

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 2003 Ohio Department of Education.

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.