For years in Ohio all sorts of people have been siphoning off profits from online charter schools—the giants like ECOT, smaller online schools, and private companies with which the schools contract for management and curriculum. There have also been overpayments to nonprofit charter school sponsors, the organizations that Ohio pays as a percentage of any […]
Two prominent and long-experienced national organizations, the NAACP and the National Education Association, have passed resolutions demanding a moratorium on the authorization of new charter schools until some kind of oversight can be put in place to protect students and the investment of tax dollars. Charter schools are being authorized under the laws of 43 […]
The serialized saga of the years-long theft of tax dollars by Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) has been exciting. It seems, however, that the story may be ending. And while Ohio’s out-of-control charter sector rip-off will continue, in the specific story of ECOT, at least, it appears there is hope that the good will […]
Yesterday afternoon, members of the Ohio State Board of Education voted 16-1 to demand that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), Ohio’s large and notorious cyber charter school, pay back $60 million it overcharged the state last year for students who were not participating full-time in its educational program. The Plain Dealer‘s Patrick O’Donnell reminds […]
Ohio’s biggest charter school, the notorious e-school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), held a big rally in Columbus early this week. Rick Teeters, ECOT’s superintendent, told all the school’s teachers and students to show up, even though the rally happened in the middle of the school day. Maybe everybody was expected to go home […]
For years and years, Ohio has negligently failed to demand that online charter schools submit accurate attendance records. In the meantime the state has kept on paying the schools for the students they claim to serve. While the state has continued to say it would crack down, oversight has been blocked by power and money. […]
Bill Phillis, Executive Director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, interviews Keith Richards, retired school superintendent of several Ohio school districts over a 40 year career. In this series of youtube videos, Mr. Richards describes his experience with the unscrupulous, online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, known in […]
The Ohio legislature is in the midst of its lame duck session—the opportunity for lawmakers to do something about the outrageous scam at the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). And today, according to Plunderbund, Senate Bill 3, an omnibus education law with 29 amendments is to be introduced in the House Education Committee. A big […]
On Friday afternoon, Ohio was granted the possibility that perhaps someday it can recover some of the hundreds of millions of dollars in years’ of over-payments to the notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). The Ohio Department of Education won a preliminary court victory on Friday, but in the context of state politics, for-profit educational […]
Attorneys for the Ohio Department of Education and Ohio’s largest and most notorious online charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, have been in court all this week tussling, as the Columbus Dispatch‘s Jim Siegel explains, “over ECOT’s lawsuit to block the state from using new attendance standards to impact funding….” “As the state’s biggest […]
