Presumably now that yesterday’s primary election has occurred, Ohio State Auditor Dave Yost will release his long-awaited audit of the now-defunct, mega-online-charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT). In yesterday’s primary election, Yost ran unopposed for the Republican nomination for Attorney General, and Mike DeWine, the current Attorney General, became the Republican nominee for […]
This week here in Ohio we had one more confirmation that the notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), which was shut down by the state at the end of January, has been intentionally defrauding the state of hundreds of millions of dollars by inflating its attendance figures. The Associated Press‘s Julie Carr Smyth reported: “Education […]
After a lengthy legal case in which Ohio’s biggest charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) has challenged the Ohio Department of Education’s attempt to crack down on what appears to be ECOT’s outrageous over-reporting of student attendance, ECOT had its final day in court. The Ohio Supreme Court heard ECOT’s appeal yesterday morning. […]
During this National School Choice Week, a celebration of school privatization that is being financially and ideologically promoted by people like Jeb Bush and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, it is a good time to consider the lessons we have been learning about the impact of parental choice and what is virtually always at the […]
Well… today is the day the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West has said it will terminate its sponsorship and end the operation of Ohio’s giant, notorious online charter school scam, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. Last night the Columbus Dispatch reported that ECOT held an emergency board meeting yesterday, after which the school […]
Imagine everybody’s surprise when, at 7:53 PM last Wednesday night, reporters from the Columbus Dispatch announced that Ohio’s notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) will likely be put out of business on Thursday, January 18th. ECOT’s final legal appeal of the state’s attempt to claw back $60 million in tax dollars overpaid to ECOT for […]
At the end of last week, explains Jim Siegel of the Columbus Dispatch, all nine Democrats serving in the Ohio Senate along with 30 of the 33 House Democrats signed an amicus brief urging the Ohio Supreme Court to find for the state and against the notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), the state’s biggest […]
ECOT, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, is the symbol of a much bigger problem in Ohio and across a number of states: an out-of-control sector of cyber schools and so-called “dropout recovery schools” whose savvy operators and owners have learned how to skirt and manipulate state laws that merely assumed entrepreneurs would run schools for […]
Ohio State Senator Joe Schiavoni ought to be a hero to public school teachers and parents—and to citizens who support responsible stewardship of tax dollars. Except that thanks to the power of the Republican leadership in the Ohio legislature, few people are really aware of Schiavoni’s heroic effort to put a stop to Bill Lager’s […]
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 […]
