Ohio Pays Millions While Students at ECOT Average Only an Hour a Day at Online School

Jim Siegel reported yesterday for the Columbus Dispatch that despite Judge Stephen McIntosh’s refusal to grant the restraining order demanded by the state’s largest online charter school to prevent a state audit of its attendance records, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) continues to refuse to share its records openly with the state’s investigators:

“Despite a judge’s ruling this week, the state’s largest online charter school has apparently declined to hand over all records requested by the Ohio Department of Education so it can conduct an attendance audit.  After a Franklin County judge on Monday denied ECOT’s request for a temporary restraining order to block the state from conducting the audit, state investigators moved into the school’s Columbus headquarters to begin reviewing data. But, according to an e-mail sent Tuesday from the Education Department’s attorney to ECOT’s legal counsel, the information ECOT provided was not complete…. The standoff is the latest development in an ongoing battle between the Education Department and the politically well-connected online school….”

Patrick O’Donnell, the Plain Dealer‘s education reporter shares some of the back story about Ohio’s push to audit attendance at the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which collected over $100 million last year to educate 15,000 students online. Apparently an initial audit of school attendance records earlier in the spring turned up some shocking news: “An initial review this spring raised red flags that students at ECOT, Ohio’s largest online school, may have done far less work than required.” “‘Those (ECOT’s) records did not substantiate the number of educational hours for which ECOT had billed ODE,’ the state’s lawyers added.”

O’Donnell continues: “Many students at the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) online charter school spend just an hour a day online taking their classes… all the while the state pays the school as if they were full-time students.  That detail was included in a filing for the state in Franklin County Common Pleas Court Monday as the Ohio Department of Education audits the giant charter school’s records.” “Unlike a traditional school, where teachers can take attendance every day, students at online schools like ECOT take classes at home by computer.  That makes it hard to measure whether they are actively taking classes…. Since charter schools are paid on a per-student basis by the state, there are millions of dollars at stake in determining which kids qualify as attending a school.”

The problem is that ECOT inadequately tracks active participation by its students.  Siegel quotes the spring’s initial audit: “The department ‘tentatively concluded that it appeared that ECOT tracks student participation time, but that ECOT does not adjust its (full-time student) FTE submission according to this participation data,’ the department wrote in a court filing. After unsuccessfully gaining access to ECOT’s full log-in data, (attorney Douglas) Cole wrote that as of Feb. 1 the law requires each online charter to ‘keep an accurate record of each individual student’s participation in learning opportunities each day’ and be kept in a manner that can be submitted to the state.  Cole said the Education Department maintains that, even before that law change, ECOT had an obligation to maintain accurate duration records.”

It is well known that William Lager, ECOT’s founder and the owner of the two privately held for-profit companies that provide all services for ECOT, has been among Ohio’s most generous contributors to the political coffers of Republicans in the legislature. In its latest report, the Dispatch notes that Lager “has given more than $1.2 million in disclosed campaign contributions, the vast majority to Republican lawmakers.”

This week, Lager’s best supporter in the legislature seems to be Rep. Kirk Schuring, R-Canton, who asked the Department of Education to delay its audit for a week.  In his report for the Dispatch, Siegel explains why Schuring says he wanted a delay: “I told them I was disappointed they wouldn’t delay just one week to allow me to at least see if there was a way to come to come kind of reasonable agreement.” The Dispatch continues: “Schuring said he wants a better understanding of the differences in learning between an online school and a traditional school.”

In March, Senate minority leader, Joe Schiavoni, D-Youngstown, proposed a bill to regulate attendance at the online schools, but the legislature did not act on it before recessing until after the November election.  Rep. Schuring is reported by Siegel to be “uncertain if lawmakers will act after the November election.”

This blog has covered ECOT extensively.

Business As Usual as OH Legislature Tries to Avoid Charter Oversight: Money Likely to Prevail

It’s time for a new installment in the tale of the Ohio Legislature’s efforts to block even the most minimal oversight of its out-of-control charter school sector.  You may remember that Ohio is a super-majority, one-party-dominated state. Its governor, legislature and supreme court are all dominated by Republicans, and in the legislature those majorities are huge.

The problems for public schools are compounded by the fact that Andrew Brenner, now chair of the House Education Committee, has declared that public schools are examples of socialism and should be privatized. Peggy Lehner, chair of the Senate Education Committee, has been more amenable to listening to the leaders of Ohio’s public schools, though we’ll see that she is carefully watched by those in control of the Ohio Senate.  The governor, John Kasich, supported minimal regulation of charter schools after Ohio became a national laughing stock and after he was hounded by the press and especially the editorial boards of every one of the state’s major newspapers.  But once weak regulations were passed, Kasich began running for President. It is being suggested these days that he has not been minding the store.

Here is where we left this story in early March.  Ohio has been asking the notorious online charter schools to document that the students—for which the state is reimbursing charter schools $6,000 per pupil—are actually sitting at their computers using the online curricula to do their lessons.  The most notorious of the online charters, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), has protested, trying to put off the requirement that it document that students are “attending school”—not merely signing up and then disappearing.  ECOT has also asked to have that regulation softened so that the school would not have to document that students are actually attending school.  Catherine Candisky and Jim Siegel of the Columbus Dispatch report that ECOT, with 18,000 students was to have been reviewed in February, but the school rescheduled the review for March.  At the same time, “School officials from ECOT reportedly crafted a softened attendance-tracking amendment—floated recently in the Ohio House—which would require online schools only to offer the statewide minimum 920 hours of instruction per school year but not require students to actually participate in these hours.”

Then, on March 22, Senate Minority Leader Joe Schiavoni of Youngstown introduced a bill to try to stop the watering down of charter school oversight.  In a press release he declared: “We need to make sure that online schools are accurately reporting attendance and not collecting tax dollars for students who never log in to take classes.  Online schools must be held accountable for lax attendance policies.  Without strong oversight, these schools could be collecting millions of dollars while failing to educate Ohio’s school children.”  If passed, Schiavoni’s bill would require e-schools to keep accurate records of the number of hours student spend doing coursework.  It would require the online school to notify the Ohio Department of Education if a student failed to log-in for ten consecutive days.  It would require that a qualified teacher check in with each student once a month to monitor active participation.

It is hard to imagine that such requirements would seem overly punitive, unless one understands how money works in the Ohio legislature.  William Lager who founded ECOT and who privately owns the two lucrative companies that create its curriculum and manage its operation, is among the largest donors of political contributions in Ohio.  Candisky and Siegel explain: “William Lager, ECOT founder and operator, was the second-largest individual donor to legislative Republicans in the last election cycle, giving $393,500, plus another $202,000 in 2015.”

Yesterday morning, Brent Larkin, the retired editorial page director of the Plain Dealer, did his best to warn the public and put a stop to the destruction by the Ohio Legislature of even barely minimal oversight of charter schools: “Call Crime Stoppers.  Better yet, alert the FBI.  May is the month state legislators want to rob you blind.  It’s the month they want to make sure your hard-earned money keeps being funneled to operators of perhaps the worst online charter schools in the United States.  We’re talking serious money—like $275 million—transferred from your pocket to theirs.  Every single year.  May is the target month for fleecing taxpayers, because legislators want to get this dirty business done before they adjourn for the summer….”

Larkin explains what is happening in the Ohio Senate to kill Senator Schiavoni’s bill to make online charter operators report their attendance more accurately:  “(W)hen State Sen. Joe Schiavoni, a Youngstown-area Democrat, designed a bill to create stronger attendance reporting requirements, Senate Education Committee Chair Peggy Lehner said she’d gladly hold hearings.  All Lehner promised was fairness…. What gets Lehner, a Dayton-area Republican, in trouble with her party’s leaders is that she actually cares more about children than about who funds her campaigns.  So instead of allowing Lehner’s education committee to hold hearings on a Democrat-sponsored bill related to education, (Ohio Senate President Keith) Faber assigned it to the Senate Finance Committee.  Where it will probably die….”

A recent Columbus Dispatch editorial describes Senator Schiavoni’s response to the diversion of his education bill to be heard in the finance, not the education, committee: “This is the second time in six months, Schiavoni said, that one of his bills has been placed in the Finance Committee after Lehner agreed to hold hearings; the earlier bill, to help Youngstown’s troubled school district, has yet to have a hearing.”

The Plain Dealer‘s Brent Larkin castigates Faber’s leadership of the Ohio Senate: “A key element of their May agenda is to dismantle many of the charter-school reforms they grudgingly approved late last year—reforms passed only because pressure from good-government groups, newspapers and other media outlets throughout the state left them little choice… Under pressure from contributors, Republican legislators now want to delay implementation of attendance requirements, (and) determine funding based on who enrolls in a charter school and not who attends classes….”