Ecot is Dead

They are officially closed.  It was a profitable run for the owners.  A terrible waste for most of the students.


The Tenth Period Blog has crunched some numbers:

"Here's the amazing thing. Between 2012-2013 and 2015-2016 (the school's most recent audited school year), Lager's for-profit companies received $83.6 million in public funds. Meanwhile, ECOT only paid $82.9 million for its teachers "

http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2018/01/ecot-in-receivership-ecot-paid-more-to.html

Others continue to survive despite their failing grades.

I heard an ad on NPR for OHDELA today another Ohio virtual school trying to profit on the demise of ECOT.

Time to start a dead pool.  Who is next?

A .0375 GPA, again......

Good article here.  Links to other reports, scandals and test results.


https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2017/10/18/virtual-charter-schools-foundations-performance


I have not posted much on this blog lately.  There has been lots of publicity on the virtual schools, none of it positive.  I am not sure there is a need.  They are no longer trendy and cool.  They are scams making some people very rich at the expense of the children.


ECOT is on its deathbed.  Trying to reorganize itself into some other structure to keep the school tax funds flowing.


Ohio Connections Academy, owned by Pearson Education, received its report card.  1 C, 2 D's, and 5 F's which I think works out to a .0375 GPA




"Some have blamed the fallout from ECOT for the disbanding of Ohio's largest charter school advocacy organization. In December 2016, the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools announced it would close at the end of 2016, after more than a decade in which it was an influential player in the state's charter school policy. Critics say poor performance by Ohio charter schools—80 percent of which received an "F" in the state's report card system—caused funder support for the alliance to dry up. In years past, the Ohio organization had counted the Gates Foundation, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation among its supporters, but by the end of 2016, none of those organizations were listed on the alliance website as current funders, according to the Columbus Dispatch."


Event the politicians are bailing. 


In the words or our President, sad, just sad, what a bunch of losers.  Too bad his education secretary does not see it as it is....

Ohio Connections Academy Report Card 2015-2016

Three F's, Two D's and a B
A 0.8333 GPA  Seriously?


Shameful. 


I note that there is no Principal listed.  The superintendent is nowhere on the report.


http://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/Pages/School-Report.aspx?SchoolIRN=000236


Time for some accountability.  End this scam!

Charter Schools: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

At least we are not Nevada! Ohio gets a special mention! 




Profits over students.




Online schools, what a scam!

Alumni of White Hat Management make the news again.

Cambridge Education Group, an apparent offshoot, now wants to open a new school in Ohio.


Finances are tricky.  A charter school cannot make money.  They are non-profit. But the management company can make all the money it can by controlling the money and can be quite profitable for the company and its employees.


This would be akin to the school board collecting all the money and then doling out what they believe is necessary to the school while keeping what they can for their services.


More Charters Cut Ties with Newpoint Partners Management Company

By dianeravitch

June 20, 2016 //

3

Last month, a grand jury in Florida indicted employees of Newpoint Education Partners and three other companies for grand theft, money laundering, and other crimes. The company, started by former employees of the White Hat management company in Ohio, lost the charters for several schools that it was running where the alleged crimes occurred.
Now, two more charter schools are cutting their ties with Newport, following an investigation by a local TV news station.
One week after an 8 on Your Side investigation uncovered $235,000 in bogus school loans, two charter schools funded with state tax dollars in Jacksonville have decided to sever ties with a for-profit management company we’ve been investigating for months because of the financial chaos it helped create in Pinellas charter schools.
The Jacksonville charter school loans by Newpoint Education Partners which are cited in a 2015 financial audit do not exist, something that caught even the treasurer of San Jose Preparatory High School and Academy by surprise after 8 on Your Side uncovered and reported it.
Are there any law enforcement officials in Jacksonville, or is it left to the media to investigate criminal activity?

Ecot Exposed

https://ecotexposed.org/


Wow, a whole website devoted to one e-school.


Shameful that this school exists!


The others are trying hard to catch up and grab a piece of this action.  Like pigs to a trough.


When I lived with a charter school administrator, they were always trying to catch up to ECOT.  Why can't Connections Academy produce the same kind of enrollment was the question being asked from the home office in Baltimore.

The Ohio auditor

Another E-School Investigation

A great expose on K-12 in California.  From The Mercury News:
http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_29780959/k12-inc-california-virtual-academies-operator-exploits-charter


This the playbook for the Ohio E-Schools




Some key findings:

Teachers employed by K12 Inc.'s charter schools may be asked to inflate attendance and enrollment records used to determine taxpayer funding.

Ohio E-School Charters are fighting this accountability issue right now.

Fewer than half of the students who start the online high schools earn diplomas, and almost none of them are qualified to attend the state's public universities.

Check out the report cards for the Ohio E-Schools.  Dismal at best.

K12's heavily marketed online model has helped the company reap more than $310 million in state funding over the past 12 years.

Market! market! market! Where do they get the money for the radio and TV ads?  SOme interesting accounting.  Make sure the school never makes a profit and write off the loss.

Students who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged in to K12's school software may be counted as present in records used to calculate the amount of funding the schools get from the state.

About half of the schools' students are not proficient in reading, and only a third are proficient in math -- levels that fall far below statewide averages.

School districts that are supposed to oversee the company's schools have a strong financial incentive to turn a blind eye to problems: They get a cut of the academies' revenue, which largely comes from state coffers.

Also note the governance issue.  K-12 sets up and loads the boards.  Same as they do in Ohio


I like pictures

10th Period: Ohio Teacher Data: Charters Flooded with First-Yea...

10th Period: Ohio Teacher Data: Charters Flooded with First-Yea...: One of the signs of a healthy charter school sector is whether teachers want to teach in the schools. Teachers are like the canary in a coal...




Charter schools have driven down teacher pay.  The best and the brightest do not stay there at least not in Ohio.

Unjust Enrichment

Trying to avoid accountability.


"When the Ohio Department of Education dug into the attendance reporting of Provost Academy Ohio, a small, Columbus-based online charter school, it found that the school was being paid far more than it should have received based on the actual time students spent logged into school-related activities.


Some wonder what would happen if the same scrutiny was applied to online charter schools that are five to 90 times larger than Provost. As lawmakers crafted new charter-school reforms, questions arose about the accuracy of e-school attendance"


What would happen is that they would see that the attendance is grossly inflated, probably fabricated and that the schools are receiving improper funding.  I would bet big on this, thus the push back.


"Hanna would not say specifically what would cause problems for e-schools. “We all want to be accountable. We just need to find a way to meet their requirements within the systems that exist now.”"


I call bullshit on that statement. They do not want visibility or accountability. 


http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/03/01/lax-attendance-tracking-allows-800000-state-overpayment-to-online-charter-school.html


"According to its five-year forecast, Provost will repay the state up to $850,000 in “overfunded foundation payments” over the next three years.


As a result, the school’s operator, Edison Learning, needs to contribute to operations or defer management fees during these years, the report said. The management company is paid $250,000 a year to handle administrative and other duties.


The Ohio Council of Community Schools is paid 3 percent of the school’s state aid for a sponsorship fee. The report does not mention deferring or waiving sponsorship fees."


Pretty soon you are talking about real money!

10th Period: Ohio's Dropout Recovery Schools Embarrassingly Poo...

Pearson is also trying to get into this market with their Nexus schools.




Follow the money.  Results are optional!




10th Period: Ohio's Dropout Recovery Schools Embarrassingly Poo...: The data on Ohio's dropout recovery charter schools is so bad I'm wondering if anything can ever really be done to repair this porti...

Impervious to failure, E-Schools

An excellent article by Kevin Huffman, former Tennessee’s education commissioner on his battle with K12 Inc.’s e-school in Tennessee.  Follow the money.  He concludes that there is little evidence that for-profits succeeding.  Too many conflicts in chasing the money over results.  We have the same situation in Ohio.

https://www.the74million.org/article/an-ed-commissioners-confession-how-i-tried-and-failed-to-close-the-worst-school-in-tennessee

Some excerpts:

“This past summer, the state released the school results from the 2014-15 school year. The Tennessee Virtual Academy earned a Level 1 in growth for the fourth year in a row. It clocked in at #1312 out of 1368 elementary and middle schools in the state. It is no longer the most improved lousy school in Tennessee. It is just plain lousy. It is, over a four-year time, arguably the worst school in Tennessee.

The K12 saga raises a lot of difficult questions for me. Is it possible for a for-profit company to run schools? Our very best charters all over the country are non-profits, and I see little evidence of for-profits succeeding in the school management business. I may be platform-agnostic, but the data is telling a compelling story on this one.

And yet, the “marketplace” fails when we are not able to ensure that parents know that the school they are choosing has a running track record of failure. Clearly, there is a critical regulatory role, and we cannot simply assume that an unfettered choice environment will automatically lead to good outcomes.

In theory, K12, Inc’s stock should be hammered by its terrible performance in Tennessee, but it’s actually up in 2015. And why wouldn’t it be? The corporate shareholders aren’t looking for student results — they are looking for K12 to expand and grow and add more students.

Nobody asks me for stock advice, but I say: Buy! Buy K12 Inc.! It is the rarest of breeds — a company utterly impervious to failure. It fails again and again, and yet it lives and breathes! “

The worm is turning for the online school scam

As it should be:


Online schools are losing support, creating divisions in the national charter school movement.


They will gladly take the money and promise result sometime in the future.  What is the cost to the students and taxpayers?  Online schools have been very good for the owners.


http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/11/online_schools_are_losing_supp.html


Poor test results at online schools are creating divisions in the charter school community in Ohio and nationally, leading some national leaders to question whether e-schools should even be part of the charter school movement anymore.
At the top of the list is Nina Rees, head of the nation's largest charter school organization, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, who is distancing herself from online schools and the damage they are causing to the public perception of charters overall.
After a visit to Ohio earlier this month, Rees said e-schools - schools where kids take all their classes by computer at home, instead of in classrooms - are dragging down the overall performance of charter schools in Ohio and other states.
"If you were to eliminate the (test scores of) online schools, the performance of the state would dramatically improve," Rees said.


Stanford study creating waves
The study in question, and one that has sparked a renewed debate over the entire online school model, came late last month from Stanford University's Center for Research of Educational Outcomes (CREDO). Researchers found that students in online schools – – learn far less than students in other schools.
Nationally, students learned the equivalent of 72 days of school less in reading and 180 days less in math, each school year, CREDO found.


CREDO found the scores of kids not only fell when they switched to online schools, but they rose when students went back to traditional schools.


Marie Hanna, executive director of Ohio Connections Academy, also had criticisms of the CREDO report, saying the virtual twin comparison "doesn't make sense."
That school is owned by Pearson, the international education giant that recently drew criticism in Ohio for its handling of the PARCC Common Core exams.
Hanna was far more reserved than the others and said that despite her reservations, CREDO's report is a call for more research.


"CREDO brings up some concerns," Hanna said. "No doubt about it. It brings up the need for more research in the e-school environment to really understand what's working and what isn't.''


Online schools receive about $6,800 per student a year in state tax dollars to run their schools, regardless of how much students learn.

Shake Off Those Charter Chains!

A chronology of failure

Adding to my chronology




http://progressohio.org/an-incomplete-yet-totally-terrifying-ohio-charter-school-scandal-chronology/

Schools as a business

Another excellent article from Denis Smith.  He hits the inherent conflict of interest between operating a business and doing what is right for the students.


http://www.plunderbund.com/2015/10/27/are-public-charter-schools-also-considered-businesses-mind-the-quotation-marks/


These charter schools are operated as personal fiefdoms.  This is another great example


"If people consider a school to be a business enterprise, inevitably the profit motive gets confused with the educational mission, which is what schools are supposed to be all about. The proliferation of for-profit national charter school chains has been a chief contributor toward the blurring of pedagogy and profit. And entities like Imagine and K12, a publicly traded company that is a big player in the virtual school field, only add to the growing perception that charter schools are first and foremost businesses and thus are all about money and privatization."


"Likewise, the nation is indebted to the Washington Supreme Court for its ability to teach us a civics lesson and, in the process, highlight a problem of democracy. When a board that is hand-picked by a private corporation and spends public funds to run what is called a “public” charter school that is a problem of democracy due to the absence of voter input – a violation of the democratic process.
We also should extend our thanks to the League of Women Voters for helping the Washington Supreme Court to understand that a school is not a business, but it nevertheless must be our business to ensure that schools are learning communities, not profit-centered enterprises, governed by citizens chosen in elections by qualified voters, not by corporations."

Ohio Education Research Center Reviews E-Schools

An extensive report from the Ohio Education Research Center .  E-schools are not successful.  More dropouts, poor performance with similar demographics.  No magic bullet/solution or excuse was determined.  It is a failed one billion experiment.

A very thorough report.  The conclusion:

E-school students’ performance on standardized tests are dramatically lower, especially for

math, compared to those students who attend a brick-and-mortar school. Test scores

plummet the year a student transitions to an e-school. E-school students’ scores see

incremental increases in the subsequent years. However, it is important to note, that despite

subsequent increases their scores remain below the scores they received prior to entering an

e-school.

http://media.cleveland.com/plain_dealer_metro/other/Ohio's%20E-Schools%20report%20by%20OERC.pdf

What is the cost?


http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-06-12/one-year-with-a-bad-teacher-costs-each-student-50-000-in-lifetime-earnings

Dealing with e-schools: Kids in first year in online schools learn little, never catch up

Drilling down into the data.  The results for e-schools is not pretty.  The kids fall behind and never catch up.


Meanwhile the taxpayers pay millions and some corporations and sponsors make a lot of money.  $6000 per kid.


"Test scores plummet the year a student transitions to an e-school," that study found. "E-school students' scores see incremental increases in the subsequent years. However, it is important to note, that despite subsequent increases their scores remain below the scores they received prior to entering an e-school."


 Ohio Education Resource Center


An ugly graph.


http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/09/dealing_with_e-schools_kids_in.html

CURMUDGUCATION: OH: 200 Failed Charters

Another take on the 200 failed charters in Ohio.  Curmudgucation is a very good blog



CURMUDGUCATION: OH: 200 Failed Charters: When the Washington State supreme court ruled charters unconstitutional just before the school year started, charter fans were outraged. &q...

200 Charter School Failures and Counting

A thorough article on the waste of taxpayers dollars in this community school experiment.

It points out the lack of appropriate supervision by sponsors.  They have a conflict as there fees depend on the existence of the school, not the results.

It points out the lack of qualified disinterested school boards.  Ohio lets the managment company pick the boards and then presents a contract with the terms the managment company writes in that contract. 

“I wonder why people sit on Boards? Is it a cheap self esteem boost?”

“ I often think the many Boards I have seen are lead around by the nose anyway.”

http://www.connectionsacademy.com/news/ray_lambert_school_leader.aspx

"In Ohio, for-profit companies run most charter schools, according to a 2014 Beacon Journal analysis. Some of the largest are out of state. Contracts allow many of the operators to hire employees and negotiate vendor and landlord contracts without seeking approval of the school board. In many cases, contracts are with parties related to the for-profit operator."

http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/blame-and-ignorance-follow-200th-charter-school-flop-in-ohio-1.625609#.VgAYW9DsFP0.mailto

No question the education education system needs help.  This points some of the many flaws.