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!

Bloomberg takes on K-12

Not a good investment.  Good article

Plagued by subpar test scores, the largest operator of online public schools in the U.S. has lost management contracts or been threatened with school shutdowns in five states this year. The National Collegiate Athletic Association ruled in April that students can no longer count credits from 24 K12 high schools toward athletic scholarships

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-11-14/k12-backed-by-milken-suffers-low-scores-as-states-resist.html#disqus_thread

The results for Ohio:
The 2012-2013 Ohio Department of Education report card shows 1 C, 1 D and 6 F's With a performance index of 73.0% and Indicators met of 45.8%^[2

The 2013-2014 Ohio Department of Education report card shows 1 C, 1 D and 6 F's With a performance index of 73.6% and Indicators met of 41.7% ^[3]

http://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/Archives%20TS/Community%20Schools/142950/142950_2012-2013_BUILD.pdf

http://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/Pages/School-Report.aspx?SchoolIRN=142950

Charter School Analysis

Lots of marketing going on.  Radio ads, TV ads, internet ads.  Yet the results are never mentioned.  I wonder why?


Failing than Public Schools

By dianeravitch

September 16, 2014 //

13

Stephen Dyer, education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio, has analyzed the latest state report cards. The state’s Governor, John Kasich, is pro-charter, pro-voucher, and pro-market forces. He is no friend to public education. The legislature is the same. They want more schools that are privately managed. As we saw in a post yesterday, Ohio has a parent trigger law, and (as I posted yesterday) the State Education Department has hired StudentsFirst (founded by Michelle Rhee) to inform parents in Columbus about their right to convert their low-performing public school to a charter or hand it over to a charter management organization. Given the statistics in this post, the odds are that the parents will turn their low-performing public school into an even lower-performing charter school, with no hope of escape.

Yet when the state report cards came out, public schools overwhelmingly received higher grades than charter schools. Dyer explains in this post that “The Ohio Report Cards are now all out, and the news is worse for Ohio’s embattled Charter Schools than it was last year. Charter Schools received more Fs than As, Bs and Cs combined. Their percentage of Fs went up from about 41% last year to nearly 44% this year.” Think of it, nearly half the charters in the state earned an F grade, yet the state wants MORE of them.

Dyer also found that the public schools in the Big 8–Ohio’s urban districts–face more challenges than charters, yet still outperform the urban charters. He writes:

In further analyzing the Ohio Report Card data released today, schools in Ohio’s Big 8 urban centers (Akron, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton, Toledo and Youngstown) scored higher on their performance index score (the closest thing Ohio has to an overall performance assessment at this point) than Charter Schools, despite having substantially higher percentages of children who were economically disadvantaged. A staggering 51% of Big 8 urban buildings have more than 95% of their students designated as economically disadvantaged (the Ohio Department of Education only says buildings have “>95.0″ if their economic disadvantaged number is higher than 95%).

So, despite having more than half their buildings with, for all intents and purposes, all their kids economically disadvantaged, Ohio’s Big 8 urban buildings actually perform better, on average, than Ohio’s Charter Schools, which were originally intended to “save” children from “failing” urban buildings.

Dyer also notes that “Of the top 200 PI [Performance Index] scores, 10 are Charters, 190 are districts. Of the bottom 200 PI scores, 21 are districts and 179 are Charters.”

When Dyer looked at Value-Added Measures for districts, the public school districts still outperformed charters, showing more test score growth than charters.

The puzzle in these results is why Ohio policymakers–the Governor and the Legislature–want more charters. The answer, as we have observed again and again, is that sponsors and advocates for charters make large political contributions to elected officials. They have become a potent special interest group. This is a case where results don’t matter.

The question is, who will save poor children from failing charter schools? Or will Ohio recklessly continue to authorize more charter schools without regard to the performance of the charter sector?

I should point out here, as I have in the past, that I think school report cards with a single letter grade, is one of the stupidest public policy ideas in the “reform” bag of tricks. There is no way that a letter grade can accurately reflect the work of a complex institution or the many people in it. Think of a single child coming home from school with a report card that contained only one letter, and it gives some notion of what a simplistic idea it is to grade an entire school in this way. Nonetheless, this is the system now in use in many states (pioneered by the master of ersatz reform, Jeb Bush), so I report what the state reports.

ECOT Exposed

Very well done!

One Year With a Bad Teacher Costs Each Student $50,000 in Lifetime Earnings

One year impact

What is the cost of an inferior education for multiple years?  Who will reimburse the students?



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


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

NCAA Bans some credits in E-Schools

NCAA Bans Coursework Completed by Athletes in 24 K12 Inc. Virtual Schools

By Michele Molnar on April 23, 2014 5:00 PM| No comments

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) won't accept coursework completed by student athletes at two dozen virtual schools operated by K12, Inc., as of 2014-15, at any Division I or Division II college or university.
K12, the Herndon, Va-based online education company, was notified on April 9 of the development, after learning in 2012 that its schools were placed under NCAA "extended evaluation" review for the eligibility of their courses, according to Mary Gifford, senior vice president of education policy and external relations, during a phone interview today. She called that "a good process where the NCAA reviews courses on an individual basis," but was less sanguine about this latest development.
Students must register for initial-eligibility certification through the NCAA. Most of the students affected by the announcement participate in individual sports like gymnastics, swimming, diving and golf, where the option to attend school online gives them more time to practice and train, she said.
Eleven of the 24 schools impacted are from the California Virtual Academies. Two more K12 schools—San Francisco Flex Academy and Silicon Valley Flex Academy—are blended high schools where students attend the learning center daily and receive face-to-face instruction from certified teachers, according to company spokesman Jeff Kwitowski.
Beyond California, all of the schools are online-only. Three are in Washington state, two in Colorado, and one each in Ohio, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Nevada, and Georgia. A full list of schools is available on the Athletic Scholarships website, which reported that the virtual schools in question are considered "nontraditional high schools" offering courses that don't meet the NCAA's requirements for nontraditional courses.
The NCAA, a private organization, did not respond today to our inquiry seeking an explanation of where K12 fell short in meeting their expectations. K12, a publicly traded company, manages schools and offers blended learning programs in more than 30 states, and enrolls 125,000 students. This ruling by the NCAA would impact less than 1 percent of them, Griffin said.
On its blog, K12 indicated that the NCAA has revised legislation for nontraditional courses, students and instructors. The requirement is that teachers and students must have "ongoing access to one another" and "regular interaction" throughout the duration of the course.
"However [the] NCAA does not provide schools any measurable standard or rubric used to determine what they believe is a suitable level of student-teacher interaction. Despite repeated requests, the NCAA will not publish specific student-teacher interaction guidelines for nontraditional courses, including online and digital courses," wrote Kwitowski in his blog post.
It was in 2009, when students were "moving from sophomores to juniors" in the organization's evolving high school program, that K12 began working with the NCAA to get its courses approved, Gifford said. "In 2012, we shifted from blanket approval to the extended evaluation process, which we didn't have any objection to," as long as there's a rubric to follow to establish and maintain eligibility, she indicated. That rubric has not been forthcoming, nor have the measurements that would explain adequate teacher-student interaction, she said.
One college student, a Division I diver in Arizona who received some of her credits from a K12 school, had the eligibility of her coursework denied, then reinstated when her college appealed, the K12 officials said. The company's own appeal fell on deaf NCAA ears.
"In Arizona, teacher testimony was submitted as part of an appeal. But that was not an acceptable demonstration," Gifford said, noting that written documentation from a credentialed professional was ruled unacceptable.
For students concerned about their eligibility in this school year, the NCAA's Eligibility Center indicated that coursework completed from spring 2013 through spring 2014 will be "subject to further review on a case-by-case basis."
The company has been in the headlines with other bad news this school year, including an under-enrollment of 11,000 students, which hit its stock price last fall. My colleague, Sean Cavanagh, recently reported on an investor lawsuit targeting K12, and the stock sales of its former CEO Ron Packard, as well as the fact that the company launched Fuel Education as a new brand without keeping "K12" in its name.

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Follow @EdWeekMMolnar and @EdWeekIandI for the latest news on industry and innovation in education.

Ohio Connections Academy School report card $19 million per year buys you this

Ohio Connections Academy, Inc 3740 Euclid Ave Ste 101 Cleveland, OH 44115-2229
Principal:				Sara Deaterla
Phone:				(216) 361-9460
Enrollment:				3,123
Achievement Standards met (62.5%) D Performance index (92.0) C Districts are measured against students' passing rate on 24 state tests given in several subjects and at several different grade levels. To meet the state standards, 75 percent of students must pass each exam. The number of standards met is used to calculate a letter grade. A second letter grade is tied to the district's "performance index" which gives credit for how well all students score on tests, giving more weight to students who perform above passing.
Progress (Value-added) All students F Gifted students NR Lowest 20% in achievement D Students with disabilities F In recent years, districts have been judged by "value-added" scores, or how much progress students made in a year's time. Now, districts will receive four progress-related letter grades: one for students overall and one each for gifted students, students who are considered low-performing because they score among the bottom 20 percent of their peers and students with disabilities.
Gap closing Gap closing (annual measurable objectives) F For the first time, the state is scrutinizing how well districts are serving all students, regardless of income, race, ethnicity or whether they're native English speakers. Only math, reading and graduation rates are considered in measuring how well districts serve students. Only districts that serve all 10 possible demographic groups adequately can earn an A grade. On the report card, the state calls this "annual measurable objectives."
Graduation 4-year graduation rate F 5-year graduation rate F

E schools in Ohio $218 million dollar experiment (per year)

In theory, a virtual school could be a good program for learning if it targeted students who would likely benefit from its schools.  These would include those highly organized and motivated students and parents.  A personalized instruction by sitting in front of a computer for hours per day.

In reality the schools accept and even target all students, including at-risk students.   It is also an easy fix to stay out of truancy court.  The results speak for themselves.  Is this the best service for Ohio Students? It is an expensive experiment.

A study in 2011 of Ohio's seven statewide online schools found that:

•"Of Ohio's 7 state-wide E-schools (which account for 90% of all E-school enrollment), six are not even rated "effective" by the Ohio Dept. of Education.

•5 of the 7 have graduation rates worse than Cleveland Municipal Schools, which has the lowest graduation rate of all traditional school districts.

•Far from saving money, E-Schools actually cost the state twice as much per pupil as traditional public schools."

 

Source: Ohio E-Schools: Funding Failure; Coddling Contributors, Innovation Ohio, 5/12/11; Cyber schools flunk, but tax money keeps flowing, Politico, 9/25/13.

 

So how does one get these students?  Market ,market, and market.  As the schools cannot discriminate, put together some slick marketing materials, employ a good sales force and sit back and collect the profits.

The USA TODAY analysis finds that 10 of the largest for-profit operators have spent an estimated $94.4 million on ads since 2007. The largest, Virginia-based K12 Inc., has spent about $21.5 million in just the first eight months of 2012.

 

So what is the motivation?  Profits or students?  Well since the e-schools do not have the quality, they will make it up in volume!

 

Again, look at the latest results in Ohio.

 

Cyber Schools Flunk but Tax money keeps flowing

So what is the wating period?  Should we measure in time or millions?  When does a virtual school need to perform?  ECOT = F, OHVA = F, Ohio Conections Academy = F  I detect a trend here.