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

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! “

Shake Off Those Charter Chains!

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

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.

Good summary of the Ohio Scam

Pretty good summary of the scam going on in Ohio.  This article focuses on the enormous rent.  There is even a more profitable business model.  Open a virtual school and pay no rent except to house some teachers.  You can further reduce this expense by having them work from home and hiring part-time teachers who only work from home.  Ohio Connections Academy, K-12, ECOT, OHVA have taken this to the next level.

I have previously posted about these hand picked boards with little school or business experience.  They will gladly sign off on a bad deal because they do not know better.  If they resist, find an even more clueless board.

Here is the article:

When Leon Sinoff was asked to sign off on a building lease for Imagine Columbus Primary Academy in Columbus, Ohio, in the summer of 2013, he had little reason to be skeptical. Before Imagine Schools, one of the nation's largest for-profit charter management companies, asked him to join the new charter school's board, Sinoff, a public defender, had no education background or experience. "I relied on their expertise and thought to myself, 'Well, who am I to say no to this proposal?'" Sinoff says.

But by the start of the second school year, he was having doubts. The school received an F grade for achievement on the 2013-14 state report card. Only three teachers had returned after the first summer break; within two years, two principals and one vice principal stepped down. The school—which serves a high-poverty, low-income community—lacked arts, music, and foreign language classes, and whenever the board inquired about adding them, Imagine said there wasn't enough money. Then Sinoff discovered that the $58,000-a-month lease—consuming nearly half the school's operating budget, compared with the national standard of 8 to 15 percent—was for a building owned by a subsidiary of Imagine, Schoolhouse Finance LLC.

"It clicked for me. Aha! This is self-dealing. That's why we are massively overpaying for the lease," says Sinoff, who resigned with the other board members this summer. He adds, "Imagine is perfectly happy cranking out low-quality schools and profiting off them. They don't care particularly about the quality of the kids' education."

Before Imagine Columbus Primary Academy opened, a different Imagine school operated in the building for eight years. Its story was nearly identical: The struggling school was paying enormous sums to Schoolhouse Finance while languishing on the state's "academic emergency" list—a designation reserved for F-rated schools—before its board voted to shut it down. One member of that board was David Hansen, who shortly after the school's closing was appointed by Gov. John Kasich to a newly created position: executive director of Ohio's Office of Quality School Choice and Funding. Kasich tasked Hansen with overseeing the expansion of the state's charter schools and virtual schools, which are online charter schools typically used by homeschoolers.

"Imagine is perfectly happy cranking out low-quality schools and profiting off of them."

In July, Hansen resigned after admitting he had rigged evaluations of the state's charter school sponsors—the nonprofits that authorize and oversee the schools in exchange for a fee—by not including the failing grades of certain F-rated schools in his assessment. Specifically, he omitted failing virtual schools operated by for-profit management companies that are owned by major Republican donors in the state.

The two central figures in Ohio's corporate charter movement, David Brennan and Bill Lager, have donated a combined $6.4 million to state legislators and committees, more than 90 percent of which went to Republicans, who have dominated the state House and Senate. Their donations have paid off. Since 1998, the state has given $1.76 billion to schools run by Brennan's White Hat Management and Lager's Electronic Classrooms of Tomorrow, accounting for one-quarter of all state charter funds.

"Why do we accept this for our kids? It's not good enough for kids in Missouri, but it's okay for kids in Ohio?"

 

The charter solution to the problem:  Get a new board who is even more clueless.

 

"I'm sure [Imagine's new board] is even more oblivious than we were, given that we caused a lot of trouble in the end," says Sinoff, who resigned after Imagine refused to re-negotiate the high-priced lease. "I think that they are not entirely happy that we squeaked through the filter to make life difficult. I'm sure they haven't made that mistake again, and they have folks even more oblivious than we were."

 

The complete article is here:

 

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/ohio-charter-schools-john-kasich-imagine

 

Top ten List by Denis Smith

A nice list from Denis Smith. 

In the hope (snicker) of getting some action from our legislators in September, our citizen panel decided to channel the spirit of David Letterman and compile a list of the Top 10 Needed Charter School Reforms. Here are the results of our deliberative body.

#10: Cut legal exemptions
Charter schools are exempt from 150 sections of the Ohio Revised Code.
The legislature needs to eliminate at least half of these exemptions by the end of the current session. After all, if proponents like to call them “publiccharter schools,” they should be more aligned to our system of public education and therefore not need so many exemptions from laws which public schools must comply with due to their public nature. If the charter industry objects, we should not let them have it both ways. Charter proponents should stop using the term public charter schools due to their resistance to increased regulation and fewer legal exemptions. In turn, the public should start using the term corporate charter schools to better define their nature.

Agree, it is taxpayer money.  We should be able to see where it goes.

#9: Management companies subject to full review by state auditor
Here’s another classic example of the charter industry having it both ways. If you receive public funds, the public has a right to see how their money is spent or misspent. Add to that the requirement that any furniture, equipment, and real estate purchased with public funds is public property, subject to liquidation at auction upon closure of the school, with the proceeds returned to the state treasury. Recall that White Hat Management took the position that such assets were corporate and not public property. JobsOhio is another example of the principle of having it both ways. Public money and the assets purchased with such funds should not be convertible to private assets through a management arrangement.

Agree, the system is set up to guarantee that the school will not show a profit.  It is pretty easy for the management company to suck out the taxpayer money and spend it however they want including high salaries for the management companies.

#8: Eliminate Non-Profit Sponsors
The charter industry is replete with example after example of someone or some entity having it both ways. Non-Profit charter school sponsors follow that tradition. They accept public funds for serving as charter school sponsors or authorizers but tell individuals and organizations seeking information that as non-profits, they are exempt from public records requests. As with Nos. 10 and 9, if a non-profit organization accepts public funds, it should be responsive to such requests and the same scrutiny that other types of sponsors (school district, educational service center, vocational school district, university) accept as a player in the charter industry. The public is tired of the charter world having it both ways.

3% is a pretty nice cut from these multimillion dollar budgets the taxpayers are funding.  More than a potential conflict of interest in this arrangement.  Taxpayers would not accept a 3% fee to their local school boards.

#7: Celebrity endorsements and cap on advertising
This charter school reform measure is tied in with Nos. 9 and 8. Public funds should not be used to pay for endorsements to promote charter schools. Worse yet, we’ll probably never find out how much ECOT endorser Jack Hanna or anyone else might have been paid because the management companies maintain they are private entities and resist audits and requests for financial information from state regulators.

Agree and you will never see the state report cards mentioned in that advertising.

#6: Accuracy in advertising
If a rose is a rose, a charter school should be called just that. Ohio is the only one of forty states authorizing charter schools that uses the term community school rather than charter. That term by itself – used in the original legislation – is purposefully misleading. My recent article on charter names pointed out that only a handful have the word charter or community school in their official title. The same is true for television ads, where the name charter isn’t used. As the school year begins and you see and hear ads for charters, listen carefully for what you might not hear in the commercial.
The local public school is a community school and a charter is a charter.

And you will never hear about their test results.  Only some private polls where nine out of ten parents are satisfied.

#5: School treasurers. There is a continuing concern about the ability of charter school treasurers to adequately perform their duties when many serve multiple schools. One former charter treasurer , sentenced to two years in prison, was said to have served as the chief financial officer of at least nine charter schools at the same time, though other treasurers have served more than that number in the past. New legislation is needed to cap the total number of schools a treasurer can serve simultaneously.

Agree, see what happened to the treasurer of Ohio Connections Academy and Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy,  How many other schools did Stephanie Millard serve?

#4: Governance reform. With more than a billion dollars in state education funds being diverted to charter schools, it’s time to require greater transparency and accountability for the use of scarce public dollars, and governance reform is one place to start. In a previous article, I wrote this statement: “The public school district that has the largest number of its resident students enrolled should be entitled to a seat on the board. Since state funds are deducted from the foundation payments for the district’s resident students and sent to the charter school where the student is enrolled, the district is entitled to monitor the performance and operation of the school, particularly when many of these students return to the district at some point.” In addition, lawmakers should require authorizer and parent representatives to be members of the board, with the parent seat filled by an individual selected at an annual meeting of the school parents. An additional part of governance reform would be to require all board members to be registered with the Office of Secretary of State, as is the case with other public school board members.

Agree, the appointment of rubber stamps. friends and collegues to the board is not in the best interests of the students. This is set up to benefit the management companies and not the students.
Raymond Lambert School Leader of the Year by the Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools (OAPCS) once had this to say about boards. “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.”
#3: Administrative qualifications. Incredibly, there are no minimum educational or professional licensure requirements for charter school administrators. This situation needs to be addressed immediately if all charter reform efforts are to be viewed as substantive. After all, school is about education.

Agree, and I would add that promotion and leadership should not be tied with who you are sleeping with.

#2: Citizenship requirement. In traditional school districts, board members have to be qualified voters – citizens – in order to serve as overseers of public funds. News reports in the last year have focused on one charter school chain where some of the board members and administrators may not be American citizens. If charter proponents want to emphasize the word public in the term public charter school, they should also agree that requiring American citizenship for board members is a no-brainer for the charter industry.

Agree

And the Number One Needed Charter School Reform –
Get the money out!
The influence of charter moguls David Brennan an William Lager on the Ohio Republican party are well-known. Money talks, and in charter world, money speaks loudly. Public funds – the profits gained from running privately operated schools with public money – should not be allowed to unduly influence legislators. The fact that HB 2 stalled at the very time that another $91,726 arrived to replenish state Republican campaign coffers is no coincidence.
If Mark Twain was correct when he observed that “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session,” the absence of lawmakers at Broad and High compounds the inaction on charter reform. But if at least two of these Top 10 Needed Charter School Reforms wound up being included in this year’s reform package, that would be a small victory for the life, liberty and property of Ohioans.

Follow the money, ignore the results

David Hansen Resigns

From the Washington Post.  There is also a lot of coverage from the Cleveland and Columbus press.  I do not see much from the Cincinnati press.

The "mask" is off.  Money talks.  He got caught scrubbing data.

Results matter.  Good and bad.  No excuses.

"In the latest mark against Ohio’s troubled charter school sector, David Hansen, the Ohio Education Department official responsible for school choice and charter schools, just resigned after admitting that he gave help to charter schools to make them look better in state evaluations.

Hansen, who resigned Saturday, recently acknowledged that he omitted from evaluations “F” grades received by online and dropout recovery schools. The evaluations were not for the schools themselves but for their sponsoring (or authorizing) organizations. His actions, according to the Associated Press, “boosted the ratings of two sponsors” so that it was possible that they could be eligible for more help from the state.

Hansen was required to include all school scores in the evaluations, which have since been retracted by the department. According to the Plain Dealer, the “F” grades the schools received were given “for failing to teach kids enough material over the school year.”

Hansen’s wife is Beth Hansen, chief of staff to Kasich. Kasich is expected to jump into the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, and Beth Hansen is planning to work for the campaign.

The AP quoted David Hansen, the executive director of Ohio’s Office of Quality School Choice and the Office of Community Schools, as saying that he omitted the failing grades because he thought they would “mask” other successes by the schools.

Inexplicity bad

An excellent article on the non-accountable online charter schools.  The online schools get a one year exemption on their  first year test scores for transfer students. 

 

As noted elsewhere in this blog  sponsorship is a big business in Ohio.  3% of the state funds.  Do the math at $267 million per year over $8 million being siphoned to the sponsors.  One could create quite an empire for $8 million.

 

Yet the sponsors remain unaccountable.  The state of Ohio has also removed all the scores for online schools to grade their effectiveness. 

 

http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/ohio-online-charter-schools-not-accountable-for-students-who-do-poorly-in-first-year-1.603886

 

 

 

More virtual school potential fraud

Ohio lawmakers forward e-school attendance allegations

ASSOCIATED PRESS

COLUMBUS — State lawmakers in Ohio have referred allegations to authorities that an online charter school failed to dis-enroll hundreds of chronically truant students in order to pad its rolls.
Ohio Virtual Academy, which serves about 13,000 students statewide, says it follows all state reporting laws and enrollment guidelines.
Reps. Bill Hayes (R., Harrison Township) and Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo), the House Education Committee’s top Republican and Democrat, told the Associated Press on Monday they have forwarded an anonymous whistleblower’s email to state Auditor Dave Yost, whose office has made school attendance fraud a priority.
Hayes also involved the Ohio Department of Education and alerted the school, whose authorizer said it is conducting its own review.
The whistleblower provided a lengthy list of specific students listed as truant, in some cases for most of the school year.

I wonder how much this cost the Ohio taxpayers?  How many youths are going to be unprepared to be productive citizens because of a lack of education because the E-school is more concerned about collecting money than insuring the students receive an adequate education.  A shameful scam.

I think K-12 is in trouble and would not be buying their stock.

E-Shools in Ohio $224 million

The worm is turning

The Columbus Dispatch is finally getting on board.

Seems pretty reasonable.  It is the taxpayer’s money.  Campaign donors do not speak for the majority of taxpayers.  Despite the massive marketing please let the results (including the finances) speak for themselves.  Billions have been spent.  How much is enough?

“Ohio’s charter-school system has attracted national ridicule for its giant-sized accountability loopholes…

A significant gap, flagged by Yost, is that the bill fails to require school-operating companies to disclose how they spend the hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of tax dollars they are paid to run the schools. Their status as private companies doesn’t change the fact that they are using public money to provide public education. Under current law, some operators refuse to show their books to the governing boards that hired them, let alone to the public.

This lack of accountability is unacceptable, and lawmakers should fix that before they sign off on H.B. 2.”

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2015/03/22/1-a-big-step-forward.html

Chapter superintendents, not so super

From Denis Smith

Seriously?  No wonder the results are often horrible.  Only the best and brightest (or not)?

Set up your own board and get yourself elected superintendent.  Title sounds good and the pay is whatever you can convince the board to pay you.  Ohio has probably doubled the number of superintendent positions with the advent of charter schools.

"How then is it that when it comes to the subject of “public” charter schools, Kasich and his friends have different definitions and understandings for terms like educators and superintendents?

Under Ohio law, there are no education or professional requirements for an individual to serve as a public charter school superintendent or principal. None. As Woody Allen might have put it, if 80% of success in life is just showing up, you’ve got a good chance of becoming the top administrator of a charter school just by showing up, with a new start-up school proposal in hand, at the offices of a charter school sponsor.

And yes, governor, let’s say it again: there are absolutely no administrative licensure requirements in charterdom. You don’t even have to be an educator in order to open and become a superintendent of a “public” charter school."

Editorial Voices

The worm is turning...

ECOT

More online fun.  $112 million this year!

ECOT received $19 million more in state funding than Cincinnati received, despite having fewer than half as many students.

Most of the publicity, including comments from governor, have been quite negative. The worm is turning....

In 2006, the Columbus-based online charter school Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow was under fire.

The state disputed its attendance numbers, and the Newark schools superintendent accused it of committing fraud by “failing to meet even minimum standards of operation.”

Since then, ECOT — whose founder, William Lager, has been a major contributor to Ohio politicians over the past five years — has continued to grow rapidly, in both enrollment and budget. Last school year, ECOT enrolled 14,561 students, more than twice the number it did in 2006.

ECOT, whose students take classes from home on a computer, grew by 122 percent during Ohio’s eight-year moratorium on new online charter schools. Some of its strongest growth was in elementary grades, including kindergarten.

ECOT now has more students than Canton, Dayton, Dublin or Westerville schools. It is the state’s 10th-largest district. And growth came for ECOT despite its consistently low state report-card results: It ranks among the worst-performing schools in the state.

“The growth has been huge,” said Aaron Churchill, who is Ohio research director for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. It has offices in Columbus and Dayton and sponsors charters but criticizes weak oversight and poor-quality schools. “There are clearly a lot of questions about the quality of the education they’re putting out. I’d be curious to know why parents are selecting it.”

ECOT’s tax revenue grew in step with its enrollment, to $112.7 million, 90 percent of which is funded by the state. Charter schools are funded with tax dollars but often are privately run.

According to a state financial audit made public last week, ECOT paid $21.4 million last year to the two for-profit companies Lager formed to serve the school — nearly one-fifth of the school’s total revenue.

IQ Innovations, Lager’s software firm, sells the IQity online-learning platform to ECOT as well as to other schools and districts elsewhere in the country. Altair Learning Management is Lager’s school-management firm, and it oversees ECOT’s day-to-day business, including hiring and firing.

Most of the money sent to the for-profit companies — $17.4 million — is for purchasing curriculum from IQ Innovations, an expense that has grown steadily each year since ECOT first paid $5 million to IQ for the 2008-09 school year.

ECOT also spent another almost $11 million on communications last year. ECOT spokesman Ryan Crawford said he couldn’t immediately say why the communications budget was so large but said it might include advertising. ECOT has used Jack Hanna, director emeritus of the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, as a spokesman in TV spots for the school.

Just over half of ECOT’s revenue goes to employee salaries and benefits, compared with 80 percent or more in traditional districts.

Critics say that ECOT owes its existence to its lavish campaign donations, mostly to Ohio Republicans.

“These guys set up companies and pay themselves,” said William L. Phillis, the executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding. He calls the relationship between Lager and the Ohio GOP “incestuous.”

“It’s pathetic from the standpoint of the taxpayers,” Phillis said. “This money’s being laundered, wasted, going into somebody’s pocket. It’s a crime, but, of course, it’s all legal.”

ECOT spokesman Crawford said that critics have raised questions about the relationship between the school and the two affiliated for-profit companies before. ECOT considers the debate a philosophical one, and he points out that neither state auditors nor the Ohio Department of Education has found fault with the relationship.

He said the school’s growth has been driven exclusively by enrollment gains from students choosing its program over other schools.

“We’ve heard these questions for 15 years now. We have a different feel for how it works than our critics. We feel confident that what we’re doing is correct,” Crawford said. “We do our very, very best to be good stewards of public dollars.”

Students interviewed for ECOT’s website for its graduation ceremony last summer said they enroll for lots of reasons, including the need for flexible schedules because they have jobs or children.

Although the online school boasts on its website that “over 10,000 students have graduated from ECOT” since it opened in 2000, its track record for helping students graduate on time is among the worst in Ohio. In the past four graduating classes alone, about 5,600 seniors did graduate on time. But two-thirds of ECOT seniors during that time — 10,600 — did not graduate with their classes.

With its most-recent graduation rate of 38 percent, few districts in the state rank lower. Only 35 of the roughly 700 traditional school districts and charter schools that serve high-school students have a worse outcome, and most of those are other statewide e-schools and charters that exclusively serve dropouts.

By comparison, Columbus schools’ most-recent graduation rate was 77 percent. Cleveland’s was about 64 percent.

Phillis said it’s astonishing that ECOT continues to escape the scrutiny of lawmakers despite meeting only three of the 24 possible state testing and graduation standards, receiving F grades in all but one category. ECOT got a D in the performance index, which is an index of state testing performance.

“It has to end,” Phillis said, “taking money that’s appropriated for the education of children for enormous advertising, campaign contributions and profit.”

Altair and the IQity software firm have several lobbyists who step in to protect their interests during state budget times and when charter-school issues crop up in the state legislature.

And ECOT’s founder, Lager, has spent at least $1.13 million on Ohio campaigns in the past five years alone. Lager could not be reached for comment, and his spokesman said he couldn’t reach him, either.

That’s more — on Ohio politics, anyway — than was spent by David Brennan, the well-known Akron charter entrepreneur who lobbies heavily on behalf of his White Hat schools group. During the same time period, Brennan donated about $820,000, according to campaign-donation records kept by the Ohio secretary of state.

For the past three years, Lager has funneled more than $200,000 per year to mostly Republican officeholders, including William G. Batchelder of Medina, the outgoing speaker of the Ohio House. The largest single donations went to the Ohio Republican Party.

Political contributions also were made through Lager’s two privately held companies. Since 2009, IQ Innovations has sent more than $154,000 to Ohio political candidates and groups. Altair’s contributions totaled about $38,000.

Lager is a member of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s Digital Learning Now initiative, whose 10-point plan includes pushing lawmakers to require all students to take at least one online course; loosening laws on class size, student-teacher ratios and required amounts of instructional time; requiring state proficiency tests to be taken digitally; and providing digital charters with the same per-pupil public funding that other schools receive.

bbush@dispatch.com

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/01/04/popular-ecot-poor-performer.html

The worm is turning

The charter school industry has had a big advantage in marketing  and presenting a positive reform minded message to the consumers and voters of Ohio.

Although the schools themselves may be non-profits, the  for profit parent companies are very profitable.  The K-12s and White Hats, Pearsons,  can lobby politicians, buy TV and radio ads, and push the freedom of choice message.  The message is loud, attractive and professional.  Combined, they can spend millions and massage their message.

What the message fails to convey are  the actual results of the schools and the cost of this transfer from public to private.

My sense is that the worm is turning.  I now see letters to the editors concerning the transfer of dollars to charters from concerned parents and taxpayers.  I see grass root organizations of parents pushing back.  I see websites like knowyourcharter.com providing information.  I see Facebook pages like cashing in on kids.  I see blogs covering education issues.  I see the press asking why politicians are taking trips to Turkey.  I see investigations and indictments.  I see questions on where the money is going and what we are getting for that money.  I see proposals for reform and accountability. 

I did not see this push back for several years.   I saw only positive spin on the charter school saviors coming to help.  They left out some important details, like results.  The devil is in the details.

Another pissed off superintendent

An opinion letter on charter school and the waste of tax dollars from Tom Dunn, Superintendent of Troy Schools

http://tdn-net.com/news/opinion_columns/150385462/You-really-want-to-know-about-this

In a previous article, I criticized state superintendent Dr. Richard Ross for his claim that the state’s quest for transparency is the driving force behind the Ohio Department of Education’s (ODE) School District Report Card. I suggested that his, the ODE’s, and the legislature’s quest for transparency seems to end where their pet project, the charter school movement, begins. I challenged readers to visit the independently created web site known as http://knowyourcharter.com/ to become better informed about the charter school debacle and how it impacts you.


Realizing that the percentage of readers who accepted my challenge would likely be small, I wanted to follow up by sharing some of the information contained on the site. My hope is that your interest will be piqued enough that you will visit it to learn what is really being done with your tax dollars. As a taxpayer, you should be very interested in both the financial and academic information contained there, and you should be outraged by it.
Before we even begin to discuss the complete academic failure of charter schools in Ohio, which you can see by clicking on each charter’s name on the web site, let’s start with the fact that $2.1 million were deducted from Miami County school districts last year and sent to charter schools, nearly two million of which went to for-profit entities operated by private corporations. You read that right — $2 million!


In other words, public funds that were approved for local districts, otherwise known as yours and my
tax dollars, are being sent to for-profit companies under the pretense that these schools are better than yours. Even worse, the money is often used to lobby our legislators to create the laws that further benefit charter schools.
Keep in mind that public dollars can’t be used to lobby for votes, but for-profit charter school operators, along with some of their lawmaker buddies, argue that it is perfectly acceptable for them to do so, because their company is private. So, to underscore the ridiculousness of this argument, charter schools, which the state champions as public schools, can be run by private companies that use public funds in ways that public funds can’t be used. That shouldn’t be acceptable to any of us.


The fact is that once these dollars enter the for-profit black hole, there is no oversight as to how they are being spent, and the folks at ODE, in the legislature, and in the governor’s office simply turn a blind eye to the practice as if it doesn’t occur. In fact, when State Auditor Dave Yost tried to increase the oversight on these kinds of activities, Governor Kasich and members of the legislature were less than pleased. After all, this money helps get them elected.


It should tell you something that the people who should care about this scam don’t care at all,
especially considering they tell us they are so enamored with keeping us informed. In fact, if not for independent researchers like those who created this web site and media outlets uncovering the shenanigans of these companies, we wouldn’t be any wiser about how our tax dollars are being inappropriately used.
To see one example, take a few minutes and read the article at http://dailycaller.com/2014/10/13/crony-capitalism-for-ohio-charter-schools-draws-criticism. If that doesn’t raise your ire, nothing will. A simple Google search can uncover many similar articles, all of which should interest you, since they are talking about your money.


It has become painfully obvious that the folks who should be providing the oversight have no intention of changing what they do, so apparently we must be the change agents for them. Learning what is happening is the first step. Putting a stop to it should follow.


Tom Dunn of Troy is superintendent of the Miami County Education Service Center. He may be reached at tom.dunn@mcapps.org

A .375 GPA

Some insights from a recent auditor’s report.  I think  I am reading this correctly. 

Imagine Schools Inc. has been justifiably  criticized for paying a subsidiary more money in rent than it does for its teaching staff and producing poor results.  The national benchmark for rent is 15% according to an article in the Columbus Dispatch. 

A recent audit of Ohio Connections Academy shows that teaching and administration total $5,268,575.  Overhead totals $6,003,793.   113% more than the money for teaching salary and benefits.  Overhead is undefined.  This money flows out of the state to a Maryland management company, Connections Learning,  who does with it as they wish.  There is little in bricks and mortar expense.  Compare that to 15% rent benchmark.

The management company can recycle the same software year after year.  They can sell essentially the same software to multiple states.  The transfer and accounting of the overhead expense insures that the non-profit altruistic E-school never will show a profit.  Useful to show why they cannot pay teachers more or to elicit sympathy from parents or politicians.  They are the underdog. 

Yet it is a very profitable business for the management company. Connections Learning, K-12 and others are aggressively expanding in every state possible.  Underdog status also justifies the need for more money and more students.  See page 20 on the attached link. 

What are the latest state report card results for this E-school?  1 C, 2 D’s and 5 F’s.  A .375 GPA.  It would be nice if they could move the decimal point.

To help manage the multimillion dollar budget they hired a part-time treasurer  who is under indictment for her role as treasurer with Cincinnati College Preparatory Academy.  I guess there is no need for an on-site full time treasurer. 

The audit also shows unresolved title money issues totaling $668,642 (see page 46).  When will this be resolved?  To paraphrase a politician, pretty soon we are talking real money.  At best it shows that they are sloppy with their record keeping.  At worst is suggests that they are playing with the allocations to put more of scarce title money in their pockets at the expense of taxpayers. 

https://ohioauditor.gov/auditsearch/Reports/2013/Ohio_Connections_Academy_11-Hamilton.pdf

There is an obvious problem.  Look at the proliferation of E-schools in Ohio.  Who benefits?

What is needed?  Transparency, strong boards (which are not lead around by the nose by the management company), and oversight.  These characteristics exist in the vast majority of our public school districts.  Oh by the way, results  would be good too.