Ohio has some of the worst charter schools in the country, which avoid accountability because their owners contribute generously to elected officials.
Among the worst performing charters are those specifically designed for dropouts. Some of these schools teach students online. Can you imagine how ineffective it is to put a discouraged student in front of a computer instead of in a class with a live, empathetic teacher who knows how to engage the student in learning and how to get him to think anout improving his life chances?
This excellent story by Doug Livingston in the Akron Beacon Journal shows how poorly dropouts are served by certain charters. Yet state legislators give these low-performing schools even more money.
“Charter schools such as Life Skills, operated by Akron-based White Hat Management and targeting dropouts, are sending Ohio spinning off in the wrong direction. Dropout rates nationally are on the decline, but Ohio’s rate is on the rise.
“Granted, some dropout charter schools graduate nearly half of their students on time, a notable feat considering students enter these programs at least a year behind their peers in traditional high schools.
“But that’s not the norm.
“Many dropout charter schools, including White Hat’s chain of Life Skills centers, consistently report single-digit graduation rates. Over the course of last school year, more students dropped out of Life Skills than attended on the average day.
“Together, they are dragging down the state’s overall rate.
“After charter schools received the largest funding boosts per pupil in the most recent state budget, state legislators are toying with the idea of giving them more money to fix Ohio’s dropout problem at a time when charter schools are reporting record-high dropout rates.”
One of these schools had a 4.2% graduation rate.
“In the 2012-13 school year, more than 5,300 dropouts — a quarter of all Ohio dropouts that year — attended one of two online charter schools: the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow or Ohio Virtual Academy. Collectively, these two charter schools have a dropout rate 45 times higher than traditional public schools, and 10 times higher than the state’s eight largest city school districts.
“Another 6,829 students — about a third of all Ohio dropouts — attended charter schools designed specifically for dropouts, among them Invictus and Life Skills. Last year, these dropout charter schools enrolled one percent of Ohio’s public school students but accounted for roughly the same number of dropout events as did public district schools, which enrolled 91 percent of Ohio’s students.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The evidence is breathtaking. I almost can’t take it any longer.
Good Lord!
Too bad I’m not into art. I can visualize the cartoon of an at risk child sitting in front of a computer hooked to a virtual charter school in Ohio, and when we look closer, that boy is watching a porno site or playing a video game.
We have not figured out, in this country, that KIDS DIFFER and that SCHOOLS HAVE TO PROVIDE MANY OPTIONS. We’re nowhere near where we need to be there, and we are headed in precisely the opposite direction with all this centralization and standardization of invariant learning progressions.
So, what is happening, now, is that a lot of low-SES, low-academic-achievement students are ending up in virtual schools where they are doing worksheets on a screen
when they could be learning useful trades.
That’s stupid and wasteful and really, really harmful to those kids.
Now, mind you, I am not attacking the virtual schools there. They are filling a void that we’ve created by providing the Lite academic track for a system that insists that every kid be on an academic track–a single track to college or career.
Look, I could teach the whole K-12 mathematics sequence in connection with the study of automotive mechanics or web design or woodshop or fashion design or sailing and navigation or even cosmetology, for crying out loud.
And kids would learn it, in such a context, because it made sense for them.
I wrote about a ride home from an auto shop recently. The kid driving me told me had attended (out of district) my district’s high school because it had a 4 year auto repair program. An aside here, this program was part of a multi-district, county-wide program. When the State cut the funding for it, the districts found a way to keep it going. He told me that all his Math classes focused on skills needed for automotive repair. I wondered if they would still be able to do this, in the era of CCSS.
“told me he had attended”
Charter promoters never mention Ohio, which is amusing because this state has put in every single demand of the ed reform political coalition. Every one.
This state is an ed reform experiment that went badly wrong, so it’s been magically disappeared. They’re “scaling” up the exact same disaster in Michigan. Michigan is now where Ohio was 5 years ago.
It’s a race to the bottom.
But, Chiara, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug.
Things are proceeding exactly as intended…
Sadly, this is true. Exactly what is the end game tho? Complete online k-12 for the underling, and brick and mortar academies for the privileged?
When the Rheeformers are done with all those closed schools, what will be done with the leftover real estate???
“When the Rheeformers are done with all those closed schools, what will be done with the leftover real estate???”
They’ll be purchased cheaply by EMO’s who will rent them out (or sell them) to charter schools at inflated prices, of course!
They promoted these schools by bashing and then undermining and damaging public schools, and the lie that they perform better than public schools as far as dropouts has stuck since they first launched it, in 1991, although it was NEVER true:
“In 1991, legislators shuffled $530,000 to a company run by Brennan’s daughter.
The money furnished a Bowery Street building with 32 computers and afforded two full-time teachers who supplemented reading instruction for 130 welfare recipients seeking employment.
The dropout program model, which relied heavily on low-cost computer instruction, was born.
Brennan, then chairman of Gov. George Voinovich’s school choice commission, spearheaded the state’s first private school voucher program. He later founded White Hat and in 1998 opened — in that same building on Bowery Street — Ohio’s first Life Skills Center.
Speaking to the Akron Rotary in 2000, Brennan accused public schools of failing Ohio’s struggling students. “To do nothing about [dropouts] is unconscionable,” he said, denouncing cookie-cutter government schools. Education needs innovation, “and only choice will do that,” he said.
White Hat, which operated a third of the state’s charter schools at that time, received approval from the State Board of Education to open 11 more Life Skills centers the next year.
With computers replacing teachers and a school day shortened to four hours, the model was profitable.”
“White Hat wants to bank enrollment, because that’s how they make their money,” said Clint Woodward, who worked for White Hat from the time the doors opened on Bowery Street until 2007.”
http://www.ohio.com/news/local/successful-dropout-schools-are-turning-from-white-hat-computer-model-1.491112
White hat company? They should be named “Brown Hat” for the load of doo-doo they’re trying to peddle.
Brennan was an alumni at a private school where I taught years ago. He was a big time donor, and I’ll never forget the time he was on campus “visiting” and some of our front office staff (chief financial officer, endowment person) followed him around like little puppies as if the Queen stopped by for tea. I was teaching in a classroom when he barged in, standing in my doorway wearing his ten-gallon hat with a pompous look on his fat face. I acknowledged him with a snarky quip that rivaled his arrogance and invited him in to take notes and learn something. His fan club of front office people looked at me wide-eyed, as if silently asking if I knew who he was. I did, and could give a rat’s a$$. Turns out, he was there to get permission to copy and paste some of the standards laid out on our website. Every time I looked at the guy my “fraud-alert” alarm would go off in my head. He hosted George Bush I for a dinner party at his mansion years ago. His sin runs deep. His next stop may be North Carolina once he learns of our current legislature’s environment for fly by-night charters.
Chiara,
Thank you for your many comments about Ohio charter schools. I have read them with interest for a few years now.
I live in Idaho, and the Idaho Charter School Network recently hired as president a person you may have heard of: Terry Ryan, formerly Vice-President for Ohio Programs and Policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. I am eager to learn as much as possible about Mr. Ryan and his influence on charter-school policy in Ohio, because it is clear to me that he has in mind to replicate some of those Ohio efforts and initiatives here in Idaho. You can reach me at bbq@clearwire.net.
I just find this framing by charter promoters incredible:
“How Charters and Rivals May Get Together”
Public schools are now relegated to the role of charter school “rivals”. The schools 90% of kids attend, when they’re mentioned at all, are only discussed in the context of comparing them to the darlings of the ed reform “movement” charter schools.
If you’re wondering why public schools are doing so poorly under federal, state and local ed reform leadership that prioritizes charter schools over public schools, you only have to look at how ed reformers use language. Public schools need advocates in government. We don’t have any. We should hire some in the next election.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/how-charters-and-rivals-may-get-together/2014/05/31/b7a1d0d2-e6b4-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html?wprss=rss_education
Why ARE ed reformers always flogging online learning with this marketing push, anyway? Do their kids sit in front of a screen all day? Why do they want to experiment on low and middle income schools, and why are they pushing this cheap replacement for instruction and a human being from charters into public schools?
How about the highest income schools go first? We’ll catch up later, thanks. You try it. Let us know how it turns out. No reason we have to recklessly expand an ed reform experiment into public schools.
you answered your own question when you said “cheap”. Online education is cheaper to produce and that equals more profits. Once a lesson is on-line, that one lesson may be used over and over, generation after generation—but they only paid for its production once.
For instance buying an e-book or streaming a film causes a higher profit ratio for the producer than printing a book on paper, storing and shipping and the same goes for films on DVD.
Internet schools leads to a bonanza in profits and you can bet they don’t care if anyone learns or not.
I thought this was interesting:
“Sen. Mary Landrieu organized a forum in Washington, DC, that highlighted the Guide to national policymakers. Their message was that cities across the nation should follow the New Orleans model of school reform because it has been an amazing success.”
Who was invited to this forum? Shouldn’t voters know that US Senators advocate closing all the public school and replacing them with privately-run and privately-owned schools? How are they supposed to make an informed decision on whether to hire an ed reformer?
Obviously, public schools aren’t going to do very well if the people we hire to run them seek only to get rid of them as fast as possible. As I think has become evident under their leadership. Might have been good to know before we vote for them or hire them.
I’m not really thrilled about paying people to dismantle the public schools they’re supposedly serving.
http://www.theneworleanstribune.com/main/new-orleans-education-reform-a-guide-for-cities-or-a-warning-for-communities/
Well, then, the teachers are to blame, right? Do these online charters get “vammed?” Does the Superintendent “clean house” and make an example of all the bad online charter school teachers?
From the story itself, these dropout factories don’t get penalized, no, they get rewarded with more money. Creating a future of dummies….thank you Obama, Duncan, Rhee, et al.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx This is a very sad story. From over here in my [relatively-OK, economically] NE corner, it just sounds like: all those states which once were our economic drivers– the manufacturing states, Ill, Ohio, Michigan, et al– are now, in their obsolescence, doomed to suffer the absolute dregs: their quality of life shall be reduced to the worst possible, including rock-bottom-quality public education.. it really hurts, having seen for example Columbus in its heyday… ouch.
I lived in Ohio for 8 years and taught high school there. It’s very corrupt, especially mafia, politicians, and unions. It’s part of the culture, so it bleeds into everything.