Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio reports that the virtual charter school Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow spent $2.7 million on advertising.
Dyer writes:
The Dispatch reported this weekend that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow — the nation’s largest for-profit charter school run by huge political donor William Lager that received all Fs and one D on the latest report card — spent $2.7 million last year on advertising. That bill equates to $155 per student. That’s about 2% of their budget.
Let’s have some fun with numbers, shall we?
If every district in this state spent 2% of its overall expenditures on advertising, that would be $381 million — or about the amount that was sent from higher performing districts to lower performing charters in the 2012-2013 school year
That $381 million is more than was budgeted in the state funding formula to pay for all the state’s poverty aid for this school year
If every district in this state spent $155 per pupil on advertising, that would be $246 million
That $246 million is more than the state was budgeted to spend in its funding formula for the third-grade reading guarantee, gifted education and career-technical education … COMBINED
The owner of ECOT is a generous donor to legislators and the Governor. That is why there is no accountability for the “school’s” poor results. Its graduation rate is 35%. Dyer wonders why they are permitted to advertise without disclosing their poor results.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When all our schools are located at the corner of Madison Avenue and Wall Street, a few million bucks here and there will just seem like chump change.
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I think you have to look at where the money GOES, too. Who benefits from public dollars going out of schools and into advertising? The people who create the campaigns and media companies, right?
My big fear is public schools will have to respond to survive and more and more public dollars will end up in advertising. What a shame that would be.
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Chiara: so all that money is to ensure $tudent $ucce$$ for self-interested grownups?
You’re making it sound like self-styled “education reform” is one giant jobs program for adults that already have practically every advantage in the book.
And that it’s not “all about the kids.”
Say it isn’t rheeally so! Even in the most Johnsonally of ways…
Ok, I apologize. I know you won’t lie.
Keep it real like you always do. I’ll keep reading.
😎
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OMG…this is really disgusting.
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Is that 2.7 million tax payer dollars?
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Do you think Lager would spend his own money?
Let’s look at the charter’s books and Lager’s tax returns to find out!
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Another interesting fact…William Batchelder just left his position in Governor Kasich’s administration as Speaker of the House to head the lobbying for ECOT. “Follow the money”…..Good article in Akron Beacon Journal
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/editorials/through-the-revolving-door-at-the-statehouse-1.568694
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“Which brings things back to Troy Judy, Chad Hawley and the former speaker. No question, the Batchelder years in the House were friendly to charter schools. ECOT serves as something of a poster child, rapidly expanding, receiving ever larger payouts from the state, all as its schools performed poorly. One fair question is: Are the two aides now getting their reward from William Lager and companies for a job well done?”
And you know, the real crime is what had happened to public schools under their watch. Why do 90% of the kids in this state have NO representation in Columbus? That’s obscene,
All the charter chatter is interesting, but these people had a duty to represent the interests of “public schools”. They’ve done a lousy job. Public schools in this state take hit after hit after hit to benefit the preferred “charter sector”.
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I’d also like to know why state and federal lawmakers are pushing online schools. I was told ed reform was “data-driven”. Why are they selling these schools to people when there is NO data that says they are at all effective?
“Section II reviews the research relevant to virtual schools. It finds that despite considerable enthusiasm for virtual education in some quarters, there is little credible research to support virtual schools’ practices or to justify ongoing calls for ever greater expansion. The authors find that even as research on virtual schooling has increased, there is still little high-quality evidence that justifies ongoing calls for the expansion of virtual schools.”
Why would lawmakers and national pundits push this experiment on lower and middle income people? Is it to save money on staffing? Our kids get a screen instead of a teacher?
http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-schools-annual-2015
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The expansion of online “virtual” education will continue, because the profits, at least for the moment, are so attractive. In the meantime there is another development that should be understood as an effort to build bricks and mortar charter schools and to expand charters schools, lifting a cap on these in every sate.
I think this (from Politco today, March 10, 2014) is the next giant step in painting all public schools as failing and making it necessary for states to lift all limits on charter school proliferation. The private profit-seekers will again be using the “trapped in failing schools” imagery combined with blaming teacher unions (and lazy incompetent teachers) to devalue public education as an institution.
————
“CHARTER CAP GOES TO COURT: In a bold bid to expand the right to a public education, a trio of prominent Boston lawyers is preparing a lawsuit arguing that state limits on charter schools are unconstitutional because they trap children in failing urban districts. Education reformers successfully used a similar argument to strike down California’s teacher tenure system in the landmark Vergara trial last spring. The argument is being reprised as well in a case taking on teacher hiring and firing rules in New York. And advocates predict it will be used across the country to enact an array of education policies that are hard to push through the political process because of opposition from teacher unions. The charter lawsuit being drawn up in Boston deals only with Massachusetts law, but similar principles could be applied in many of the 19 other states that limit the number of charter seats. “We see a generation of students that aren’t getting an adequate education, particularly inner-city students, particularly minority students,” attorney Michael B. Keating said.
– That line of reasoning infuriates union leaders who say struggling urban districts can’t afford to lose any more state funding to privately-managed charter schools. Charter advocates “are very crafty in how they frame the issue, in that they say they’re promoting civil rights, but they’re really doing the opposite,” said Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union. “They’re harming the civil rights of the 95 percent of children who go to public schools.” Stutman added: “These people are a danger to this democracy. And they’re winning.” Stephanie Simon has the story behind a pay wall at: http://politico.pro/1Mpo72o
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My take: This legislation, if successful, will fit hand-in-glove with the expansion of charter school facilities authorized in NCLB, updated by the Obama Administration, and the subject of today’s NYC conference of bankers and financial wizards sponsored by the Walton and Gates Foundations and LISD the Local Initiatives Support Corporation. LISD is a syndicator (bundler) of tax credits that can be marketed to holders of big bucks (e.g. large banks, investment houses) who then receive huge IRS breaks by documenting their investments in distressed communities. This is not new. The new target for the tax break are charter school facilities in these communities.
What we are witnessing is the morphing of public-private “partnerships” for social services, including education, from public control to private control under conditions that allow investors to cherry pick services offering profit. The “unprofitable remainders” are left in the public realm but under conditions that severely limit the role of the public in making decisions about these private ventures. And the unprofitable remainders are usually left with fewer resources and more formidable problems to address.
The legal drive to remove caps on charter school expansion, in tandem with the drive to to make the building of facilities for charter schools profitable is enabled by a form of voter suppression not often discussed, but increasingly enacted by legislatures and the courts as the seen in the Vergara trial and in the pending lawsuits on behalf of unlimited expansion of charter schools.
The public is only marginally present in the venues where such key decisions are made. The lawyers making the case for unlimited charter expansion want to avoid public engagement with the issues, especially voters who may have legitimate concerns about the fate of their collective investments in public schools (bricks and mortar) and related resources for public education. There are also serious questions about whether these charter schools are truly open to all students–by definition making them public institutions.
Charter schools are privately run. They are not required to respond to freedom of information requests or comply with regulations bearing on open enrollment, workloads placed on students and teachers, or qualifications of teachers and administrators.
The wheeling and dealing of billionaires and Wall Street investors together with the potential for legal action that could aid charter expansio are intended to marginalize public education with local governance, public discussion, and voter decisions on key issues.
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The ads on TV are designed to attract parents who say their child is misunderstood by conventional classroom teachers. They also seem to praise the fact that the teachers and parents work together making the experience wonderful because they want one on one education for their children. It sounds like a private tutor arrangement, with tearfully smiling parents. And they tout the fact that it is “all free”. Yet, they never talk about the school’s poor performance.
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