Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times about the terrible results obtained by online charter schools. She focuses on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, whose founder has become very wealthy thanks to taxpayer money and the friendship of reformers such as Governor JohnKasich and the GOP legislators in Ohio. Founder William Lager has been very generous to his friends who hold elected office.
A terrific business. A lousy education.
Five years ago, the New York Times ran a superb expose of online charters, pointing out that they are very profitable but basically scams that rip off taxpayers.
In 2011, the Washington Post published an excellent expose of Michael Milken’s K12 Inc, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
For-profit virtual charter corporations are a cynical business that exploits children and does not have educate them. It demands full state tuition to provide home schooling plus a “teacher” on a monitor.
I wrote about the online charter fraud in my 2013 book “Reign of Error.”
Numerous studies have concluded that these schools have startlingly high attrition rates, large “class” sizes, low wages, high teacher turnover, and their students very little.
The latest study, by CREDO, found that students lost 180 days of instruction in math for every year of 180 days in a virtual charter.
Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy wrote about today’s article in the Times and pointed out that ECOT has received nearly $1 billion in public funding since 2002.
Frankly, these fake schools should be investigated by authorities, monitored, and limited to students who are unable to attend school. They should exist only as public institutions, not profit-making corporations.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The ECOT story is much bigger than ECOT, the online charter. You would also need to include IQ Innovations:
“Amid growing opposition to William Lager’s consistently failing online charter schools, Mr. Lager found a new cash cow: IQ Innovations, his online learning management company.
Political leaders close to Lager steered at least $2.7 million in public money to help refurbish IQ Innovations, a distance learning platform that Ohio tapped to provide online textbooks and other educational materials used by K-12 schools. The state calls the clearinghouse iLearnOhio.
Governor John Kasich’s first state budget mandated that the digital clearinghouse be housed at Ohio State University but authorized the Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents to choose IQ as its outside vendor.
This resulted in a highly unusual arrangement: Ohio taxpayers paid millions to help IQ, a private firm, build a sophisticated technology platform – but the state received zero ownership interest in it.
Despite the state’s generosity, IQ consistently failed to deliver on the system’s promised functionality, records show.
Its failure to perform didn’t matter. IQ had a powerful protector on the inside.
Former Lager consultant John Conley, appointed by the Kasich administration as Vice Chancellor of Educational Technology for the Board of Regents, was tasked with overseeing the project. Conley helped keep public money flowing to IQ Innovations and he helped sideline whistleblowers who tried to hold IQ accountable, according to public records.”
“Three of the employees filed 2014 whistleblower complaints with OSU that singled out Conley among the main offenders. OSU found the whistleblowers provided “credible information of significant retaliation,” but could not make a final determination, saying they lacked jurisdiction to interview Conley or other Board of Regents employees. The report states that they did not try to interview them. Conley resigned before the investigation concluded.”
You can read the ethics report from OSU at the link:
http://progressohio.org/progressohios-full-report-on-iq-innovations/
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Amazing disclosure of the depth of corruption in Ohio.
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Oh, it gets better. You could write a book:
“Recently retired Ohio House Speaker William Batchelder, R-Medina, long an advocate for school choice, has gone into business with former House staffers who are lobbying for the state’s largest charter school organization.
The online school, Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow and known as ECOT, is among the state’s lowest performing charter schools. The for-profit companies related to ECOT are Altair Learning Management and IQ Innovations, an online education software firm.
The founder, William Lager, has donated more than $1 million to prominent Ohio Republicans since 2010, among them Batchelder.
Less than a month after the speaker was term-limited in December, Batchelder’s former chief of staff, Troy Judy, and policy director, Chad Hawley, changed the name of a consulting firm created by Judy months earlier to The Batchelder Company, a lobbying firm.”
http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/former-house-speaker-william-batchelder-joins-lobbying-firm-for-ohio-s-largest-charter-school-ecot-1.568549
Jeb Bush was promoting the company as late as 2010.
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Now Bush is fronting “chiefs of change” so he can help himself to more tax dollars under ESSA which leaves the door open for hair brained ideas to catch fire under the guise of “innovation.’
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I believe the expression is “harebrained”, but I do love the juxtaposition of “hair-brained” with “catch fire” so I call this inspired!
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The OSU John Glenn College had a leadership conference in 2015. Three proponents of charter schools were invited to the conference, including the newly appointed State Superintendent. No charter opponents nor, public education supporters were included in the conference. It’s surprising b/c John Glenn’s other namesake, John Glenn H.S., in the East Muskingum school district had more than $500,000 transferred to 8 charter schools, 4 of them, had “D” ratings and 3 of them, had “F” ratings.
The state’s premier public university serving plutocrat businessmen, instead of citizens and taxpayers?
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The John Glenn College chose to mislead, by calling the charter schools, “public”.
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High class sizes and student attrition, low wages, high teacher turnover: that’s the menu so-called reformers love to gorge on.
As for the non-education students receive, well, that’s a mere externality.
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Just keep in mind that Motoko Rich is a charter cheerleader. This is the latest meme – let’s throw online charters under the bus because they’re tarnishing our brand making the rest of us look bad.
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Likely some truth in your observation.
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The attorney’s general need to take a long hard look at these entities.
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And in other headline news today: “The Earth continues spinning like a top on its yearly trek around the Sun”
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On-line schools didn’t “fail” to fill the pockets of fraudsters, schemers and convicted financiers from Wall Street.
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At the expense of kids, communities and taxpayers.
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Florida has 39 schools with virtual, FLVS, K12, or Edgenuity in the school name. Of these, 23 schools got a grade of Incomplete and 3 got a D or F. An Incomplete means either there were testing improprieties or less than 95% of the students took the state test.
From the Sun-Sentinel regarding two virtual schools in south Florida.
“Problems involving the two schools came to light in October after K12 Inc. sent a letter to the Broward and Palm Beach counties’ superintendents accusing Morgaman of violating Florida’s ethics laws.
At issue were a $60,000 check written from the schools’ account to the United Schools Association, a Deerfield Beach-based nonprofit for which Morgaman serves as chairman and CEO, and $40,000 in payments made to Dane G. Taylor, the nonprofit’s chief administrative officer.”
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It is outrageous the amount of students who fail, but what also worries me is that the students who pass did not earn it about 75% of the time. Teachers are encouraged to ‘turn them green’, not to ensure they’ve learned, or understand, or are making progress, but just ‘turn them green’. Students are allowed to walk in the graduation ceremony despite the fact that they hadn’t passed required state tests, or even the classes they were currently enrolled in. Teachers are encouraged to consider a 35% in each quarter added together as equal to a 70%, and therefore passing. Those of us who passed even the most basic math classes know that is not how things work. Teachers are encouraged to only count assignments that a student has completed towards their final grade. You only did 2 out of 40 assignments? If I only count those two then yes you have B! The list could go on, but I think that enough to realize what a waste of taxpayer dollars ECOT is.
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