The Virtual Community School in Ohio won’t open this year. It must First sort out how much it must pay the state for overstating its past enrollment. It owes millions. This is the kind of “school” that Betsy DeVos is promoting.
“Virtual Community School of Ohio has announced it won’t open as scheduled Tuesday for the upcoming school year. On the school’s Facebook page, parents were told they should consider enrolling in another school for the upcoming year.
“During an emergency meeting July 31, the VCS board agreed to a “temporary suspension by our sponsor while a financial investigation is conducted,” according to a notice on the school’s website. At that time, its sponsor was the Reynoldsburg School District, which created VCS in 2001 with the help of a former ECOT administrator.
“VCS had billed the state for an attendance of 835 students for the 2015-16 school year; a department audit of student attendance found that should be reduced to 280 students. Based on that, the school would have to repay about $4.2 million of the $6.33 million it was paid that year. The state found VCS, like ECOT, couldn’t document how much time students were participating in classwork.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane I cannot even imagine the disturbances that are going on in these children’s heads. Everyone is getting ready to go to school and, wham, everything changes. Whatever problems I had growing up, or need I say most of us, if not ALL, they were NEVER about my school not being there.
These children don’t go to a brick-and-mortar school. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is a virtual school. They can log on from their smartphone from anywhere and who knows they are the one logging on.
Imagine a mother or grandmother who wants their child or grandchild to graduate from high school doing all the work for them as the child, who is not in a brick-and-mortar public school that monitors attendance, hangs out with the local druggies or teen gangsters.
Lloyd Lofthouse Oh, no. I hadn’t thought of that. (How disheartening.)
Reynoldsburg School District was entirely taken over by ed reformers. It was basically an ed reform experimental district. They pushed the heck out of online learning- Fordham called it “limitless learning” and it was featured on the Center for Ed Reform site.
This is the district where the reform superintendent threatened to cancel the teachers’ health insurance so they went on strike.
If this is a corrupt mess you can lay it directly at the feet of ed reform. They ran the whole place.
Here’s one of the glowing rah-rah pieces about Reynoldsburg:
“The Reynoldsburg City School District, just east of Columbus, is far down the “portfolio management” path – further than probably any suburban school district of its size. Reynoldsburg is a district of about 6,300 students, so it is not surprising that few observers outside Ohio know anything about its efforts. But, it is a district with a significant impact on state education policy in the Buckeye State. ”
It looks like shortly after this piece was published the OH Dept of Ed pulled Reynoldsburg’s ability to sponsor schools, due to poor oversight.
https://edexcellence.net/ohio-policy/gadfly/2013/april-8/limitless.html
I just hope public schools don’t take advice from ed reformers on “blended learning”
This is a sales job. They’re pitching product. Please, please don’t fall for it. These people will be down the road and off to their next project and your school will have poured a bunch of money and time into garbage.
That online school has a FIFTY PER CENT absence rate. Those kids aren’t being educated! They’re never there!
I have teenagers TELL ME other people are doing their online classes for them. They think it’s great. They can’t believe “the adults” are this stupid, to think they won’t game this.
The state found VCS, like ECOT, couldn’t document how much time students were participating in classwork.”
Chiara’s teen-age informants have figured it out. “can’t tell who is attending” is probably a feature of on-line learning in the design stage, not a bug. All of the hoopla about data-driven learning, enabled by online any-time, any-where access to “classes” is undermined by the “mobility” tech experts who make it possible for the class-taker to be anyone, anytime, anywhere.
So riddle me this – how can an electronic school go bankrupt? They must have the lowest run costs of all, am I right? Isn’t this bare bones? What is the profit margin?
ALL of these “schools” should be investigated, and shut down. Fast.
Just like Medicaid fraud – Let’s call it what it is – Education fraud!
On Tue, Aug 22, 2017 at 12:01 PM, Diane Ravitch’s blog wrote:
> dianeravitch posted: ” The Virtual Community School in Ohio won’t open > this year. It must First sort out how much it must pay the state for > overstating its past enrollment. It owes millions. This is the kind of > “school” that Betsy DeVos is promoting. http://www.dispatch.c” >
Trickery and deceit is a way of life for the Monsters, Ogres and Agenda Driven Politicians as they have found ways to maintain the subclass, keeping children in their designated place in a social cast system by manipulating the educational process. Listening to the old worn out phrases gives a hint as to the antiquated thinking used in today´s educational world. “If the school day was longer kids would learn more, or unions are the problem or just raise the bar, or change to a charter school and the problem is solved”. The reality is that none of these artificial changes make a difference.
The elevating of the artificial standardized test to celestial predominance becomes a smoke screen designed to assure a simplistic approach to education. The schools that have the best test scores win, regardless of the gains made by students in that school or what skills those students can actually demonstrate. No consideration is given to those children who have huge obstacles in the way of learning as they are expected to be proficient on the same day and at the same time as demanded by the standards. When those students don’t “succeed” at the same rate in the same way on the test as the selected elite schools, their schools are deemed failures by those Monsters, Ogres and Agenda Driven Politicians.
The trickery and deceit continues as the evil empire embarks on the poverty games. Those school officials then shout from the mountain top, “poverty isn’t destiny” while they continue to maintain an antiquated system that assures most poverty is destiny. Listening to that rhetoric begs the question, which “poverty” are they talking about? Poverty covers those who are damaged by its obstacles as well as those who, with the help of a strong support system, can overcome those obstacles.
It is the goal of the tricksters to convince the public of the racist belief that all poor black children are the same, and their school came to the rescue. The real trick used is to enhance a school population by taking the effort to sort through and identify those in borderline poverty with a strong support system that can score high. Enrolling those students gives them the ability to demean the schools who serve the children who need us the most while maintaining bragging rights.