Ohio legislators and the State Department of Education continue to fund the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, despite scandal after scandal.
Phantom students. The lowest graduation rate of any school in the nation.
And now auditors discover that ECOT overbilled the state by another $20 million last year, by inflating the number of students it claimed to enroll.
Read the article to see what an awful “school” this is. Only 2.9% of its graduates earn a college degree within six years.
What an amazing trick can be accomplished with campaign contributions! Ohio officials should be ashamed.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Follow the money
And you can bet
It flows in circles
Pocket to pocket
And down the toilet.
BURMA SHAVE
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With such a horrible track record, it defies reason that ECOT would be awarded a lucrative drop-out recovery program contract. Somebody needs to definitely follow the money.
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The trail is clear. The owner of ECOT, William LAGER, gives millions to politicians. He gets hundreds of millions from the state and no accountability. Elected officials speak at ECOT graduation ceremonies.
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“ECOT — a virtual school without walls, buses, lunch ladies, or janitors — received $7,291 per pupil in state funding last school year — an amount greater than 85 percent of school districts. And if they did not educate 19 percent of their students as the Ohio Department of Education now claims, their per pupil funding for the kids that they did “educate” jumps to $8,923 — an amount greater than 96 percent of Ohio school districts”
It isn’t really “state funding”. ECOT takes a set share of each “sending” schools per pupil budget. If the state share is less than the sending share, every public school kid remaining in the sending school contributes some of THEIR state funding to ECOT.
Either that or local taxpayers pick it up, because it has to come from somewhere.
Ohio legislators didn’t just write ECOT a blank check out of state funds. They also had every school district make up the difference between state funding and ECOT funding.
They didn’t just screw state taxpayers. They screwed local taxpayers in 85% of districts.
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One would think at some point there would be an investigation into how this happened- what money changed hands to which lawmakers.
Because they knew. They knew this was going on and they let it continue for 15 years.
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They do know, but the public does not and the press gives little coverage to the fraud in this school and other charters in Ohio.
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This is how Ohio charter schools are funded:
“Instead of directly funding charter schools, Ohio subtracts the money from what traditional districts would receive under the state funding formula. But the state takes away more money per pupil than it provides, and districts complain that forces them to rely more heavily on local taxpayers to offset the loss of state funding to charter schools.
Columbus residents in 2013 overwhelming rejected a levy that would have shared local property-tax dollars with charter schools, but data show that the sharing is essentially happening anyway.
When a student living in the Columbus district attends a charter school, the state subtracts nearly $7,800 on average from the district’s state funding. But the state is giving Columbus only an average of about $3,900 in basic aid per pupil.
Columbus needs nearly $69 million in local property-tax money — the equivalent of 7.6 mills — to offset the loss of state funding to charter schools, the highest total in the state. Once charter-school money is subtracted, the district gets just $2,604 for each student who is left, a $1,312 loss that is also, by far, the highest in the state.”
They aren’t funded by the state because the state takes more money FROM public schools than they GIVE to public schools. The difference is picked up one of 2 ways- it either comes from local taxes OR it’s taken from the public school students who remain.
They all know this in Columbus. They admit it:
“Rep. Mike Duffey, R-Worthington, attended the board meeting and said the charter deductions are ” a real concern.” He said he would like to see the amount limited to the amount a district gets, or shifted completely off the books.”
They don’t care that public school students are taking a hit to subsidize charters apparently, because it’s been going on for years and none of them can be bothered to fix it.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/09/09/ohios-charter-schools-essentially-get-local-property-tax-money.html
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Thanks, Chiara. So Ohio has an education problem and an opioid problem. Good GAWD! This is CREEPY. Ohio WAKE UP!
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Ohio lawmakers could make up for their horrible neglect of 90% of students in the state by offering some benefit or worthwhile improvement for PUBLIC schools.
Remember them? The unfashionable schools that the vast majority of the citizens attend?
Maybe they could put in a day or two of work this session on them.
They’re supposedly brimming with innovative ed reform ideas. Let’s hear it. Let’s hear if they got anything other than rah-rah for charters and vouchers.
Because it’s been 20 years and I haven’t seen a single practical improvement that benefited one kid in one Ohio public school out of this bunch. Enough. Time for new politicians.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch: the Ohio Democratic Party and their federal, state and local candidates are literally saying nothing about this.
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In the old Soviet Union, there was a saying:
“We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
ECOT slogan:
“We pretend to run a school, and the state of Ohio actually pays us millions of taxpayer dollars.”
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