Jan Resseger describes the outrageous ECOT scandal in detail. A vigilant press broke the story and alerted the public to a theft of hundreds of millions of dollars diverted from public schools to an online for-profit virtual charter. Now, because of a whistleblower complaint about fraud was ignored by public officials for six months, ECOT is back in the news. It is also in court as the state continues to recover some of the lost money.
The State is dominated by Republicans who happily accepted political contributions from ECOT’s founder,William Lager, and overlooked accountability. The state should “claw back” the money illegally diverted from public schools by going after Lager’s assets.
Resseger writes:
“Although this week’s new Associated Press report about the ECOT whistleblower doesn’t say anything really new about ECOT’s failure accurately to count its students, and even though nobody has imagined that ECOT mis-reported student attendance by accident, the new story is accomplishing something important. Suddenly politicians in the race for governor, state auditor, and state attorney general are accusing incumbents of failure to pay attention and to respond immediately last summer to a whistleblower’s account of what was surely criminal fraud on ECOT’s part. And the incumbents are all scurrying around saying that they paid more attention than anybody knew. Suddenly the ECOT scandal—which died down for a couple of months after the school was shut down in January—is a major topic in the political campaigns for statewide offices in the May 8, primary election.
“In Ohio, where the Governor is a Republican and the state House of Representatives is dominated by a 66:33 Republican majority and the state Senate by a 33:9 Republican majority, we don’t have any checks and balances. It is essential that the over-fifteen-year ECOT ripoff will remain in the news and that candidates running for office demand that voters hold Ohio’s politicians accountable.
“ECOT is now closed, a school in bankruptcy with its affairs being managed by a receiver, but ECOT’s owners are still trying to resurrect the school through the appeal of its case against the state, a case heard finally in February by the Ohio Supreme Court. We await the Court’s decision. Once again, during oral arguments, the press played its essential role. The Dispatch‘s Jim Siegel described the final interchange between ECOT’s attorney and Ohio’s Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor: “As ECOT attorney Marion Little finished his arguments for why, under the law, the online school should get full funding for students even if they only log in once a month and do no work, Chief Justice Maureen O’Connor interjected. ‘How is that not absurd?’ she asked.”
“We shall see how the Ohio Supreme Court eventually decides the case. Ohio’s supreme court is elected, and like the legislature, it is majority-Republican. But the persistent coverage by the press has kept pressure on the Court just as it has on the staff at the Ohio Department of Education and on ECOT’s sponsor, The Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West. After all, unless the Supreme Court saves it, ECOT is now closed. It is no longer receiving Ohio tax dollars, even though it still owes the state millions of dollars that had not yet been clawed back prior to the date of its closure.”
I hope it does, but based on anecdotal experiences, I don’t think it will. I’m amazed by how many people with whom I speak agree this is bad but don’t connect it with their vote—as they continue to vote for the status quo in the Assembly.
Maybe the Ohio courts should rule that all campaign contributions from ECOT to Republican elected officials should be paid back to the traditional public schools out of GOP pockets.
What a great idea.
Ohio could start by “clawing back” every tangible asset of the owner of this failed for-profit enterprise. Then claw back his campaign contributions, which are a very small proportion of the dollars he diverted from public schools.
How can the voters in Ohio ignore such an outrageous misuse of public funds! There must be some critical thinkers that should rally their neighbors against the profiteering Republicans. I am still shocked that a scandal of this magnitude has been ignored by the media outside the state.
It will be up to non-affiliated and/or indepedent voters to take Ohio away from the Koch bought-and-paid-for corrupt GOP.
Weekly Voter Statistics in Ohio April 21, 2018
Total Registered 7,940,803 (Down 405 From Previous Week)
1,270,966 were Democrats
1,982,341 were Republicans
4,687,495 were non-affiliated
https://ohiovoterproject.org/
I don’t think they’re ignoring it. Also- ECOT is a state school. It’s huge. People are familiar with it. It’s not like a school district, where all real news is intensely local. Almost everyone has had some exposure to ECOT. People talk to other people. I have an ECOT “story”- I have an acquaintance who told me her eldest son graduated from there and 3 years later told her his 20 year old girlfriend completed all the assignments. She was furious.
Our public school superintendent complained specifically about ECOT- she says the kids go back and forth between the charter and the public school and they fall behind. She also can’t plan because she has no idea whether they’re coming or going.
It’s really unique to have a state-wide school like this. I don’t know how people will treat it. Ohio essentially set up two school systems- one is a state system (charters) and the other are local systems.
They shouldn’t be surprised the state system is poorly regulated and corrupt. They never had process in place to actually govern these schools. It was ludicrous to think they could be run from Columbus. State lawmakers can’t even run state government. They thought they could run a state school system? They never even enter the brick and mortar charters. No one outside of the operators every does. They don’t even know if these schools are safe let alone “better” than public schools.
ECOT has an “authorizer”. I don’t know who they are but they must have one because it’s part of Ohio’s (terrible and sloppy) charter law.
What that means for the public is the authorizer took millions of dollars to supposedly regulate this school and did nothing to earn that money.
The authorizers are the missing piece in charter corruption. No one knows who they are or what they do to earn the cut of funding they skim off the top.
Authorizers were supposed to be the regulatory mechanism for privatized schools- to oversee the contractors. Instead they just created a useless layer of adults who take a piece of the public school budget.
You see the same thing in US healthcare. Endless replication and fragmentation.
Authorizes in Ohio skim 3% of total funding off the top. ECOT had a huge, if inflated and fraudulent, enrollment. The authorizes was raking in millions for nothing. But at some point, the legal problems were onerous and the authorizes pulled the plug. It too should be required to pay back millions in spoils.
The US Department of Education continues to boldly ignore the teacher strikes.
1.5 million public school children affected. DC could care less.
You know what your DC lawmakers have spent weeks on? A voucher program. Faced with whole state systems collapsing due to their neglect lawmakers focus on…private schools.
It goes beyond out of touch. They have nothing in common with the people they represent. They don’t even know where most of us send our kids to school.
Betsy DeVos has said nothing about the historic teachers’ strikes, other than to admonish teachers in Oklahoma to get back to work.
DeRolph v. State of Ohio
We have seen on March 24,1997, the Supreme Court of Ohio ruled
in a 4-3 decision, that the state funding system
fails to provide for a thorough and efficient educational system,
as dictated by the Ohio Constitution of 1851,
by relying so heavily upon local property taxes to fund schools.
We shall see again how the Ohio Supreme Court …