Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio, a lawyer and former Ohio legislator, reports that the ECOT scandal is worse than previously known.
He writes:
New state funding reports indicate that ECOT had nearly 8,000 fake students in its last full year of operation. According to the Ohio Department of Education, its last year of operation, ECOT couldn’t account for about 20 percent of its students. However, the monthly finance reports ODE puts out suggests the number may have been closer to 55 percent.
First of all, the last year ECOT was fully operational was in the 2016-2017 school year. So I’m using that as a baseline for comparison.
In the 16-17 school year, ECOT received $103.6 million for 14,208 students. This year, it’s zero dollars. A lot of news stories have tried to figure out what happened to all those students. One of the challenges appears to be that they may not have actually had all those students….
ECOT graduated about 2,000 students in 2017, but even subtracting out those students from the 7,791 “missing” students means 40 percent of the ECOT total is unaccounted for — about double the rate that was found by ODE.
So there seems to be something going on here.
I would sure like to know how many, if any of the 7,791 students ECOT claimed it had in 2016-2017 that aren’t in charter schools anymore were actually ever there to begin with. Because it looks like the state’s 20 percent assessment may be significantly lower than first thought.
Follow him as he connects the dots.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
ECOT was a scam, a phantom school with ghost students for a fake education. They wanted to make education “portable,” but the only portable aspect was the taxpayers’ money. This is supposed to be “innovation?” Those d*mn “gubment” schools actually expect students to show up, participate and learn something that will help them in life.
TRULY GREAT LINE: “The only portable aspect was the taxpyer’s money.”
Data was fudged?! Say it ain’t so!
Ed reformers are bad at governance. They set up governance schemes that don’t work.
Charters in Ohio are a really good example. They can’t regulate hundreds of schools from Columbus. Even if they wanted to regulate these schools properly (they don’t, but that’s a different problem) they couldn’t.
That’s one of the reasons schools are regulated locally- not because it’s an evil scheme to deny “innovation”- but because it makes sense.
They are “reinventing governance” of public schools and they’re terrible at it. It’s arrogance, really. They’re so convinced their privatization schemes are superior to public schools they completely dismiss all the valuable and worthwhile parts of public school systems. It’s hubris.
We’ve had fraud and financial scandals in our public school system. The county auditor caught it in 2 months because the county auditor is located here and monitors the schools books. If we were relying on the State of Ohio to regulate schools we’d still be waiting.
This is what you get when you let Gates and Walton write state law. They don’t know what they’re doing.
Lots of libertarians believe that the only “good government” is one that stays out of their way. We can see what happens from looking at ECOT. You get a free market free for all in which greedy corporations grab as much money as fast as they can when there is little oversight or accountability. The taxpayers are left holding the bag.
Financial scandals are bad, but what they’re risking with this lack of regulation will be much worse- a safety scandal. Schools are tightly regulated because they’re filled with children. It is incredibly reckless to conduct this laissez faire experiment in schools.
I look at those unregulated voucher schools in Florida and I just shudder. The financial scandals will be the least of their problems in ed reform if they don’t accept reality and start regulating these schools. I would bet you 5 dollars NONE of those voucher parents in Florida know that no one is regulating those schools. They probably assume since the schools are state sanctioned and funded they’re regulated like public schools, and they’re not.
The cavalier attitude towards regulation is just breathtakingly arrogant. It’s ideological zealotry and we are all going to pay for it.
I read a lot of ed reformers and they constantly report on scandals with public school teachers- which teachers are punished, how they are punished.
They don’t seem to realize the only reason they have this information is public school teachers are regulated and there are reporting requirements. They have labor union sanction records for teachers because labor unions KEEP records.
Who keeps records for the charter sector? Has it occurred to them yet that they don’t know about any systemic problems with charter teachers because no one compiles and reports and releases that information?
These people see themselves as “data” people and yet they miss the ABSENCE of the data. They don’t have any centralized information on charter teachers and staff. That’s why they don’t see any problems.
Whatever the problems with public schools at least we KNOW about them. Their schools are a black box. They’re all separate franchises. Nothing is collected system-wide.
Minor correction:
“Their schools are a black HOLE.”
A black box contains information specific to the functioning of the plane. It’d be good of those schools actually had a “black box” (figuratively speaking) like public schools do.
I continue to be amazed at your production of relevant topics on your blog. Don’t know how you do it. Thanks for this expose.
Today in the Arizona Republic, an article by Rob O’Dell & Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, “$700K in voucher funding misspent.” This is new information added to the older information about the lack of oversight of the credit card vouchers.
We now have 35 auditors for the State of Arizona, up from a low of 9 in previous years.
Hopefully, if we are able to change the legislature and top state officials, we can change at least some of this.
Thank you, I just finished writing about the latest voucher scandal in AZ.
Giving debit cards to thousands of parents with minimal oversight is crazy.
Dr. Ravitch is more valuable than gold.
Our public school offered online classes 2 years ago. It was a big, expensive flop.
I really wish public schools would stop taking advice from national ed reform consultants and lobbyists. They are discrediting themselves with the public. Stop jamming this garbage down our throats. if ed tech executives want to do “beta testing” tell them to put it in their pricey private schools. THEN we’ll consider it.
Our kids are not lab rats and I’m not paying taxes to conduct beta testing for ed tech companies. Tell them to pay for their own experiments. Our public school is not their product development site.
The least they could do is pay these kids for their labor. Instead, we’re paying the adults who sell this garbage. Stop buying what they’re selling. We’re paying you to do your OWN thinking. If I wanted to pay Facebook engineers I would hire them.
Reblogged this on rjknudsen and commented:
Over $14 million lost by Cincinnati Public Schools to ECOT.
The ECOT scandal, brought to Ohio by Republicans because the operator made large donations to the state Republican Party, hasn’t stopped organizations like the Koch’s Americans for Prosperity. In a humorous mailer, AFP tells residents that their Ohio candidate, Steve Chabot, was a “kid from a trailer park who knows a lot about breaking barriers.” Being White and male was the first barrier broken. The 2nd was finding the support of the Koch’s so that he could take trips on the taxpayers dime worth $250,000 while robbing constituents of protection for pre-existing conditions.
The death of Dave Brennan last week gave me a little smile. But the local papers still called him a successful business man who donated to his community. What they didn’t write is that he was well-connected grifter whose “donations” were public funds that were left over after spending on himself and his cronies. He disproved the cliche that bad guys wear black hats. Some of the worst wear white ones.
The common good wins- two privatizers dead in a month.
I hope Ohioans can collect from Brennan’s estate but, ECOT was probably incorporated or a limited liability company.
Kenneth Lay denied the public its due- to watch him serve time. Sometimes convictions after death seem warranted.