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Ohio: Supreme Court Rules Against ECOT and the Virtual Charter School is DEAD!

By dianeravitch
August 9, 2018 //
26

It has taken nearly 20 years, and cost Ohio taxpayers $1 billion or more, but the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) died in court this week.

The owner William Lager became a millionaire many times over, supplying goods and services to his corporation.

The “school” had a high attrition rate and the highest dropout rate of any high school in the nation, but it was protected by politicians who received campaign contributions from Lager. The contributions were piffle compared to Lager’s profits.

After embarrassing stories, the ECOT authorizer withdrew its sponsorship. The state, after years of ignoring the horrible performance of ECOT and its huge profits, eventually got around to auditing it and found many phantom students and asked ECOT for an accounting. ECOT insisted that when students turn on their computer, they were learning even if they didn’t participate in activities.

ECOT attorneys argued that the state illegally changed the rules on how to count students in the middle of a school year, and that state law did not require students to participate in class work in order to be counted for funding purposes.

Perhaps foreshadowing the final decision, as attorney Marion Little’s argued before the court in February that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow should get full funding for students even if they do no work, Chief Justice O’Connor interjected, “How is that not absurd?”

After a long battle in court, the Supreme Court voted 4-2 to support the state in its decision to force ECOT to pay back money for students who never received instruction.

Since opening the school in 2000, Lager went from financial distress to a millionaire, with his for-profit companies, IQ Innovations and Altair Learning Management, collecting about $200 million in state funding for work done on behalf of ECOT. At its peak, the school was graduating more than 2,000 students annually, but also had the highest dropout rate in the state.

Lager and his associates also donated $2.5 million to Ohio politicians and political parties, the vast majority to Republicans, with the ECOT scandal boiling into a major issue ahead of the Nov. 6 election featuring the gubernatorial race between DeWine and Democrat Richard Cordray.

Be it noted that Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a huge fan of online charter schools and was an investor in K12 Inc., which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Farewell, ECOT. You won’t be missed. Besides, K12 Inc. and other e-schools are rushing in to Ohio to grab your market share.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Failure, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Scandal, Virtual Charter Schools

Why It Matters that LeBron James Is Supporting a PUBLIC School in Akron, Not a Charter School

By dianeravitch
August 8, 2018 //
32

I salute LeBron James for investing his funding in a public school, not a charter school.

Mr. James understands that the overwhelming preponderance of children in this country attend public schools, and we have a responsibility to make them work for all children. Charter schools and vouchers are an escape from the central problem, not an answer. He is way smarter than Donald Trump or Betsy DeVos or John Kasich or Jeb Bush or Rick Snyder or Rick Scott or Donald Trump or Reed Hastings or Eli Broad or any of the other billionaire builders of escape hatches that lead nowhere.

He is investing in wraparound services, as public schools do when they have the resources.

What he is demonstrating is that every public school can be its best when it has the resources to do what kids need.

We don’t need to hand public schools, their building and their public funding over to private entrepreneurs to prove what we know: Good schools are costly when kids are poor. They need smaller classes and additional resources.

This article in The Nation says exactly what I believe: “LeBron’s Education Promise Needs to Become This Country’s Promise.”

Every child should have the wraparound services, the small classes, the job training for parents, the caring environment of a family, that LeBron James’ school will offer its students.

LeBron James’s promise to the students in his school should be the promise that America makes to all its children.

I laughed when I read that Donald Trump slammed LeBron James and called him “stupid.” Trump doesn’t have the brains, the heart, or the accomplishments of LeBron James.

And I laughed again when Melania sent out a tweet congratulating LeBron after her husband mocked him. I hope she visits his PUBLIC school.

Categories Education Reform, Ohio, Supporting public schools

Ohio: A Great New Organization Has Been Launched to Fight Privatization, Theft, and Greed

By dianeravitch
August 7, 2018 //
19

I learned from Bill Phillis’s posts about a great new organization that has just been launched in Ohio.

If you live in Ohio, join it.

The organization, called Public Education Partners, was inspired by Jan Resseger’s post: https://janresseger.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/my-public-education-platform/

Every candidate running for public office, whether school board, state legislature, the governorship, or Congress should be asked to take a stand: Do you support this platform?

Preamble to PEP’s Public Education Platform

The Ohio Constitution (Article VI, sections 2 and 3) requires the state to secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools and provide for the organization, administration and control of the system. School district boards of education have the constitutional and statutory responsibility to administer the educational program. Boards of education have the fiduciary duty to ensure the educational needs of all resident students are met in an equitable and adequate manner.

The state’s first obligation is to ensure that a thorough and efficient system is established and maintained. The state has no right under the Ohio constitution to fund alternative educational programs that diminish moral and financial support from the common school system. Ohio’s system of school was declared unconstitutional more than two decades ago, yet since that time $11 billion have been drained from the public school system for publicly- funded, privately-operated charter schools. This egregious flaw in state policy must be addressed.

Jan Resseger of Cleveland Heights has aptly defined state and local responsibility for education as follows:

A comprehensive system of public education that serves all children and is democratically governed, publicly funded, universally accessible, and accountable to the public is central to the common good.

The education platform premised on the constitutional responsibility of the state of Ohio as stated in the preamble is:

A comprehensive system of public education that serves all children and is democratically governed, publicly funded, universally accessible, and accountable to the public, is central to the common good.
~Jan Resseger

Ohio Public Education Platform

This education platform is premised on the constitutional responsibility of the state of Ohio:

 Provide adequate and equitable funding to Ohio school districts to guarantee a comparable opportunity to learn for ALL children. This includes a quality early childhood education, qualified teachers, a rich curriculum that will prepare students for college, work and community, and equitable instructional resources. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WLdVez25ZjDzzd2irSUwUggj-GflNQuO/view?usp=sharing

 Respect local control of public schools run by elected school boards. There are different needs for different schools of different sizes, and each local school board knows what its students, families, and community values. http://www.nvasb.org/assets/why_school_boards.pdf

 Reject the school privatization agenda, which includes state takeovers, charter schools, voucher schemes, and high-stakes testing. The school privatization agenda has proven to be ineffective at bringing efficiency and cost savings to our schools. https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Privatizing_Public_Education,_Higher_Ed_Policy,_and_T eachers

 Do away with the state takeovers of school districts imposed in House Bill 70. State takeovers of school districts (HB 70), followed by the appointment of CEOs with power to override the decisions of elected school boards and nullify union contracts, is undemocratic, unaccountable, and without checks and balances. http://www.reclaimourschools.org/sites/default/files/state-takeover-factsheet-3.pdf

 Promote a moratorium on the authorization of new charter schools while gradually removing existing charters, which take funding and other valuable resources from public school districts. Charter schools remove funds and other resources from public school districts and need to be phased out. For-profit charter schools should be eliminated – tax dollars should never be transferred into private profits. https://knowyourcharter.com/

 Eliminate vouchers and tuition tax credit programs. Voucher schemes take desperately needed dollars out of education budgets and undermine the protection of religious liberty as defined by the First Amendment. https://educationvotes.nea.org/2017/02/08/5-names- politicians-use-sell-private-school-voucher-schemes-parents/

 Encourage wraparound community learning centers that bring social and health services into Ohio school buildings. These wraparound services ensure that the public schools are the center of the neighborhood, and they include health, dental, and mental health clinics, after school programs, and parent support programs. Cincinnati Public Schools has a very successful program: https://www.cps-k12.org/community/clc

 End the test-and-punish philosophy, and replace it with an ideology of school investment and improvement. The tests have narrowed the curriculum to the tested subjects. If national standardized testing is to continue, testing should be limited to the federal minimum guidelines, and there should be no state standardized tests beyond those mandated by ESSA. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer- sheet/wp/2017/01/06/how-testing-practices-have-to-change-in-u-s-public- schools/?utm_term=.45d28f77dcb0

 Remove high stakes mandates from schools, and abolish the practice of punishing schools, teachers, families, and students for arbitrary test scores. Do away with mandatory retention attached to the 3rd Grade Reading Guarantee and high school end-of-course state tests. If parents choose to opt their children out of testing, no one should be penalized. http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Dangerous-Consequences-of-high-stakes- tests.pdf

 Restore respect for well-trained, certified teachers, and return educator evaluation systems to locally elected school boards. Dismiss Teach for America, which is funded by the Eli Broad Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation. https://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/went-wrong-teach-america/

Eliminate the practice of judging teachers by their students’ scores – research has proven it unreliable. http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/TeacherEvaluationFactSheetRevisionJanuary201 6.pdf

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Ohio, Privatization, School Choice, Supporting public schools, Testing, VAM (value-added modeling), Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

About LeBron James’ New Public School in Akron: The Akron Superintendent Speaks

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2018 //
65

My thanks to Akron Superintendent David W. James for answering the questions that some readers have asked.

And congratulations to superstar LeBron James for supporting public schools in Akron!

Diane,

I felt compelled to provide some additional information based on some of the responses to your blog that I have read here today.

First, LeBron is a wonderful partner of the Akron Public Schools (APS). The I Promise School (IPS) is a public school. We fund the students like we fund all other students in our district of approximately 21,000 students. The school was not built from the ground up, we are using an existing APS facility that was used to house students while their schools were being rebuilt. By the way, we have rebuilt 32 schools so far.
Students are selected by lottery among students from across the district who perform below the 25th percentile in reading. In addition we have an independent auditor from a local financial services firm observe the randomized lottery process.

While opening a new school will result in adjustments among other schools across APS, this is no different than our National Inventors Hall of Fame STEM Middle and High Schools or our Akron Early College High School, where enrollment is from across the district.

In terms of the teachers, they are union members represented by the Akron Education Association, and I am proud of the fact that we agreed to use an interview process to select them. The District and the Association also agreed to the modified school schedule without contention because it is good for kids.

APS funds this school as we fund all other schools within the district. LeBron and his Foundation partners are funding most of the wrap-around supports and extra services above and beyond what we typically provide. For those of us in the public and not-for-profit sectors, we constantly worry about sustainability.

The free breakfast and lunch meals provided to all APS students are also provided to the IPS students. The bus rides provided to APS students in grades K through 8, who live more than 2 miles away from their school, are provided to the IPS students, in accordance with Ohio law. Our resident students are not charged tuition.

Our partnership with LeBron James goes back over 10 years. His commitment to our children is absolutely genuine.

David W. James, Superintendent
Akron Public Schools

Categories Ohio, Supporting public schools

LeBron James Is Proud That He Opened a Public School, not a Charter School or a Private School

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2018 //
27

LeBron James could have followed the well-worn path of other celebrities by putting money into a charter school (e.g., Andre Agassi, whose Las Vegas charter school was so bad that it was handed off to a New York City charter operator).

But, no, he partnered with the Akron public schools to open a public school.

Good on LeBron!

Read here. Or here for the transcript.

View the video, where he says: “We literally have a school. It’s not a charter school, it’s not a private school, it’s a real-life school in my hometown. And this is pretty cool.”

The kids in his schools will have lots of wraparound services and, if they graduate, free college.

LeBron is giving back to the schools that made his success possible. He knows exactly what he is doing.

LeBron is creating a model of what a public school can be if it is well funded.

Categories Education Reform, Ohio, Supporting public schools

Ohio Taxpayers Charged $7.7 Million to Renovate Charter-School Building Valued at $2.4 Million

By dianeravitch
July 31, 2018 //
22

The Columbus Dispatch reports on the continuing financial misadventures of the Imagine charter chain.

Imagine Schools, a for-profit Charter chain, bought an appliance store in a building valued last year at $2.4 Million. It renovated and passed the bill to Ohio taxpayers for $7.7 Million, triple the buolding’s value.

The charter, Great Westerm Academy, will have 700 students.

“Under its finance deal, Great Western Academy had to come up with added lease payments totaling $7.7 million over the past decade to cover the renovations — $3.3 million above their actual cost — at times paying nearly $1 million a year in total rent.

“According to the Franklin County auditor, the property was valued at $2.4 million in 2017. In other words, the $7.7 million the school paid for renovations was more than three times the building’s value.

“The deal has raised questions about Great Western’s lease agreement with SchoolHouse Finance, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools. SchoolHouse rents the space and sub-leases to Great Western. SchoolHouse also financed the renovations.”

This is the sweet part of the deal. Imagine rents the space, then subleases it to an Imagine school.

Do Ohio taxpayers care what happens to their money?

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Ohio, Privatization

Politico: ECOT Collapse Hangs Over Ohio Elections like a Huge Lead Balloon; Major School Funding Ruling in New Mexico

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
13

Or the Sword of Damocles? Or a guillotine for politicians who feasted at William Lager’s full trough while the getting was good?

Politico Morning Education reports:

WILL A FAILED VIRTUAL CHARTER HAUNT REPUBLICANS COME NOVEMBER? Ohio Democrats for years have complained about the state’s welcome of virtual charter schools, which educate thousands of kids who log on at home.

— Then, in January, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow — one of the nation’s largest K-12 schools — collapsed, leaving 12,000 Ohio students to find a new school. With that, Democrats believe they’ve found a politically potent issue ahead of the November midterms.

— Ohio Democrats on the campaign trail are charging that Republicans turned a blind eye to ECOT’s clear problems, while accepting campaign contributions from the school’s owner. The line of attack is creating a political headache for GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike DeWine and on down the ballot.

— “People should’ve held a big failing charter school like this accountable, should’ve stopped the millions of dollars from pouring into it over many years, should have investigated a lot of the rumors about inflated attendance figures,” Richard Cordray, the former head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who is DeWine’s Democratic challenger in a closely watched race, told POLITICO.

— The GOP calls the Democrats disingenuous. They argue it’s Republicans like DeWine and State Auditor Dave Yost, the party’s candidate for attorney general, who are tackling the problem. “Republicans have made necessary reforms to Ohio’s charter school system and held bad actors accountable while Democrats have done nothing but hurl misleading attacks from the sidelines,” said Blaine Kelly, an Ohio Republican Party spokesman.

— The issue plays out as the Ohio Supreme Court decides whether the school must return $80 million to Ohio coffers, since the state alleges scores of students went sometimes days at a time without logging in. The school’s graduation rate was 40 percent. Read more from your host.

— Meanwhile, Cleveland.com reports that Ron Packard, the founder and former CEO of online learning giant K12 Inc., which has also faced scrutiny over the years, has acquired a different virtual school in Ohio, the Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy. Like ECOT, it has struggled academically.

— The changes proposed by Packard include requiring more in-person meetings between teachers and students and less advertising. “We’re trying to create the next generation model, which will be a more service-intensive design to get kids engaged in the process and have more face-to-face time,” Packard said.

Also in the same edition of Politico Morning Education:

BIG SCHOOL FUNDING RULING FROM OUT WEST: A state court judge has ruled that New Mexico has an “inadequate system” to fund the state’s schools that violates the constitutional rights of at-risk students. District Judge Sarah Singleton set an April 15 deadline for the state to rectify the situation.

— “Reforms to the current system of financing public education and managing schools should address the shortcomings of the current system by ensuring, as a part of that process, that every public school in New Mexico would have the resources necessary for providing the opportunity for a sufficient education for all at-risk students,” Singleton wrote.

— The ruling came in the consolidated lawsuits of Yazzie v. State of New Mexico and Martinez v. State of New Mexico. It’s unclear yet whether state state officials, who were reviewing the ruling over the weekend, will appeal it, WRAL reported.

— The Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the New Mexico Center on Law and Poverty, which represented the plaintiffs, are holding a press conference at 10 a.m. mountain time today in Albuquerque to discuss the ruling. Watch it on Facebook Live. Read the decision here.

New Mexico has the highest percentage of children in poverty of any state other than Mississippi. Its schools are underfunded. This is a first step towards educational equity for the state. It has been firmly under the control of conservative Republicans and Reformers for the past eight years and is stuck at about 49th on NAEP. New Mexico schools showed no improvement during the reign of Reformer Hannah Skandera. There is a good chance that Democrats will sweep the state this fall and kick the Reformers out and replace them with educators who have ideas about how to help kids that don’t involve privatizing their schools or punishing their teachers.

Categories For-Profit, Fraud, Funding, New Mexico, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Chris Cotton: Ohio’s End-of-Course Tests Are a Sham

By dianeravitch
July 23, 2018 //
47

Chris Cotton teaches high school English in Ohio. He posted it on the Facebook page of NE Ohio Educators and given permission to post it here.

He writes:


Harnessing Student Anger on Ohio’s EOC Tests

I’ve been working on my preparations for next year. I teach English to a class of remedial-level sophomores who are several years behind in reading level. I’ve been banging my head against a brick wall trying to figure out how to prepare them for Ohio’s EOC (End-Of-Course) tests. My first feeling is that I can’t prepare them. It’s simply not possible.

I also teach AP seniors, and parts of these tests (ELA I for freshmen and ELA II for sophomores) would be very difficult for those students. In fact, most educated adults would struggle. I struggled with them myself.

I’ll give a little sample from the one (and there’s only one) released ELA I test on the Ohio Dept. of Ed. website. This test for freshmen asks the students to compare two passages: one from King Lear, and one from Shakespeare’s source material, written 40-50 years earlier.

In freshman English it’s traditional to teach one Shakespeare play (usually Romeo and Juliet). But that comes, even in honors classes, with a great deal of teacher support and scaffolding.

I read King Lear in a college literature class, and it was a challenge then, even with a textbook that had at least five times as many explanatory notes as the ELA test. Here is an example of lines that have no explanatory notes on the test:

“Of all these bounds, even from this line to this,
With shadowy forests and with champains rich’d,
With plenteous rivers and wide-skirted meads,
We make thee lady. To thine and Albany’s issue
Be this perpetual.”

Imagine seeing this on a high-stakes test if you’re a student reading at fourth grade level. There isn’t even a note saying that Lear is pointing at a map (“this line to this”). How many adults could tell you what “champains” are, or “wide-skirted meads”? There’s inverted sentence order, archaic pronouns, apostrophes that look like typos. “Albany” is a person, not a city, with an “issue” of some sort.

We are deliberately inflicting pain on young people. I know my kids, and I know they will feel humiliation when they begin this test. Many of my kids believe that the world and school especially are out to get them. A test like this is confirmation. Most of them will simply give up after reading the first line of the passage. It’s too painful.

So, I’m trying to figure out a way to prepare my students to not give up at the outset. They need to do as well as they can, due to the “point system” we have in Ohio for graduation. In one course, I can’t teach them all the material covered by this “end-of-course” test (because that’s impossible). I don’t even think I can “teach to the test.” No, what I have to do is teach against the test.

A lot of my students have a great deal of anger, much of it directed at school (sometimes for fair reasons). How can I work with that anger, so it doesn’t lead to self-destructive capitulation, but instead to energy for getting as many points as possible.

So I’m pulling together a unit of some sort predicated on the fact that these tests are a scam. If I can validate their anger, could I then redirect it in a direction that helps them?

I have a few questions for the other teachers on this site:

What do you think of this basic idea? Is it crazy?

Is there any text or materials you would suggest for reading?

I’d like to show a movie as part of the unit. I know there are many on the topic, is there one you’d recommend?

Thank you very much,

Chris Cotton

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, Ohio, Testing

Ohio: Andrew Brenner, Listen to the People

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2018 //
9

Andrew Brenner is chairman of the House Education Committee in Ohio. He has a knack for making provocative and unfair statements. A few years ago, he said that public schools were “socialism.” He also regularly blocks people on Twitter if they disagree with his extremism. His critics have started their own Facebook page.

Denis Smith has written a genial open letter to Andrew Brenner. He thinks Andrew should revere the First Amendment even more than the Second Amendment, because it comes first.

He should listen to his constituents. He might learn that he is out of synch with their views.

Categories Freedom of Speech, Ohio

Stephen Dyer: Who is to Blame for Ohio’s $1 Billion ECOT Boondoggle?

By dianeravitch
May 25, 2018 //
6

Stephen Dyer, former legislator in Ohio, now a fellow at Innovation Ohio, notes that Ohio’s Republicans are scurrying to denounce ECOT, which is now a criminal investigation. Some are even returning campaigning contributions. How did ECOT manage to survive for nearly 20 years while providing a low-quality education and receiving $1 billion from the state?

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Equity and Adequacy Coalition said in a post today that the owner of for-profit ECOT was very generous in distributing campaign contributions to influential officials. He wrote: The ECOT Man really covered all the bases when doling out campaign funds-county prosecutor, legislators, party caucuses, governors, attorney generals, secretaries of state, state treasurers, supreme court justices and probably other office holders. The money doled out came from tax dollars that should have been used to educate students.

Some Republicans are trying to blame Democrats too, since there was a Democratic governor in 2009. But Dyer points out that Governor Ted Strickland tried to slash the appropriations for e-schools by 70%, and Republicans threatened to block the entire state budget unless the cut was restored.

It’s very simple. Gov. Strickland’s budget that year called for a 70 percent cut for Ohio eSchools. That’s right. If Gov. Strickland’s budget had passed unamended, ECOT funding would have been cut by 70 percent, effectively ending the school 10 years before it actually shut down, which would have saved Ohio taxpayers about $700 million that went to the school since then. Not to mention the lives of thousands of students ECOT failed to graduate.

By the way, of the 3,794 students who actually did graduate ECOT the first year of the 2009 budget, only 109 have college degrees today. Just by way of reference.

However, Ohio Republicans still controlled the Senate during the 2009 budget. I was in those budget negotiations and I can tell you that we were told in no uncertain terms that if the 70 percent cuts stayed in the budget, there would be no budget for the 2009 session — severely crippling Ohio’s potential economic recovery from the Great Recession.

When Dyer ran for re-election, he was targeted for defeat by a group that included ECOT.

The Republicans own this scandalous waste of taxpayer dollars. They should be held accountable.

Good riddance to bad rubbish!

Categories Accountability, Fraud, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools
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