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Ohio: Four Radioactive Politicians Who Helped ECOT Milk $1 Billion from Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2018 //
7

Denis Smith writes here about four elected officials, now standing for re-election, who stood by and watched (or helped) the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) as it drained money from the state’s public schools and its taxpayers. $1 billion since 2000!

If you vote in Ohio, watch out for these four:

As damaging as the charter school’s implosion was on the viability of Republican pols, the corresponding explosion ECOT’s demise is causing in state political circles continues to reverberate, particularly for four GOP ECOT stalwarts named Dave Yost, Mike DeWine, Keith Faber and Andrew Brenner.

They are not your friends. They are not friends of public education. They are not stewards of the public trust and treasury.

Rep. Keith Faber is the first case in point. [When the subject is term-limits and running yet again for some other office, you might want to get a scorecard to follow the runs, hits, and mostly errors of this Republican team.] The former Senate president and now House member is currently running for Auditor, seeking to replace current Auditor Dave Yost, who is, you guessed it, term-limited and running for Attorney General.

Faber’s way to brush off the radioactive fallout is to distribute more than $36,000 collected from ECOT to “high quality” charter schools.

Based upon past history, that’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?

Then comes Mike DeWine, a candidate for governor:

Then there’s the curious case of Mike DeWine. The term-limited Attorney General, who is now running for Governor, has decided to go after ECOT founder William Lager, his companies, and several others in high ECOT circles, including its former superintendent, treasurer, and accounting administrator.

Voodoo economics begets voodoo public policy begets voodoo charter schools begets voodoo accounting.

In DeWine’s case, his lawsuit seeks to recover from the ECOT hierarchy a portion of the $62 million ECOT is accused of over-billing the state in voodoo student attendance data.

Worst of all is Andrew Brenner, who called public schools “socialism.”

The third usual GOP suspect is House Education Committee Chair Andrew Brenner who is, you guessed it, term-limited and running for the Senate. Brenner has apparently learned the use of pejoratives from his idol, Donald Trump, the undisputed king for crafting pejoratives as a tactic to demean opponents.

Louise Valentine, Brenner’s Democratic challenger for the Senate seat asked in May if Brenner was considering returning the ECOT donations he’s received over the years. In his usual attack mode characterized by splitting hairs and deflecting the subject, Brenner said he never received any money directly from the school.

No, of course, Brenner didn’t get any money from ECOT. He got money from ECOT’s owner, William Lager!

His opponent calls him #ECOTAndy.

Last is the Auditor who claims to have brought ECOT to justice!

The final figure of the fast and furious foursome is Auditor Dave Yost who, like his colleagues memorialized here, served ECOT well as a commencement speaker, endorser, and proponent of the corrupt online charter school. In addition to scooping up more than $29,000 in campaign cash from ECOT, Yost is remembered for bestowing not just one but three awards for the school’s financial reporting.

According to a 2016 press release on the Auditor’s website, “The school’s excellent record keeping has qualified it for the Auditor of State Award with Distinction.”

There is something Orwellian in the fact that a public official offers praise for an entity which does not operate in the public interest, convenience, and necessity. Such an award demonstrates once again that voodoo economics begets voodoo public policy begets voodoo charter schools which begets voodoo accounting. Which begets an Auditor’s Award for Voodoo Accounting. With Distinction, no less.

Wow. You can’t make that one up.

Vote. Sweep out the scoundrels who stood by and applauded the raid on the state’s treasury.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization

Bill Phillis: Those Poor, Poor, and Very Few Bad For-Profit Charters in Ohio

By dianeravitch
August 23, 2018 //
5

Bill Phillis, retired for many years as deputy state superintendent of education in Ohio and now the state’s most outspoken critic of charter fraud, writes on his blog about the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s lame defense of for-profit charters:

“The myth of Ohio’s ‘for-profit’ charter school system”: A Fordham Institute’s damage control effort

An August 20 Fordham article suggests the charter industry is getting a bad rap because of the cronyism of a few charter operators. The article also attempts to justify the use of for-profit management companies by charter schools.

The notion proffered is that ECOT and the White Hat Management Company are the only bad actors in the charter industry. What about the 250 or so charter schools that took state and federal money and closed or never opened leaving kids in an education lurch? What about the other charter operations that have been reported as fostering gross irregularities, such as the Gulen charters, but not appropriately investigated by state officials? What about the Imagine Schools Inc. charter school chain that requires the charter schools to pay absurdly high rent to a real estate company allied with Imagine?

Corruption in the charter industry in Ohio and elsewhere is not confined to just a few bad actors. The industry is rife with low performance, cronyism and corruption.

In the article, the author equates a charter board hiring a management company to operate its school to a school district purchasing buses, books, etc. from the private sector. An absurd stretch!

A management company that operates charter schools performs a governmental fiduciary function and thus should be subjected to the same accountability and transparency measures as school district officials. Bus and book companies don’t operate the schools to which they sell products.

The Ohio charter industry seems beyond repair but Fordham keeps defending it.

Be it noted that the NAACP report on charter schools not only called for a moratorium on them, but called for the elimination of all for-profit charters and the for-profit management organizations that manage charters.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Privatization

NEPC: What Does Research Say About LeBron’s New School in Akron?

By dianeravitch
August 21, 2018 //
25

The National Education Policy Center reviews plans for LeBron James’s new public school in Akron, Ohio.

Overall it gets good marks.

So are the approaches of I Promise in line with research? For the most part, yes: Practices such as providing additional resources, reducing class size, offering wraparound services like food pantries, extending learning time, and offering free college tuition to graduates are all associated with positive outcomes. But the school may face challenges in educating a large population of struggling students rather than creating heterogenous classes of children with higher and lower levels of performance. And the school’s STEM focus could end up shortchanging other important subjects such as social studies and the arts.

The school can tinker with its model. On the whole, what is most encouraging is that it is a good model for public education. No harsh disciplinary practices. A cap on class size. Wraparound services. Free college for those who persist. Extra supports where needed. Best of all, it was not created to put public education out of business, but to make it better.

The National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado Boul-der School of Education, produces and disseminates high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Visit us at: http://nepc.colorado.eduNEPC Resources on School Reform and Restructuringhttp://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/newsletter-LeBron3 of 3

Categories Class size, Innovation, Ohio, Supporting public schools

This is What Privatization Looks Like: Schools Bought and Sold

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2018 //
16

Why should taxpayers subsidize corporations that buy and sell schools to one another as one fails and the other picks up the offloaded franchise?

Vote them all out of office in November!

Reader Chiara wrote:

“By June of this year, White Hat’s once prolific presence in Ohio had shriveled to a single online school — Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy (OHDELA) — and 10 “Life Skills” centers, which deliver computer-based GED courses to academically faltering teens and young adults.

Virginia-based Accel Schools, which is amassing an education empire the likes of which hasn’t been seen since White Hat dominated the Ohio landscape, has bought out the contract for OHDELA.

Utah-based Fusion Education Group (FusionED) is taking over contracts for seven of the Life Skills centers, including the North Akron branch in a Chapel Hill storefront at 1458 Brittain Road.

Life Skills Northeast Ohio on Larchmere Boulevard in Cleveland has hired Oakmont Education LLC, a company associated with Cambridge Education Group. White Hat could find no buyer for the last two centers, which will close at 4600 Carnegie Ave. in Cleveland and 3405 Market St. in Youngstown.

Information on White Hat’s off-loading of assets came via the schools’ sponsors: the Ohio Council of Community Schools, which oversaw OHDELA and two Life Skills schools, and St. Aloysius Orphanage, a Cincinnati social service provider. ”

This is what privatization looks like. These schools are 100% taxpayer-funded yet they’re being bought and sold by private entities.

All they’re doing is replacing one garbage contractor with others.

Ohio needs to clean house of state-level politicians and get some new people in there.

This situation will not improve until we break the stranglehold these contractors and their lobbyists have on state government.

Old wine, new bottles.

https://www.ohio.com/akron/news/local/schools-out-for-white-hat-david-brennans-pioneering-for-profit-company-exits-ohio-charter-scene

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Failure, For-Profit, Ohio, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

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
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