Archives for category: Virtual Charter Schools
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Is School Choice Good for Kids? A Debate Between an Expert and an Ideologue

By dianeravitch
September 17, 2017 //
16

Samuel Abrams, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, is a hardy soul. He agreed to debate Bob Bowdon, film-maker, pundit, and hater of all things public, in a debate sponsored by the libertarian publication Reason. The debate took place in July but it remains relevant.

Sam taught for many years in the New York City public schools, then wrote his academic thesis on the Edison Project, which grew into a book about for-profit education ventures called Education and the Commercial Mindset, published by Harvard University Press. The book is thoughtful, well-documented, and scholarly.

Bob Bowdon is a film-maker who made a name for himself as someone who despises public schools, teachers, and unions. He is a libertarian, and the crowd was with him from the start. Abrams was brave to go before a pro-choice crowd, and he won some of them over to the idea that there is actually something called the common good.

Bowdon, needless to say, is unfamiliar with the research about vouchers, and is unaware of research from Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and D.C. showing that students who take vouchers lose ground as compared to their peers who stay in public schools.

Here is a transcript of the debate.

Categories Charter Schools, Privatization, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

Bill Phillis: Ohio Allows ECOT to Spend $33 Million on Ads, Lobbying, Lawsuits, and Profits

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2017 //
11

Bill Phillis, watchdog extraordinaire for Ohio, reports that the state of Ohio has allowed the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) to use public money in its public relations blitz to avoid accountability for inflation of enrollment and the state’s efforts to claw back more than $60 million. ECOT is notable for having the lowest graduation rate of any high school in the nation, as well as dubious quality standards. Its founder is a major contributor to elected officials. In return, he has collected many millions of dollars of profit.

Bill Phillis writes:

“ECOT has spent $33 million on ads, lobbyists, profits and lawsuits
since January 2016

“According to a September 3 Columbus Dispatch article, ECOT has spent $33 million on TV ads, lobbyists, lawsuits and William Lager’s for-profit companies since January 2016, all in pursuit of gaining state approval to continue to count students that are not participating.

“Over 400 school buses could have been purchased with the $33 million ECOT has spent recklessly. While Ohio students ride on worn-out buses, the ECOT Man spent money extracted from school districts to rev-up his tax-consuming machine.

“It is amazing that public officials have tolerated payments to ECOT’s for students not participating during a span of 15 years. Now that ECOT has finally been audited and exposed, this business is in the process of submitting a plan to transition to the totally unregulated dropout recovery charter scheme.

“Will state officials allow this duplicity to proceed? This will be an ethical and moral test for state officials and the Ohio Department of Education.”

You can contact Bill Phillis or join his organization at:

William L. Phillis
Ohio Coalition for Equity & Adequacy of School Funding
614.228.6540
ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net
http://www.ohiocoalition.org

Categories Failure, For-Profit, Ohio, Online Education, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio: ECOT Finds Another Profitable Gig

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2017 //
7

Peter Greene reports that ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) has found a way to escape its current woes and keep on collecting state money.

Having attracted the ire of the state for inflating enrollment, having lost its court battle to hang on to its profits for producing low-quality education, having been labeled the school with the lowest graduation rate in the nation, what’s an entrepreneur to do?

Go into the business of dropout recovery!

What a clever idea: First you create the dropouts, then you remediate them. Or claim to.

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

Ohio: Another Virtual Charter School Bilked Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2017 //
9

The Virtual Community School in Ohio won’t open this year. It must First sort out how much it must pay the state for overstating its past enrollment. It owes millions. This is the kind of “school” that Betsy DeVos is promoting.

http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170814/online-charter-virtual-community-school-ordered-to-pay-back-millions

“Virtual Community School of Ohio has announced it won’t open as scheduled Tuesday for the upcoming school year. On the school’s Facebook page, parents were told they should consider enrolling in another school for the upcoming year.

“During an emergency meeting July 31, the VCS board agreed to a “temporary suspension by our sponsor while a financial investigation is conducted,” according to a notice on the school’s website. At that time, its sponsor was the Reynoldsburg School District, which created VCS in 2001 with the help of a former ECOT administrator.

“VCS had billed the state for an attendance of 835 students for the 2015-16 school year; a department audit of student attendance found that should be reduced to 280 students. Based on that, the school would have to repay about $4.2 million of the $6.33 million it was paid that year. The state found VCS, like ECOT, couldn’t document how much time students were participating in classwork.”

Categories Education Reform, Ohio, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio: Close Down This Phony “School”!

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2017 //
19

What would you say about a school that had the lowest graduation rate in the nation? What would you say about a school whose owner made millions of dollars from taxpayers while making regular contributions to state legislators and other elected officials? What should happen if that same school was audited by the state and found to have inflated the number of students? What should happen if the auditor determined that the school overcharged the state by $60 million and refuses to repay it? What if the school goes to court to fight the repayment and loses, using taxpayer dollars to advertise its cause?

The Columbus Dispatch reported here on the origins of this lucrative scam.

What should be the consequences for this massive ripoff of students and the public?

The state is allowing it to remain open, continue recruiting students, and pay off its debt a little at a time.

Why is this school still allowed to operate?

If it were a public school, it would have been closed long ago for its poor performance and its defrauding of the taxpayers.

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

Stephen Dyer: Weep Not for ECOT! Its Profits Are Secure

By dianeravitch
July 26, 2017 //
5

Stephen Dyer writes from Ohio about the unfolding saga of ECOT, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow.

http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2017/07/even-with-layoffs-ecot-will-make-killing.html?m=1

It was recently ordered by a state court to return $60 million that it had charged for educating students who never logged on. ECOT complained bitterly, but the state audit showed that its enrollment figures were inflated.

ECOT is owned by William Lager, who has donated millions of dollars to elected officials over the years and received special treatment. He has collected hundreds of millions of dollars to run a virtual K-12 school with the lowest graduation rate in the nation. He thought that his generosity to politicians would protect him from accountability from abysmal results, but it hasn’t.

Lager took out ads (at taxpayer expense) to warn that he might have to lay off 350 employees if the state forced him to return a portion of his revenues. It would “hurt the children.”

The state is willing to allow him to pay his debt at $2.5 million a month for two years.

Boo hoo!

Dyer says she’d no tears for Lager. He will still clear at least 30% on his investment, probably more. He will still make a killing.

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

National Education Policy Center: New Research on Virtual Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2017 //
3

The National Education Policy Center has released new research on virtual charter schools that shows variation among those in different states, though all have poor academic results:

Key Takeaway: Case studies from the Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute suggest that policymakers should prioritize understanding and improving virtual school performance before permitting further growth

Press Release: http://nepc.info/node/8721

Contact:
NEPC: William J. Mathis: (802) 383-0058, wmathis@sover.net
MVLRI Report – Research: Michael K. Barbour: (203) 997-6330, mkbarbour@gmail.com
MVLRI Report – Performance: Gary Miron: (269) 599-7965, gary.miron@wmich.edu
MVLRI Report – Policy: Luis Huerta: (212) 678-4199, huerta@tc.columbia.edu

BOULDER, CO (June 27, 2017) – Over the past five years, the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) has produced an annual report called Virtual Schools in the U.S.: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence. These reports provide an impartial analysis of the evolution of full-time, publicly funded K-12 virtual and blended schools by examining the policy issues raised by available evidence. They also assess the research evidence that bears on K-12 virtual teaching and learning, and they analyze the growth and performance of such virtual and blended schools.

Building on the April release of the Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2017 report, the lead researchers have engaged with the Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute (MVLRI) to use the data set to undertake a more in-depth analysis of five states: Ohio, Wisconsin, Idaho, Washington, and Michigan. The MVLRI published that work today.

These case studies describe the enrollment, characteristics, and performance of virtual and blended schools in each state over the previous year. They also examine the research related to the virtual and blended school characteristics and outcomes, as well as the legislative activities. And they consider the legislation and policies that have been introduced (and enacted) over the past two years.

Based on a national data set, the April NEPC Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2017 report included two key findings: (1) that the growth of full-time virtual schools was fueled, in part, by policies expanding school choice, and (2) that this growth is seen most among the for-profit education management organizations (EMOs) that dominate this sector. All five states follow these national trends. Also, and again consistent with national trends, students that attend the virtual schools in these five states tended to perform quite poorly compared to their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

At the same time, these case studies revealed that the enrollment demographics in each of these states did vary from the national trends. For example, Ohio and Michigan brick-and-mortar schools and virtual schools enrolled similar proportions of White students and students of color (bucking the national trend which found that the majority of students attending virtual charter schools were White), while Idaho and Michigan enrolled higher proportions of free and reduced lunch students (which was the opposite to the national average). Another distinction highlighted by the case studies is that one of the states – Michigan – has seen considerable research into the actual practice of K-12 online learning, and this evidence-based approach appears to be paying off for the Michigan Virtual School.

Find Virtual Schools in the U.S.: Case Studies of Policy, Performance, and Research Evidence, by Michael K. Barbour, Luis Huerta, and Gary Miron, at:

Click to access VSCase-17.pdf

This report was published and funded by the Michigan Virtual Learning Research Institute: https://mvlri.org/

Categories Resistance, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio: State Auditor Reprimands ECOT for Using Public Money to Lobby Against Penalty of $60 Million

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2017 //
11

ECOT is the largest virtual charter school in Ohio and among the lowest-performing schools in the state. It has thrived over the years because its founder, William Lager, has given generously to elected officials. The New York Times reported last year that ECOT had the largest graduating class in the nation, but also the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, an online charter school based here, graduated 2,371 students last spring. At the commencement ceremony, a student speaker triumphantly told her classmates that the group was “the single-largest graduating high school class in the nation.”

What she did not say was this: Despite the huge number of graduates — this year, the school is on track to graduate 2,300 — more students drop out of the Electronic Classroom or fail to finish high school within four years than at any other school in the country, according to federal data. For every 100 students who graduate on time, 80 do not.

Virtual online charters, said the Times, are the new “dropout factories.”

Having abysmal results was not enough to cause a problem for ECOT. If it were a brick and mortar public school, it would have been closed down.

What caused a problem was that the state audited ECOT’s attendance and found that a substantial number of students were phantom. They either did not exist, never logged on, or logged on for a minute or two.

The state sued ECOT, and won a decision that ECOT owed the state $60 million for inflated attendance numbers. ECOT maintains that the state has no right to audit their numbers. Ha.

Now ECOT is flooding the TV space with heartrending advertisements about how the state is picking on the school. And, here is a true demonstration of chutzpah: ECOT is using taxpayer money to pay for the ads defending its right to avoid auditing.

State Auditor Dave Yost has called out ECOT for its audacity. Yost has ordered ECOT to stop using taxpayer dollars to attack the court’s order to repay the state $60.4 million.

Ohio Auditor Dave Yost has ordered ECOT to stop using taxpayers dollars on television ads attacking the state Department of Education’s decision to seek repayment of $60.4 million, saying the commercials are not proper expenditures “and are impermissible.”

In a letter to the giant online charter dated Friday, Yost said he was writing ECOT “to demand that you act without delay to cease and desist the expenditure of public funds” being used for ads.

ECOT has not yet responded, but it is maneuvering in the Legislature to get the debt deferred until it has time for more appeals.

In the latest ad, signed at the end by “Ohio’s children,” a former ECOT student says: “The Ohio Department of Education wants to end school choice and stop parents from deciding what’s best for their children. That’s why I and the over 36,000 students and alumni of ECOT are hoping our elected leaders fix what’s broken and save our school.”

Thank you, Auditor Yost, for upholding the law and requiring accountability even from a big campaign contributor!

As for ECOT, its results speak for themselves: Close it down.

Categories For-Profit, Fraud, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio: ECOT Uses Taxpayer $$ to Fight Accountability

By dianeravitch
June 25, 2017 //
24

The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) has collected hundreds of millions of dollars from Ohio taxpayers to pay for online schooling st home. The owner of ECOT makes large campaign gifts to legislators. The “school” delivers low-level instruction and gets terrible results. High attrition, low test scores, and (according to the New York Times) the lowest high school graduation rate in the nation.

Incredibly, the Ohio Department of Education audited ECOT and found that its enrollment numbers are vastly inflated. The state ordered ECOT to refund $60 million.

ECOT went to court to challenge the state’s right to demand accountability. ECOT lost. ECOT announced layoffs.

Now ECOT is blitzing the state with TV ads to protest the state’s efforts to recover the$60 million in overcharges.

http://www.dispatch.com/news/20170624/ecot-continues-tax-funded-ad-blitz-despite-layoff-announcement

This is the definition of chutzpah.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Fraud, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools

South Carolina: Taxpayers Waste $350 Million on Failing Virtual Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
June 19, 2017 //
8

Legislators in South Carolina must have been following an ALEC script when they authorized Virtual charter schools to enroll students and take money away from their underfunded public schoools. Or maybe they were paid off by lobbyists. There is certainly massive evidence, even from charter advocates, that virtual charters get terrible results. Yet no matter how much they fail, they are never closed or held accountable.

Consider this report in the “Post & Courier” in South Carolina:

“Online charter schools have grown exponentially across South Carolina and the nation — and questions about their effectiveness are growing, too.

“Today, the state has five virtual charter schools that together enroll roughly 10,000 students, up dramatically from about 2,100 students nine years ago when the state’s first cyber schools opened. A 2007 bipartisan bill fueled their growth by authorizing the state’s virtual schools program, and since then, taxpayers have footed the bill to the tune of more than $350 million.

“Despite this hefty investment, online charter schools have produced dismal results on almost all academic metrics, according to state and district data. On average, less than half of their students graduate on time. At one cyber school, nearly a third of students dropped out last school year. Data from the S.C Public Charter School District, which oversees these schools, shows just one in two virtual students enroll for a full year.

“Supporters of online education, including U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, praise virtual schools for their flexibility, innovation and reach. For struggling, home-bound or bullied students, advocates argue, these schools are lifelines.

“But critics contend state taxpayers have spent tens of millions of dollars lining the pockets of the for-profit companies that manage these schools at the expense of their flailing students.

“It concerns me,” said Don McLaurin, chairman of the S.C. Public Charter School District Board of Trustees. “Right now, for a variety of reasons, the virtuals are having performance problems, at least some of them. … We may have more than we need.”

The online charters have a graduation rate of 42%, compared to the state rate of 82.6% for public schools.

But, says DeVos, we need more failing virtual charters because parents choose them.

Categories Scandals Fraud and Hoaxes, South Carolina, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools
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