Archives for category: Virtual Charter Schools
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Pennsylvania: Court Dismisses Cyber Charter’s Claims Against 6 Parents Who Accurately Accused It of Fraud

By dianeravitch
June 28, 2016 //
15

This is one of the strangest stories of the week or year. Back in 2008, a group of parents at the Agora Cyber Charter school in Pennsylvania began questioning the financial affairs of the corporation that owned it. Agora was paying rent and management fees to another company, the Cynwyd Group, which June Brown, the founder of Agora, also owned.

In January 2009, the owners of Agora filed suit against the parents:

As parents tried to gather records and sort out the business relationships at Agora, they circulated emails expressing their concerns. They also complained to the state Education Department when the school did not provide information they requested.

In the suit filed in January 2009, Brown and Cynwyd Group charged that the parents had made statements that defamed and libeled Brown.

The complaint also alleged that the parents’ group had tried to interfere with Cynwyd’s contractual relationship with Agora “by spreading untruths about Dr. Brown and by implying that she had improperly used public funds.”

Brown and Cynwyd sought more than $150,000 in damages from the six parents for libel, slander, and civil conspiracy.

The parents denied the allegations and said they had merely sought information about the taxpayer-funded school their children attended.

Brown said the parents had defamed her and she had to defend her reputation. The parents had trouble paying for legal representation.

The suit dragged on, but in 2012, “federal grand jurors indicted Brown and charged her with defrauding Agora and her other charters of $6.7 million.”

The case against the parents remained active, to be addressed after the conclusion of the criminal trial. Brown’s criminal trial ended in a hung jury in 2014, and a retrial was canceled in 2015 after Brown’s lawyer said that she suffered from dementia. So, she escaped legal action, kept the money, but the parents were in limbo, still facing the charges of defamation that Brown had lodged against them.

Earlier this month, the charges were dismissed. The parents were relieved. One had used the family’s mortgage payment to pay a lawyer and lost her home fighting the lawsuit.

It does seem unjust that the parents were dragged through legal proceedings for more than seven years, accused of defaming Brown, even while she was under federal indictment for defrauding her charters of millions of dollars.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, For-Profit, Fraud, Parents, Pennsylvania, Virtual Charter Schools

Peter Greene: When Charters Fight Charters, Grab Your Popcorn

By dianeravitch
June 20, 2016 //
10

The charter industry is split by an internal quarrel between the brick-and-mortar charters and the virtual charters.

Report after report has concluded that the virtual charters do not live up to their claims. The latest–from CREDO at Stanford–found that students in virtual charters lost a year of math instruction for every year in the virtual charter, and nearly half a year of reading. What do you call a school where no one learns anything? A failure.

Peter Greene writes here about the charter vs. charter dust-up.

Here is a news story about the battle between the traditional charters that have buildings and their Ponzi cousins.

Since elected officials are unwilling to clean up the mess in the charter industry, will self-regulation work? I wouldn’t bet on it.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, Virtual Charter Schools

Peter Greene on Jeb Bush’s Stale Vision to Disrupt, Privatize, and Monetize Public Education

By dianeravitch
June 14, 2016 //
21

Jeb is back, writes Peter Greene, with the same old snake oil. Having lost the GOP presidential nomination, he has returned to his favorite song: Public education is failing, and we (the reformers) need to disrupt it, monetize it, privatize it, and sell lots of technology to it.

As Peter shows, there is nothing new in what he has on offer. The same overworked and faulty statistics about massive educational failure (we would now be a fourth world nation if any of this baloney were true). The same claims about the wonders of technology. The same empty claims for privatization and profiteering. Merit pay. No unions. Test scores as the be-all and end-all of education.

Peter writes:

Jeb loves him some vouchers. In his perfect future, the money will follow the child. I always think this is a bold choice for a nominal conservative politician, since it is literally taxation without representation– taxpayers who don’t have kids get to pay for schools, but they have no voice in what kind of schools they get. And if the money follows the kid, why can’t the kid just have a big party?

But I have to take my hat off to somebody who still believes in vouchers. It’s the kind of devotion you usually find only in members of the Flat Earth Society, an adherence to a long-debunked belief that doesn’t have a speck of evidence to support it.

Float Free as a Bird

But why have a school at all, says Bush. Why not just get your AP Calculus from this on-line provider, and get your English from some other provider. Watch for the Amazon.com of homeschooling. Let students move through coursework at their own personal speed. Assess student mastery of skills through the year, and never social promote. Yes, we’ll have Competency Based Education, but we’ll call it something else.

Jeb’s answer to everything: get rid of public education.

Jeb Bush is the Ivan Illich of the right.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Online Learning, Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

California Legislator Files Bill to Ban For-Profit Operators of Virtual Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
June 12, 2016 //
12

Thank you, Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, for writing a bill to ban for-profit operators of virtual schools.

The bill, Assembly Bill 1084, “would prevent charter schools that do more than 80 percent of their teaching online from being operated by for-profit companies or hiring them to facilitate instruction. If passed and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, the legislation would effectively put companies like K12 out of business in the Golden State.

“Our taxpayer dollars should be spent in the classroom to help our students, not used to enrich a company’s shareholders or drive up its profits,” Bonilla said in an interview.

But K12 spokesman Mike Kraft railed against the proposal, calling it “another cynical effort to take away the rights of parents to choose the way their kids are educated.”

How cynical are those “special interests” who want to take away K12 Inc.’s ability to profit while providing inferior education!?

That company is K12 Inc., a publicly traded Virginia firm that allows students who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged onto its software to be counted as “present,” as it reaps tens of millions of dollars annually in state funding while graduating fewer than half of its high school students. Students who live almost anywhere south of Humboldt County may sign up for one of the company’s schools.

Assemblywoman Bonilla was acting in response to a brilliant series of articles by Jessica Calefati in the San Jose Mercury News, exposing the profitable but educationally bankrupt K12 Inc., the corporation founded by the Milken brothers and publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

I hope Assemblywoman Bonilla and the media will review the abundant research on K12 Inc, such as the Credo study or the NEPC study. What she will learn is that students in online charter schools lose ground and fall behind their peers in real schools.

If California chooses to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on bad schools to enrich the stockholders and the Milken family, shame on the legislators and the governor.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio Outrage: GOP Leader Celebrates Wor$t School in State

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2016 //
30

The New York Times wrote a front-page expose of ECOT only weeks ago. The online charter school has an on-time graduation rate of 20%. Students get credit for “participation” if they log in for only one minute. It is very profitable for its owner, William Lager. Despite its dismal results, the Republican speaker of the House was its graduation spoke at its graduation ceremonies. William Lager is the state’s biggest donor to Republican politicians. They have been good to him in return. He has been awarded nearly $900 million in public funds for his low-performing e-school since 2002. Pending in the legislature is a bill to regulate ECOT and similar institutions just a little bit. The chances of its passage are slim to none. Lager is a very generous man.

From 2000-2013, Lager has donated $1.4 million to Republican politicians in Ohio. Of course, he has given more since then.

This is what ECOT–the state’s lowest performing school–has received from the legislature (data supplied by Bill Phillis, former deputy state commissioner of education and now retired and relentless watchdog of education spending):

2004
$28,768,914.97

2005
$38,139,918.73

2006
$39,762,863.11

2007
$44,540,366.08

2008
$50,475,630.27

2009
$57,233,338.72

2010
$59,990,773.55

2011
$67,510,732.17

2012
$78,850,259.14

2013
$88,358,002.78

2014
$99,180,328.91

2015
$104,380,709.86

2016
$107,517,808.16

total
$864,709,646.45

How cool is that? He gives $1.4 million to politicians, and he gets $864 million to run a school with a graduation rate of 20%, with no accountability or transparency. Now that is what you call a terrific “return on investment”!

Here is the latest from Bill Phillis of the Ohio Equity and Adequacy Coalition:


A post on the Facebook page of the chairman of the House Education Committee, Andrew Brenner

“I attended the ECOT graduation today. Cliff Rosenberger was the keynote speaker. It was impressive.”

Bill Lager, the ECOT man, certainly knows how to gain the favor of state officials. The June 5 ECOT graduation speaker was Cliff Rosenberger, the Speaker of the House. Senator Coley introduced the speaker. Senator Coley is on the Senate Finance Committee where SB 298 was blocked from passage this spring. This bill requires online charters to verify they are serving the students for which they receive funding.

The ECOT graduation ceremony VIP lineup probably sealed the doom of SB 298 [the bill to require charter school transparency].

Former governors, even Jeb Bush, state superintendents and other state officials have graced the stage of previous ECOT graduation ceremonies.

The Plunderbund article of June 6 provides some startling insights into the ECOT industry. This article should create a sense of urgency in the public education community.

Is there no no in the Ohio legislature who can stop this waste of taxpayer dollars?

Does anyone care?

William Phillis

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

California: State Superintendent Orders Audit of Low-Performing K12 Virtual Charter School

By dianeravitch
June 2, 2016 //
9

Jessica Calefati wrote a blistering series about Michael Milken’s K12 Inc. virtual charter school in California (called California Virtual Academy or CAVA) a few weeks ago. The series caused enough of a stir to persuade State Superintendent Tom Torklakson to order a state audit of CAVA.

Calefati reported that less than half the students at CAVA graduate, and none is qualified to attend a California public university.

The virtual charter industry is noted for high profits and poor performance. Student attrition is high, test scores and graduation rates are low. But profits are excellent, because the “school” receives full state tuition but has none of the expenses of a brick and mortar school. No grounds, no transportation, no custodian, no food services, no library, no support staff, no athletics. And classes that range from 40-more than 100 in number. As Calefati reported in the original series, students may get credit for attendance if they are online only one minute a day. The latest CREDO study found that for every 180 days enrolled in a virtual charter, students lose 180 days of instruction in math and 72 in reading. This is a lose-lose.

It is heartening to see state officials taking action to curb the fraud that runs rampant through its charter industry, unsupervised, unregulated, and unchecked.

Calefati writes:

In a rare move, California’s top education official has enlisted the state’s highest-ranking accountant to conduct a sweeping audit of California Virtual Academies, a profitable but low-performing network of online charter schools that enrolls about 15,000 students across the state.

The audit is the first that Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Torlakson has asked the state controller’s Office to conduct since he took office in 2011. The request comes two months after this newspaper published an investigative series on K12 Inc., the publicly traded Virginia firm that operates the schools and reaps tens of millions of dollars annually in state funding.

In a statement Thursday, Torlakson said he has a duty to ensure that public money isn’t being squandered and sought the probe into the California Virtual Academies because of “serious questions raised about a number of their practices.” He said the audit would examine the relationship between the schools and the company and the “validity” of attendance, enrollment, dropout and graduation rates reported by the academies to the state.

This isn’t the first time the company has come under fire in recent weeks.

Torlakson’s request follows lawmakers’ calls last month for the state auditor to examine for-profit charter schools operations and Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla’s introduction earlier this month of legislation that would prohibit online charters from hiring for-profit companies like K12 for management or instructional services. The company is also being probed by Attorney General Kamala Harris, who launched an investigation of online charter schools last fall.

If Controller Betty Yee finds evidence of gross financial mismanagement, illegal or improper use of public money, a disregard for sound educational practices or repeated failure to improve student test scores the state Board of Education, may — based on a recommendation from Torlakson — vote to revoke the schools’ charters.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, K12 Inc., Privatization, Virtual Charter Schools

Ohio: State Investigates Online Charter Schools: Better Late than Never

By dianeravitch
May 28, 2016 //
9

The Ohio Department of Education under John Kasich has not been known for vigilance when it comes to the virtual charter school industry. However, increased media attention to Ohio’s pockmarked charter sector has caused the state to look into its underperforming and highly profitable virtual charters.

 

What they discovered was ugly. Inflated enrollments. Lack of evidence that students participate in instruction for the required 5 hours a day. An industry that profits while students fail.

 

The investigation focused on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), owned by one of the state’s major contributors to Republican campaigns. William Lager has received nearly $1 billion in public funds since 2002. The money to pay for a failing online school was taken from Ohio’s public schools.

 

The New York Times wrote about ECOT a few days ago and pointed out that the online school has the largest proportion of students who fail to graduate of any high school in the nation. Only 20% finish on time.

 

Actually, it is worse than it appears. Stephen Dyer noted that ECOT accounts for 5% of the graduates in the state, but it accounts for more of the students who fail to graduate from high school than all the state’s districts combined!

 

This is a failing school! It should be closed.

 

The state may revise a regulation or two. Don’t expect anything dramatic, like shutting down the state’s lowest performing school, or basing pay on performance. That’s for public schools, not Ponzi schemes that contribute to Kasich and friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, High School Graduation, Ohio, Virtual Charter Schools

New York Times: Online Charter Schools Are Failures

By dianeravitch
May 19, 2016 //
16

Motoko Rich writes in the New York Times about the terrible results obtained by online charter schools. She focuses on the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, whose founder has become very wealthy thanks to taxpayer money and the friendship of reformers such as Governor JohnKasich and the GOP legislators in Ohio. Founder William Lager has been very generous to his friends who hold elected office.

 

A terrific business. A lousy education.

 

Five years ago, the New York Times ran a superb expose of online charters, pointing out that they are very profitable but basically scams that rip off taxpayers.

 

In 2011, the Washington Post published an excellent expose of Michael Milken’s K12 Inc, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

 

 

For-profit virtual charter corporations are a cynical business that exploits children and does not have educate them. It demands full state tuition to provide home schooling plus a “teacher” on a monitor.

 

I wrote about the online charter fraud in my 2013 book “Reign of Error.”

 

Numerous studies have concluded that these schools have startlingly high attrition rates, large “class” sizes, low wages, high teacher turnover, and their students very little.

 

The latest study, by CREDO, found that students lost 180 days of instruction in math for every year of 180 days in a virtual charter.

 

Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy wrote about today’s article in the Times and pointed out that ECOT has received nearly $1 billion in public funding since 2002.

 

Frankly, these fake schools should be investigated by authorities, monitored, and limited to students who are unable to attend school. They should exist only as public institutions, not profit-making corporations.

Categories Education Reform, Failure, Fraud, Virtual Charter Schools

Four New Members Join “Chiefs for Change” to Promote Charters and Vouchers

By dianeravitch
May 9, 2016 //
15

Four new members joined the “Chiefs for Change,” which was established by Jeb Bush to promote school choice, charters, vouchers, online charter schools, the Common Core, and high-stakes testing. School choice has been shown to promote segregation, but that probably will not be a topic of discussion at the next meeting or any future meeting. Nor is there likely to be much attention to the many reports about the poor results obtained by virtual charters. Perhaps they might discuss the continuing lack of any evidence for the success of vouchers. Or the many charters that are low-performing and how they should be held accountable.

 

The new members include Carey Wright, state superintendent of Mississippi; Malika Anderson, Superintendent of the Achievement School District in Tennessee; Steve Canavero, Superintendent of Public Instruction in Nevada; and Lewis D. Ferebee, Superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chiefs for Change, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization, Segregation, Testing, Virtual Charter Schools, Vouchers

What Should Be Done About Failing Virtual Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
May 1, 2016 //
6

Gary Miron and Charisse Gulosino have prepared a guide and analysis of the growing online cyber schooling sector.

Nearly 300,000 students are enrolled in these schools. Their performance is unimpressive, decisively worse than public schools. Their graduation rates are abysmal. Yet they are profitable, which means their owners will continue to seek a greater market share.

The authors recognize that this secor produces inferior education.

What is to be done? I would say that these schools should not be allowed to operate for profit. They should not be allowed to advertise for customers. they should be closed if they are bad schools. That would be a start.

The authors recommend that policymakers should slow or stop
the growth of these schools. They should be closely monitored and sanctioned when they fail. They should be required to devote more resources to instruction and limit class sizes.

“

Categories On-Line Education, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools
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