Ohio’s “Dropout Recovery” Charters Increase State’s Dropout Rate, Swallow Tax Dollars
Doug Livingston, the education writer for the Akron Beacon Journal and Ohio’s top education journalist, recently reported on the financial scam at Ohio’s so-called “dropout recovery” charter schools. These are the on-line charters that say they are serving Ohio’s most vulnerable adolescents while in reality they are, according to Livingston, making enormous profits while driving up Ohio’s dropout rate at the same time other states are significantly increasing the rate of high school completion.
It is, of course, true that these schools cater to students in danger of dropping out, but because of the way the state reimburses such schools, there is massive profit to be made. In the first of his new series of articles Livingston explains that two-thirds of Ohio’s dropouts are from charter schools, the vast majority on-line academies that require students to sit in a cubicle with a computer for four hours a day.
In a table that accompanies his recent investigation, Livingston lists a dozen dropout-recovery charter schools with a graduation rate below 4 percent, two of them posting a 4-year graduation rate of zero percent. Seven of these schools are part of the Life Skills Academy network owned by politically connected David Brennan as part of his White Hat chain. In a second piece, Livingston reports: “For 15 years, White Hat and its programs for high school dropouts have cornered an education market saturated with struggling students who often bounce from school to school. White Hat’s model—what founder and owner David Brennan held up as the alternative to government schools’ failing ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach—has spread to every major city in Ohio.”
“Absenteeism tops the reasons why students drop out; charter schools continue to collect tax dollars for more than a month while they are gone.” “Administrators call it churning’ or ‘school hopping’—when student drop out, disappear for months and then return.” “The state counts a dropout as an event, not as a person. If one student drops out three times in one year, that is three dropouts. It happens, a lot.” The state requires that students who are absent or truant for more than 23 days be taken off school rolls, but during that 23 days, the state reimburses the school. Livingston explains: “There were more than 11,000 removals for Ohio’s “Dropout Recovery” Charters Increase State’s Dropout Rate, Swallow Tax Dollars | janresseger:
