Ohio Legislators Fail—So Far—to Block Investigation of Notorious Online Charter Schools
Ohio is a state with huge Republican majorities—protected by gerrymandering—in both houses of the legislature, a Republican governor and an elected Republican supreme court. Few elections in the next few years will be contested; everybody is very safe. Hence there are virtually no checks and balances.
Despite all this, the state has been moving by millimeters toward at least the most minimal regulation of an out-of-control charter school sector. Most notably there has come a realization that the notorious online charter school magnates—people who have been buying the legislature for years—must somehow be stopped. This is partly due to the relentless daily e-mail blasts from Bill Phillis, the former assistant state superintendent who led the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding to bring the school funding case,DeRolph v. Ohio, and win four times at the Ohio Supreme Court. And it is because Ohio’s major newspapers have refused to let this issue go—Patrick O’Donnell, the Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s education reporter and Jim Siegel and Catherine Candisky at the Columbus Dispatch—along with the editorial boards at the Plain Dealer, the Dispatch, the Akron Beacon-Journal and other papers.
Brent Larkin, the Plain Dealer‘s editorial director from 1991 until he retired in 2009, writes a Sunday column in which for a year he has been eviscerating the legislature for sending hundreds of millions of dollars to unscrupulous charter school entrepreneurs and thereby robbing the state’s public schools and our children. Larkin did it again on Sunday:
“The biggest scandal in Ohio history is knocking on the Statehouse door… It’s about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars a year down a rat hole and selling out tens of thousands of children. Every penny of this massive waste of money would come straight from your pocket. Every child who would get kicked in the teeth might as well be your neighbor. The villains who want to perpetuate this swindle are the Republicans who run the Ohio General Assembly.”
Here is what’s been happening recently as Bill Lager, operator of the notorious Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) and his lobbyist Neil Clark have tried to pull every string to keep the Ohio Department of Education from auditing the 15,000-student school for what seem to be serious problems with its reporting of student attendance. In a preliminary audit this spring, the state’s Department of Education discovered that ECOT’s students were logging on to their computers for an average of only an hour a day, even though the state has been paying the online school for 15,000 full time students. (This blog has covered the long-running ECOT scandal here.) The legislature passed a new law last winter that would penalize the agencies that sponsor charter schools when these authorizers neglect their oversight responsibilities, but ECOT and its attorneys have filed a lawsuit to block increased state oversight of the e-schools and their sponsors. In late August at a legislative committee hearing, legislators friendly to ECOT—contending that the Department of Education has tried to use a new law retroactively—blocked a rule that would allow the Department’s investigation of attendance records to move forward.
Jim Siegel of the Columbus Dispatch quotes Rep. Greta Johnson, D-Akron, as she responded to the committee’s action to delay oversight of the notorious e-schools: “This is a clear case of Ohio Legislators Fail—So Far—to Block Investigation of Notorious Online Charter Schools | janresseger:
