Ohio’s Notorious E-Charters Evade Regulation: ECOT Saga Drags On and On and On
Ohio’s biggest charter school, the notorious e-school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), held a big rally in Columbus early this week. Rick Teeters, ECOT’s superintendent, told all the school’s teachers and students to show up, even though the rally happened in the middle of the school day. Maybe everybody was expected to go home afterwards and study online until midnight.
ECOT’s founder, William Lager, made an emotional speech bragging that his school has provided more choices for those who have few. Lager didn’t mention, of course, the hundreds of millions of tax dollars the school has been receiving year after year from the state on a per-student basis. Neither did he say anything about the $60 million from last year alone that the Ohio Department of Education says ECOT fraudulently charged the state for students who did not really attend school at ECOT last year. ECOT is trying to avoid paying back the money.
In Ohio, pretty much everybody knows that ECOT is a huge scam, but because Ohio is an all-Republican state without any checks and balances at all, and because William Lager keeps on contributing to the campaign coffers of members of the legislature, no strong law has been passed to stop the ripoff. And now, in the biennial budget bill the House passed on May 2, nobody will even claim the language that mysteriously appeared to undermine oversight of Ohio’s charter school sector.
Under enormous pressure from the press last year, the legislature did tighten the regulatory process to demand that the online academies must now provide documentation that students are at their computers doing 20 hours per week of work in order to be counted. ECOT has continued to maintain that it has, as the law has specified for years, been providing 920 hours of curriculum for its students each year. But, says ECOT, the state never asked for attendance Ohio’s Notorious E-Charters Evade Regulation: ECOT Saga Drags On and On and On | janresseger:
