Dayton is the lowest performing major urban district. Yet 2 out of 3 Ohio charter schools are less prepared than Dayton students.
Stephen Dyer
Ohio’s new report card has revealed something extremely troubling about Ohio’s Charter Schools. On a new measure called “Students in the 4-year Graduation Cohort who Completed a Pathway and are Prepared for College or Career Success”, only 9 percent of Ohio’s potential Charter School graduates met those qualifications. More than 36 percent of Ohio’s public school district students met those qualifications.
I’d also like to use some space to bring up the Ohio Virtual Academy (OHVA) — the ECOT-sized online school. OHVA was paid to educate 14,530 students last year — more students than ECOT ever was paid to educate.
Yet they are just as bad as ECOT at preparing their students for the post-graduate world. An astonishing 87 of 1,820 potential OHVA grads were considered college or career ready. That 4.8 percent rate is lower than all but one Ohio school district — New Miami Local in Butler County, which only had 1 of 44 potential graduates considered college or career ready.
Maybe it’s time to take a look under OHVA’s hood. They did receive $104 million last year to produce these anemic results, after all.
What was it I was just saying about being good stewards of the public purse and the promise of a quality public education?
What does this mean for potential Voucher problems?
Stephen Dyer
A new report came out yesterday from State Auditor Keith Faber’s office reaffirming that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow — at one time run by the most powerful Republican donor in the state Bill Lager — owed the taxpayers of Ohio $117 million. The state said the school had to repay all the money it was sent for the 2017-2018 school year, as well as about 35% of the money it was sent in the 2016-2017 and 2015-2016 school years.
This wasn’t the first time the state caught Lager and ECOT cheating. Its very first year of operation, ECOT was forced to repay $1.7 million of the $8.7 million it had been paid by the state. And it was all for the same reason — ECOT couldn’t prove it was actually educating the kids the state was paying them to educate.
This one caught my attention simply because ECOT was an example of the kind of corporate greed that underscores so much of the neo-liberal cyber charter movement. The kind of greed that many would have us believe can only happen with the biggest cyber charter in the state or cyber charters that aren’t part of a national network (at least that’s what one Pearson rep claimed during a public debate at a conference shortly after the ECOT example, and as the Indiana Virtual School incident was unfolding).
The reality is that smaller cyber charters often fly under the radar and with less scrutiny are able to get away with more, which is why the issues with cyber charters were able to go unnoticed by most for so many years – they were simply only a very small part of the larger school choice movement. Similarly, those with national networks are able to leverage their substantial legal resources to make problems go away with payoffs, but without accepting responsibility. I suspect that is more of the reason that the Pearson rep’s statement is true, and it has less to do with the fact that cyber charters that match that description are somehow better stewards of the public purse and the promise of a quality public education.
How Ohio School Districts and Charter Schools spend money tells you what they care about
Stephen Dyer
Yesterday, I tried to sound the alarm about how Ohio Charter Schools shouldn’t be ignored, despite culture and voucher war focus this election year.
In order to reinforce the urgency of this, I thought I’d dig into how Ohio’s public and charter schools spend money. What you’ll notice is while Ohio’s public schools spend their money on kids, far more — and by far more, I mean nearly double the commitment — is spent on the adults in charters who don’t actually teach kids1.
The reason this one caught my attention was this bit:
Here’s the bottom line: If Ohio Charter Schools spent the same amount on administrative costs as Ohio’s public school districts, they would have at least an additional $142 million to spend on kids — roughly the total amount Parma City Schools spent last year.
As you can see, Ohio’s Charter Schools spend almost 1 in 4 of its dollars on non-instructional administrators2. Ohio’s public school districts spend about 1 in 8 on these non-instructional folks.
It caught my attention because I’ve often commented about the executive salaries for the top officials at companies like K12, Inc./Stride, Inc. being considerably out of step with the leadership of other public school districts of similar size. When I do that there are folks who argue with me, stating that singling out just the the top executives are unfair and if I were to look at the administrative bloat across the full district that the cyber charters would perform much better.
Well, this analysis in Ohio doesn’t include the corporations executives in their analysis – it only include the school/district leadership. And that analysis concludes:
No Ohio school district spends as much on administrators as the average Ohio Charter School.
As usual, a quick statistics entry this month. In August 2022 there were 1,439 hits from 981 distinct visitors. This was about 400 more hits and 250 more visitors as we saw in July 2022. Similarly, it was about 100 fewer hits, but about the same number of visitors as August 2021.
As usual, a quick statistics entry this month. In July 2022 there were 1,058 hits from 734 distinct visitors. This was about 100 fewer hits and 50 fewer visitors as we saw in June 2022. Similarly, it was about 600 fewer hits and 300 frewer visitors than July 2021.
Stephen Dyer
12 Unique Blogs Are Written By Professors
Virtual School Meanderings 