On February 29, 2016, Tim Walker wrote the following for the NEA Today magazine, in the middle he quoted yours truly.
Here are some highlights:
- The Ohio Department of Education audited ECOT and found only 40% of student met attendance requirements.
- “While ECOT boasts about graduating 2,674 students last spring, you won’t find in any of its slick marketing materials any mention of the 3,252 students who dropped out. In fact, one out of every six dropouts in Ohio are ECOT students. More ECOT students either leave or fail to finish high school within four years more than at any other school in the nation. And ECOT repeatedly scores F’s on state report cards.”
- “ECOT is the poster child for the worst of Ohio’s struggling charter schools’” said Becky Higgins, president of the Ohio Education Association. “From persistently poor performance to a stubborn refusal to be held accountable, ECOT is a disservice to the students it purports to be educating.”
- “ECOT’s failures are so towering that even charter school advocates in Ohio and across the country, have distanced themselves.”
- “The school has become a major embarrassment,” says Sandy Theis.
