Tag: Graduation Rate

ECOT Fails to Graduate More Students Than All Ohio School Districts … COMBINED

AN UNBELIEVABLE STATISTIC!  ECOT, which likes to brag about how many students they enroll, don’t like to talk about quality.  In this post, blogger Stephen Dyer, points out that ECOT failed more students than all other Ohio school districts COMBINED.

No wonder ECOT (and Ohio) is the laughing stock of the charter school movement.

From Mr. Dyer’s 10th Period post:

While ECOT may account for 5% of Ohio’s high school graduates, it accounts for more students who don’t graduate than (drumroll please) all Ohio school districts combined! If ECOT were the 610th Ohio school district (under Ohio law, charters are treated as districts), it would account for more than 1/2 of all non-graduating seniors in this state.

There were 2,918 ECOT kids who didn’t graduate in four years, according to the latest state report card, and 1,852 who did. Statewide, school districts failed to graduate 2,626 and graduated 27,748.

This is just more evidence that ECOT is, in fact, America’s Dropout Factory.

Online School Enriches Affiliated Companies if Not Its Students

Rich, Motoko.  The New York Times.  May 18, 2016.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/online-charter-schools-electronic-classroom-of-tomorrow.html?_r=0

The New York Times highlights ECOT, in a scathing article, about their graduation rate being the lowest in the United States, which include Ohio cities like Cleveland and Youngtown.  ECOT’s very rich owner, William Lager, declined to comment for the article.

More students drop out of the Electronic Classroom or fail to finish high school within four years than at any other school in the country, according to federal data.

Even as the national on-time graduation rate has hit a record high of 82 percent, publicly funded online schools like the Electronic Classroom have become the new dropout factories.

When students enroll in the Electronic Classroom or in other online charters, a proportion of the state money allotted for each pupil is redirected from traditional school districts to the cyberschools. At the Electronic Classroom, which Mr. Lager founded in 2000, the money has been used to help enrich for-profit companies that he leads. Those companies provide school services, including instructional materials and public relations.

For example, in the 2014 fiscal year, the last year for which federal tax filings were available, the school paid the companies associated with Mr. Lager nearly $23 million, or about one-fifth of the nearly $115 million in government funds it took in.

Critics say the companies associated with Mr. Lager have not delivered much value. “I don’t begrudge people making money if they really can build a better mousetrap,” said Stephen Dyer, a former Ohio state legislator and the education policy fellow at Innovation Ohio, a Columbus think tank that is sharply critical of online charter schools.