ECOT outrage fails to inspire changes in school law

One might think a year filled with outrage over the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow’s fleecing of taxpayers would inspire Ohio lawmakers toward real reform of online charter schools. House Bill 87 and Senate Bill 216, approved and sent to Gov. John Kasich on Wednesday, prove one would be wrong.

SB 216 sets up a committee to study better ways of funding online schools, which is needed. Otherwise, the bills sidestep many of the much-needed changes that were part of a different measure, House Bill 707, before it was folded into the other bills.

Democrats in the General Assembly protested that combining the bills was a way to bury the contents of the reform bill, and they appear to have been right.

Gone is a provision to allow online schools to disenroll students who aren’t doing any work.

To be clear, online schools are not clamoring for this authority; continuing to collect state funding for “ghost” students can be a major revenue source. Enabling the schools to remove nonparticipating students (without the truancy process required of traditional schools) would leave no excuse for bloated rolls.

But senators didn’t take even the easiest steps to hold charter schools accountable.

HB 707 would have required for-profit operators of charter schools to be more transparent in how they spend public money, including disclosing their relationships with subcontractors. A sizeable chunk of the millions paid to ECOT over the years went into the pocket of school founder William Lager, who also owned the companies that were paid to operate the school.

That should be a no-brainer, but SB 216 as passed Wednesday assigned the online-school-funding study group to study transparency requirements as well. That looks a lot like a delay tactic.

The bills further defer accountability by giving the state’s remaining charter schools an extra two years before they have to include test scores of transferred former ECOT students in their academic-performance results.

That sounds reasonable, but it’s unnecessary. Ohio law already holds that no school, charter or traditional, has to count the test performance of any student who hasn’t been at the school for at least a year. ECOT closed midyear, so none of its former students’ scores would count against their new schools for the 2017-18 school year.

HB 87 goes well beyond that, exempting other e-schools from counting results of ECOT transfers through the 2019-20 school year.

The bills are a major disappointment in a season when lawmakers should have been inspired toward reform.

Still, if the study group solves one key problem — how to fairly fund online schools — it will count as an accomplishment.

It seems absurd now that lawmakers — and the public — ever accepted the notion that simply enrolling a student in an e-school should entitle the school to a year’s worth of state funding for that student, with no checks on whether the student actually participates.

But counting only the time that a student is logged in and/or actively using the computer isn’t necessarily fair, either; students are learning when they’re studying printouts or working on projects that don’t involve a keyboard.

Ohio needs a valid and fair way to pay for public online education, to keep this important option available without enabling opportunists to rip off taxpayers.