Ohio must finally fix online charter schools

Mercifully, an Ohio Supreme Court ruling on Wednesday means the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow’s persistent demand to be paid money for nothing is, along with the school itself, essentially dead.

The court ruled 4-2 that the Ohio Department of Education was on solid ground in requiring online charter schools, including ECOT, to justify their state funding by providing proof that students on their rosters actually logged in for a minimum amount of time. That upholds the state’s claim that ECOT owes the public at least $80 million from overpayments — based on students for whom ECOT offered no proof of participation.

It was the last round of a court fight that ECOT lost at every step, and it ends the chance that the school, which closed in 2017 in the face of the state’s funding clawback, can regroup and reopen.

It now falls to the Ohio Attorney General’s office to collect that debt, and we wish the current occupant, Mike DeWine, and his successor good luck. Even more important, lawmakers need to come up with a valid and fair way to fund online charter schools.

Those should be the priorities. Instead, we’re likely to hear a lot more about ECOT from candidates on the November statewide ballot either claiming credit for taking on ECOT or blaming opponents for not doing so. Voters should take it all with a grain of salt.

Ohio’s leaders failed the public when it comes to ECOT, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Through governors and legislative majorities of both parties, politicians on both sides of the aisle took millions in contributions from ECOT founder William Lager — along with other charterschool titans — and did little to protect the public interest as laws and rules were developed.

The ECOT funding fight developed because Ohio charter-school law initially required no more