It’s time to make e-school funding accountable in Ohio

Ohio has spent years shoring up regulation and oversight of its charter schools, trying to clean up the mess created by the campaign-donor-friendly, anything-goes approach that marked the origin of charter schools in the state.

One area that remains a mess is funding and accountability for e-schools, so it’s encouraging that lawmakers appear poised to pay it some attention this year. A joint House/senate committee on e-school funding formed in November; here’s hoping the work will continue in the New Year and new administration of Gov.elect Mike Dewine because there are plenty of questions to consider.

The primary one is how to fairly determine how many students an e-school actually is serving and thus how much it is entitled to in taxpayer dollars. The original method — paying e-schools full freight for every student who enrolled — was absurd and led directly to millions of misspent tax dollars.

The most notorious case, of course, was that of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which long billed taxpayers for thousands of students without any evidence that many of them actually logged in or completed assignments. For years, the Department of Education required only that e-schools prove they had offered 920 hours of instruction in a school year, the same number of hours traditional schools are required to be in session — not that individual students “attended” for that long.

When the department finally began demanding proof that students actually had engaged in education via their ECOT computers, the school cried foul, saying the state had changed the rules mid-game. A Franklin County Common Pleas judge disagreed; though ECOT pursued the case to the Ohio Supreme Court, it lost at all levels and was ordered to give back a total of more than $80 million in unmerited tax dollars.

No tears need be shed for ECOT founder Bill Lager, who greased politicians with millions in campaign contributions and went from broke to multi-millionaire thanks to ECOT, while students languished and mostly

didn’t graduate. But the fight did highlight the real difficulty of quantifying online education.

ECOT lobbyist Neil Clark wasn’t wrong when he told The Dispatch, “In a new world, when you’re talking about e-schools, you can’t look at it where everybody has to be in their chair.”

What should we count, then? Simply adding up time logged in, as the state is doing now, is subject to failure in either direction. A student obviously can stay logged in, and stroke a few keys every once in a while to appear active, without really doing any work. Conversely, a student could be reading, writing or otherwise completing school work but not have it counted because he is offline.

The staff of State Auditor Dave Yost, who is soon to be sworn in as attorney general, studied the problem in detail last year and issued a little-noticed report in November with some ideas that deserve consideration.

Along with the pro-charter-school Fordham Institute, Yost’s report suggests that e-schools could be funded based on performance, as measured by a student’s competence or mastery of subject matter. That would eliminate the incentive for schools to claim students who don’t participate.

The report also points out the need for consistency and clarity in Department of Education policies and rules for e-schools. Whatever standards and rules are adopted, they should be clear to everyone involved and uniformly enforced; to date, the report says, department employees were unaware of requirements and often applied them incorrectly.

Another important point in the report is the inherent conflict in the fact that the department is simultaneously in charge of setting e-school policy, training schools in it and evaluating their performance. This has been a problem with all charter schools; the report is right to suggest that the department’s duties should be “divided or restructured.”

If lawmakers ever propose funding e-schools according to how many students pass tests, school operators no doubt will protest that brickand-mortar schools get funded regardless of how well their students perform. That’s true, but only to a point; under state accountability standards, schools with chronic poor performance face dire consequences, including closure (for charter schools) and state takeover (for traditional schools).

The stronger argument, though, is that e-schools actually should be treated differently. Traditional brick-and-mortar schools operate under significant state regulation, and the means exist to know that their students are attending and participating. When a student is present but not engaged, a teacher is expected to notice and try to engage him.

E-schools shouldn’t expect to receive equivalent taxpayer support without some demonstration of their service. As long as it remains impossible to observe and track students’ engagement, basing funding at least partly on students’ output may be the only realistic option.

We hope the House and Senate education committees will have solutions to propose for the state budget that will be due in June.

And we encourage the new governor to follow through on his campaign promise to hold online schools accountable by requiring them to show that students are making progress through end-of-course exams to qualify for state aid.

Ohio may never recover the $80 million owed by ECOT, but taxpayers must be assured of value for future payments to e-schools.