The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow lost in court three weeks ago. A Franklin County judge denied the online charter school’s request for a temporary restraining order that would have blocked the release of attendance data sought by the Ohio Department of Education. Did ECOT then comply? Hardly. It acted as though it had prevailed.
Now the online school has declared that it will not provide the information without the litigation running its course and a judge issuing a final order. To its credit, the Education Department has not backed down. In a motion last week, its attorneys exposed the hollowness of the ECOT arguments.
What is the information the online charter school resists releasing? Attendance records that it shared, in part, earlier in the year. That led to a preliminary finding showing many ECOT students spend just an hour per day logged into the online lessons. The state requires an average of five hours per day.
When the state returned this month for its final audit, ECOT went to court. The stakes are high. The online school receives $106 million annually from the state for its 15,000 students. Its founder, William Lager, has proved generous in contributing political money to Statehouse Republicans. More, the school has a dismal academic record. It even had an ally in the Education Department who last year doctored its record.
ECOT argues that the department has changed the rules, breaking a longtime agreement in which faculty members could certify that students participated in learning for the required time. Teachers could do so, the contention goes, without the school having to provide daily log-in and log-out data.
What the online school doesn’t highlight is its 2010 contract with the state that makes plain students must “participate” in learning five hours per day. One key way of establishing such participation is the log-in and log-out information.
The school makes the laughable claim that it doesn’t collect such data or have the capacity to do so. Yet it provided the relevant information as part of the preliminary review. The software allows for such accounting. An ECOT attorney cited “truckloads” of the data.
Keep in mind, too, state law changed on Feb. 1, much-needed new oversight of charter schools taking effect. Better that the education department stick with the old ways rather than move forward to achieve improved accountability?
ECOT is stonewalling, plain and simple. It isn’t enough for the school to provide a computer and offer coursework. There must be concrete information showing the degree to which students are participating. In that way, the department can evaluate whether public money is spent well or not.
Surely, the expectation isn’t that ECOT somehow be allowed to supply little more than a reassuring “trust us.” Or that its school receive public money without showing it has delivered at an acceptable academic standard.
The concern has been that an accommodating Statehouse will come to the rescue of ECOT by rolling back the enhanced oversight. The school and its lobbyists have been playing the victim. Yet the victims are the students who have not received the education promised and taxpayers who have seen the misuse of their money.
That is not to say an online charter education has ill served all students. Many have succeeded with the option. Rather, ECOT must be measured accurately, and that requires the state Education Department gaining the information it has requested.