Saturday, January 20, 2018

School's Out Forever

After years of the state resisting, Kentucky GOP Gov. Matt Bevin and state Republicans approved charter schools in the state last year, the last Southern state to do so.  They should have paid attention to the biggest charter school scandal in America just across the Ohio River, where the Education Classroom of Tomorrow program, ECOT, just blew up into $80 million in taxpayer fraud and thousands of students with no classes to attend on Monday.

The west side of Columbus, Ohio, is a flat expanse of one-story houses, grimy convenience stores, and dark barrooms, and William Lager, in his business wear, cut an unusual figure at the Waffle House on Wilson Road. Every day, almost without fail, he took a seat in a booth, ordered his bottomless coffee, and set to work. Some days he sat for hours, so long that he’d outlast waitress Chandra Filichia’s seven-hour shift and stay on long into the night, making plans and scribbling them down on napkins. 
The dreams on the napkins seemed impossibly grandiose: He wanted to create a school unlike anything that existed, a K-12 charter school where the learning and teaching would be done online, and which would give tens of thousands of students an alternative to traditional public schools across the state. It would offer them unheard of flexibility—a teen mom could stay with her child and study, while a kid worried about being bullied could complete lessons at home. And it would be radically cheaper than a traditional classroom, since there would be no buildings to maintain, no teachers’ unions to bargain with. At the time—the late 1990s—it was a revolutionary idea. Lager called it, in the heady days when the internet seemed to promise a solution to every problem, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. 
But back then—before Lager had his mansion and lake house, before he rose to become a hero of the school choice movement, before Jeb Bush flew in to give ECOT’s commencement speech and Betsy DeVos helped him and his cohort transform Ohio’s educational landscape—Filichia, the Waffle House waitress, could tell Lager seemed broke. Balding, round-faced, and concentrating intently as he scribbled, she even once caught him trying to pass off photocopies of discount coffee coupons. But he didn’t plan on using a Waffle House as his office forever. “One of these days I’m going to have a real big business,” she remembers him telling her, “and you can come work with me, and you won’t ever have to work anywhere else.” 
Lager kept his promise, sort of. His back-of-the-napkin vision soon became an improbable reality, and though she’d never gone to college, in 2000 Lager hired Filichia, and eventually, she says, she became one of ECOT’s registrars. In that role, the 24-year-old had a front-row seat to watch the company’s growth. As it expanded from an upstart to a juggernaut—this year it educated some 12,000 students across Ohio, and two years prior its student body was the largest in America—she began to turn on Lager, angered that the school seemed to provide some students with a sham education, functioned more like a profit center than an educational institution, and ignored its own attendance policies, a fact later corroborated by court documents. “I am a single mom, so obviously I needed money and stayed there,” Filichia told me. “But after so long, when I saw how bad these poor kids were doing, I couldn’t do it anymore.”
Yesterday, after 17 years of operation, the school came to a spectacular end, and many of Filichia’s concerns suddenly seemed prophetic. (Lager and ECOT officials did not reply to repeated requests for comment.) Despite years of critics raising similar concerns, the school’s demise happened quickly, after two Ohio Department of Education reviews from 2016 and 2017 found that ECOT had overbilled taxpayers by $80 million for thousands of students it couldn’t show were meeting the department’s enrollment standards. As a result, last summer the state ordered the school to begin paying back almost $4 million per month in school funds, which ECOT claimed it was was unable to do. Then, last week, the school’s charter sponsor, the Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West, claiming concern that ECOT wouldn’t have the funds to last out the year, suddenly announced plans to drop the school. Many of ECOT’s 12,000 current students learned on the nightly news or read in newspapers that unless an emergency deal could be worked out, the institution was in imminent danger of folding up before the start of next semester, set to begin on January 22, leaving many parents confused and panicking, with only days to choose a new school and get their child enrolled.

The drama reached its climax yesterday. The board members of Lake Erie West held a public meeting in Toledo to vote on how they would respond to ECOT’s plea that they remain the school’s sponsor, at least temporarily. About 40 students, parents, and teachers, some of them breaking down in tears, reportedly showed up. “If this is really about our children,” one parent, Lisa Burford, pleaded, “I hope that you consider our children.” Burford explained that her daughter, who was deaf, had struggled with Toledo’s traditional schools and had been better off in ECOT’s online program, where she was scheduled to graduate in May. ECOT had been deeply troubled long before this year—it had a graduation rate of just 40%, and produced more dropouts than any other school in the nation, according to an investigation by the New York Times. But, for some, it was a school of last resort, and now that last resort was about to vanish. All three board members of Educational Service Center of Lake Erie West voted to withdraw their sponsorship of ECOT, effectively shuttering the school immediately. The decision cast doubt over whether or not Burford’s daughter, and thousands like her, would be able to graduate at all this year. But it also cast a doubt over why Lager’s troubled school had been allowed to operate so long, and why it had been given almost a billion dollars in taxpayer money that would otherwise have gone to local school districts. “A lot of these students,” Burford said, “don’t have any other choices.” 
Now, with ECOT imploding, some state politicians have floated the idea that Lager, who has made millions in profits off the school and come a long way from the Waffle House, should be personally held responsible for paying back some of the $80 million owed to the state. But while the coming days will reveal if the political will or mechanisms exist to make this happen, it’s unclear how he might ever be held accountable—because the real scandal is that ECOT grew up legally, with the support of state politicians and national GOP power brokers, and that in many ways it has served as a model for schools like it across the country. Now, the same districts ECOT pulled its funds from are scrambling to find a way to take in its former students, and Ohio is facing a reckoning, after nearly two decades when the state became one of the country’s freest laboratories for pro-charter policies. “Why did it take a generation and a half of kids to go through this crappy system for us to do something about it,” Stephen Dyer, a former Ohio state representative asked me in exasperation in December. “The reason is because a lot of money came in.”

ECOT was held up all though the 2000's as the model of charter schooling and remote learning in America, where the country was sure to be headed in primary education, where expensive teachers and school buildings would be replaced by inexpensive technology and we could educate all of the kids and it would be magical, except what happens is we take your money because we've turned your child's education into a profit center and besides, we need uneducated people to do grunt work and vote Republican.

Meanwhile on this side of the river in Bevinstan, Matt Bevin's promise not to cut education funding lasted about as long as a butterfly fart in a hurricane.

Scott County Schools Superintendent Kevin Hub estimates, after hearing Gov. Matt Bevin’s budget address Tuesday, that his district could take at least “a $10 million hit” in state budget cuts, $2.1 million of that in transportation. 
Hub is among the Kentucky school officials concerned about picking up most of the tab for student transportation. Hub said the district was already covering half of its needed transportation expenses. 
“Everybody expects us to put good, well-maintained buses with well-experienced drivers on the road, and we are not going to scrimp on those funds. We’re going to be receiving less than $1 million for a fixed expense that costs us nearly $5 million,” Hub said. 
Bevin’s budget proposal would cut about $138 million in state funds for student transportation in school districts. In his speech, Bevin said he wanted districts to make up that money by spending some of the $950 million in their reserve funds. 
“We are going to expect the local school districts to contribute to transportation more than in the past... they are not going to be funded to the same degree by the state as they have historically,” Bevin said. 
Administration officials said they wanted to focus on the classroom, so the savings came from transportation. 
The shift of costs “will be a significant concern” to many districts, especially those that are large geographically and are already financially strained, said Eric Kennedy of the Kentucky School Boards Association.

Guess who will bear the brunt of those cuts?  That's right, urban schools in Lexington and Louisville will take about half those cuts by themselves, while poor mountain districts with limited tax bases and students that depend on buses getting through winding roads will hurt too.

But considering Bevin is also cutting $112 million from the roads budget, it's going to be a grim trek for kids to get to school in Kentucky.  Or much of anywhere, for that matter.

And I guarantee you the state GOP will follow through with Bevin's cuts.  They've been wanting to do it for decades.

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