— Across the U.S.,
there are now more than 500 online charter schools
enrolling close to 300,000 American kids.
15,000 of them are at one school in Ohio called the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow,
or ECOT.
It has no hallways or classrooms or buildings— everything it does, it does online.
ECOT’s students get a computer, a wifi connection,
and access to classes they can take on their own time.
Its teachers communicate by phone and email.
It’s up to the students to log-in and do the work.
They have required classwork and tests, but in reality, the commitments are minimal.
ECOT is designed to be a way for students
who might have fallen out of the traditional education system to pursue a degree.
Like with all charters,
ECOT is paid based on the number of students it enrolls each year.
In 2015, that meant more than 100 million public dollars.
But last summer, the state Department of Education decided to review the school,
asking for actual log-in data to justify the expense.
And when ECOT finally shared the data,
it didn’t look so good.
A sample of more than 700 students enrolled at ECOT during the 2015–2016 school year
showed that more than half of the students ECOT was paid to teach all year
spent fewer than two hours, on average, online each day.
Ohio’s Department of Education concluded
that it had paid the school to teach 9,000 more students than it should have.
ECOT disagreed.
It said it never committed to measure how much time students spent working online—
or, more importantly, use that time to gauge enrollment—
and that the data it gave the state was incomplete.
ECOT told us it had never been asked to produce this sort of data when audited before,
and that it shouldn’t be used to judge how many students it teaches.
At this point,
the school and the Department of Education have been fighting in court for more than a year.
Disputes like this are becoming more common.
Gary Miron is a professor at Western Michigan University
who has spent the past five years studying online charter schools:
— It’s been very difficult for states to hold these charter schools accountable—
even to verify and document with evidence
that the students actually are enrolled and active in the schools.
Most of state oversight regulations are based on traditional public schools.
These regulations and these practices don’t really apply to virtual schools.
— It’s not that safeguards don’t exist.
In Ohio, for example,
all charters have to unenroll students
who don’t show up for 105 hours, or about a month.
But at online schools, students can game those rules easily,
and it’s not exactly in ECOT’s financial interest to go out of its way to unenroll students—
the fewer students EOT has on its books, the less money it gets from the state,
which can put its teachers in an awkward position.
We spoke to one who taught at the school for four years:
— ECOT has a rule that if you don’t log-in once every 28 days,
they unenroll you from the school and they put you back into your district school.
Out of the 185 students that I had in my classroom,
I believe that about 50 percent of my students figured out
that you can go 28 days without logging into the system and then,
as long as you logged in on that 28th day, you would be able to stay enrolled at ECOT.
They would log in for maybe a few minutes and then log back out.
I just kind-of felt unethical as an educator.
I actually gave my mentor a phone call and I talked to her about that.
She kinda told me that that was the norm,
that there was not much that ECOT was doing at that point,
but they were trying.
— ECOT says its hands are tied by the state law that prohibits it from disenrolling these students.
The school has continually dismissed criticisms,
emphasizing that their students work and learn in ways that aren’t captured by log-in times.
But it still hasn’t managed to convince the state—
or the courts—
that all of its students are actually going to school.
Ohio’s state school board and local courts
have consistently ruled in the favor of the Department of Education,
which says that ECOT must return $60 million it received during the 2015–2016 school year.
ECOT is continuing to appeal the decision.
It’s also in the process of laying off hundreds of staff.
It’s unclear what this will mean for the students at ECOT
who are still in the habit of logging in.