Education Week - March 8, 2017 - 13

TRACKING E-SCHOOL LEARNING TIME
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Ohio Scrutinizes
Cyber-Charter Data
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scrutiny of the country's full-time
online charter schools. For years, the
sector has had to contend with reports
of poor academic performance, lack of
transparency, and mismanagement.
State regulators, school operators, and online-learning experts
continue to disagree about such
basic questions as how to track
e-school student attendance. Issues related to improving public
oversight have proved even thornier. Such debates took on added
significance with the selection of
Betsy DeVos, a prominent advocate of school choice who supports
expanding online school options, as
the new U.S. education secretary.
When it comes to figuring out
how to best regulate e-schools, the
devil is in the details, said Michael
K. Barbour, an education professor
at Touro University in California.
But one thing is clear, he said:
It's a major red flag if a full-time
online school can't clear the low
bar of getting its students to log in
and use learning software.
"These audits reveal a significant
lack of engagement among Ohio eschool students in their online studies," Barbour said. "The operators of
these schools should be focused on
what they can do to address the fact
that they simply aren't providing a
quality educational experience for
their students."

Measuring Attendance
Across the country, roughly 200
full-time online charter schools in
26 states now serve 200,000 students and counting. A 2015 study
by Stanford University's Center for
Research on Education Outcomes
found that more than two-thirds of
those schools performed worse academically than comparable brickand-mortar charter and regular
public schools.
Ohio is home to 23 full-time online charter schools, 12 of which
draw students from across the state.
Researchers at New York University and the RAND Corp. recently
found that Ohio e-school students
typically lose between 75 days and
a full school year of learning compared with their peers in the state's
brick-and-mortar schools.
Like most states, Ohio funds its
e-schools on the basis of enrollment. It provides a base per-pupil
allotment of $5,900.
Historically, the Ohio education
department determined student
attendance, and thus enrollment,
based on paperwork submitted by eschool representatives, who certified
that students were enrolled and had
been offered the 920 hours of learning required by state law.
Problems with that enrollmentverification system date back
more than a decade. In 2003, for

example, the Associated Press reported that ECOT billed the state
for a number of ineligible students,
including nine children under 5
years old. In other years, the school
did not receive all the funding to
which it was entitled, because it
underreported enrollment, according to media accounts at the time.
In 2014, the state education department began adopting a more
aggressive approach for documenting student attendance, based on
asking e-schools to submit records
showing when students had logged
into and out of their online-learning systems. The department maintains it has long had the authority
to do so, but had previously chosen
not to exercise that power.
The first e-school test case was
the online Provost Academy Ohio.
For the 2014-15 school year, Provost had reported the equivalent
of 162 full-time students. State officials said the login data showed
just one-fifth of that total. Provost
agreed last year to repay nearly
$800,000 of the $1 million in state
funding it had received.
The use of software-login and
usage data to hold e-schools accountable represents a significant
development in the online-learning
field, said Barbour, the Touro University professor.
"If we are looking for a way to
measure attendance that is specific
to the e-school context, data from
the learning management system
is probably the best we have available," he said.
In the second half of 2016, the
Ohio education department expanded its efforts, using softwarelogin records to audit 13 more
e-schools.
State officials ultimately concluded that nine of the schools had
overreported their enrollment, by a
combined total of more than 12,000
students.
The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, the state's largest e-school,
was determined to have overstated
its 15,000-student enrollment by
more than 9,000 students, according to state officials.
Through an open-records request, the Columbus Dispatch obtained the records behind the Ohio
education department's audit of
ECOT. An analysis by the newspaper found that as many as 70
percent of the e-school's students
had missed enough time during the
2015-16 school year that they could
be declared truant under state law.
An Education Week analysis of
those same records found that
ECOT typically reported that
students spent three times more
hours learning than state officials
were able to document.
Some critics of online schools
viewed the results of the state audits as vindication.
"The [education department]

Using software-login records, the Ohio Department of Education determined that students at the
Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow were engaged in learning for far fewer hours than the school
reported for 2015-16. An ECOT spokesman called the methodology "blatantly unfair."
ECOT 29.0%

22.6%

38.9%

9.6%

Ohio Department 3.3% 9.3% 49.1%
of Education

38.2%

Fulfilled State Requirement (920 or more)

501-919 hours

101-500 hours

0-100 hours

Note: Percentages may not add up to 100 due to rounding.

OVER-REPORTING OF OHIO E-SCHOOL STUDENT ENROLLMENT
The Ohio Department of Education reviewed the 2015-16 software-login records of 13 e-schools. Nine were
found to have over-reported the number of full-time equivalent students for which they should be paid.
E-SCHOOL
Akron Digital Academy

SELF-REPORTED ENROLLMENT

ENROLLMENT DETERMINED BY STATE

372

Buckeye Online School for Success

906

Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow

15,322

6,313

Findlay Digital Academy

156

Masillon Digital Academy

META Solutions/TRECA Digital Academy

1,964

1,214

Quaker Digital Academy

666

Southwest Licking Digital Academy

Virtual Community School

835

280

SOURCE: Ohio Department of Education, 2017

should have put its foot down earlier," said state Sen. Joseph Schiavoni, a Democrat who for years has
pushed for greater oversight of Ohio
e-schools.

'Garbage In, Garbage Out'
Neil Clark, a spokesman and lobbyist for the Electronic Classroom
of Tomorrow, has a different view of
the state audits.
"Garbage in, garbage out," said
Clark. "That's my response to the
department's findings."
Founded in 2000, ECOT has attracted criticism for low graduation
rates and millions of dollars in payments to for-profit companies led
by its founder, William Lager.
For almost a year, the school
has strongly resisted the state's
attempts to change how it counts
e-school attendance. When the
state education department first
requested that ECOT provide
student software-login records for
state review, the school refused to
supply the information.
In August, Judge French, of
Franklin County, ordered the
school to turn the records over.
ECOT complied, then filed a lawsuit seeking to block the department from moving forward with
an audit based on its new methodology. French denied the school's
request for an injunction in September, then ruled against the
school on the merits of its case in
December.
In its suit, ECOT made a series of
arguments: The Ohio education department was violating its years-old
funding agreement with the school.
The department was unfairly applying a new standard to e-schools,

without giving them adequate time
to prepare. Existing state law required only that e-schools "offer"
920 hours of learning opportunities,
not that students actually take advantage of them.
Furthermore, said Clark, the
ECOT lobbyist, the state's narrow
focus on login records is "blatantly
unfair" because it does not capture
all the ways students learn in eschools. What about children who
read a book or go on a field trip?
What about supplemental-learning
software programs that don't track
student time spent logged in? And
why aren't Ohio's traditional brickand-mortar schools, some of which
have high chronic truancy rates,
also required to document evidence
of student engagement?
ECOT will soon have another
chance to press such arguments
in court. Oral arguments in the
school's appeal to Ohio's 10th District Court could begin later this
month. Administrative-appeal
hearings for eight other Ohio eschools are also scheduled for
March and April, according to a
spokeswoman for the state education department.
And 18 new e-school attendance
audits will also begin this spring,

with final determinations expected
in September.
The online education world will
be paying close attention. Problems with low student attendance
and engagement have cropped up
in states such as Colorado, where
an Education Week investigation
found that just 1 in 4 students at
the state's largest cyber charter
used the school's learning software
on a typical day. A handful of other
states, including New Hampshire
and Utah, have begun experimenting with a new approach, funding
e-schools on the basis of course
completion rather than on enrollment or attendance.
But the question of how best to
track student attendance in online
schools remains very much up for
debate. Perhaps the only thing all
sides can agree on is that policy
and regulations have failed to keep
up with e-schools' rapid growth.
"We don't have a silver bullet to
change the system," said Clark, the
lobbyist for the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. "It needs to be
torn down and rebuilt."
Librarian Holly Peele and Assistant
Librarian Maya Riser-Kositsky
contributed to this report.

EXCLUSIVE SPECIAL REPORT

Rewarding Failure
An Education Week investigation found
widespread reports of trouble in the country's
cyber charter schools, including Colorado's GOAL
Academy, where internal data showed that just 1 in
4 students used the learning software each day.

Exclusive edweek.org content
www.edweek.org/go/Cybercharter

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