Attendance in traditional public schools is important. If a school age student does not attend school, there is an investigation into why. Children who have chronic absenteeism often drop out of school.
For many corporate bigwigs, the ultimate goal in schooling is to make money by getting students online at home for all their schooling. Call it disruptive education or competency-based or personalized, et cetera. Students go online for the bulk of their instruction, minus teachers—and schools.
The dream is to get rid of those old teachers and bad brick-and-mortar schools.
Ironically, it would seem like parents would want nothing more than to get their kids to limit their use of tech devices. And with all the hype over online instruction, there are two serious problems. One, if students don’t want to log in they don’t have to. Or, they can get someone else to log in for them…what’s called cheating. But that’s another story.
Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) is a charter school where students do their schoolwork online at home instead of going to school. Sometimes you can find this school listed as a community school which is strange. Funding is based on attendance figures, but the school is being called into question for students not receiving the appropriate number of hours of instruction. The concern is that they only get one hour a day of instruction.
The politics surrounding this school is rich with corporate reform connections that you can read about here.
But I am concerned about student online behavior and whether teens enjoy learning this way. Ads for these schools often show students smiling and very engaged with their work. But ECOT’s problems show another side. Students appear to be playing online hooky. I guess personalized learning isn’t all that engaging for Ferris Buellar and friends.
The ECOT gets $108 million a year for 15,000(!) students who work on computers instead of attending brick-and-mortar school. The attendance figures should come to 920 hours of time spent, about 5 hours a day per student, on the computer for the school to get the money.
Instead of turning over their attendance records, since this could mean a loss of millions of dollars, ECOT filed a lawsuit to block the Ohio Department of Education from requiring an audit—even though students don’t seem to be getting the schooling ECOT promises.
Last year, a smaller online program Provost Academy had to pay back $800,000 to the state for similar problems. Many students in the Provost school clocked in under just an hour a day of schooling.
But the ECOT managers claim the contract language doesn’t state students must have 920 hours, just be given the opportunity to get that much instruction.
It’s like telling students in a traditional classroom that the teacher will teach, but they can leave anytime they want.
Or, it’s like telling Chicago’s Ferris, “Hey kid, learn if you want to but if you don’t want to, go have some fun in the Loop.”
Isn’t it too bad the ECOT doesn’t make learning engaging enough for the students to want to clock in the hours?
Good luck Ohio parents. And I’m sorry. Having a student who missed out on learning, who will have no skills to show on graduation day, and handing over tax dollars for school lawsuits must get pretty old.
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