Stephen Dyer · June 7, 2018

No Type of District or Community Immune to ECOT

Now that we’ve released district-by-district deductions to the scandal-ridden and potentially criminal enterprise that was the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, it’s helpful to examine what types of districts lost money and students to the scammy school. The state has nine categories of districts it tracks. Within those categories the state classifies them based on location (urban, suburban, rural, small town) and poverty from very low to very high. About 1/2 of the $591 million came from urban districts, but not just large ones like Cleveland and Columbus, but smaller urbans like Mansfield and Lima. Surprisingly, the next largest category of losses to ECOT — about $200 million — came from small town and rural districts which tend to be much smaller sizes. Even large, wealthier suburban districts lost money and students to ECOT to the tune of about $100 million. Looking at just the districts’ poverty classification, ECOT received about 2/3 of its money from poor or very poor Ohio school districts. No surprise there. However, the next largest category of funding came from low poverty districts. More money came from Ohio’s wealthiest districts than school districts with average poverty. What does all this mean? It means that ECOT’s largest impact was on Ohio’s poorest districts and students — areas and populations that have traditionally suffered outsized portions of public scandals like ECOT. However, the scale of ECOT’s scam was so large that even Ohio’s wealthiest school districts were not immune from this school’s politically connected tentacles.