Stephen Dyer was an Ohio legislator, and he continues to be an expert in the state’s education shenanigans. Take the dropout recovery charter schools, which do not deliver on the promise they make.
For many years, Ohio has had Charter Schools that are supposed to serve high school dropouts. These are called “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools. And their performance has always been among the worst in the entire country.
That’s because these schools were never meant to help kids. They were designed to make the state’s largest Republican donor rich.
For years, these schools were dominated by David Brennan’s Life Skills Academies — schools that would graduate maybe a couple kids a year, but roll in the cash, which Brennan would then return to legislators and governors in the form of political campaign contributions.
Accountability was so lax at these schools that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which closed amid the largest taxpayer ripoff in state history, tried to be designated a “Dropout Recovery” Charter School to avoid scrutiny — even though the school created more dropouts than any school in the country.
Brennan’s been dead about 10 years. But, if anything, these schools have become even more scandalous.
Here’s something to noodle over: So-called “Dropout Recovery” schools don’t have to include a single “dropout” in the way we think of dropouts — kids who stopped going to school and need to come back.
Here’s how the state defines who may attend “Dropout Recovery” Charter Schools:
“(1) Any community school that operates a drug recovery program in cooperation with a court; or
(2) Any community school in which the majority of students are enrolled in a dropout prevention and recovery program operated by the school that meets the following criteria:
(a) The program serves only students not younger than sixteen years of age and not older than twenty-one years of age;
(b) The program enrolls students who, at the time of their initial enrollment, either, or both, are at least one grade level behind their cohort age groups or experience crises that significantly interfere with their academic progress such that they are prevented from continuing their traditional programs.”
That, my friends, is it.
You’ll notice the definition doesn’t include those students you and I would consider a “dropout” student — “… individuals who do not complete the necessary requirements to graduate from secondary school.”
Nope.