Bill Bush
THE
The attendance numbers for many Internet charter schools look good.
In fact, the number with perfect scores are a little too good, prompting the Ohio Department of Education to give them a second look later this month, said Todd Hanes, executive director of the department’s Office of Community Schools.
Twenty Internet charter schools — state-funded public schools where students do work online from home or other sites — reported perfect attendance for the 2005-06 school year. Several others reported nearperfect rates.
But at least two of the schools — including the state’s largest — acknowledged that they don’t count students who were expelled after being absent from school for more than 21 consecutive days.
"This sounds like just another way that charter schools are gaming the system," said Lisa Zellner, spokeswoman for the Ohio Federation of Teachers. "What does this do for the student? The point is to be educating these kids, giving them what they need."
At the end of September, the Education Department for the first time will compare the number of students expelled for absenteeism with attendance rates, Hanes said. If a school expelled any students for missing 21 days of class, that would "make it impossible for them to have a 100 percent attendance rate," he said.
Those schools could be forced to come up with a plan to keep more meaningful attendance rates, Hanes said.
The state requires bricks-andmortar public schools to calculate attendance by dividing the number of days each student shows up for school by the total days in the school year. If a school doesn’t have at least a 93 percent attendance rate, it doesn’t meet the standard that is part of the state rating system.
Because students can work online 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the state created a different measure for e-schools that requires students to perform 920 hours of work a year to have perfect attendance, Hanes said.
One of the e-schools reporting perfect attendance was the state’s largest, the 6,664-student Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow. The Columbus-based school has reported a 100 percent attendance rate for the past three school years.
"It’s highly unlikely that a school of that size could have a 100 percent attendance record," Hanes said.
The state’s e-school attendance formula always results in a perfect attendance score, said ECOT spokesman Nick Wilson.
Attendance was one of only three state standards ECOT met last year out of 25, but it is a essentially a "meaningless statistic," Wilson said.
"We use the state’s formula because we’re required to do so for the report card,"
Rather than trying to measure attendance, ECOT internally measures student engagement, including what time of the day children log in, how long they work, how many messages they send the teacher and how often they call the teacher, Wilson said. That information doesn’t show up on the report card.
The Columbus-based Virtual Community School of Ohio, with about 1,200 students, had a similar understanding of the rules for calculating attendance, said spokeswoman Lori Berkheimer.
"It’s kind of given that we will be at or near 100 percent," said Berkheimer, whose school recorded 99.8 percent attendance in the 2005-06 school year and 100 percent in the previous year.
But the 1,300-student
If other e-schools automatically are scoring perfect attendance numbers each year, the state needs to come up with a formula "that has meaning," said John Shank, TRECA’s director of operations.
