Ohio needs moratorium on Internet charter schools

The last thing Ohio needs is another Internet charter school.
There are still far too many questions to be answered about the first such enterprise to be embarking on another.
In the General Assembly's zeal to provide what it saw as necessary competition for the state's public schools, it actively encouraged educational experimentation from one end of the state to the other.
Right and wrong: Improving education is one thing, and we're all for it. Throwing the money of state and local school districts at anyone who claims to have a better idea is quite another. And we're against it.
The first Internet charter school in the state is the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow, which is run by a Columbus company that got its charter through the Lucas County Educational Service Center in Toledo. It went to Toledo after the state Department of Education rejected the idea.
Now many of the same people who were involved in eCOT have hooked up with the Reynoldsburg Board of Education near Columbus to create Virtual Community Schools of Ohio.
While these charter "schools" -- there is no school building, no student body -- are sanctioned by school boards in Columbus or Toledo, they draw students from any school district in the state.
If a student in Youngstown signs up for eCOT, the $4,300 that the state would normally give the city school district goes to eCOT instead. For that $4,300, eCOT is to provide a telephone line to the student's home, a computer, and access to an eCOT Website through which the student's virtual education is supervised.
Horror stories: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the state should be taking a very hard look at whether its money is being well spent on Internet education. One suburban Youngstown school superintendent says that of the nine students from his district enrolled in eCOT at the beginning of the year, two got both phone line and computer, three came back to the public schools and the other four received either a phone line or a computer. Another superintendent says that one of her district's eCOT "students" is in jail for murder.
What effort is the state making to see that it is getting a full year's worth of electronic education for each $4,300 it pays out?
If there is a statewide need for electronic education for students with special needs of some kind, it should be researched, instituted and audited for performance at the Ohio Department of Education level. Any one local or county school board should not be sanctioning private companies to go into the education business in all 88 counties and 611 school districts.
The state is properly demanding greater accountability by bricks and mortar schools. It should not be giving virtual schools a virtual blank check.