Letting at-risk students slide

Letting at-risk students slide

Scripps Howard News Service: In 30 states, special for-profit charter schools are supposed to rescue students at risk of dropping or failing out of traditional public high schools.

On paper it sounds like a good idea. But too often in practice the taxpayers are shelling out millions to educate students who don’t show up for class and are unlikely ever to graduate.

Scripps Howard News Service reporters Thomas Hargrove and Gavin Off have christened these “ghost schools” for the thousands of students who are on the rolls but rarely in class. In most places, the schools get reimbursed regardless. What checks are in place tend to be cursory at best.

Ohio is poster child

Ohio, hardest hit by the trend, paid $29.9 million during the 2006-2007 to educate students who weren’t there at 47 “dropout recovery” schools. At one school in Cincinnati the daily absentee rate averaged 64 percent of those enrolled. And still the state paid.

The crux of the problem, according to Hargrove and Off, is that the for-profit charters “are paid based on the number of students enrolled -- not those who actually attend -- so the schools get their money even if the desks are empty.”

“It’s a cash cow!” said one former principal.

Texas, in the words of one of its educators, settled on the seemingly obvious premise “that attendance is important to achieving good performance in school.” It is one of the few states that pay by attendance rather than enrollment and as a result has a significantly lower absentee rate.

A ghost school that purports to be teaching absent kids is providing a phantom education.