In late 2017, a Columbus Navigator essay called Ohio’s charter sector “the complete and utter failure,” arguing that the state was sending roughly a billion dollars a year to charters while districts asked voters for levies to keep the lights on. It was written with the exhausted urgency of someone watching a slow leak become structural damage, and it posed an implicit question that still hangs over the policy debate: if charter schools are public schools, why has Ohio treated them like a parallel system with looser guardrails and a private marketplace’s tolerance for churn?
Nearly a decade later, the honest answer is mixed. The state has tightened some accountability mechanisms, most dramatically by forcing the closure of ECOT, the state’s mammoth online charter school. Yet the underlying incentives that made ECOT possible, and made oversight politically fragile, have not disappeared. The story of what changed is also the story of what resisted change.
The headline change: ECOT collapsed, but the bill is still being tallied
If you want a before and after marker, it is ECOT.
By 2017, state officials were already challenging the school’s funding based on participation, not just enrollment. Ohio’s Department of Education concluded it had overpaid ECOT, and the State Board ordered repayment after reviewing login and attendance data. A core allegation was simple and devastating: students were counted for funding purposes even when their engagement did not meet the state’s own requirements.
The school’s collapse became a rare moment when accountability did not just exist on paper. ECOT shut down in 2018, and the legal and financial aftershocks kept coming. The Ohio Attorney General announced a settlement tied to repayments ordered by the State Board, reflecting tens of millions of dollars at stake from disputed overpayments.
Then, in 2022, the Ohio Auditor of State issued findings for recovery of more than $117 million related to ECOT’s final years. The press release also highlighted a structural reality that critics of for profit involvement have been shouting about for years: ECOT was a public charter school intertwined with private vendors and management companies, including entities founded by the same individual who founded the school.
The Mother Jones reporting on ECOT, widely circulated through education watchdog channels, framed the episode as a two decade extraction of public funds paired with bleak student outcomes and relentless political protection. Whether you accept every rhetorical flourish or not, the underlying facts have been affirmed repeatedly in official actions: the school was funded at scale, oversight lagged, and the state later moved to recover significant sums.
So yes, one thing changed: Ohio’s most notorious “virtual disaster” is gone.
But it is worth asking what that change proves. ECOT’s demise did not happen because the system was designed to detect and stop failure quickly. It happened after years of warning signs, after enormous sums had moved through the system, and after political conditions shifted enough to make enforcement possible. That is not a triumph of design. It is a case study in how long a determined operator can keep a publicly funded enterprise alive when the incentives lean toward enrollment growth and the politics punish regulators.
Oversight improved, then got wobbly again
Ohio’s own annual reporting describes community schools as public, nonprofit, and subject to public records and open meetings. It also underscores that sponsors are central to the model, because sponsors approve schools, set expectations, and can close schools that fail to meet standards.
The sponsor system is supposed to be the safety valve, the mechanism that makes choice compatible with accountability. The state also says it evaluates sponsors on academics, compliance, and quality of practice, and in its 2024–2025 annual report it notes that all sponsors carried overall ratings of Effective or Exemplary.
On paper, that sounds like a mature sector.
In practice, sponsor accountability remains politically contested. In 2024, the Fordham Institute, a charter friendly policy organization, warned that lawmakers had moved to suspend sponsor evaluations for a school year through a last minute legislative amendment, and urged the state not to “chip away” at sponsor accountability. When a pro charter group is publicly alarmed about weakened oversight, it is a sign that even supporters recognize how easily the system can drift back toward a permissive posture.
This is the pattern Ohio keeps repeating. After scandal, rules tighten. After time passes, pressure builds to loosen them again, often framed as reducing bureaucracy, encouraging innovation, or protecting “high quality” schools from paperwork. The problem is that the most damaging failures in Ohio were not caused by excessive paperwork. They were caused by governance arrangements and funding incentives that made it rational to prioritize scale, marketing, and revenue flows, even when performance lagged.
The structural issue has not changed: money moves, accountability is optional until it is not
The Columbus Navigator piece was blunt about the political intent it perceived, that the charter push was less about education than about undermining public schools by diverting tax dollars. You can disagree with the motive, but it is hard to dispute the mechanism. When students leave a district school for a charter, state funding follows. Meanwhile districts retain fixed costs: transportation routes, building operations, specialized staff, and contractual obligations. That is not ideology; it is basic finance.
Ohio’s own annual report also makes a crucial point that is often missing from charter debates. Community schools receive state and federal funds but no revenue from local property taxes. That means charter growth can function as an unfunded mandate on the community level, because local taxpayers still support district infrastructure even as state dollars are redirected elsewhere. In plain terms, the community can end up paying twice for parallel systems.
And then there is the question of who benefits.
Ohio’s annual report explicitly notes that community school governing authorities may contract with operators that can be for profit or nonprofit, and that these operators can handle a wide range of day to day functions. That is the gateway through which public money can be transformed into private revenue, not in the form of dividends to shareholders from the school itself, but through management fees, real estate arrangements, technology contracts, and layered service agreements that are difficult for the public to track in real time.
The ECOT record illustrates how this can play out at scale, with public funding flowing through a charter school to private companies tied to the school’s founder, and with the state later arguing it paid for participation that it could not verify.
If you are pro public education and pro labor, the lesson is not that every charter is a scam. The lesson is that systems should be judged by their worst incentives, not their best intentions. Public school districts, for all their flaws, operate within democratic governance, open records, and labor structures that provide some stability for students and staff. When charter governance becomes diffuse and operator contracts become the real center of gravity, it can produce a sector that looks public when it collects money, and looks private when asked to explain where the money went.
So, has anything changed since 2017?
Yes. Ohio shut down its most infamous online charter, and state auditors and courts have supported significant recovery and enforcement actions tied to overpayments and attendance verification.
But the deeper question, whether Ohio has built a charter system that reliably delivers better outcomes without destabilizing district schools, is still unresolved. The state itself continues to describe a sector that disproportionately serves at risk students, and it continues to permit operator models that can be for profit, which is precisely where accountability can thin out.
The most telling sign is how quickly oversight tools become bargaining chips. When sponsor evaluations can be paused by legislative maneuver, accountability starts to look less like a principle and more like a policy option.
If Ohio wants to prove the 2017 critique is outdated, it will not be enough to point to ECOT’s closure as a one off cleansing fire. It will have to show, year after year, that public dollars come with public rules: transparent contracting, enforceable conflict of interest standards, meaningful consequences for poor performance, and stable protections for the educators doing the work. Until then, the safest assumption is that the system has improved at the margins, while the underlying incentives remain intact.
Read more: https://www.columbusnavigator.com/complete-failure-ohio-charter-schools/
Additional sources used
https://www.courtnewsohio.gov/cases/2021/SCO/1005/200182.asp
https://www.ohioauditor.gov/news/pressreleases/Details/5965
https://www.ohioattorneygeneral.gov/Media/News-Releases/June-2019/AG-Yost-Announces-%24879K-Settlement-With-Former-Spo
https://fordhaminstitute.org/ohio/commentary/ohio-must-stop-chipping-away-charter-sponsor-accountability
https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/About/Annual-Reports/2023-2024-Community-Schools-Annual-Report.pdf.aspx?lang=en-US
https://education.ohio.gov/getattachment/Topics/Community-Schools/Annual-Reports-on-Ohio-Community-Schools/2024-2025-Community-Schools-Annual-Report.pdf.aspx?lang=en-US