- Enrollments Show D.C. Parents Want More School Choices
- Education Finance Panel Back From Limbo
- New Initiatives Making Schools Data Readily Available
- District Mayor Vincent C. Gray Calls for Changes in DCIAA Sports [Friendship, Maya Angelou, KIPP, and Options PCS are mentioned]
- Education Group on D.C. Plan: Teachers Want More Than Money
- Virtual Schools Are Multiplying, but Some Question Their Educational Value
- FOCUS School Quality and Education Policy Dashboards
Enrollments Show D.C. Parents Want More School Choices
The Washington Times
By Deborah Simmons
November 27, 2011
OK school-choice advocates. It’s time to go old-school this week as the Gray administration begins drawing up a school-closure list and as the new panel charged with examining the education-affordability factor holds its first session.
Ordinarily, the first few rounds of such who-gets-what budget cycles are colorful lessons about adults playing nice with their Crayolas and water-soluble paints. And they are largely tugs of war between two familiar sets of opponents — charter-school proponents and public-school traditionalists vs. reform-minded advocates and static teachers unions.
But this year it’s a paint-by-numbers game, courtesy of the popular federal voucher law that Congress passed and President Obama signed earlier this year.
With a few slight-of-hand strokes, Mr. Obama set in motion a dynamic that uses a broad brush to define public education and a less-pedestrian approach in the bricks-and-mortar sense.
Enrollment numbers portray in the clearest of pictures that parents want a more choice-centric approach.
• The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program provided vouchers for about 1,000 students in 2004, its first year.
That number rose to more than 1,900 in 2007, when funding was cut off. But now, with bipartisan backing, more than 1,600 underprivileged youths are participating in the program, which allows low-income students to attend the private school of their parents’ choosing.
That 745 of these students are new to the program means parents are embracing this game-changing approach and that 1,600 fewer youths are attending public schools.
• Enrollment in public charter schools is soaring as well. Unaudited numbers show a 9 percent increase in this oldest of D.C. school-choice options, with 32,000 students currently enrolled, compared with more than 29,300 last school year. Overall, charters educate 41 percent of D.C. youths.
• Traditional public schools also had a measurable rise in enrollment, with unaudited numbers at an estimated 46,200. Much of the increase was a result of the universal pre-kindergarten programs pushed largely by Democrats, including Mr. Obama and Mayor Vincent C. Gray.
But other numbers also come into play. Recommendations on school closings due this week from the mayoral-commissioned Illinois Facilities Fund (IFF), which focused on individual schools’ test scores, will be delivered to the Public Education Reform Commission (PERC), whose primary charge from City Hall is to dig deeply into all funding issues.
Parents whose children attend schools in the city’s wealthiest ward have little to worry about at this juncture, because none of its schools is ranked as an underperformer on test scores.
But stray far or near from Rock Creek Park and parents are at the ready to discuss why underperforming schools in each of the city’s other seven wards faces grayer prospects.
The number of designated underperforming schools: Ward 1, eight schools; Ward 2, three; Ward 4, 11; Ward 5, 11; Ward 6, 11; Ward 7, 20; and Ward 8, 20.
Ward 7 education activist Alicia Rucker, a nurse whose five school-age children attend public schools, told me this weekend that “affluence,” “highly effective principals who get the teaching-and-learning job done” and a keen sense of priorities are common but key components of a “great school.”
“There are up to three teachers in a classroom at [some] charter schools, a best practice that reduces teacher-student ratio and gives students more face time with their instructors,” she said. “When I talk to an art teacher in Ward 3 with a budget of $6,000, I have to ask how many art teachers with similar budgets are in Ward 7.”
IFF already has crunched numbers for such metropolises as Chicago, Denver and St. Louis, as well as Milwaukee, ground zero in the school-choice movement. Those cities’ schools are typically characterized as either “performing” or “not performing.”
Meanwhile, PERC will officially begin pondering the affordability question Thursday.
If your head tilts to the right, remember that those to the left always color outside the lines. How else to explain the unique performance of Ward 3 schools, eh?
Education Finance Panel Back From Limbo
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque
November 23, 2011
After springing into existence in late September, following many months of delay, the Public Education Finance Reform Commission (PEFRC) essentially disappeared. Formed by the D.C. Council in 2010 to explore questions about fairness and equity in public schools and public charter schools funding, the panel met just once before it was eclipsed by its own budget and procurement problems.
But PEFRC is back, with a schedule of six three-hour meetings between now and the end of January, when it is supposed to make recommendations to the D.C. Council. The first session is set for 6 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 1, (location TBD). The commission’s charge is a broad one: to look at issues of adequacy, equity, affordability and transparency in local school finance — and to do it in time to inform the fiscal year 2013 budget cycle.
Chairman Ed Lazere, executive director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, said he’s not altogether sure how much ground the panel can cover between now and late January, or how meaningful its recommendations will be, given the deadline.
“I can’t say at this point,” Lazere said, adding that much of the Dec. 1 meeting will likely be devoted to assessing what the commission can actually accomplish.
Membership is already changing. Timothea Howard of CentroNia has resigned due to health issues. Lazere said she will be replaced by a representative from the community, based on nominations submitted by commissioners and members of the public. Two additional community-based members will also be added, in response to criticism that the group is top-heavy with government officials.
New Initiatives Making Schools Data Readily Available
The Washington Post
By Bill Turque and Michael Alison Chandler
November 26, 2011
Parents across the Washington region will soon have more readily available — and useful— information about how their public schools are doing, the result of new initiatives underway at the local and state level for reporting and displaying education data.
The District, Maryland and Virginia are pledging some changes as part of their applications to the Obama administration for exemption from unpopular requirements of the No Child Left Behind law, among them the mandate for 100 percent proficiency by 2014 on standardized reading and math tests.
The U.S. Education Department is offering the waivers to states that adopt an “index” system of multiple measures that go beyond annual test results in determining school performance. These include test score growth over time, graduation rates and other evidence that schools have produced students who are college- or career-ready. States also must show plans for evaluating teachers and principals by multiple measures.
Schools will still have to meet specific academic performance expectations, but they will have new latitude in defining success. With the waivers, states can also avoid No Child’s prescribed improvement strategies that allow students to transfer out of schools labeled as failing and that require private contract tutoring to struggling students.
States will also be required to identify the lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools and make aggressive efforts to improve them.
Maryland and the District already have a head start in pursuit of the waivers, having committed to many of the same reforms in their successful bids for the administration’s Race to the Top grants.
Unlike with Race to the Top, there is no cap on the number of waivers to be granted. Eleven states — Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Tennessee — submitted applications by the initial deadline of Nov. 14. The District, Maryland and Virginia are aiming for the next application window in mid-February. New accountability systems could be in place as early as spring.
Officials are reaching out to local school leaders, teachers, parents and other community stakeholders for ideas on what the index should include.
“What we’re doing is allowing parents, teachers and administrators to sort of define education for themselves,” said Kayleen Irizarry, D.C. state assistant superintendent for elementary and secondary education. She said the District will hold a series of town hall meetings over the next couple of months to discuss school measures.
In the District, other efforts to deepen the pool of publicly available school data are nearing completion. D.C. Public Schools, the Public Charter School Board and the Office of the State Superintendent of Education are all expected to roll out revamped school performance reports in coming weeks, all based on the idea of providing multiple measures of progress.
As part of commitments it made to win $75 million in Race to the Top funds last year, the Office of the State Superintendent of Education will introduce a “Schoolwide Growth Model” similar to the one it is preparing for the No Child waiver application. The charter board will roll out an ambitious new Performance Management Framework that for the first time will rank schools by “tiers” of effectiveness across 15 indicators, including test score growth, and rates of re-enrollment and college acceptance.
D.C. Public Schools will release “School Scorecards” with similar metrics, in addition to data on attendance, expulsions and suspensions, and retention of “effective” and “highly effective” teachers as assessed by its IMPACT evaluation system.
Educators credit No Child Left Behind with shining a new light on racial achievement gaps and the status of children with special needs. But they also say that the laser focus on annual test scores has put a failure stamp on schools that might actually be serving children.
Faced with the prospect of no action in Congress to modify the law before 2014, Education Secretary Arne Duncan initiated the waiver program. The exemptions will relieve officials from having to deliver large amounts of discouraging news about school progress in 2014.
Under the current configuration of the law, 62 percent of Virginia schools and 44 percent in Maryland were deemed failing in 2011, percentages that would almost certainly continue to climb.
The numbers are even more stark in the District, where 162 of 218 public and public charter schools (74 percent) failed to make adequate yearly progress, or AYP, as defined by the law. Without a waiver, that number is projected to rise to 179 (82 percent).
“We made a lot of progress with No Child Left Behind,” said Mary Gable, Maryland’s assistant state superintendent for academic policy. “But it put many schools in AYP jail.”
District Mayor Vincent C. Gray Calls for Changes in DCIAA Sports [Friendship, Maya Angelou, KIPP, and Options PCS are mentioned]
The Washington Post
By James Wagner
November 23, 2011
D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) will be in the stands Thursday at Eastern High when his alma mater, Dunbar, plays Coolidge in the 42nd annual Turkey Bowl. Also expected in the stands for the game, one of the D.C. Interscholastic Athletic Association’s marquee events, will be members of the eighth-ranked team from Friendship Collegiate, a charter school whose program has risen to such prominence that many believe there is little doubt the Knights are the city’s best.
Friendship’s 9-1 season ended a few weeks ago without so much as a playoff game. According to Gray, who has taken an active role in trying to shape District high school athletics, that’s just one of many things that must change on the D.C. high school sports landscape.
Gray said in an interview on Tuesday that the tattered image of the DCIAA needs to be restored and the athletic league needs better marketing, more sports and more resources. He also wants to bring burgeoning public charter athletics into the city-wide fold.
“The charters should have the opportunity to play for what is the ultimate championship,” said Gray, a regular presence at DCIAA events. “How we structure that is still open for discussion. . . . But at the end of the day, I don’t think you have a true city-wide or state-wide championship if you’ve got schools that have been excluded, especially when they are public schools, they just happen to have a different governance model.”
The city’s public charter schools continue growing, totaling more than 32,000 students this school year while enrollment in D.C. Public Schools, which has seen a decades-long decline, stands at nearly 46,000 students. Friendship Collegiate, which beat three-time Turkey Bowl champion H.D. Woodson, 46-6, last month, opened its season on ESPNU and its only loss was in New York to nationally ranked Bergen Catholic (N.J.). Meantime, charter schools Maya Angelou and KIPP fielded their first varsity football teams, and Options started one last season.
“To me, these are public schools just like other schools and we’ve got to find a place for them,” Gray said.
The mayor said he has floated the idea of forming a public charter school league and possibly having the champion play the DCIAA champion for a city title. That could take the place of the Turkey Bowl or be scheduled after the game, he said.
Gray said the Office of the State Superintendent of Education recently posted an opening for a newly created position of a District-wide athletic director that could oversee a public charter league and work with private schools in the city. State Superintendent of Education Hosanna Mahaley would be responsible for that hiring, he said.
Gray also addressed the public image of the DCIAA, which has been hurt in the past year. An eligibility scandal cast a cloud over last season’s Turkey Bowl, an episode Gray referred to as “terrible.” Eligibility standards were also an issue during basketball season, both for boys and girls. This football season, three of the DCIAA’s 11 football teams were involved in on-field fights (including Turkey Bowl participant Dunbar) that ended games and resulted in forfeits. Scheduling issues plagued the start of the football season and an eleventh-hour rule change allowed fifth-year seniors to compete, casting the league’s ability to compete against other area schools in doubt.
Repairing that image begins with “improving the schools themselves, which we are working hard on,” Gray said. “There was a time many, many years ago when there were close to 150,000 kids enrolled in DCPS. And now you have about 45,000, so the sheer numbers have reduced. Working to improve those academics conditions will send a message to kids, too.”
Gray said he wanted to add more staff to the athletic office to help better police the league’s rules, chief among them the eligibility of athletes, instead of relying on coaches or administrators to turn in offenders.
Echoing the thoughts of new DCIAA Athletic Director Stephanie Evans, who was introduced last week, Gray said ensuring coaches are properly trained and certified is a priority.
Gray said the DCIAA wants “coaches who realize that their real goal is to be a teacher and are not just teaching the skills of the athletic endeavor but are also teaching the values to these young people. We’ve seen instances where that wasn’t the case. And we’re going to work hard to clean that up.”
The mayor also said he wants a more robust offering of sports, from lacrosse to rugby, at all schools, with an eye for increasing the participation of girls in athletics. He said money could be secured for these ideas by securing donations from foundations and by better marketing existing sports events.
This year’s Turkey Bowl will feature a title sponsor in Safeway, which signed on for a three-year, $150,000 deal, Gray said.
Gray also addressed the competitive imbalance of the DCIAA, noting that it’s an issue that relates directly to the DCPS out-of-boundary policy that allows students to apply to change schools for any reason. The enrollment disparity that results among DCIAA schools creates concerns both in the classroom and on the playing field, Gray said.
“When you have a school that is beating another one at halftime, 40-0, you’ve got a real disparity there,” he said. “And those schools typically don’t have many players, they may have 20, 25 players. And that’s a part of fixing the educational stuff because as you get more kids coming to a particular school, it’s also going to broaden your talent pool of kids that are participating in athletics.”
Education Group on D.C. Plan: Teachers Want More Than Money
The Washington Times
By Tom Howell Jr.
November 24, 2011
The National Education Association has responded to a D.C. proposal to give city teachers a bonus to transfer to underachieving schools by saying money is not what motivates great educators.
Association President Dennis van Roekel says his group has conducted focus groups on what gets a teacher to leave one building for another, and “money is not” the determining factor.
“The most common answer is, ‘I want a real good principal, a leader,’ ” Mr. van Roekel told The Washington Times. “A good principal is like a magnet; a bad principal is like same poles.”
Legislation before the D.C. Council would offer a $10,000 bonus and other financial incentives to “highly effective” teachers who agree to transfer to “high-need” schools. Sixteen states offer similar programs with various incentives, including tax breaks and housing assistance.
The bill’s sponsor, council Chairman Kwame R. Brown, says the three-year pilot program for as many as 20 teachers would give four high-need schools — two of which must be middle schools — a boost. It also would reassure instructors who worry that teaching in schools with lower test scores will impact their evaluations, his office said.
Mr. Brown, a Democrat, said his goal is to help students in underachieving schools, not force teachers to leave their current schools.
D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Kaya Henderson is scheduled to testify on the measure Dec. 14 at a hearing before Mr. Brown’s Committee of the Whole.
While Ms. Henderson has not signaled what she will say, she has indicated her desire to work with Mr. Brown on “creative solutions” to getting effective teachers in the neediest classrooms.
“Similar kinds of incentive programs have been attempted across the country, so we should be careful not to make the same assumptions or fall into the same traps as districts who have tried this before, and failed,” Ms. Henderson said. “I am especially concerned about the assumption that teachers are interchangeable. Because someone is successful in one context, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee success in another context.”
She said teachers must be treated as professionals whose input is critical to forming a plan.
“I believe in asking our high-performing teachers what would make them consider teaching in a low-performing school, and conversely, what’s holding them back,” she said.
Mr. van Roekel said he cannot comment on issues specific to the District, but good schools start with a leader who is part of the community, he said, citing anecdotes about an inner-city principal in Omaha.
“Those kids that come into her class, she knows their auntie, and she knows their grandma,” he said.
Under Mr. Brown’s bill, teachers who commit to the program would still be subject to evaluation under IMPACT — a controversial program that scores teachers based on classroom observations and student achievement. However, the teachers would not risk losing their “highly effective” status during the three-year period.
The legislation defines underachieving schools as “high-need schools” having a proficiency rate in reading and math below 40 percent and with 75 percent or more of its student body eligible for free and reduced-price lunches. Teachers are eligible for homebuyer and other housing assistance, tuition assistance and income-tax credits, in addition to the $10,000 bonus.
Mayor Vincent C. Gray and the Office of the State Superintendent for Education would select the schools for the project, which could expand to more schools if it’s successful, according to Mr. Brown’s office.
Three to five teachers would be selected for each school, the bill states.
Virtual Schools Are Multiplying, but Some Question Their Educational Value
The Washington Post
By Lyndsey Layton and Emma Brown
November 26, 2011
A Virginia company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers — in which children as young as 5 can learn at home at taxpayer expense — is facing a backlash from critics who are questioning its funding, quality and oversight.
K12 Inc. of Herndon has become the country’s largest provider of full-time public virtual schools, upending the traditional American notion that learning occurs in a schoolhouse where students share the experience. In K12’s virtual schools, learning is largely solitary, with lessons delivered online to a child who progresses at her own pace.
Conceived as a way to teach a small segment of the home-schooled and others who need flexible schooling, virtual education has evolved into an alternative to traditional public schools for an increasingly wide range of students — high achievers, strugglers, dropouts, teenage parents and victims of bullying among them.
“For many kids, the local school doesn’t work,” said Ronald J. Packard, chief executive and founder of K12. “And now, technology allows us to give that child a choice. It’s about educational liberty.”
Packard and other education entrepreneurs say they are harnessing technology to deliver quality education to any child, regardless of Zip code.
It’s an appealing proposition, and one that has attracted support in state legislatures, including Virginia’s. But in one of the most hard-fought quarters of public policy, a rising chorus of critics argues that full-time virtual learning doesn’t effectively educate children.
“Kindergarten kids learning in front of a monitor — that’s just wrong,” said Maryelen Calderwood, an elected school committee member in Greenfield, Mass., who unsuccessfully tried to stop K12 from contracting with her community to create New England’s first virtual public school last year. “It’s absolutely astounding how people can accept this so easily.”
People on both sides agree that the structure providing public education is not designed to handle virtual schools. How, for example, do you pay for a school that floats in cyberspace when education funding formulas are rooted in the geography of property taxes? How do you oversee the quality of a virtual education?
“There’s a total mismatch,” said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, who served on K12’s board of directors until 2007. “We’ve got a 19th-century edifice trying to house a 21st-century system.”
Despite questions, full-time virtual schools are proliferating.
In the past two years, more than a dozen states have passed laws and removed obstacles to encourage virtual schools. And providers of virtual education have been making their case in statehouses around the country.
K12 has hired lobbyists from Boise to Boston and backed political candidates who support school choice in general and virtual education in particular. From 2004 to 2010, K12 gave about $500,000 in direct contributions to state politicians across the country, with three-quarters going to Republicans, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
“We understand the politics of education pretty well,” Packard told investors recently.
K12’s push into New England illustrates its skill. In 2009, the company began exploring the potential for opening a virtual school in Massachusetts in partnership with the rural Greenfield school district.
But Massachusetts education officials halted the plan, saying Greenfield had no legal authority to create a statewide school. So Greenfield and K12 turned to legislators, with the company spending about $200,000 on Beacon Hill lobbyists.
State Rep. Martha “Marty” Walz, a Boston Democrat, wrote legislation that allowed Greenfield to open the Massachusetts Virtual Academy in 2010. She acknowledged that the language was imperfect and didn’t address issues of funding or oversight but said she couldn’t wait to craft a comprehensive plan.
“You do what you need to do sometimes to get the ball rolling,” said Walz, who accepted at least $2,600 in campaign contributions from K12, its executives or its lobbyists since 2008, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
That scenario is repeating nationwide as K12 and its allies seek to expand virtual education.
About 250,000 students are enrolled in full-time public virtual schools in 30 states, according to Susan Patrick of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a trade association. Although that’s just a fraction of the country’s 50 million schoolchildren, the numbers are growing fast, Patrick said.
K12 teaches about two out of every five students in full-time online schools. Its next largest competitor is Baltimore-based Connections Education, which was recently acquired by Pearson, the mammoth British textbook publisher. The rest of the industry consists of smaller operators and some nonprofit virtual schools.
Seizing an opportunity
If it were a school district, K12 would rank among the 30 largest of the nation’s 1,500 districts. The company, which began in two states a decade ago, now teaches about 95,000 students in virtual schools in 29 states and the District of Columbia.
And it plans to grow. “We are now that much closer to our manifest destiny of making a K12 Inc. education available to every child,” Packard said in a call with Wall Street analysts this month.
It’s a promising business. In the past fiscal year, K12 had revenue of $522 million — a 36 percent increase from the prior year, according to securities filings. Its net income after a series of acquisitions was $12.8 million. Packard earned $2.6 million in total compensation.
Packard, 48, took a roundabout route to education. A former Goldman Sachs banker, he was working as a consultant with McKinsey and Co. when he got a call from Michael Milken, the financier who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990 and later became a philanthropist partly focused on education.
Packard joined Milken’s education investment holding firm and ran one of his companies, a chain of preschools. About the same time, Packard was trying to find an online math course for his 6-year-old daughter. Frustrated by the dearth of options, he saw a business opportunity.
He founded K12 in 2000 with a $10 million investment from Milken and Larry Ellison, the chief executive of Oracle Corp., maker of software and hardware systems. William J. Bennett, education secretary under President Ronald Reagan, became the company’s chairman, bringing his conservative bona fides and political connections to a company that originally aimed for the home-schooling market. Bennett resigned from K12 in 2005.
In the early years, Bror Saxberg served as the chief architect of K12’s curriculum. With a medical degree from Harvard and a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, he was excited by the potential to transform education by applying what cognitive scientists have learned about how brains work.
“There was a terrific opportunity to finally apply some of this learning science work at scale, to make learning environments that could really make a difference for students,” Saxberg said. He left the company to join Kaplan Inc. in 2009.
Kaplan is a for-profit education provider owned by The Washington Post Co. It competed directly with K12 until May, when K12 acquired Kaplan’s virtual-schools business. Kaplan continues to offer test-preparation courses, and in November the two companies announced an agreement to share distribution of some products and services.
K12 sells a variety of ways to learn online, ranging from hybrid schools — in which students meet in a classroom but take courses via computer — to a la carte courses purchased by traditional schools.
Last year, K12 formed a joint venture with Middlebury College to offer foreign language courses. This year, it bought a stake in a Chinese company that teaches English online.
But K12’s core business — and the one proving most controversial — is full-time virtual public schools.
No need for the bus stop
For Tyler Hirata, going to school used to mean waking up at 6 a.m. and clambering aboard a yellow bus. Now he snoozes until midmorning and pads downstairs to the computer in his Dumfries home.
“This is fantastic!” said Tyler, 8, who had attended a Prince William County school but was enrolled this fall in the Virginia Virtual Academy — a public institution run by K12 and open to any student in the commonwealth.
Tyler said the best thing about taking third grade online is that it requires less than three hours a day. His mother is more excited that, for the first time, Tyler is reading fluently on his own.
“The K12 program is phenomenal,” said Michele Hirata, adding that Tyler blossomed with her daily one-on-one attention. Virtual school has been equally positive for her fifth-grade daughter, Gennifer, 10, a fast learner who spends five hours a day practicing gymnastics, she said.
Virtual class sizes tend to be larger than at traditional schools — the Virginia academy averages 60 students per teacher, according to a school document. So in the primary grades, the model relies on the intensive work of a parent “learning coach,” who provides most lessons away from the computer, using books and 90 pounds of other educational materials shipped to families by K12.
In the older grades, the bulk of learning is online, with software that sometimes aims to mimic real-life experiences for students, such as a high school biology lab featuring an animated frog dissection.
Teachers monitor student progress, grade work and answer questions by e-mail or phone. They work from home, aren’t likely to be unionized and earn as much as 35 percent less than their counterparts in regular schools, according to interviews with former K12 teachers.
Teachers also look for ways to help students socialize. Bethany Scanlon, a former special education teacher for K12’s Ohio Virtual Academy, shipped hot chocolate and popcorn to her students one winter holiday season. They all settled in with their computers to watch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” streamed over the Internet.
“When you’re teaching online, you have to be very creative,” she said.
In Dumfries, Tyler said he misses some of the best parts of school, such as lunchtime. And recess. And friends.
“Believe me,” he said, “if you are home-schooled, you will want friends.”
During recent deliberations over virtual schooling in Virginia, a member of the state Board of Education raised the issue of socialization.
“This would appear to make it possible to go from kindergarten through eighth grade without ever stepping into a real classroom,” David M. Foster said. “I’m not sure I want to encourage that. . . . Collaborative problem solving, socialization, working with other people is key not just to the global economy but to getting along in life.”
Mixed performance
While virtual schools continue to expand, their effectiveness is unclear.
“We have no real evidence one way or another,” said Tom Loveless, a Brookings Institution scholar who served as a paid consultant to K12 in its early years.
A 2009 analysis by the U.S. Education Department found that there wasn’t enough research to draw conclusions about how elementary and secondary students fare in full-time virtual schools compared with classrooms.
On measures widely used to judge all public schools, such as state test scores and graduation rates, virtual schools — often run as charter schools — tend to perform worse than their brick-and-mortar counterparts.
At the Colorado Virtual Academy, which is managed by K12 and has more than 5,000 students, the on-time graduation rate was 12 percent in 2010, compared with 72 percent statewide.
That same year, K12’s Ohio Virtual Academy — whose enrollment tops 9,000 — had a 30 percent on-time graduation rate, compared with a state average of 78 percent.
Last year, about one-third of K12-managed schools met the achievement goals required under the federal No Child Left Behind law, according to Gary Miron, a Western Michigan University professor who called that performance “poor.”
K12 officials say the weak test results are related to the program often attracting students who struggled in regular schools.
One of K12’s oldest and biggest schools is the Agora Cyber Charter, a statewide virtual school that began in Pennsylvania in 2005. The company manages the school under a contract with its nonprofit board of trustees. Enrollment this fall topped 8,000 students.
Agora has never met federally defined achievement goals.
The school markets itself as an option for at-risk students who are failing at their neighborhood school. Last year, about two-thirds of its students were low-income.
Many lived in unstable homes, said Aimee Saunders, who taught history at K12’s Pennsylvania schools for four years until 2009.
Some of those children didn’t have an adult who could serve as the learning coach. Instead, they were left home alone and did little or no schoolwork, she said.
“You take students who normally would struggle because of their home environment and then you put them in their home to learn,” Saunders said. “It doesn’t work that well.”
Rapid student turnover can compound the problem. Of the 8,700 students who enrolled in 2010-11, more than a quarter withdrew during the year, according to school records.
“New students were always coming in,” Saunders said, which “made it difficult to be able to focus on the students I already had.”
Company officials said internal data show that Agora students — and K12 students in general — are learning at a faster rate than the national norm, even if they can’t pass a grade-level test. And the longer students stay with K12, the better they perform, the company said.
But Pennsylvania has its own measure of how fast students are learning, and it showed “significant evidence” that Agora did not meet growth standards last year.
In June 2010, the state threatened to revoke Agora’s charter unless the school made changes, including aligning the curriculum with state standards and expanding remediation programs for struggling students. It also insisted on more transparency so it would be clear how much K12 was receiving for different services.
Agora officials said they addressed those concerns by opening a face-to-face tutoring center in Philadelphia, for example, and hiring staff to conduct home visits.
Saunders, the former Agora teacher, says virtual schools provide an important new option for families and should be forgiven for missteps.
After all, many traditional public schools have failed to help the neediest children.
“A lot of schools are making mistakes by not trying anything different than they’ve tried before,” she said.
Cost to taxpayers
Even some supporters of virtual schools question whether online operators are charging taxpayers fairly.
“They have no business trying to charge as much as the brick-and-mortar schools, at least over time,” said Finn, of the Fordham Institute, which has commissioned a study of the cost of online schools. “Once you’ve got the stuff that you’re going to use for fourth-grade math, for instance, you don’t really need to do much with it. And it should be cheaper.”
Online education companies say they are no different from textbook publishers and other businesses that profit from sales to schools.
But payments for a year’s worth of online schooling can vary wildly. For instance, K12 received $3,728 per full-time student in 2009-10 for its virtual school based in Broward County, Fla., but $5,000 per student in Greenfield, Mass. K12 is getting $6,200 for each student in its D.C. school, which enrolls about 100 students.
In Pennsylvania, because of a complicated funding mechanism, K12’s Agora Cyber Charter receives $6,000 to $16,000 per student for an identical course load, depending on where that student lives.
“We don’t have a real handle on what the real cost is for a virtual school,” said Mitchell D. Chester, commissioner of elementary and secondary education in Massachusetts.
Jeff Kwitowski, K12’s vice president for public relations, said it’s “impossible” to pinpoint the true cost of educating a child in any environment, whether virtual or face-to-face. Prices vary because some schools purchase different K12 services, he said.
Targeting rural counties
The Virginia Virtual Academy, another K12 venture, began enrolling full-time students across the commonwealth in fall 2009, more than a year before state law addressed this new kind of education.
The Virginia school offers a lesson in how K12 relied on political savvy and statehouse connections to build its business.
The Virginia venture was a partnership between the traditional schools of Carroll County — a rural county bordering North Carolina — and K12. Children who enrolled in the Virtual Virginia Academy were counted as Carroll County students no matter where they lived.
That was no accident.
State aid varies by school district and follows a formula based on poverty, among other factors. Affluent Fairfax County receives $2,716 per pupil from Richmond, whereas relatively poor Carroll County receives $5,421, according to the state Education Department.
This year, 66 Fairfax students are enrolled in the virtual school. Richmond is paying the virtual school twice as much for those students as it would if they attended neighborhood schools in their own county.
“Clearly, it’s not a logical or equitable system,” said state Sen. George L. Barker (D-Fairfax). “It’s a horrible deal for taxpayers.”
Barker has twice tried to change funding so that subsidies are based on where students live. Twice he was rebuffed by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell (R), a champion of school choice who successfully promoted legislation to authorize full-time virtual schools in 2010.
K12 was the only private company present during talks to craft that legislation. McDonnell has received $55,000 in campaign contributions from K12 or its executives since 2009, including a $15,000 payment to his political action committee this month.
McDonnell was on a trade-related trip to India late last week and unavailable to comment. But his spokesman, Jeff Caldwell, said K12’s political support had not influenced decisions regarding virtual schools.
“They’re a corporation that is making donations to several folks,” Caldwell said. “The fact that they gave some to the governor certainly did not sway his opinion.”
The governor recognizes that the state needs a better way to fund virtual schools but does not want to make abrupt changes that would harm the new schools, his staff said.
McDonnell “came into office really wanting to provide options and innovation to Virginia schoolchildren,” state Education Secretary Laura Fornash said. “Virtual schools [were] a major part of that.”
This year, K12 opened a second virtual school in Virginia, signing a contract with Buena Vista City, near Lynchburg, where the per-pupil state subsidy is $5,850. The two schools combined have an enrollment of 540 students.
While K12 executives see unlimited horizons for online education, traditional schools are struggling with severe budget cuts.
In Carroll County, the Virginia Virtual Academy provides a revenue stream for the public school system, which collects a $500 registration fee for each out-of-district student. On top of that, the county collects a management fee — 6.5 percent of the taxpayer dollars that flow to K12.
In what may be an unintended irony, Carroll County is using that windfall — $178,450 last year — to buy old-fashioned but much-needed textbooks for its brick-and-mortar schools.
Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
FOCUS School Quality and Education Policy Dashboards
The FOCUS School Quality Dashboard has been updated with the 2011 DC CAS results. Available at www.focusdc.org/data, this easy-to-use, interactive tool allows users to see school performance on the state test and compare progress from 2006 to the present for all public schools in the District, both traditional and charter.
The FOCUS Education Policy Dashboard is a collection of sector level information on performance, enrollment, funding, poll data, facilities, and ward facts. It is available at www.focusdc.org/education-