Online Charter Schools No Solution in a Pandemic
Instead of going to school every morning, what if school could come to you?” an ad asks enticingly, promising students “online personalized learning” tailored to their specific needs. It’s one of hundreds of active Facebook ads run by K12 Inc., the largest for-profit virtual charter school provider in the United States. As public schools rose to the challenge of educating students online during the pandemic, corporations like K12 Inc., whose stock price has been climbing since mid-March, were licking their chops at the prospect of moving kids online permanently. Though virtual charter schools perform dismally academically and are plagued by scandal, the goal is for them to replace traditional brick-and-mortar public schools in an effort to privatize education. While this would harm students, it would most egregiously damage Black and Latino children, who’ve already been disproportionately impacted by the coronavirus, due to structural inequities such as lack of access to computers and internet service, as well as inconsistent health care and crowded housing.
K12 Inc. was founded in 2000 by investment banker Ron Packard, “junk bond king” Michael Milken, and Bill Bennett, the U.S. secretary of education under President Ronald Reagan, who was also the company’s first board chairman. Betsy DeVos was an early investor in K12 who held shares in the company until she became education secretary in 2017. The idea behind virtual charter schools was promising: to serve a varied group of students who might benefit from the flexibility of learning online, from those who struggled academically, to others with health challenges, to athletes and performers, as Mary Gifford, a senior vice president for K12, explained in a 2016 article in Education Week. But the venture quickly fell into corruption by putting profits over performance and using taxpayer dollars as its personal piggy bank, as a 2017 report by the American Federation of Teachers detailed.
Coronavirus and racism combined with online charters would create a plague of injustice that will never be wiped out.
Like brick-and-mortar charter schools, virtual charters are publicly funded but privately managed, raking in more than $1 billion taxpayer dollars each year while functioning with minimal oversight. Most are for-profit entities in a market dominated by K12 and its chief competitor, the Pearson-operated Connections Academy. Full-time virtual schools served about 300,000 students nationwide in 2017-18, according to the National Education Policy Center.
Darcy Bedortha, who taught at the K12-operated Insight School of Oregon and wrote about it in Education Week, described a toxic environment where students logged into class erratically and staff meetings focused more on recruiting students than helping those who already attended and were struggling. Teachers were CONTINUE READING: Online Charter Schools No Solution in a Pandemic - LA Progressive
