California: Charter Operators Will Repay the State at Least $215 Million | Diane Ravitch's blog

California: Charter Operators Will Repay the State at Least $215 Million | Diane Ravitch's blog

California: Charter Operators Will Repay the State at Least $215 Million

Will Huntsberry of Voice of San Diego writes here about one of the biggest scams in the history of charter schools (the biggest was probably the ECOT–Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow–scandal in Ohio, which cost the state about $500 million).

The two ringleaders of an online charter school scam that raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges on Friday. 

Sean McManus and Jason Schrock, as well as nine other defendants, including a superintendent, were charged back in 2019 as part of a complicated scheme that involved enrolling fake students into their online charter schools and collecting public money for each student...

“The general activity is you and your friend got these millions of dollars from the state and you funneled them into your pocket, correct?” asked San Diego Superior Court Judge Frederick Link, while taking the pleas. 

Both answered yes. 

Online charter schools are allowed to collect just as much CONTINUE READING: California: Charter Operators Will Repay the State at Least $215 Million | Diane Ravitch's blog

Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools - The Washington Post

Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools - The Washington Post

Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools

A new report on California’s online charter schools says that the state is “wasting hundreds of millions of dollars a year by funding these schools at a level far above their costs.”

The report, published Tuesday by a California-based nonprofit research and policy organization called In the Public Interest, also says that the “track record of online charter schools has been uniformly negative for every demographic subgroup of students” despite the promise of online education.

“In a time when school districts everywhere face the heartbreak of knowing they cannot provide all the services their students need and deserve, it is critical that lawmakers act as conservative stewards of the state’s tax collars by focusing funding on the schools where it can do the greatest good for the greatest number of the state’s students,” the report says.

Charter schools are publicly funded but privately operated. About 10 percent of public school students in California attend charter schools — both brick-and-mortar and online. According to the report, nearly 175,000 California students in 2018-19 were enrolled in online charter schools, representing 27 percent of all charter school students in the state.

The charter sector in California — which has more charter schools and more charter students than any other state — has long been troubled. Though charter schools are designed to operate outside the rules of school district bureaucracies, the state allowed them to expand for years with very little oversight despite continuing controversy over financial scandals and other problems.

In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law the most substantial changes to California’s charter school laws since passage of the original California Charter Schools Act in 1992. Among the changes was a two-year moratorium on new online charter schools till the end of this year. The state legislature will have to address the issue of whether to extend the ban on new online charter schools in the current session, which ends in September. CONTINUE READING: Report: California ‘wasting’ millions of dollars funding online charter schools - The Washington Post

La. Virtual School’s Whopper Course Sizes, with a Side of Edgenuity | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

La. Virtual School’s Whopper Course Sizes, with a Side of Edgenuity | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

La. Virtual School’s Whopper Course Sizes, with a Side of Edgenuity

At the outset of the tumultuous, 2020-21 pandemic school year, I was asked if I preferred to teach at my district’s virtual school rather than return to the classrrom in person.

I declined, for two reasons. First of all, I did not want to put myself in a position in which I could be assigned hundreds of students because virtual school has no physical space restraints to stymie a ridiculous overload. And second, I did not want to risk losing my position (including my physical classroom and my particular course responsibilities) at my current school.

However, even though I declined, when I was asked if I would like to teach virtual school, I assumed the request entailed actually teaching— meeting students virtually for class at a set time, and assigning my own class assignments via computer. It seems that such an expectation is also in line with guidance from the Louisiana Department of Education. Some key requirements:

• Teacher-led instruction with student-teacher interaction (e.g. live teaching, pre-recorded lesson, office hours, individual instruction, small group instruction) is a regular component of student instruction.
• Teachers regularly provide and set clear expectations for opportunities involving student-to-student interaction in a virtual setting (e.g., discussion boards, responding to peer assignments, live chats, etc.)
• Students have daily communication with a school staff member regarding academics (e.g., a check-in phone call, teacher-led instruction, email exchange, teacher feedback on student work, small breakout groups, chat, messaging applications such as Remind, etc.)
• Teachers have opportunities to collaborate to plan virtual instruction and adapt and annotate materials for the virtual classroom.

What I now realize is that the teachers who are working at my district’s virtual school are not teaching– they are supervising “caseloads” of students who are expected to complete a canned curriculum, Edgenuity, mostly “independently.” From the St. Tammany Virtual CONTINUE READING: La. Virtual School’s Whopper Course Sizes, with a Side of Edgenuity | deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog

Virtual Charter Schools Are Booming, Despite A Checkered Reputation | 89.3 KPCC

Virtual Charter Schools Are Booming, Despite A Checkered Reputation | 89.3 KPCC

Virtual Charter Schools Are Booming, Despite A Checkered Reputation

Parent Mandii Brower vividly remembers what it was like when her kids' school in Yukon, Okla., switched to distance learning in the spring: "It was just like, we never learned with our teachers again. They never checked on things again." She says "school" consisted of just a few short daily assignments.

"I [couldn't] see my kids' education going that way."

So this fall, Brower enrolled her two daughters in Epic Charter Schools, a virtual program that allows students to study online, at their own pace, with pre-recorded lessons and one-on-one teacher support. For Brower, the difference has been night and day. She says Epic "[has] it down pat, and they know how to help families."

Brower wasn't the only parent to give the Oklahoma-based virtual school a try this year. Since last spring, Epic enrollment has grown to be double the size of the state's largest public school district.

In fact, across the country, fully virtual K-12 charter schools have experienced a pandemic-induced "surge," as one sector observer put it. K12 Inc., one of the biggest in the business, has reported a 57% enrollment increase, taking it up to 195,000 students; Connections Academy, another heavy hitter, has reported a 41% jump, and the list goes on.

Virtual charter schools have been around for a couple of decades. In that time, they've been both relatively niche and highly controversial. Free to families but paid for by taxpayers, they enrolled about 300,000 full-time students in the 2017-18 school year, according to the National Education Policy Center. The market has been dominated by publicly-traded corporations, including K12 Inc. and Pearson, which CONTINUE READING: Virtual Charter Schools Are Booming, Despite A Checkered Reputation | 89.3 KPCC

In the Public Interest: Beware the Privatization Racket! | Diane Ravitch's blog

In the Public Interest: Beware the Privatization Racket! | Diane Ravitch's blog

In the Public Interest: Beware the Privatization Racket!

The nonpartisan “In the Public Interest” keeps close watch on privatization across all sectors, including education. Corporate interests are preying on the public sector, looking to extract profit from our public dollars. Be vigilant! Sign up to receive newsletters from ITPI.

Students are flocking to poor-performing online charter schools, straining public school budgets.Superintendents in Pennsylvania are warning that increasing enrollment in online charter schools could strain already burdened public school budgets. “There will be public schools, school districts, in a lot of trouble financially,” said Jeff Groshek, superintendent of the Central Columbia School District. Fox 56

Check out In the Public Interest’s two fact sheets on the widespread poor performance of online charter schools: “Why online education can’t replace brick-and-mortar K-12 schooling,” and “Frequently asked questions about online charter schools.”

“Passionate voucher advocate” joins Tennessee CONTINUE READING:  In the Public Interest: Beware the Privatization Racket! | Diane Ravitch's blog

DOE Report: Acellus Online Curriculum Violated Religion, Discrimination Policies - Honolulu Civil Beat

DOE Report: Acellus Online Curriculum Violated Religion, Discrimination Policies - Honolulu Civil Beat

DOE Report: Acellus Online Curriculum Violated Religion, Discrimination Policies

The Hawaii Department of Education’s internal review of the remote learning tool found the inappropriate content in lessons to be “severe, pervasive and persistent.”

The controversial distance learning program used by hundreds of Hawaii public schools this year discriminated against protected classes based on race, national origin, gender, religion, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, according to a Hawaii Department of Education review of Acellus Learning Accelerator.

The 140-page report, drafted last month but just posted to the DOE website on Monday, reveals the program violates the state Board of Education’s anti-harassment, anti-bullying and anti-discrimination policy against students by employees.

“Viewed through the lens of BOE Policy 305-10 … the identified discriminatory content rises to the level of being severe, pervasive and persistent,” the report says.

Additionally, the report found Acellus program content promotes religion in the public schools in violation of a BOE policy that prohibits religion in the schools.

The DOE had released a five-page condensed report on Acellus in mid-October but the comprehensive report released this week offers a much fuller and more detailed picture of the extent to which Acellus has featured harmful material to scores of public school students in Hawaii.

Although the full report had been available for more than a month, it’s not clear why the DOE took as long as it did to post the full review. Hawaii Board of Education members were publicly calling for its release as far back as at an Oct. 15 meeting.

Civil Beat had also requested the report on Oct. 19 via the Uniform Information Practices Act. After several follow-up emails, the DOE replied last Thursday by referencing a proclamation by Gov. David Ige that suspended UIPA deadlines due to COVID-19.

At its Oct. 15 meeting, the Board of Education voted to discontinue Acellus by the end of the school year. While some DOE schools have independently chosen to yank the online curriculum from their menu of distance learning tools, other schools are choosing to CONTINUE READING: DOE Report: Acellus Online Curriculum Violated Religion, Discrimination Policies - Honolulu Civil Beat

Instead of Funding Public Education, Oklahoma Bankrolled a For-Profit Virtual Charter School - Progressive.org

Instead of Funding Public Education, Oklahoma Bankrolled a For-Profit Virtual Charter School - Progressive.org

Instead of Funding Public Education, Oklahoma Bankrolled a For-Profit Virtual Charter School

Outsourcing online learning to for-profit providers was never a good idea. The pandemic has made it worse.

As public schools continue to struggle to reopen during the pandemic, many parents are refusing to send their students into school buildings. And, given the risk of in-person learning, it’s understandable that some families would turn to online charter schools, whose enrollments have soared in recent weeks. 

But the controversy surrounding a popular online charter school in Oklahoma provides a cautionary tale of how this trend can put public education dollars in jeopardy, rather than alleviate students’ lost educational opportunities.

On October 12, Oklahoma’s Board of Education demanded that Epic Charter Schools, a statewide online charter, refund $11 million to the state. The decision came after the first part of a state audit showed that Epic charged the school district for $8.4 million in improperly classified administrative costs between 2015 and 2019, as well as millions of dollars for violations that the state previously failed to address.

The second part of the audit will investigate the $79 million in public money that was directed to a “learning fund,” an $800 to $1,000 stipend for students enrolled in Epic’s “One-on-One” individual learning program. While the funds were intended to cover educational expenses, a search warrant issued by the Oklahoma State Board of Investigation found that they may have been used to entice “ghost students,” or students that were technically enrolled—and therefore counted in Epic’s per-pupil funding requests to the state—but received minimal instruction from teachers.

Despite the controversy surrounding Epic, the school has received a total of $458 million in state funds since 2015, according to the audit report. More than $125 million of this money went to Epic Youth Services, a for-profit management company owned by the school’s co-founders, David Chaney and Ben Harris. 

Following the audit’s release, the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School board CONTINUE READING: Instead of Funding Public Education, Oklahoma Bankrolled a For-Profit Virtual Charter School - Progressive.org

Board sets termination hearing on Epic authorization

Board sets termination hearing on Epic authorization

Board sets termination hearing on Epic authorization

The Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved a motion today to enter the process for terminating their charter authorization contract with Epic One-on-One Charter Schools owing to alleged violations.

“As a society, it is essential that we provide a healthy mix of    educational opportunities to support all types of students and all types of life circumstances. Online charter schools must continue to be one of those choices,” SVCSB Chairman John Harrington said during the meeting. “That is why it’s important that we work hard to safeguard our online schools and educational resources. One way to protect them is to insist that schools respect their obligations and conduct themselves with integrity. This responsibility starts with a commitment from a school’s board of directors and extends to it’s superintendent, staff and third-party vendors. This standard applies to every Oklahoma public school, including our six online public charter schools.”

While Rose State College is the authorizers for the Epic Blended school, Epic One-on-One has been under the oversight of SVCSB since April 2014. The charter was last renewed on July 2018. Charter authorizers are allowed to retain up to 5 percent of state aid received from the State Department of Education, with a remainder of the funds being transferred to the charter schools.

According to the Epic audit released by the State Auditor & Inspector’s Office on Oct. 1, SCVSB also has the responsibility of maintaining oversight and evaluation of the charter CONTINUE READING: Board sets termination hearing on Epic authorization

Jeff Bryant: How online learning companies are using the pandemic to take over the classroom - Alternet.org

How online learning companies are using the pandemic to take over the classroom - Alternet.org

How online learning companies are using the pandemic to take over the classroom

This article was produced by Our Schools.

Opening schools during a pandemic in an underfunded urban district like Providence, Rhode Island, where buildings are in miserable physical conditions, is already a huge undertaking, but the situation is made worse when district leaders bring in private contractors who know nothing about the community and make no effort to collaborate with public school teachers. That's what's happening in Providence, according to Maribeth Calabro, the president of the Providence Teachers Union, who spoke to me in a Zoom call.

As part of its plan to start the new school year with a gradual opening for in-person learning and an online option for all students, the district announced the creation of a new Virtual Learning Academy operated by Scottsdale, Arizona-based company Edgenuity.

When Calabro looked into Edgenuity, she found out the parent company, Weld North Education, was owned by a private equity firm, which had recently acquired Odysseyware. She recalled that when Providence had used Odysseyware for a high school credit recovery program there were problems with students cheating. "Students were quickly flying through courses that should have taken weeks or months," she remembered.

Calabro is also concerned the Edgenuity platform requires little to no human instruction from Providence teachers and will instead rely on learning coaches, who are expected to be the parent, guardian, or someone else in the household of each child. She feels most parents signing up for the program may not realize this because the district's description of the program largely relegates the complete explanation of the responsibilities of a learning CONTINUE READING: How online learning companies are using the pandemic to take over the classroom - Alternet.org

Florina Rodov: Online Charter Schools Are Not a Solution to Education in a Pandemic | Ed Politics

Florina Rodov: Online Charter Schools Are Not a Solution to Education in a Pandemic | Ed Politics

FLORINA RODOV: ONLINE CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE NOT A SOLUTION TO EDUCATION 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 CONTINUE READING: Florina Rodov: Online Charter Schools Are Not a Solution to Education in a Pandemic | Ed Politics

Online Charter Schools No Solution in a Pandemic - LA Progressive

Online Charter Schools No Solution in a Pandemic - LA Progressive

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

Barbara Madeloni: Virtual Schools Better Than Death Traps - LA Progressive

Virtual Schools Better Than Death Traps - LA Progressive

Virtual Schools Better Than Death Traps

Educators Demand Virtual Schools as ‘Least Bad’ but Safe Option

As the coronavirus continues to spread, teachers and school employees are being handed reopening plans that require them to be in their classrooms at the bell—and they are resisting.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers has scheduled a vote to decide if educators will refuse to enter the buildings when school starts. After the West Virginia United caucus held well-attended Zoom meetings to address concerns about reopening, the leadership of the West Virginia Education Association is calling for full remote learning to start the year. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis is insisting schools will open and continue even when positive tests are reported. In Arizona, a district outside Phoenix closed before it could open when too many teachers called out sick.

The various strengths and weaknesses of unions are becoming more evident as the school year begins. We have yet to know the strength of educators’ internal organizing or the ways fear might ignite wholesale disruptions as they simply refuse to enter schools.

Returning to schools that often have old and ineffective HVAC systems and windows that don’t open, where the question of what to do about students who refuse to wear masks goes CONTINUE READING: Virtual Schools Better Than Death Traps - LA Progressive

ROUND 3 IS NOW UNDERWAY – Dad Gone Wild

ROUND 3 IS NOW UNDERWAY – Dad Gone Wild

ROUND 3 IS NOW UNDERWAY

“I sometimes think we must be all mad and that we shall wake to sanity in strait-waistcoats.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“If we judge ourselves only by our aspirations and everyone else only their conduct we shall soon reach a very false conclusion.”
― Calvin Coolidge

Two months ago, when the decision to offer a virtual option was made, MNPS signed a 5 million dollar contract with the Florida Virtual School. The thinking was that in these unprecedented times, having a common curriculum would create uniformity across the district. Switching to a canned curriculum was supposed to take the pressure off of teachers and as District Superintendent Dr. Battle told the MNPS School back in June, “It allows teachers to focus on supporting students rather than creating lessons.”

In July the district made the decision to go all virtual. A decision that has been borne out as the right one based on increased cases of COVID across the state. In making the decision, Battle further emphasized the need to engage the Florida Virtual School curriculum, “”We will be utilizing a standard curriculum to be used across the district in all schools, and this is very necessary because we need to provide a continuity of learning plan for consistency for our students.”

Unfortunately, that consistency hasn’t materialized.

MNPS may have acquired a standardized curriculum but they didn’t create a standardized implementation. As a result, virtual schooling looks different at every school in the district. Teachers are scrambling to learn multiple systems while also trying to adapt the curriculum to fit their individual classes. Many elementary teachers did not even get a look at the curriculum until a week before school began, middle school and high school got a look only days before them.

A brief training was given to teachers on technology and the assumption was made that every CONTINUE READING: ROUND 3 IS NOW UNDERWAY – Dad Gone Wild

Online Instruction for All | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Online Instruction for All | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Online Instruction for All

Even the most fervent advocate for online instruction would be surprised. For those who predicted 20 years ago that remote instruction will take over public schooling, the future has arrived. And for the true believers in online instruction as the best, efficient (read: less expensive) way of teaching and learning, Nirvana has arrived.

Covid-19 has upended naysayers who opposed expanded use of online instruction, seeing it as a pale substitute for in-person instruction. For the fall semester in schools across the nation, complete or partial online instruction (I avoid the word “learning”) is nearly universal.

Since March 2020 when nearly all public and private schools were closed to halt the spread of the coronavirus, face-to-face classroom instruction has largely disappeared from large urban districts. With the continued spread of the virus into rural, suburban, and urban communities, virtual instruction has become the only way of re-opening schools—except for those districts in states that have paid only lip service to guidelines for protection from the virus or where the incidence of infections are low, according to health authorities. In those places, hybrids of remote and in-person or full in-person schooling have been announced for the fall semester.

But for most students , they will sit and face screens daily. As a result, many district administrators have been scrambling to insure that every student has the hardware and software necessary to enable a K-12 program to be brought into every kitchen and living room. And teachers unused to teaching from their CONTINUE READING: Online Instruction for All | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice