This week, Connections Academy, the second largest virtual charter school company in the U.S., issued a press release announcing the graduation of their class of 2018. The piece mentioned some pretty stellar young students, including a future NASCAR driver, a learner with epilepsy who has raised money in support of others living with the condition, and a boy genius. In all, 5,300 Connections Academy learners graduated.

“The school and their staff have been lifesavers,” said Martha Simpson, the mother of Chance Simpson, who has been dubbed “Einstein Jr.” and graduated high school at the age of 13. “Georgia Connections Academy is our rock. Their flexibility and Chance’s ability to learn so quickly gave him the opportunity to pursue many other interests.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Virtual charter schools stand as an ideal solution for wholly unique learners like these. Students who need to travel constantly to pursue a career in sports, who live with conditions that make attending school difficult, or who thrive on self-guided study constitute prime virtual learners.

The Student Body at Connections Academy

But then there’s everyone else. A total of 5,300 students graduated from a Connections Academy virtual charter school this year. At South Carolina Connections Academy, where U.S. Senate Youth Scholarship Delegate Harshini Abbaraju completed her postsecondary education this summer, 3,648 students in grades K-12 attend. They have a graduation rate of 60%, according to U.S. News and 39% of their student body are economically disadvantaged.

At Colorado Connections Academy, where Grace Garcia, the learner with epilepsy studied, 2,420 learners are enrolled. The graduation rate is 55% and 41% of the learners are economically disadvantaged.

And for a final example, there’s Georgia Connections Academy, where Simpson studied. The school currently teaches 3,881 learners, 45% of whom are economically disadvantaged. The graduation rate currently stands at 34%.

According to data from the National Education Policy Center, roughly 229,000 learners were enrolled in virtual charter schools in the U.S. in the 2015-2016 school year. By enrollment, Connections Academy teaches roughly 23% of that number, or around 52,000 learners.

Data isn’t available for what distribution of these students are in high school grades. But considering graduation rates as low as 34%, many more than 5,300 students should be leaving these schools with a diploma. The adjusted cohort graduation rate at public high schools in the U.S. in 2015-16 was 84%.

When School Choice Offers Just One Option

The dialogue surrounding virtual charter schools and school choice in the U.S. could be better described as two monologues. Those in favor tend to discuss perspectives like those displayed in the Connections Academy press release. They highlight exceptional young people who truly benefit from the online model.

The other side focuses on larger populations of students who do not graduate, come from underserved communities, and who actually have little choice in the matter.

School choice—the policy that parents should be able to choose where they send their child to school—sounds good on paper. But numerous journalists and outlets have documented cases in which parents were left with no choice but to send their child to a virtual charter school.

The most extensive of these is the book Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation, and the End of Public Education by Cornell Professor Noliwe Rooks. A summary essay of this phenomenon can be found here.

“There is a term they call 90-90-90 schools,” Rooks said on Rising Up with Sonali, a Pacifica show, last year. The school is “90% of color, 90% below the federal poverty cutoff, and 90% of the students are underperforming in the schools. Those are the regions that large growth charter schools will begin to target because of the demographics.”

There is no doubt that virtual charter schools have a place in American education. But when they’re offered as a cost-saving measure to underserved communities, it’s a less than ideal solution.

The post Connections Academy and the Confusing Stories Told by Virtual Charter Schools appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In Modoc, Indiana, educators faced an ongoing crisis for several years. They couldn’t find a way to sustainably fund their public school. They tried to boost funding by introducing an international program that would bring students on exchange from China—along with $18,000 on a per student basis. They considered advertising campaigns. They reached out to a nearby Amish community to bring in a few more learners.

“We’ve almost kind of been forced to run our school more like a business in terms of marketing ourselves and bringing in new kids to stay afloat,” said superintendent and high school principal Allen Hayne, according to a local NBC report. “And we just found an out-of-the-box idea that really works for us and has generated enough kids and interest to keep us open.”

K12 Inc. Steps In

That idea was forming a virtual school. They partnered with K12 Inc., the largest virtual charter school management company in the U.S. In 2017, they grossed over $875 million.

The school, known as Union School Corporation, formed the Indiana Digital Learning School (INDLS) with K12. Going from 256 students in 2016-17, they boosted that figure to 937 this year. Indiana currently allocates $5,273 per student, so the gains proved lifesaving to the district.

But Will It Be Sustainable?

But it’s unclear just how buoyant their lifeboat will be. K12 rents two classrooms from Union for $1,200 per month. For state income from digital students, K12 receives 95% of the revenue. The rest goes to Union. Assuming that all of the extra learners Modoc enrolled this year went to INDLS, Union will receive less than $200,000 of the nearly $4 million that came with the boost.

Still, it’s better than the alternative. “When you eliminate the school, we’ve seen what happens to these small towns,” said school board vice president Christa Ellis, according to NBC. “Those towns have died over the years. We didn’t want our entire township and [nearby townships] to die. We didn’t want our community to die.”

While They Perform Poorly, Virtual Charter Schools Continue to Grow in Popularity

The success of INDLS will hopefully be enough to float the district in the future. Enrollment was capped for this past school year, a typical regulation for new virtual charter schools. It will be expanded to 1,000 students for the coming school year and grow from there.

The waiting list to attend INDLS is currently hundreds of names long. In the 2017 fiscal year, K12 spent $36.8 million on marketing and advertising, SEC filings show.

That money seems to be well-spent. Some virtual charter schools manage to meet or even outperform their brick-and-mortar peers, but most lag behind when it comes to performance testing and graduation rates. A report released by the National Education Policy Center in May again came to the same conclusions.

And yet, their popularity continues to grow. A full 17,000 learners left traditional schools and enrolled in virtual charters between 2015-16 and 2016-17. The total number currently sits above 300,000.

Last month, Missouri passed a bill that marked a major victory for school choice advocates. Former Governor Eric Greitens signed it into law hours before resigning from his post following a series of political scandals.

The post District Turns to Virtual Charter School in a Last Ditch Effort appeared first on eLearningInside News.

In Missouri, educators at public schools are facing a unique situation: virtual charter schools might make them look bad. This month, a bill in the state that put student attendance in a virtual charter school in the hands of districts passed the House and the Senate. Hours before former Governor Eric Greitens resigned from office, he signed it into law.

The Missouri Course Access and Virtual School Program is a major win for school choice advocates. Like in other states, it allows tax dollars to pay for a student’s education at a virtual charter school.  By delegating responsibility—financial and otherwise—state lawmakers are making it incredibly easy for a parent to send their child to a virtual charter school.

Virtual Students Will Test–And Be Counted–Alongside their Brick-and-Mortar Peers

But in Missouri, there’s another aspect to the bill. Students attending virtual charter schools will be counted in the district where they live. They will also be tested with their district. Here’s the issue: the odd virtual charter school will out-perform a brick-and-mortar equivalent, but in general, they tend to do anywhere from a little worse to much, much worse.

“It’s fairly clear that virtual charter schools don’t perform very well,” said Micah Wixom, who specializes in school choice at the Education Commission of the States. “Some do, but overall, it’s fairly clear that they tend not to do as well as their peers. States are aware of that, but they also seem to be unsure on how to best regulate them.”

If any district sends a significant amount of students to a virtual charter school, therefore, statistically, their testing scores will likely go down.

“One of the concerns is that this will morph into virtual charter schools, where students aren’t students of the public school at all. Students can just enroll in it directly and the online provider will collect state aid,” said Susan Goldammer, associate executive director of the Missouri School Boards’ Association, according to the St. Louis Dispatch.

“Part of our concern is a kid could take literally all of their education virtually, but they’re still considered a student of the district, and the student’s scores on the MAP test will be attributed to the district even though the district hasn’t hired the teachers that taught these courses,” Goldammer said.

Missouri tests students in grades 3 through 8 in math and communication arts. 4th and 8th graders also take science tests. In high school, students take an End of Clourse test (EOC) in a variety of subjects.

Outcomes Remain Uncertain with Virtual Charter School Law

Critics have many reasons to dislike this bill besides the testing issue. Most notably, it seems similar to the situation in Pennsylvania documented by Noliwe Rooks in her 2017 publication Cutting School. In summary, the state gutted the education budget while opening up virtual charter schools (which can be more cost effective). During winter, many Philadelphia schools didn’t have the budget to keep the heat on. Learners were pressured into virtual charter schools, where at least they could stay home where it was warm. This trend is ongoing.

Following a series of political scandals, including potential campaign finance mismanagement, former Governor Eric Greitens announced he would resign last week. Many hoped that the former governor would leave quietly, but hours before leaving his office, he signed a full 77 bills into law. The virtual charter school measure was one of them.

Cover Image: Nicola Tolin.

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On Tuesday, residents of Ohio went to the voting booths to pick their Democratic and Republican representatives who will face off this November. A senate seat and the governor’s office are the two most important positions on the line. With polling and history in mind, there were no surprises. In the race for Governor, Richard Cordray—a middle-of-the-road Democrat who earned Senator Elizabeth Warren’s endorsement—fended of former Cleveland Mayor Dennis Kucinich’s progressive insurgency. On the right, longtime Ohio politician Mike DeWine saw a more realistic threat from current state Attorney General and ride-or-die Trump supporter Mary Taylor. He still won by nearly twenty percentage points. The reason that this news has made it onto eLearning Inside, however, is that one topic took center stage: education.

Specifically, the fraudulent and former virtual charter school, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), which was shuttered in January, has received attention from nearly every candidate. Virtual charter schools certainly form a divisive political issue on their own. But besides the stealing of millions of state taxpayer dollars, the ECOT scandal also involved a fair amount of dubious political dealing.

This Swamp Runs Deep

ECOT’s founder, William Lager, built the virtual charter school with his own blood, sweat, and concerted, well-funded state lobbying efforts. Over the school’s lifetime, Lager donated roughly $2.1 million to political state causes. The vast majority—91% roughly—went to Republican candidates. Considering the $200 million of taxpayer dollars Lager took in, that’s not a very good tip. Cordray has, in the past, taken small donations from Lager totaling less than $1,000.

On the ECOT scandal: “Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal; But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven.” Then next in Matthew: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

— Rich Cordray (@RichCordray) January 22, 2018

Spare us the sermon, Rich. You took Bill Lager’s money in 2006 and money from #ECOT‘s COO in 2008.
“For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you.” Matthew 7:2 https://t.co/6Ts2YQvHfp

— Stephanie Dodd (@StephanieDodd) January 23, 2018

According to the Record-Courier, “Democrats contend virtually every Republican running statewide can be tied to ECOT.”

Sticking to yesterday’s ballot, these include DeWine, Taylor, DeWine’s running mate, Secretary of State Jon Husted; auditor candidate Rep. Keith Faber; and attorney general candidate Auditor Dave Yost. Husted has also received an honorary degree from ECOT. Yost has spoken at ECOT graduations.

And for the icing on the cake, DeWine’s son, Patrick, is a current Ohio Supreme Court Justice. The younger DeWine did not to recuse himself from the ECOT case—which was heard by the state supreme court this winter—despite having received campaign donations from Lager himself. He is also facing disciplinary actions for numerous other alleged ethical lapses. 

School Choice Will Figure Heavily in Ohio Elections this Fall

Both DeWine and Taylor continued to support virtual charter schools despite the recent scandal. This comes despite the fact that the ECOT fallout has grown even uglier in recent weeks with whistleblower allegations that ECOT had manipulated activity that tracked student software and had sweetened employee severance packages in exchange for a non-disclosure agreement.

On the left, both Kucinich and Cordray have criticized the state’s charter school policy. While some states have used virtual charter schools as a way to cut education budgets, democratic Ohioans know the institutions to be rife with fraudulent activity. Kucinich has referred to them as a ‘multi-billion-dollar boondoggle.’

DeWine and Cordray both served as Attorney General during ECOT’s lifespan. Neither initiated investigations into the school despite repeated red flags.

But neither of their track records with Lager and ECOT were enough to upset their races. Considering the ongoing attention to ECOT, both candidates’ ties to the defunct virtual charter school, and their wildly diverging stances to school choice at large, education is set to play a large role in the governor’s race this fall.

Cover Image: Chris Baker, Flickr.

The post In the Ohio Primaries, School Choice, Virtual Charter Schools, and ECOT Take Center Stage appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Last week, Pearson, one of the world’s largest education-focused companies, announced that it will be partnering with three new virtual charter schools that will open this year. Much hangs on the term ‘partner.’ ‘Opening’ might be more accurate. Each school is an iteration of Connections Academy, the virtual charter school operator it acquired in 2011. According to Vox, Connections Academy virtual charter schools make up nearly one quarter of the total in the U.S. They are second only to K12.

“Florida Connections Academy (FCA), Lighthouse Connections Academy (LCA) in Michigan, and Great River Connections Academy (GRCA) in Ohio join 34 other Connections Academy-supported schools in 27 states,” the company states in a release.

“As the landscape of learning shifts and evolves, we are thrilled to partner with the Governing Boards of three new online schools in the United States,” said Tom Simon, managing director for Pearson’s Online &  Blended Learning K-12 group. “Providing school options that meet the needs of the modern learner is crucial to students with diverse preferences and needs, and we are encouraged by the successes we have seen so far.”

Pearson’s language indicates just how touchy a subject virtual charter schools can be in the current climate.

When the Sun Shines, Make Hay

On the one hand, the current regulatory landscape is especially favorable to these institutions. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos is a big supporter of school choice, an ideology that states that parents of children in underperforming districts should have the option to send their kids to a different school.

In practice, this often means a different charter school or a different virtual charter school. Charter schools are generally run by for-profit companies and DeVos also happens to have ties to more than a few of them.

Education regulation was also just largely handed to the states with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which passed in 2015 and will go into full effect this fall. The law hands control of education to the states. Some have banned virtual charter schools outright, but most have passed the buck or simply neglected them, allowing for much greater freedom from a business standpoint.

Meanwhile, popularity for virtual charter schools has steadily increased since their inception. According to the National Education Policy Center, enrollment for full time students has risen from essentially 0 in 2000 to over 280,000 in 2016.

It isn’t uncommon for virtual charter schools to turn away students due to limits on class size. These regulations vary from state to state, but they also tend to be much larger than the average public school.

According to Pearson, Their Charter Schools Perform Very Well

Finally, by Pearson’s own reporting, parents are by and large thrilled with sending their students to a Connections Academy ‘partner.’

According to their latest parent satisfaction report, “Ninety percent of parents with students enrolled in a Connections Academy school gave their online school an “A” or “B” grade, a rating that has remained steady since the survey was launched. In comparison, 67 percent of public school parents gave the school their oldest child attends an “A” or “B” grade, according to the 48th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools.”

That data, however, stands in stark contrast to what more rigorous academic surveys have found. The latest study of note was published in 2015 and looked at charter schools in just 17 states, making it neither very comprehensive nor recent. Still, their results were damning:

“While findings vary for each student, the results in CREDO’s report show that the majority of online charter students had far weaker academic growth in both math and reading compared to their traditional public school peers. To conceptualize this shortfall, it would equate to a student losing 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math, based on a 180-day school year. This pattern of weaker growth remained consistent across racial-ethnic subpopulations and students in poverty.”

At the same time, communities have greeted Connections Academies with dubious attitudes. It remains to be seen whether or not that sentiment is deserved or not.

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After a few hiccups and delays, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is set to take full effect this coming school year. The rewrite of No Child Left Behind (and reauthorization of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act) is the first education bill since the ‘80s to limit federal control of education and hand more power to the states. It was passed largely as a response to the culture of ‘teaching to the test’ created by NCLB and seeks to allow states to handle measures of quality on their own. But, according to Micah Wixom, a specialist in school choice for the Education Commission of the States (ECS), there’s one area in which state lawmakers appear uncertain: virtual charter schools.

“States aren’t necessarily clamoring to start new virtual charter schools. Kentucky passed a charter school bill a few years ago that banned their virtual counterparts. It’s a good example of a state saying, ‘We’re not really sure how to proceed, so let’s just not do this right now.’”

ECS is a non-partisan, non-profit commission and Wixom spoke as objectively as possible. Her job is to track what states are doing in regard to education, not what they should do. In January, she put together a broad collection of information on state charter school policy, which should prove an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the subject.

Virtual Charter Schools Could Use a Second (or First) Thought from States

“It’s fairly clear that virtual charter schools don’t perform very well,” Wixom said. “Some do, but overall, it’s fairly clear that they tend not to do as well as their peers. States are aware of that, but they also seem to be unsure on how to best regulate them.”

Like Kentucky, many states have banned virtual charter schools outright. Other states have put together very specific guidelines for how they should operate. Oregon, for example, has extensive stipulations, including: providing students with computer, printer, and internet access; opportunities for students and teachers to meet at a minimum of 6 times a year; and a minimum of 6 optional educational experiences, such as field trips, per year.

“Oklahoma has also done interesting things,” Wixom said. “They have a state board specifically for virtual charter schools, not many states have done that. It’s an interesting approach because virtual charter schools are—some would say—quite different from brick-and-mortar schools. So the kinds of issues they face and their oversight will be different.”

Exceptions that Prove the Rule

Still, Wixom says that these states are exceptions. Besides banning them outright, many states have only tentative, basic legislation in place for them. Six states—Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and West Virginia—have no legislation relating to virtual charter schools at all.

Even charter school authorizers often struggle to handle virtual charter schools effectively. These are the entities that determine whether or not a charter school follows a set of standards.

Many charter school authorizers are unsure of how to handle them and what to do.

“They will approve or disapprove a virtual charter school performance,” Wixom said. “They’ll be the one who, in some cases will close them down. Some states will say that only certain authorizers can oversee a virtual charter school. Some states have a number of authorizers.” But again, more states still appear not to know how to deal with them.

The post With the ESSA Set to Roll Out, Few States Have Dealt With Virtual Charter Schools in their New Legislation appeared first on eLearningInside News.

On Tuesday, the Columbus Dispatch reported that the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) manipulated student activity tracking software in order to boost their reported student activity and, in doing so, the total taxpayer dollars they receive from Ohio.

ECOT lawyers earlier this year argued that their client should not have to pay a fine of $80 million to make up for student participation that they could not account for. “We’re mixing apples and oranges,” said ECOT lawyer Marion Little in a video recorded by cleveland.com. “If we’re in a brick-and-mortar environment and attendance is taken in October and a school has 1,000 students, that school is not going to have its funding reduced throughout the course of the school year because a student has mono and is gone for three weeks.”

According to the Columbus Dispatch’s source, who has chosen to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions, students missing school from mono shouldn’t be a major concern. After facing backlash and a hefty fine in 2016 for failing to account for student activity, ECOT implemented software known as ActivTrack, which keeps an account of student activity. The Dispatch’s source said that the default settings in ActivTrack consider a student idle after 2 minutes of inactivity. But in May of last year, ECOT changed that duration to 15 minutes and later raised it again to 60 minutes.

A student checking an email, therefore, would be considered active for a full hour.

ECOT Sweetened some Severance Packages in Exchange for NDAs, Sources Claim

But that’s not where it ended. When the Ohio Department of Education audited ECOT, the virtual school gave them a huge load of documents to “inundate the state with detail to make auditing as tough as possible,” according to the Columbus Dispatch.

Similar reports emerged in the last two weeks of April detailing whistleblowers coming forward to the Ohio Department of Education.

Meanwhile, WOSU reports that whistleblowing would be far more rampant against ECOT. But employees signed non-disclosure agreements before they began to work at the virtual charter school.

“If taxpayer dollars are being misspent or ill-gotten, we should find out about that immediately or as quickly as possible. Non-disclosure agreements for the public sector seems to really fly in the face of that principle,” said Steve Dyer of the think tank Innovation Ohio, according to WOSU.

But that’s not where the scandal ends. Sandy Theis, a member of the Charter School Accountability Project came forward to WCMH, a local NBC affiliate, saying that ECOT even increased their severance package with former employees in exchange for signing these NDAs.

ECOT was once the largest virtual charter school in the U.S. A private for-profit company, they receive compensation from Ohio for every student they educate.

ECOT’s Demise

Trouble started in 2016 when state regulators began looking into the school because of its chronically low graduation rates. They found in the process that the school could not prove the full time enrollment—known also as ‘full time equivalency’ or FTE—of a good deal of their students. Their records at the time showed that only 6,300 of its reported 15,300 had attended full time. The school was ordered to return taxpayer dollars for every student they could not account for. This translated into $60 million fine.

In the following school year, ECOT again failed to fully account for all the students it claimed and was again hit with a fine, this time totaling $19 million.

In mid-April, ECOT appealed the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision to support the outstanding fines. In light of recent news, their fate doesn’t appear too positive.

The post Skewed Data, Non-Disclosure Agreements, and Hush Money from ECOT: Allegations Fly Against the Now Defunct Virtual Charter School appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Source: Ken Lund, Flickr.

In the future, the spring of 2018 will be remembered for labor movements mounted by public teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky. Educators from Arizona and elsewhere may soon follow suit. On Wednesday, an unexpected group joined that trend. Teachers at the California Virtual Academy (CAVA) successfully reached a labor agreement with their employers regarding class sizes and pay increases, and a salary schedule, among other items.

Despite what other sources have erroneously reported, CAVA teachers unionized in 2013 as the California Virtual Educators United (CVEU). They are affiliated with the California Teachers Association (CTA).

The Unique Challenges Faced by California Virtual Educators United and Others

While teachers’ unions dot districts throughout the U.S., only a handful of virtual charter school employees have organized. Because of the nature of their work, the medium through which they deliver their education, and the fact that they answer to private companies, not state governments, unionizing at virtual charter schools doesn’t look the same as your average organization.

“Organizing teachers in a workplace where we don’t see our peers and where the bargaining unit stretches across a state as large as California isn’t easy and it also isn’t easy establishing a precedent-setting agreement,” said CAVA teacher and California Virtual Educators United President Brianna Carroll in a release. “We are so proud of the hard work and commitment our teachers made in ensuring that our core values on work status, caseloads, and workload were recognized. We now have a first contract that begins the process of fixing CAVA and ensuring the success of our students and teachers. Our schools here in California and other online schools have had very little input from the teachers on the frontline. This agreement will change that and allow those who work most closely with students a greater say in shaping the curriculum and school policies.”

While educators in West Virginia and Oklahoma (the latter of whom are currently marching over 100 miles to protest in the state capitol) took to the streets recently, CVEU began their negotiations over one year ago. In November, CVEU members voted with overwhelming support to strike if negotiations failed. They were prepared to walk out this week in the absence of a resolution.

CAVA currently operates nine separate virtual charter schools in numerous California districts. They represent the state’s largest network of schools of their kind. Enrollment stands at over 10,000 and the system employs roughly 450 teachers. While that breaks down to just over 20 students per teacher, many classes had far exceeded that.

“Either you have teachers who are burning themselves out because they’re trying to meet the needs of everyone, or you aren’t meeting the needs of everyone,” Carroll told The Atlantic. “It’s really one or the other.”

A Tenuous Relationship with K12

CAVA schools maintain that they operate independently. But according to the investigative journalism of Jessica Calefati from The Mercury News, they are associated with, or often directly controlled by, K12 Inc., the largest virtual charter school company in the U.S. In 2016, Calefati uncovered tax documents indicating that K12 employees started the schools.

Many students who faced any number of challenges in traditional K-12 schools have thrived in virtual charter schools. Still, data indicates that most virtual charter schools underperform significantly. What’s more, others have been found guilty of gaming the system. The Ohio-based Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) was heavily fined for inflating their enrollment (virtual charter schools are compensated by states on a per-student basis). The punishment forced the school to close overnight.

The post Another Step Forward for Teachers’ Unions: California Virtual Educators United Settles in Lieu of a Strike appeared first on eLearningInside News.