The K12 corporation boasted to investors about the solid test score gains of students at its Agora school in Pennsylvania. But the Times learned that students in that school scored far below students in the state: only 42 percent were at grade level or better in math, compared with 75 percent of students statewide, and in reading only 52 percent were at grade level, compared with 72 percent in the state. Said the Times: “The school was losing ground, not gaining it.”
Within three days of the publication of the Times’s investigation, K12’s stock price plummeted by 34 percent, from $28.79 a share to $18.90.18
The evangelists for online learning made mighty claims for the power of their medium. They said it would put excellence within the reach of every child, it would close achievement gaps, it would narrow the income divide, it would enable every student to have high-quality instruction that met the highest standards.
But there was no evidence for these claims. Bill Bennett, we now know, was right when he wrote in 1999 that there was “no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve learning.” In fact, as more virtual charter schools were opened, evidence accumulated that online homeschooling did not significantly improve learning and that many students lost ground when they were in full-time cyber-schools. Students who enrolled in online schools had lower test scores than those in traditional schools, lower graduation rates, and higher attrition rates.
K12’s Colorado Virtual Academy, which enrolls more than five thousand students, had an on-time graduation rate of 12 percent, compared with a statewide graduation rate of 72 percent. K12’s Ohio Virtual Academy, which enrolls more than nine thousand students, had a 30 percent on-time graduation rate, compared with a statewide average of 78 percent.19 Less than a third of online charter schools met the federal law’s requirement of adequate yearly progress, compared with 52 percent of the nation’s public schools. A review of K12 schools by the National Education Policy Center found the following: “Thirty-six of the 48 full-time virtual schools operated by K12 were assigned school performance ratings by state education authorities in 2010–11, and just seven schools (19.4% of those rated) had ratings that indicated satisfactory progress status.” The report said that students in K12 virtual schools consistently scored below students in brick-and-mortar schools in reading and math in every state. Gary Miron, the senior author of the study, said, “Our findings are clear. Children who enroll in a K12 Inc. cyberschool, who receive full-time instruction in front of a computer instead of in a classroom with a live teacher and other students, are more likely to fall behind in reading and math. These children are also more likely to move between schools or leave school altogether—and the cyberschool is less likely to meet federal education standards.”20
An investigation of online learning in Colorado determined that the state was spending $100 million a year for full-time virtual charter schools. But the results were dismal: half the students who enrolled in the virtual schools dropped out and returned to their public schools within the same year. However, their tuition money stayed with the online schools. When they returned to their local public schools, many were further behind academically than when they started. Thirty-nine students left the Florence School District to enroll in online schools, costing the district a quarter million dollars, the equivalent of four or five teachers’ salaries. When thirteen of them returned to their public schools midyear, the online schools kept the money, and the public schools had to scramble to find money to educate them. The analysis also found that the “online schools produce three times as many dropouts as they do graduates. One of every eight online students drops out of school permanently—a rate four times the state average.” In addition, the virtual schools were collecting millions of dollars each year for students who were no longer enrolled.21
Officials at the online schools offered a familiar excuse: they attributed the high attrition rate to the large proportion of high-risk students they served. However, the journalists reviewed the schools’ records and determined that only four hundred of ten thousand students could be considered “at risk” and that most were not struggling academically when they entered the online school.
Brandon Shaffer, the president of the state senate, told the journalists, “We are bleeding money to a program that doesn’t work.” He noted, “We spend over $100 million a year on online schools now—in an environment where we’re cutting $200 to $270 million a year from brick-and-mortar schools.”
The Denver Post professed to be alarmed by the statistics about the online schools and urged greater scrutiny but warned, “We hope the scrutiny doesn’t morph into a plan to drive these valuable alternative education options out of existence.”22 The Denver Post consistently supported corporate-style reform. The editorial didn’t say what part of the online school experience or financing or academic results was valuable.
The states with the biggest online charter sector were Pennsylvania and Ohio.
In 2011, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University published its analysis of charter school performance in Pennsylvania, based on four years of data about academic growth on state achievement tests. The CREDO report showed discouraging results for charters in general but devastating results for cyber-charters. The typical student in brick-and-mortar charter schools is black and poor; the typical student in a cyber-charter is white and not poor. The starting scores for cyber-students are significantly higher than those of the brick-and-mortar charter students. But cyber-students are more likely to be repeating a grade. In reading, the students in the brick-and-mortar charters got the same academic gains as their peers in public schools, but in math they learned significantly less. The students in the cyber-charters learned significantly less than their traditional public school peers in both reading and math. They did especially poorly in math.23
The study examined test scores in eight different cyber-charters and found that all eight performed significantly worse than their peers in traditional public schools. Thirty-five percent of the brick-and-mortar charters outperformed traditional public schools in reading, as did 27 percent in math.
The following types of students got significantly lower scores in reading and math when they enrolled in charter schools, whether brick-and-mortar or cyber: black students, Hispanic students, poor students, special education students, and grade repeaters.
The CREDO study found that 100 percent of cyber-charters performed significantly worse than traditional public schools in both reading and math. This study, authored by charter-friendly academics at Stanford and the Hoover Institution, was bad news for cyber-charters in Pennsylvania. These are the very schools, according to Jeb Bush and Bob Wise and their “10 Elements of High Quality Digital Learning,” that are supposed to give every student an excellent education and close the achievement gaps.
But there was worse news to come.
Pennsylvania’s biggest cyber-charter is the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. It opened in Midland in 2000 as a replacement for the local high school, which closed when the area lost its steel mill and the population declined.24 Superintendent Nick Trombetta founded the new online school as a nonprofit intended for the district’s fifty students, but it enrolled five hundred students in its first year. It currently enrolls more than eleven thousand students from across the state; the school has revenues of more than $100 million annually. The future appeared to be one of unlimited success until July 2012, when the FBI raided the offices of Pennsylvania Cyber Charter, and of several for-profit and nonprofit businesses in Pennsylvania and Ohio connected to the corporation. Journalists noted that the school pays tens of millions of dollars to a network of companies run by former executives of Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. The administration of the former governor Ed Rendell had asked the school for better accounting of these relationships, but Governor Tom Corbett’s Department of Education “opted early on to let the relationships continue without heightened accountability.”25
The mu
ltiple embarrassments to cyber-schools in Pennsylvania did not affect the decisions of policy makers in the state. In 2012, they voted to approve four more cyber-charters, bringing the total in the state to sixteen. It can’t have been because the existing cyber-charters got good academic results; they didn’t. For cyber-charters, results and accountability don’t matter.
In Oregon, a pair of entrepreneurs opened at least ten online charter schools in 2007, authorized by various school districts. The state gave each school a start-up grant of $450,000 plus $6,000 for each student it enrolled. Five years later, Oregon’s Department of Justice accused the founders of inflating their enrollment figures and of racketeering and fraud. The state demanded repayment of $17 million in taxpayer funds, plus another $2.7 million in damages and costs to the state. In Pennsylvania, the FBI indicted the founder of two online charter schools, along with three other executives, for defrauding the schools of $6.5 million. Such instances of misbehavior are not typical of the charter sector, but the opportunities for malfeasance are many, and financial oversight is lax or nonexistent.26
In Ohio, the first cyber-charter was the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), which opened in 2000–2001 with twenty-two hundred students. In 2005, the state imposed a moratorium on creating any new cyber-schools until accountability standards were developed, but Governor John Kasich ignored the moratorium, and it was full speed ahead for cyber-charters with no standards or accountability.27
In 2009–10, the Ohio Department of Education issued its school ratings. Of twenty-three cyber-charters in the state, only three were rated “effective” or better. Only 8 percent of the children enrolled in cyber-charters attended schools that the state rated at least a B. In its report on cyber-schools, the public policy center Innovation Ohio wrote, “By contrast, more than 75 percent of traditional public school students attend school in buildings rated B or better. In short, children are nearly 10 times more likely to receive an ‘effective’ education in traditional public school than they are in E-schools.” Worse, only two of the seven statewide cyber-schools had higher graduation rates than the Cleveland public school district, which had the lowest graduation rate of any district in the state. As Innovation Ohio put it, “A child has a better chance of graduating if he or she attends school in the Cleveland Municipal school district (whose poor performance has long served as a punching bag for conservative school choice advocates)—than in an Ohio E-school.”
The state reimburses cyber-schools about $6,000 per pupil, as if they had the same costs for teachers and facilities and transportation as traditional public schools. This amount is deducted from the budget of the state’s public schools. But the average salary for teachers in public schools was about $56,000, compared with an average of just $36,000 for teachers in cyber-charters. The cyber-schools not only have lower teachers’ salaries but larger classes and none of the costs associated with brick-and-mortar schools. Thus, every cyber-school has a cushion of millions of dollars of taxpayer funding, extracted from local school districts but not necessary for its operations.
The state of Ohio originally set minimum amounts that the cyber-charters were required to spend on instruction, to be sure that the funds were used appropriately. But in 2011, Governor Kasich and the legislature removed the minimum requirements, so the cyber-charters could cut costs and increase their profits.
Why was the state sending so many millions of dollars to schools that get such poor results? Innovation Ohio suggested that the answer was to be found in the campaign contributions of the two biggest E-school operators, David Brennan and William Lager.
Brennan’s private corporation controls the largest chain of charter schools in the state, as well as a cyber-charter called the Ohio Distance and Electronic Learning Academy (OHDELA). According to Innovation Ohio, he collects about $100 million annually from the state. From 2001 to 2010, he donated nearly $3 million to mostly Republican candidates. OHDELA graduates 35.9 percent of its students, which is lower than Cleveland. Brennan’s corporation receives $11.7 million annually to operate OHDELA.
William Lager is the founder of ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow). He has made nearly $1 million in political contributions since 2001. ECOT obtains $64 million each year in state funding but graduates only 35 percent of its students. On the state’s ratings, it is near the very bottom of 613 districts.
The findings of Innovation Ohio’s report were replicated in 2012 by a Cincinnati journalist who reviewed state data for the cyber-schools and determined that they spend 15 percent of their state funding on teachers’ salaries as compared with 75 percent at traditional public schools. Furthermore, under Governor John Kasich’s reform plan, “all statewide e-schools reviewed by Innovation Ohio would have been given F’s under the proposed overall grading system.” That is, if the cyber-schools were traditional public schools, the state would have closed them down for poor performance—and would have done so long ago. But given their political connections, they could count on a secure future—without accountability for their spending or their performance.28
Those who believe that online learning is the key to bringing excellent education to every child and that it would close achievement gaps and lift up the nation to new heights of academic performance, as Jeb Bush and Bob Wise predicted in 2010, were unfazed. They never stopped to wonder whether homeschooling on the Internet was appropriate for some children but not for others. Perhaps it is just right for pregnant teenagers, or for athletes training for the Olympics, or for child actors hoping to make it to Broadway, or for seriously ill children who can’t travel to school, or for other students in unusual situations. But once the profit motive entered the equation, all such qualifications were dismissed, and the goal was more enrollment. Greater numbers mean greater revenues. Greater revenues require cost cutting: lower salaries and larger classes for teachers. This is not a formula for educational improvement.
Surely every student should learn to use computers and the Internet in school. The possibilities for imaginative teaching and learning and research are boundless. But that is quite different from inviting the private sector to make money by enrolling students in virtual academies. As we have seen, the incentives to grow enrollments are much larger than the incentives to provide high-quality education. And very little thought was given to the developmental needs of children of all ages and what it meant to isolate them during their formative years.
In the rush to boost enrollments, no one paused to wonder whether it was appropriate for young children to be placed in front of a home computer for their education. Nor to question what children were missing when they had so little interaction with peers or adults. Nor to judge the value of the content that was delivered or the point-and-click assessments. Nor to gauge what was lost when students are not engaged in face-to-face discussions with other students to exchange ideas. Online learning may work well in the military and in industry and in higher education for highly motivated students, but there is no reason to assume that it is right as a full-time means of educating children in kindergarten or third grade or eighth grade or high school. There is no evidence to support this belief, and many reasons to question it based on children’s need for wholesome personal and social development.
Online technology surely holds immense potential to enliven the classroom. But the story of cyber-charters warns us that the profit motive operates in conflict with the imperative for high-quality education. Given the nature of the political process, the question today is whether education technology can be recaptured by educators to benefit students, not investors and stockholders.
CHAPTER 18
Parent Trigger, Parent Tricker
CLAIM If parents seize control of their school, they can make it better.
REALITY There is no evidence for this claim.
California’s Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger favored charter schools. While slashing billions of dollars from the budgets of the public schools, he made sure that his cash-strap
ped state had ample funding for charter facilities and construction. More important, he appointed charter school advocates to a majority of seats on the state board of education, even though charter schools enrolled only 5 percent of the state’s children. Ted Mitchell, president of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which develops new charter schools and charter school chains, was president of the state board of education from 2008 to 2010. By 2012, California had more than a thousand charter schools, far more than any other state, with 484,000 students (about 8 percent of the state’s six million public school students).1
One of Governor Schwarzenegger’s appointees to the state board in 2010 was Ben Austin, executive director of an organization created only a year earlier called Parent Revolution. Austin, a lawyer, had previously worked for the Green Dot charter school organization in Los Angeles, which had been launched with $10.5 million from the Broad Foundation. Austin’s Parent Revolution was funded by the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation, among others. It advocates for school choice. It achieved its first big victory, months after its founding, when the Los Angeles Unified School District passed a school choice program to allow charter operators to compete to run fifty new schools and two hundred existing schools. Parent Revolution worked closely with other pro-charter organizations like the California Charter Schools Association and Families That Can to win that battle.
Parent Revolution’s biggest coup, however, was the passage of the “parent trigger” law by the California legislature in January 2010. According to its Web site, Parent Revolution “invented” the idea of the “parent trigger” and persuaded the state senator Gloria Romero to include it in her education reform legislation. If 51 percent of the parents in a low-performing school sign a petition, the law says, the parents may take control of the school, its staff, and its budget, fire some or all of the staff, or turn the school over to a charter management organization. The law assumes that parents know best what is needed to reform their children’s schools and should be empowered to turn them over to a private corporation to manage.2
Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools Page 24