Daily postings from the Keystone State Education Coalition now
reach more than 3950 Pennsylvania education policymakers – school directors,
administrators, legislators, legislative and congressional staffers, Governor's
staff, current/former PA Secretaries of Education, Wolf education transition
team members, superintendents, school solicitors, principals, PTO/PTA officers,
parent advocates, teacher leaders, business leaders, faith-based organizations,
labor organizations, education professors, members of the press and a broad
array of P-16 regulatory agencies, professional associations and education
advocacy organizations via emails, website, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
These daily emails are archived and searchable at http://keystonestateeducationcoalition.org
Follow us on Twitter at @lfeinberg
Keystone
State Education Coalition
PA
Ed Policy Roundup Special Edition Dec 3, 2016
Cyber
Charters: The Crack Cocaine of #SchoolChoice?
What would persuade state lawmakers to
bring greater accountability to the nation’s troubled cyber charter sector?”
Blogger Commentary (the opinions
expressed herein are my own and are not necessarily representative of any
organization I may be affiliated with):
In reading several news and commentary
pieces covering the policy positions of the Trump Administration’s choice for
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, my impression is this: That parental choice
is paramount regardless of resulting academic performance or fiscal
transparency, and that taxpayers who are footing the bill should have virtually
no say, via their locally elected school boards, in how their tax dollars are
spent. I was particularly struck by the
fact that 80% of charters in Michigan are run by for-profit organizations, in
no small part due to lobbying and contributions by the DeVos family. In Pennsylvania, for-profit charters have
been a wellspring of fraud, waste and abuse of tax dollars.
What does accountability look like? Tomorrow evening, I will begin my eighteenth
year as a member of a locally elected, volunteer school board. About twice a month, at public board meetings
that have been advertised in advance, we review and vote upon pending
disbursements of our neighbors’ tax dollars.
The meeting agendas are public and posted in advance. Members of the public have an opportunity to
speak on any topic of concern. Local
press provides coverage. We review and
vote on check registers, spending our neighbors’ tax dollars. Each year, members of the school board
complete and submit detailed financial disclosure forms to the state. Our meetings are televised and stream on our
website. They are run in strict accordance
with the state’s sunshine laws.
Each year, ever the course of several
public meetings, we discuss, deliberate and reach consensus on a budget for the
school district which determines whether there will be an increase in our
neighbors’ taxes. The budget is posted
on our website. The check registers are
public information, as are the salaries of all of our employees and our
superintendent. Most of the time the
meetings are not particularly exciting; it is democracy at work.
We are accountable to our constituents whom
we see regularly at the bank, the barber shop, the soccer field or in the
supermarket, and they are free to express their support and concerns. Additionally, every two years they have an
opportunity to vote to re-elect or replace half of the members of the board.
For the past several years those check
registers have included payments to a number of Pennsylvania’s cyber charter
schools. Unlike brick and mortar
charters, which must be authorized by local school boards, cyber charters are
authorized by the PA Department of Education; we never voted to authorize any
of the cyber charters. Our board has had
significant concerns about spending tax dollars on cyber charters whose
academic performance has consistently been dismal, both under No Child Left
Behind’s Adequate Yearly Progress measure, and, for the past four years, the PA
School Performance Profiles scores.
Under the law, we have no choice but to
approve those expenditures. If we don’t,
the PA Department of Education will just draft our state subsidy to send the
payments. This is in spite of the fact
that our own in-house blended programs that provide cyber education operate at
about one third of the cost per student to our taxpayers. We get virtually no information back from the
cyber charters other than their invoices.
I have never seen any press coverage of a cyber charter school board
meeting.
The two major corporations behind cyber
charters, K12, Inc. and Pearson (previously Connections) were instrumental via
the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in developing model
legislation enabling cyber charters and in significant lobbying to have that
legislation enacted into law.
This past week, I tweeted a link to Morningstar’s
Executive Compensation at K12 to a member of K12’s management. He responded by accusing me of an ad hominem
attack. Our public tax dollars are
funding windfall profits and inflated salaries for these folks who wrote the
laws that preclude us from holding them accountable for their performance or
their use of those tax dollars. In a
public school district, the superintendent’s salary is public information.
In today’s special edition of the PA Ed
Policy Roundup, I have attempted to consolidate a number of pieces that provide
details on this issue. It is my hope
that this might serve to better inform the public discussion when considering
this question: What would persuade state
lawmakers to bring greater accountability to the nation’s troubled cyber
charter sector?
The74 by MATT BARNUM matt@the74million.org matt_barnum December 1, 2016
EdSec nominee Betsy DeVos has long supported
virtual schools despite their track record of low performance
Secretary of
education nominee Betsy DeVos has a long history of backing virtual schools,
including founding and funding groups that have supported the expansion of
online education. Additionally, as of 2006, her husband, Dick DeVos,was an investor in K12, a large network of more than
70 online schools. Although advocates for
virtual education say it is a lifeline for students who struggle in traditional
settings, multiple research studies show that online
charter
schools and other virtual
education models post dismal academic results, as measured by improvement on
standardized tests. DeVos, as chairman
of the American Federation for Children — she stepped down last week — repeatedly called for
expanding virtual schools. In a 2015 statement released through the group about a federal
spending bill, DeVos said, “Families want and deserve access to all educational
options, including charter schools, private schools and virtual schools. … [V]irtual
schools are growing across the country. Greater innovation and choice will
contribute to better K-12 educational outcomes for our children.” In 2012,
DeVos supported a plan by Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell
that including an expansion of online schools.
The American Federation for Children has praised such schools as allowing for “more flexibility
and options in education” and includes “virtual learning” as part of its mission
statement.
“Full-time virtual charter school
students experience 180 fewer days of learning in math and 72 fewer days of
learning in reading in comparison to traditional public school students. Put another way, these data show that in a
given year full-time virtual charter school students overall make no gains in
math and less than half the gains in reading realized by their peers in
traditional public schools.”
A CALL TO ACTION TO IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF FULL-TIME
VIRTUAL CHARTER PUBLIC SCHOOLS JUNE 2016
A Report by the National Alliance for Public Charter
Schools, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and Fifty CAN
June 2016
The first
full-time virtual charter public schools opened in the late 1990s. Since that
time, the number of these schools has greatly expanded across the country. As
of August 2014, there were 135 full-time virtual charter schools operating in
23 states and D.C. – about twice as many as in 2008. These schools were serving
approximately 180,000 students. Students in full-time virtual charter public
schools represent a broad cross-section of K-12 education: rural students
seeking to avoid a lengthy bus ride to a brick-and-mortar building,
student-athletes seeking a flexible schedule, home- or hospital-bound youth who
want to stay in school despite an illness or a family challenge, and high
school students looking for an alternative to dropping out. Although learning
online full time is not the right answer for all K-12 students, there clearly
exists a demand for it by certain students and families. However, at the same
time that full-time virtual charter public schools have seen significant
growth, far too many have experienced notable problems. Governmental agencies
such as the Colorado Department of Education and the Minnesota Office of the
Legislative Auditor and such national media outlets as The New York Times, The
Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal have documented these problems.
Most significantly, though, three research organizations – the Center for
Reinventing Public Education, Mathematica Policy Research, and the Center for
Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) – released three separate reports in
October 2015 that represented the most complete and comprehensive examination
of full-time virtual charter schools to date. These reports examined the
characteristics and the performance of full-time virtual charter schools, as
well as the policy frameworks in which they operate. Most striking and
troubling in these reports is the finding of large-scale underperformance by
full-time virtual charter schools. If traditional public schools were producing
such results, we would rightly be outraged. We should not feel any different
just because these are charter schools.
Newsweek BY BRYAN MANN AND DAVID BAKER ON 12/4/16 AT 6:10 AM
Bryan Mann is a Ph.D. candidate, Pennsylvania State University, and David Baker is a professor of sociology, education, demography, Pennsylvania State University.
This article originally was published on The Conversation.
What President-elect Donald Trump and the Republican sweep of government will mean for K-12 education priorities over the next four years is not entirely clear yet. However, policy statements and administration selections so far indicate “school choice” will top the agenda.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s nominee for education secretary, has been known to be an advocate of school choice initiatives: DeVos has supported voucher programs that allow families to use taxpayer money to enroll in private and religious schools. She also promoted charter school legislation that offers students choices outside of traditional public schools.
Vice President-elect Mike Pence also has a history as governor of Indiana of promoting school choice policy. Indiana not only is ranked as having the most favorable policy provisions for charter schools by a prominent charter schooling advocacy group, but it is among the 25 states employing a type of charter school unfamiliar to many folks across the United States: the cyber charter school. Unlike the usual charter school, the cyber version is typically delivered to students online wherever they may live, so long as they are residents of the state in which the cyber charter school operates. Cyber charter schools have been growing in states that have school choice policy. Our research, along with a body of academic work, suggests that the public should be concerned about an expansion of the cyber charter schooling model. Here’s why.
Cyber Charters: Widespread Reports of Trouble
Education Week November 3, 2016
A Colorado cyber charter school with a 19 percent graduation rate. An Ohio cyber that inflated student attendance by nearly 500 percent. A Pennsylvania cyber founder who siphoned off $8 million in public money, including $300,000 to buy himself an airplane. A Hawaii cyber founder who hired her nephew as the athletic director – for a school with no sports teams. As part of an eight-month investigation into the poor academic performance and financial mismanagement of full-time online charter schools, Education Week reviewed hundreds of news stories and dozens of state audits and reports dating back to the early 2000s.
“Kids mean money. Agora is expecting
income of $72 million this school year, accounting for more than 10 percent of
the total anticipated revenues of K12, the biggest player in the online-school
business. The second-largest, Connections Education, with revenues estimated at
$190 million, was bought this year by the education and publishing giant
Pearson for $400 million.”
Reprise 2011: Profits and Questions at Online Charter
Schools
New York
Times By STEPHANIE SAUL Published: December 13, 2011
By almost
every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.
Nearly 60
percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail
in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from
kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a
remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company
that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers. Agora is one of the largest in a portfolio of
similar public schools across the country run by K12. Eight other for-profit
companies also run online public elementary and high schools, enrolling a large
chunk of the more than 200,000 full-time cyberpupils in the United States. The pupils work from their homes, in some
cases hundreds of miles from their teachers. There is no cafeteria, no gym and
no playground. Teachers communicate with students by phone or in simulated
classrooms on the Web. But while the notion of an online school evokes
cutting-edge methods, much of the work is completed the old-fashioned way, with
a pencil and paper while seated at a desk.
Reprise Aug 2016: As
students return to class, some recommendations to improve cyber-charter
schools: Lawrence Feinberg
PennLive Op-Ed By Lawrence Feinberg on August
26, 2016 at 2:00 PM, updated August 26, 2016 at 8:46 PM
If it
sometimes seems like "tuition-free" cyber charter ads are running
non-stop, consider that in just one year your tax dollars paid for 19,298 local
TV commercials for Agora Cyber Charter, just one of Pennsylvania's 13 cyber
charters. And far from being
tuition-free, total cyber tuition paid by Pennsylvania taxpayers from 500
school districts for 2013, 2014 and 2015 was $393.5 million, $398.8 million and
$436.1 million respectively. Those
commercials were very effective, especially if you were an executive at K12,
Inc., a for-profit company contracted to manage the cyberschool. According to Agora's 2013 IRS filing, it paid
$69.5 million that year to K12, Inc.
According to
Morningstar, total executive compensation at K12 in 2013 was $21.37 million.
Not so
effective for kids or taxpayers, though. What the ads don't tell you is
that they are paid for using your school tax dollars instead of those funds
being spent in classrooms, and that academic performance at every one of
Pennsylvania's cyber charters has been consistently dismal. While the state Department of Education
considers a score of 70 to be passing, Agora's Pennsylvania School Performance
Profile scores for 2013, 2014 and 2015 were 48.3, 42.4 & 46.4. In fact, not one of Pennsylvania's cyber
charters has achieved a passing score of 70 in any of the three years that the
test has been in effect.
Keystone State Education Coalition October 16, 2016
Source: PA Department of Education website; A score of 70 is considered passing
Total cyber charter tuition paid by PA taxpayers from 500 school districts for 2013, 2014 and 2015 was over $1.2 billion; $393.5 million, $398.8 million and $436.1 million respectively.
Not one of Pennsylvania’s cyber charters has achieved a passing SPP score of 70 in any of the four years that the SPP has been in effect.
Morningstar: K12, Inc (LRN) Executive Compensation
Education Week November 2016
Contributors:
Benjamin Herold, Staff Writer
Arianna Prothero, Staff Writer
Maya Riser-Kositsky, Assistant Librarian
Holly Peele, Librarian
Alex Harwin, Research Analyst
Sumi Bannerjee, Web Designer
Nina Goldman, Web Producer
Laura Baker, Creative Director
Gina Tomko, Art Director
Lovey Cooper, Multimedia Intern
Holly Yettick, Director, Education Week Research Center
Charles Borst, Director of Photography
Kevin Bushweller, Assistant Managing Editor
Lesli A. Maxwell, Assistant Managing Editor
Kathleen Kennedy Manzo, Managing Editor
Gregory Chronister, Executive Editor
With growing evidence that the nation's cybercharter schools are plagued by serious academic and management problems, Education Week conducted a months-long investigation into what is happening in this niche sector of K-12 schooling. The result is a deep-dive account of what's wrong with cyber charters. Education Week uncovered exclusive data on how rarely students use the learning software at Colorado’s largest cybercharter, the questionable management practices in online charters, and how lobbying in scores of states helps keep the sector growing.
ultimately, sleep, sleep, sleep. it's miles that vital. Getting much less than seven to eight hours per night can simply mess together with your circadian rhythm. that is why your testosterone tiers are higher within the morning after an awesome night time's sleep.For more ==== >>>>>> http://www.healthsupreviews.com/neurocyclin/
ReplyDelete