Carly Berwick writes about K12’s plan to establish a virtual charter school in New Jersey. It was turned down, but only temporarily, to provide a year of “planning” time.
The poor academic results of K12 cyber charters are well known. They were written about in the New York Times and the Washington Post. They were reviewed negatively by the National Education Policy Center. The most startling statistic –of many–is that K12’s Colorado Virtual Academy had a graduation rate of 12 percent in 2010, compared to 72 percent statewide in regular public schools.
And let’s not forget the money! K12 had revenues of $522 million last year, and its CEO was paid $5 million of taxpayer dollars.
What’s to like?
Yet the “reformers” continue to demand more of these for-profit schools despite their poor academic performance. They continue to insist, despite the evidence, that they are a good choice for children.
Berwick raises an important point: If virtual charters take hold in cities like Newark and Jersey City, what will it do to urban life? Schools are now the center of their community, a place not only for children during the day, but for athletic events and community activities in the afternoons and evenings.
Will it weaken cities to turn their schools into vacant lots? Of course it will.
When will our public officials think of what is good for society and for our shared future?
The only beneficiaries of a new virtual charter in urban New Jersey, as she points out, would be the investors, not the residents of cities struggling to make a comeback.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So then why does our esteemed Governor feel so strongly about virtual charters that he’s willing to circumvent the legislature? http://www.educationnews.org/k-12-schools/christie-introduces-charter-regs-bypasses-legislature/
Because he’s a bully??
No (though that doesn’t change his status). Christie’s first job was as a registered lobbyist for Edison Learning, a for-profit “reform” company in which Commissioner Cerf had a significant interest. I really think the reason he’s pushing so hard is to get his cronies – the ones who contribute(d) to his campaign(s) – a little quid pro quo.
Yeh, that would seem to explain it better.
One of the less-developed discussions about charter schools is their role in destroying the neighborhood school – now effectively accomplished among NYC high schools, for example – and how that is integral to the class and racial reconfiguration of the neighborhoods in which they are being placed.
As Mark Naison perceptively wrote weeks ago, throughout the grim Reagan, Bush I and post-NAFTA years of deindustrialization that hollowed out so many communities, the one place that remained was the neighborhood public school, which often employed neighborhood residents and provided an island of stability. Now, as developers have their eyes on some of those communities, they have allied with charter school operators. It’s no coincidence, for example, that one of the most active real estate developers in rapidly gentrifying Harlem (Gideon Stein) is on the Board of Eva Moskowitz’s aggressively metastasizing Harlem Success Academies.
It’s a vicious irony that, hyped as a panacea for poor Black and Latino urban children, charter schools in many cities and neighborhoods are in fact a vehicle for ultimately displacing them. After all, as census data has been showing for a while, the slums of the future are forming in the suburbs (charter operators take note: a rapidly developing market!), and the urban core is becoming whiter and more affluent.
Charters, whether brick-and-mortar schools or virtual sweatshops started by ex-felons (as is the case with K-12 and its founder, Michael Mlken) are not just about busting the unions and monetizing every last data point generated in the school building, but are also a real estate play, eliminating what is often one of the last public, universally accessible institution in these neighborhoods, and making way for more desirable consumers who don’t rely upon or care about the ongoing destruction of the public realm.
My district in Oregon has an on-line charter school which was started a few years ago. When they were setting it up, they invited several teachers from different schools in the district to a meeting to try out the program they were going to use and give feedback.
I don’t remember what the program was, but they said it was being used successfully in New Orleans in schools that had been devastated by Katrina. Anyway, this group of teachers got to try out the program they would be using for a couple of hours. We were told that any student who enrolled in the on-line school would be given a laptop to use for this program. They said they weren’t really trying to draw kids away from the public schools, but hoped to enroll students who were now home-schooling with this program. They saw it as a way to potentially get a new pool of education dollars from this group.
After trying out the program, I was one of a very few people in the room who saw any kind of problem with the idea. I remember being the only one who spoke up and said that if this was what somebody thought was a good program to replace a regular classroom I was shocked. It was canned, and boring. It was supposed to be interactive, but to me it was awful–read the paragraph and then answer questions–repeat, repeat, repeat. I couldn’t imagine how they thought this could replace a busy, creative, active classroom in any way shape or form.
I was also bugged that they would be giving free laptops to all the students. I remember asking why they weren’t thinking of giving all my students laptops. I could think of a thousand much more creative ways to use them in my regular classroom than this boring program. A few people nodded in agreement, but nobody else spoke up. I went on to say that if our schools were ravaged by floods like in New Orleans, or if a child was in the hospital with cancer I could see this type of program as better than nothing, but that in no way should it be purposely used to replace any regular classroom.
At any rate, they obviously didn’t listen to me, they implemented the idea, and we now have a Web Academy. It has 143 students a 20% graduation rate, and is now on the Federal Watch List for not meeting AYP in spite of having almost no ELL students and 86% white population. Oregon just implemented a new rating system for our schools and our Web Academy is on the bottom of the list along with one elementary school that has 70% free and reduced lunch along with 50% minority students.
I still say they could have gotten more bang for their bucks if they gave laptops to every student in my class!
What they didn’t tell you is that adding the virtual school would attract home schooled kids who were getting no public dollars, and that these dollars would be subtracted from what was available for regular brick and mortar public schools. By bringing them to Oregon, you committed to dividing the public education budget with an ineffective online school, dedicated to recruiting students who were home schooled or students now enrolled in your school.
Late at night, very late at night, I have recently started to see advertizing for Louisiana Connections Academy, a virtual school that will have classes beginning this fall. I hope everybody else is in bed!
http://louisiana.connectionsacademy.com/la/geocontent
get used to it, you will see many more