Stephen Dyer raises the question about whether Ohio will follow in Florida’s path and open an investigation of the K12 for-profit school. In Ohio, K12 has classes of 51 students to a single teacher even though it is paid to have a ratio of 20:1.
That is way profitable for K12, though not for the students.
Dyer’s article includes a link to a story about the sharp drop in K12’s stock price that occurred after news of the Florida investigation broke. That story points out that K12 is under investigation in Georgia as well as Florida.
You do have to wonder at what point Secretary of Education Arne Duncan might speak out against the poor quality of online for-profit charter schools and other for-profit entrepreneurs that raid school budgets and produce terrible results. Will he?

I’m not sure how K12 divides classes for teachers, but it could be that each teacher only teachers one “class” and so the numbers could be accurate. Some online schools have 1 teacher with 130 students for say Algebra 1 and since they aren’t “teaching” 7 classes a day it is 7 classes worth in one “class”. I hope that made sense ?
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51 students per teacher would be a blessing for K12’s teachers in Colorado: http://www.examiner.com/article/k12-inc-online-schools-a-view-from-the-inside
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Interesting, and troubling, piece about the funding K12–They get paid full per-pupil cost, even though they have only a fraction of the public school overhead:
http://10thperiod.blogspot.com/2012/09/will-ohio-join-florida-and-investigate.html?spref=tw
The same game is going on here in ME. We need to demand a full accounting from our politicians. The public has been led to believe that the charters are a better deal; we know they’re just a scam.
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