John Thompson is a historians and recently retired teacher in Oklahoma.
For more than two decades I’ve mourned the loss of opportunities for online instruction to augment and enhance student learning, as opposed enabling a Social Darwinian competition where charters attack traditional public schools. Educators seeking meaningful choices, such as real personalized learning, have been shackled by the need to fight back against “choice” advocate, as well as their spin, claiming to offer “personalized” instruction, measured by impersonal test score metrics.
Above all, I’ve been saddened by the way that beaten-down educators have often been bogged down in a defensive war against test-driven, competition-driven reformers. In order to survive the charter assaults armed with bogus test scores, too many schools merely complied with the corporate reformers’ mandates. In doing so, they robbed the students of the opportunity to be taught and to learn how to make the real choices that can guide them to lifelong learning.
This year’s Oklahoma legislature’s Common Education Committee Interim Studies are revealing a new, brave, and worthy campaign for holistic instruction. Almost all of the legislators who attend these hearings are former educators. Even though the committee avoids mentioning the unfolding Epic virtual charter school scandal, their weekly questioning of state educationleaders and virtual charter supporters make two things clear: today’s accountability for virtual charters is completely inadequate and it’s hard to even visualize a path toward a valid accountability system, much less build and implement one.
These hearings have been especially impressive because witnesses now dare to “keep it real.” They share the lessons learned in their years of experience in developing blended learning, recent experiments in virtual learning in traditional public schools, and their witnessing of the harm they’ve seen imposed by for-profit virtual charters. These efforts have been guided by experienced educators, by cognitive science, and educationresearch, not business people assuming that the market would solve vexing dilemmas.
So far in the interim hearings, charter advocates have kept their cards close to their vests and ducked the most important questions. A common refrain is that many charter leaders now agree that more accountability is necessary. An unknowable number of online students “hide out,” pretending that they are enrolled in school.
When asked how we got to the point where at least 18,000 students are enrolled in virtual charters, although we don’t even have adequate methods of counting attendance, they hear from charter supporters that the accountability law is only two years old, there are concerns about accountability metrics, and concerns about virtual charters not being accountable for low graduation rates, as well as a prominent multi-million dollar marketing campaign (which clearly referred to Epic’s advertising budget.)
The latest hearing, “Family Choice within Oklahoma Public Schools,” started with an overview of the vast range of choices that are offered by traditional public schools. Patrons don’t need charters to have access to: “Empowerment Schools;” “Conversion Schools;” supplemental online blended and virtual learning; and magnet and enterprise schools; or to take advantage of the state’s Open Transfer law. Expert witnesses then made the case that all of these options are less risky and more likely to benefit students when they are deliberately planned and implemented by professional educators, as opposed to true believers in market forces that can “blow up” the education “status quo,” producing rapid, “transformative” change.
https://okhouse.gov/Documents/InterimStudies/2019/19-129%20Detailed%20Agenda.pdf
Two of the best things about the evidence being presented to the interim committee are that they draw upon seven years of research by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), and cognitive science about what it really takes to devise 21st century pedagogies. For the first time in years, I heard thoughtful discussions of how schools can nurture “inner directedness,” respecting students by helping them to develop their internal locus of control.
In previous meetings, Derald Glover of the Cooperative Council for Oklahoma School Administrators (CCOSA) cited the National Education Policy Center and others showing that virtual schools need 24 to 41 percent less funding than brick and mortar schools. A key recommendation was that virtual school funding should not be based on student counts like brick and mortar schools; Oklahoma should learn from research and from states that base funding on course completion.
https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Virtual%20Schools%202019.pdf
https://www.ecs.org/clearinghouse/01/11/11/11111.pdf
https://www.tulsaworld.com/news/local/education/lawmakers-examine-charter-school-funding-and-oversight-policies/article_77a4ca26-a05d-52be-acf6-570b141698a3.html
And the NEPC research cited by Glover explains why traditional public schools are the better vehicle for expanding online instruction. They cost less and produce better student performance. (For instance, administrative costs of virtual programs run by Oklahoma traditional public school systems range from about 1/3rd to ½ of Epic’s administrative costs.)
Their testimony was also consistent with the NEPC’s conclusion that blended learning is much more promising than virtual learning, but that blended charters haven’t shown that much better outcomes than virtual charters. This helps explain why blended learning offered by brick and mortar traditional public schools are the best option for online learning. Drawing upon the work of Gary Miron, Alex Molnar, and others, CCOSA developed Blended Learning Framework where the teacher drives instruction.
https://www.ccosa.org/index.php?resources&a=view&resource_id=112
Moreover, representatives of the Tulsa Union and Cleveland school systems described the process of how they started with blended instruction, and used those experiences when devising virtual learning programs. Tulsa Union is the district which inspired the headline for David Kirp’s New York Times article, “Who Needs Charters When You Have Public Schools Like These?”
Union’s virtual students are offered “every choice they could ever want.” They are welcome to enjoy the “entire high school experience, including prom.” About 1/4th of the virtual students sign up for music electives, and they can sign up for early college instruction and graduate with associates degrees; or participate in Career Tech partnerships that seek, “Commencement for a Reason”
Union, as well as Cleveland Public Schools, “vet applications carefully.” In contrast to for-profit and competition-driven virtual charters, traditional public schools understand that, ultimately, it is the patrons who choose the type of school they want, but if you have a kid who has struggled, extra guidance needs to be provided. They invest heavily in conversations with counselors and families, and seek buy-in by parents and students. During Q&A, the Cleveland superintendent said that if parents chose virtual schooling for a student who seemed to not be ready for it, they would then meet with counselors after two weeks, continuing the conversation about what was best for the kid.
And that brings me to the crucial issue that has been mostly ignored during the corporate school reform era. It was so rewarding to hear superintendents stressing the need to help learners become inner directed, not “outer-directed” persons, controlled by external forces. In contrast to some charters that are trying to socio-engineer a better system of controlling children’s behavior, molding them into better gladiators in the global marketplace, these traditional public schools want to help students develop an internal locus of control. Of course, that means these innovative districts put the whole child over test scores. Give the persuasiveness by which they explained their blended learning frameworks, I expect more and more districts to follow their lead, build upon the power of public education, and serve students holistically.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are many pieces to the puzzle when teaching children. Those pieces depend on the needs of children., inner directed being a basis for many of those pieces. Well said John
This kind of investigation and reporting on virtual charters MUST happen here in California. We just read about the head of Inspire Charters suddenly being sent on a “long vacation”!!!!! Maybe he headed to Australia to join Sean McManus, head of A3 charters who was indicted last spring by the San Diego district attorney. McManus is AWOL, probably back in his home country of Australia.
It won’t survive them because it IS them.
truth
“For more than two decades I’ve mourned the loss of opportunities for online instruction to augment and enhance student learning, as opposed enabling a Social Darwinian competition where charters attack traditional public schools.”
The online instruction was garbage though, and ed reformers so oversold it that it was inevitable schools would become disenchanted.
Most of it is gone from our working/middle class public high school. It’s already been tried and then rejected. I don’t know what that experiment cost but I wish they had passed on conducting it.
Have any of the people selling it looked at the actual product in action? It’s junk. It’s elaborate test prep. Parents didn’t even reject it here- they didn’t have a chance to- students rejected it. They complained they were spending entire class periods taking a series of short tests. Over and over and over.
It absolutely WAS sold to replace teachers, too. We were told explicitly that the online courses would be cheaper than paying teachers.
I think this organization does things pretty well: https://artofproblemsolving.com/
Online takes away an important way kids learn … kinesthetic. DUH … the deformers have no clue … and are only KA-CHINGING their way to their “offshore” accounts and their other bank accounts.
And a lot of time is also wasted re: online learning.