The Miami-Dade school board voted to sever ties with the notoriously awful for-profit K12 online corporation.
K12 has long been known as a huge money-maker that produces bad education and high attrition rates.
The Miami-Dade County School Board has voted unanimously to stop using My School Online, the district’s controversial new online learning platform many say is at the center of the failed start of school.
The board voted to sever ties just before 2 a.m. Thursday, 13 hours after the meeting began. Teachers can begin using other platforms immediately.
The early morning decision sent some elementary schools into a scramble. Some schools that never used Microsoft Teams, like Bob Graham Education Center, were caught off guard and quickly went to work to set up Zoom meetings to find a way to educate students.
The School Board debate and vote stretched into the middle of the night because members had to finish public comment on Vice Chair Steve Gallon’s catch-all proposal to get to the bottom of what went wrong. In the first board meeting since school began Aug. 31, nearly 400 teachers and parents submitted comments that were overwhelmingly negative about the online platform….
My School Online is run by the for-profit tech education company K12. Its investors included Michael Milken, the convicted junk-bond king whom President Donald Trump pardoned earlier this year, and current Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. In 2016, former California Attorney General and current Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris oversaw a $168.5 million settlement with K12 over alleged violations of the state’s laws against false claims, false advertising and unfair competition.
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/education/article245619095.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It is time to take out the cyber garbage and kick it to the curb. We need to stop believing in “fairy tales.” On-line electronic worksheets are no substitute for face to face human instruction. If we have learned anything about education from the pandemic, it is this.
Good for them for recognizing it was a problem and getting rid of it.
School districts are on their own in this pandemic. They’re all struggling to put together a response with no assistance at all from the people they’re paying in state and federal government. US public schools have been abandoned by their own government. The United States simply failed to muster any kind of coordinated, systemic plan to get kids back into schools unlike virtually every other country on the planet.
Some will fare better than others, but it’s not a bad thing to admit an error, as long as they fix it. It’s a tough problem to address with no assistance and they aren’t getting any assistance and none is coming.
There just isn’t enough support for children and families who attend public schools in our government. They didn’t show up for our students.
Do the best you can but recognize you’ll be doing it district by district and all by yourselves.
Public school students and families were abandoned by state and federal government because the people in charge didn’t attend public schools themselves and don’t send their children and grandchildren to them.
They simply don’t value our students and schools so made no effort at all to assist them.
If public schools get thru this- and they will- this it will be due exclusively to the work of people in each school. The students will have lost a lot- that either will or will not be remedied by each district, or not at all.
Students and parents should be told this, because it’s the truth and it’s information they need going forward.
We are not, actually, “in this together”. We will either rescue our own kids in each district or no one will do anything. It’s been 7 months. If they had any intention of assisting public schools they would have gotten it done months ago- they didn’t.
no intention of assisting public schools, strategic intentions of sucking up public school money
This is good news for the students and teachers and school board, and bad news for the stock of this company as shown by the plunges in this graph and others at the website. K-12 stock reached a high of 51.60 on August 8, but then plunged to 30.86 on 9-11-2020. At least for that interval of time, familiarity bred contempt. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LRN/
“that little k12 dog really starting to piss me off”
This story’s just such a gem. When I read in the linked Miami Herald article about banana dog, I was instantly curious. What is a banana dog, thought I. Is it a dog shaped like a banana? Did a dog-shaped dog step on a banana peel? What merry hijinks is this? I had to look it up. I found this: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/banana-dog-is-the-symbol-of-miami-dade-schools-k12-server-problem-11689243.
Apparently, banana dog is not shaped like a banana. Banana dog is the screen that K12 puts up when its server goes down. Here’s the thing about the information about banana dog in the Miami New Times article: The server kept going down because of a massive cyberattack. Students took to social media in droves, denouncing the dog screen. One tweet reads, “that little k12 dog really starting to piss me off.” All that was caused by a cyberattack. Well, not all of it; K12 offers a dung-smelling product before cyberattacks.
When the cyberattack happened, the school board voted to drop K12 and recommended Microsoft Teams. 95% of parents reported that their teachers were using Microsoft after the notably abrupt shift. That’s Bill Gates’ company. Think of all the data Microsoft is about to get. All that money. Mmm, money. I’m sure it’s all just a series of coincidences that just happened to play out in favor of a company long known for its anti-competitive business practices. Yep, nothing to see here. Move along.
I work as a teacher for Miami Dade County Public Schools, and can testify that this start of the school year has been a complete disaster. We received 5 days of horrible training for this K-12 platform, which Superintendent Alberto Carvalho had supposedly contracted with for $15 million. The first week most teachers and students could not log in and spent countless hours sitting idly in front of computer screens waiting to see if we could teach and learn. Unfortunately, we couldn’t and it became apparent that this platform could not sustain the 345,000 students and 18,000 teachers trying to log in. Then Carvalho tried deflecting attention from his bad decision by blaming it on cyber attacks from Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and from a 17 year old student. Now the K-12 contract has been nullified and we are all left with no online textbooks or materials to teach our classes. Utter disaster. Carvalho now wants to rush to open schools in a week instead of the agreed upon Oct 5th date. This is a shame for the hundreds of thousands of students waiting to get an education this school year.
Richard,
You describe sheer incompetence. K12 has always had a horrible reputation in education. They are all about money and profit, not education.
Mmeanwhile, Utah lifted the cap of students both Pearson-owned Connections and K-12 could accept. Utah has no clue.