Frankly, it’s hard to understand why Miami public schools chose for-profit K12 Inc. as it’s provider of remote instruction. Ten minutes or less on google would have turned up multiple articles about its terrible track record: high attrition, poor curriculum, low test scores, low graduation rates. NCAA strips accreditation for 24 schools using K12.
Wired tells the story in Miami, which recently severed its contract with K12.
ON THE MORNING of August 31, the first day of school, the 345,000 students in Miami-Dade County’s public schools fired up their computers expecting to see the faces of their teachers and classmates. Instead a scruffy little dog in banana-print pajamas appeared on their screens, alongside an error message. “Oh bananas!” read one message from the district’s online learning platform. “Too many people are online right now.”
A rudimentary cyberattack had crippled the servers of the nation’s fourth-largest school district, preventing its 392 schools from starting the year online. But even once the district had quelled the distributed denial-of-service attack and a local teen had been arrested for the crime, “Banana Dog” didn’t go away. If anything, the security breach merely obscured for a few days the crippling weaknesses in the district’s plan to move every aspect of its schooling—including a revamped curriculum—onto a platform that had only ever supported half as many students (and never all at once).
The platform was built by virtual charter school company K12, backed by one-time junk bond king Michael Milken and US secretary of education Betsy DeVos. Doug Levin, an education tech consultant, calls the decision to use K12 “atypical.” Another ed tech analyst, Phil Hill, calls it “weird.”
The rapid pivot to, and even faster pivot away from, K12 amounts to a case study in how not to deploy a massive new software project. It also illustrates how, in a few intense weeks of summer decisionmaking, a charter-school curriculum written by a for-profit company was chosen and installed, with little scrutiny, across one of the largest districts in the country.
Alberto Carvalho made the decision on his own, without consulting the board. They trusted him.
It was a disaster from the start.
K12’s software promised to replace all the other apps that schools had been using. “It was billed to teachers as the Rolls-Royce of software,” says Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of the United Teachers of Dade. The district and the company rushed to implement it. At the end of August, all of Miami-Dade’s educators sat through six days of K12 training—and that’s when they started to panic.
The teachers received demo logins to try out the platform, but they didn’t work, and even the trainers struggled to access it, West says. From 8 am until 3:30 pm each day, teachers took notes without once trying the software themselves. “The training was make-believe, it was so, so complex,” says one teacher. “Even our techie teachers were lost.” On Facebook, teachers shared GIFs of dumpster fires and steaming poop emojis in response to the experience.
“That’s a very complex, aggressive undertaking. And to do it with 345,000 students and in less than a month? There’s a lot of hubris involved.”
PHIL HILL, EDUCATION TECHNOLOGY ANALYST
Once the school year began in earnest, technical challenges persisted. Some students struggled to log in. Uploads could be excruciatingly slow. A particular sore point was the platform’s unreliable built-in video conferencing tool, called NewRow. It had issues with sound and screen-sharing. After about 15 minutes, the video quality started to degrade. It didn’t work on iPads or iPhones.
And then there was the built-in curriculum. K12 provided content, though teachers could change or supplement it. The lessons had been devised for K12’s virtual charter schools: for-profit schools that are entirely online and receive taxpayer money for every student enrolled. When some Miami-Dade teachers examined K12’s materials, they were horrified by what they found. One teacher came across a quiz for second graders with one question: “Did you enjoy this course?” Clicking “yes” allowed the student to ace the test. Several classes relied on K12’s paper workbooks, which the students didn’t receive. “One thing our educators complained about was, the rigor was not there. It was a very watered-down curriculum,” Hernandez-Mats says.
I think they did it because they were desperate to get up and running and there wasn’t any real help or guidance offered to districts, from anywhere.
It seems to me that most of the people and entities who might have assisted in real, practical work helping districts were busy pushing their usual “reinvention” schemes.
The vast majority of the governmental/policy effort seems to have gone into pushing private school vouchers. Every public school in the country closed and the United States governmental/policy apparatus decided the focus should be on private school vouchers. Ed reform preferences and priorities utterly dominate government and policy to the exclusion of anyone else and ed reform doesn’t prioritize public schools or public school students.
A bad decision but public schools were scrambling- no one was interested in assisting them. There’s still no real assistance for public schools. The difference is now I think districts know none is coming.
The US policy and practice for the last 20 years has been to dump every crisis on public schools and then scold them when they don’t fix it. We have a huge public school critics policy sector. We don’t have a huge public school assistance policy sector.
My son’s school is open and he complained about some of the restrictions/priorities because some of them don’t make sense to him. I wanted to tell him “I’m sorry, but you don’t have even a minimally functional government so the district had to patch together ‘school + pandemic’ on the fly”
Look at the bright side- if the ed reform echo chamber get their way in the next pandemic every single individual school will be making it up as they go along- this is probably the MOST organized response students and parents will see. In a wholly privatized “system of schools” it will be bedlam. They’ll be battling over who gets to attend school at all.
a key factor behind the scenes: the future of education will be for SOME kids…
It just came out that K12 made a huge donation to the Superintendent’s nonprofit. https://miami.cbslocal.com/2020/09/17/oig-investigation-alberto-carvalho-nonprofit-k12/?utm_campaign=snd-autopilot&fbclid=IwAR2XEBqC3erdsDmb1oGLb3BSuWFAwZH2hFy89KmS0xorkcyzQ6707Vb2pfA
Thank you. When deals are this bad and ineffective, it is always important to follow the money. Superintendents in Florida have been clubbed by Jeb Bush’s “stupid stick.” Most of them believe in monetizing students and education or else they don’t get appointed. The appointing of superintendents has turned the job into one that is more political than educational. Education should be putting students first, not politics or profiteering.
Many State Secretaries of Education were clubbed by Jeb Bush “stupid stick”. New Mexico was one of the states under the leadership of Hanna Skandera who worked for Jeb Bush while she was in Florida. Absolutely nothing good happened educationally under Skandera. Skandera is gone and the world in education looks brighter each day even though we are in the pandemic.
Slanders was a disaster in NMex, trying to promote Florida model.
I love it when spellcheck occasionally gets to the heart of the matter.
I hate to do off topic posts, but this one is topic adjacent. Story in Akron Beacon Journal today about how widow of Dave Brennan donated $2.5 million to Case Western law school. Does anyone out there know the total amount Brennan fleeced from the state for his failed White Hat charter chain? Seems to me that this money–and much more–should be going back to the taxpayers of Ohio.
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/2020/09/19/ann-brennan-wife-late-businessman-david-brennan-donates-millions/5832332002
Dave Brennan was a real moneymaker in Ohio charter politics. He knew nothing about education.
I’d appreciate it if you could point me to a source of how much he fleeced. Want to submit LTE on this story.