New video exposes ALEC's ed task force

 Here's a great tool you can use in meetings and classrooms to educate about ALEC's role in privatizing public schools, curriculum and testing. The video has a good critique of cyber-schools, the Virtual Schools Act currently being pushed in several states by ALEC,  and companies like, K12 Inc. which are making millions in profits even while being currently under federal investigation.

Cyber schooling could be one the great scams of our time

New study shows cyber kids falling behind

"Children who enroll in a K12 Inc.cyberschool, who receive full-time instruction in front of a computer instead of in a classroom with a live teacher and other students, are more likely to fall behind in reading and math." -- Gary Miron, NEPC fellow

Two stories on cyber-learning caught my eye this past week. The first had to do with the closing of a privately-run cyber charter school in Pennsylvania, due to financial mismanagement. According to the July 10th Edweek story, the state then issued charters to 4 other new cyber-charters.

The second story was about last week's FBI raid on  the office of Pennsylvania Charter Cyber School founder Nick Trombetta, who is suspected of misusing Pennsylvania tax dollars to fund his out-of-state ventures. The FBI raided the administrative offices of PA Cyber and other ventures founded by Trombetta, including the Avanti Management Group -- a for-profit consultant firm based in Ohio.


But the topper is the release this morning of a new report by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado which shows that students at K12 Inc., the nation’s largest virtual school company, are falling further behind in reading and math scores than students in brick-and mortar schools. These virtual schools students are also less likely to remain at their schools for the full year, and the schools have low graduation rates.

“Our in-depth look into K12 Inc. raises enormous red flags,” said NEPC Director Kevin Welner.

Duncan and K12 founder Bennett

K12 was started by Republican operative and former Sec. of Education William Bennett but the company was forced to remove Bennett as chairman of its directors following a series of racist remarks and gambling scandals which threatened the company's marketability. K12 Inc. has been under investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, which has been looking into K12's involvement in a project that received an improper multimillion-dollar grant from the Department of Education during Bennett's tenure at the firm.

I posted twice last December about K12's financial problems, it's plummeting stock prices and the company's huge executive salaries. About the same time came a New York Times story by Stephanie Saul, "Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools", which called out K-12, not on its stock prices, but on how badly its "portfolio schools" like Agora Cyber Charter School are doing.

Back in 2010, I posted on my SmallTalk blog about the connections between K12 founder William Bennett and Ed Sec. Arne Duncan. 

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Now, thanks to the NEPC report, we can see the connection between all this dirty cyber dealing and its negative impact of student learning.

Virtual charter schools lag far behind

The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management organizations rose sharply last year, but the students in those schools are lagging far behind their peers in in traditional public schools. This according to a new study by the National Education Policy Center.  

About 27 percent of these schools achieved “adequate yearly progress,” the key federal standard set forth under the No Child Left Behind act to measure academic progress. By comparison, nearly 52 percent of all privately managed brick-and-mortar schools reached that goal, a figure comparable to all public schools nationally.

“There’s a pretty large gap between virtual and brick-and-mortar,” said Gary Miron, a professor of evaluation, measurement and research at Western Michigan University and a co-author of the study.

“E.M.O.’s” — educational management organizations, a term coined by Wall Street in the 1990s — now operate 35 percent of all charter schools, enrolling 42 percent of all charter school students, according to the report. “Charter schools are publicly funded and they are serving public school students,” Dr. Miron noted. “But they are increasingly privately owned and privately governed.” -- New York Times

Nonprofit E.M.O.’s have a better track record of academic success than for-profits, and smaller E.M.O.’s in general perform better than larger ones, at least defined by the federal standard of adequate yearly progress — a metric Dr. Miron called “very crude.”

'Virtual' schools

The Nation reports:

If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.

From Idaho to Indiana to Florida, recently passed laws will radically reshape the face of education in America, shifting the responsibility of teaching generations of Americans to online education businesses, many of which have poor or nonexistent track records. -- Lee Fang, How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools