Potholes
in the Road to Virtual Schooling
GENE V GLASS There’s a town on the prairie east of the Colorado foothills
that showed a total population of 77 persons among 24 families in the 2000 Census. It
was somewhat shocking, then, that in 2005 the school district in the town
reported an enrollment of more than 1,000 students to the Colorado Department
of Education and had collected more than $15 million in state money since it
opened in 2001. Even more surprising is the fact the Colorado
Virtual Academy is only the largest online school in the state. “Cyberschools are the 800-pound gorilla
of the choice movement, although vouchers and charter schools get a lot more
attention,” said William Moloney, Colorado’s state education commissioner. An office in a high rise in downtown
Phoenix, Ariz., houses a charter school that annually receives reimbursement of
more than $20 million from the Arizona Department of Public Instruction for nearly
3,000 students. There are no buildings, no buses, no cafeteria, just a virtual
school. Both the Arizona Virtual Academy and
its counterpart in Northglen, Colo. A suburb of Denver, purchase most of the instruction they offer from K12 Inc., a
Virginia-based provider of online education with total enrollment numbering in
the tens of thousands of students. K12 Inc. was founded by former U.S. Education
Secretary William J. Bennett and Ronald Jay Packard, a former mergers
specialist with Goldman Sachs, in April 2000. K12 Inc., which became a publicly
traded company in 2008, owns a network of virtual charter schools in California
called the California Virtual Academies and supplies courses for the Ohio
Virtual Academy. Beyond
Novelty Virtual schooling is a rapidly growing and, to many, an increasingly troubling phenomenon. In a decade, online education has grown from being a novelty act to an established mode of education, consisting of asynchronous, computer-mediated interaction between a teacher and students over the Internet. Although exact figures are hard to come
by,
online instruction provides all or part of the formal schooling for nearly one
in every 50 students in the United States today. A few states, Alabama and Michigan
among them, even require high school students to experience at least one such
course before receiving their diplomas.
Teaching and learning in other than a face-to-face relationship has a century-long
history of success, dating from correspondence courses conducted through the
mail of the early 1900s up to televised classes to those in remote locations and
to Internet-supported instruction to home-bound (not home-schooled) students. Educators
have delivered schooling under unique circumstances that almost duplicate traditional
education. The bulk of virtual schooling today can
be classified as either credit recovery or full-time cyber schools. The student
making up a course online that was failed or conflicted with the timing of
another class gains the academic credits to graduate. Students involved in
credit recovery are quite familiar to their teachers, who know what they need,
what to expect from them, and just what kind of supervision is in their best
interest. A sterling example of the
type of service that can be provided across the Internet is the Appleton (WI)
eSchool. A state chartered school operated by the Appleton Area School
District, Appleton eSchool serves students in grades 9 through 12 who are
repeating a course to recover credit, who can not enroll in a particular course
due to schedule conflicts, or who are enrolled in nearby rural schools that
cannot offer a specialized low enrollment course. Appleton eSchool courses
eschew the drill-and-kill drudgery of so many online courses in favor of
constructivist approaches to teaching and learning and even Socratic-style
teaching in some higher-level offerings. The situation with full-time virtual
schooling is quite different. Although spreading widely as a few large private
companies lobby legislatures across the nation, the full-time cyber school, often
chartered by a state agency and supported wholly or in large part by state
funds, has not been fully embraced by education professionals. Cyber
schools, such as the virtual academies in Colorado and Arizona, are a world
apart from brick-and-mortar public schools that run online credit recovery
programs. The harmonic convergence of home schooling, charter schools, and
online course providers coming together to produce the cyber charter school
fuels this concern. These cyber schools may be beloved by politicians seeking
to slash state budgets for K-12 education, but experienced education leaders worry
that something is lost when teachers are replaced by avatars and real life is
replaced by real Facebook. Terry
Moe and John Chubb, long-time foes of public education, devote a chapter in
their recent book Liberating
Learning: Technology, Politics and the Future of Education to an
extended hymn in praise of cyber schools. They cite with approval the outsourcing of instruction
to low-paid “cyber tutors” in India. The Arizona Virtual Academy referred to
some of these East Indian cyber tutors as “secondary teachers” on courses, but
when questioned by a local newspaper, the school’s director, someone with
neither credentials nor experience as a school administrator, insisted they
actually were only “outside scorers.” Who teaches at the cyber schools? It’s
a question that doesn’t just come up when outsourcing to India is revealed. In 2008, a state court in California
ruled that students whose education is provided by state funding must be taught
by a credentialed teacher. The court vacated its decision subsequently under
pressure from well-organized home-schooling parent groups. But the issue will
surely be raised elsewhere and in different contexts. Will a cyber teacher
credentialed in Idaho be permitted to teach a cyber student in Massachusetts? Comparability
Issues Is a cyber course as good as face-to-face instruction? In
some subjects, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Anyone who denies learning can
take place on the Internet ignores the fact that most of what people know about
the Internet was learned there. On the other hand, only a fool believes
everything that can be gained from face-to-face teaching and learning also can be
acquired online. Basic math? Of course. English grammar? Certainly. Musical
performance? Graphic arts? Or even the appreciation of great literature? Probably
not. A hands-on science experiment differs from a hands-on keyboard experience.
Some community colleges have been teaching multicultural education to students
sitting at home in their ethnically homogeneous communities never exchanging a
word with an individual from a different culture. Authenticating
the source of the student’s work also has emerged as an issue for educators. The parent who is actually the creator
of the middle school student’s science fair project is a well- known scenario to
teachers. But the cyber school student presents a problem in this regard on a bigger
scale. Who really is doing all those online assignments and how do we really
know the diploma went to the right person? Some cyber schools are contracting with
testing centers around the country to proctor at least an exam or two during
the school year. . Technological advances in biometrics and online conferencing,
such as Skype, may help. But in the meantime, prudence and sensible precautions
are in order. Trusted organizations that can administer
examinations in person to the individual receiving credit are badly needed.
This arrangement does in fact prevail in some cyber schools. Pearson VUE, a
private company that administers tests in centers around the country, and
Kaplan K12 Learning Services are both sometimes used to proctor exams in online
courses and schools. This issue has found its way into the enabling legislation
for the South Carolina Virtual School that says, “Students enrolled in an
online course for a unit of credit must be administered final exams and
appropriate state assessments in a proctored environment.” Regulatory
Needs The regulation of K-12 virtual education is a complex issue
that affects not just the revenues of private providers and the costs of public
schools offering this alternative but also the quality of schooling itself.
Legislators will have to grapple with issues that bear on the funding and
effectiveness of online instruction. These issues include the level and extent
of teacher involvement; the certification status of cyber teachers; the role of
tests and grades in the awarding of online credits; reciprocity of teacher
certification across state lines; and traditional accounting practices, such as
100-day enrollments or average daily membership, used to fund conventional
schools. The substantial variation in how states
currently regulate virtual education speaks less to the differing circumstances
nationwide than it does to the alacrity with which some states have confronted
the emerging concerns while others dawdled. States
should conduct audits to determine actual costs incurred by private firms
providing courses and programs that receive state funds and by public school
districts claiming membership by students earning credits online. Pegging
reimbursements at some arbitrary level, say 75 percent of the state’s average
contribution, ignores the reality of actual cost savings afforded by online
instruction. Virtual education costs obviously will depend on the subject being
taught, whether it is an isolated course or a complete academic program and how
many students are being taught. As
for accreditation, few existing agencies can help with evaluating providers of
online courses. Government at some level or some other credible public body
should create a clearinghouse of legitimate agencies for accrediting of
providers of K-12 online courses and programs. To avoid abuses such as those
encountered with proprietary vocational schools and online diploma mills, the
traditional high school accrediting agencies or some other governmental agency
must vigorously address the accreditation of commercial online course providers
leading to a high school diploma. The
road to the future of education in America is likely to lead to a hybridization
of face-to-face and online teaching and learning. It is a tricky road to
traverse with potholes in the fast lane. The wise school district administrator
will drive slowly and cautiously. Gene
V Glass is Regents' Professor in
the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education at Arizona State
University and author of Fertilizers,
Pills and Magnetic Strips: The Fate of Public Education in America.
E-mail: glass@asu.edu 2010 |
Writings of Some General Interest, Not Readily Available Elsewhere. To receive a printable copy of an article, please email gvglass @ gmail.com.
Sunday, October 2, 2022
Potholes in the Road to Virtual Schooling
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