Potholes in the Road to Virtual Schooling

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