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Troubling questions about online education
Written by Burt Hubbard and Nancy Mitchell on Oct 4th, 2011. | Copyright © EdNewsColorado.org
Great piece and reporting. Can you add the dollars lost/gained to online programs by District?
Fantastic reporting, great stuff Burt and Nancy! We can hopefully begin to have a thoughtful conversation about having quality online learning that supports innovation while we shut down the poor performers.
A must read for those working on quality in the charter movement. Kudos to the reporting team.
I believe that the brick & motar schools still have the ability to always teach the required courses and that GOAL ACADEMY are for the chosen few who haven’t any other options because they either fell behind in their studies or they dropped out of school for some reason. Today our students are more adapted to the regular schools that offer the best education availale for the disciplined student, who goes to school for the right reasons each day, day in and day out! Sure you can recruit those who choose to go to online studies, but the simple fact is that according to the stats, its not happening the way they planned it! Every school has it’s own ways & means of doing things, but hearing it from an actual teacher who has a degree in their field of study, is a little bit better than any computer driven avatar thinking that they have all the answers, when they don’t even know what the question was! Just saying !
I would like to know more about the transferring patterns of students that switch back and forth between traditional schools and the on-line schools or those moving among the charters and traditional schools. For example, in addition to the great reporting here, it would help to know how many students enter the charters after the count day but before the next year’s count day. This would indicate that both the on-line and brick-and-mortar schools are “getting stuck with unfunded kids” after count day. Clearly, Colorado’s single count day approach to identifying students in schools creates absurd incentives and problems. It was interesting to see how many people defended this approach last year when a state commission was exploring whether to adopt any of the alternatives that are needed to solve this problem more generally. Using average daily attendance or multiple count days instead of a single count day to determine funding is something we should do for all schools. This includes on-line certainly, but this would also create an incentive for all schools to address their dropouts’ needs or help smaller districts affected by other unexpected changes in enrollment.
In terms of the mobility after Colorado’s “count day”, it would also help to know how many kids leave the district schools after the count day in total, and what percent of the district’s own churn can be attributed to the on-line schools. I suspect the net effect trends strongly toward the problem discussed in the article, with more kids returning to the brick-and-mortar after enrolling in the charter for a short term. And the rates do indicate a serious problem, but it would be good to figure out what those other numbers are overall. Then we could better evaluate the on-line churn as a portion of the general churn of Colorado’s choice approach.
A second issue this raises has to do with why students move around. At this stage in the maturity of the online schools, the on-line community really ought to have much better data on their students and their needs. Without data, some of the usual talking points about the expected mobility of at-risk students are starting to look very suspect.
Many operators claim their enrollment includes a lot of students who have a temporary event in their life that makes online learning a temporary fix. According to operators I’ve spoken with, “many” of their students experience sickness or an injury, are escaping a bullying situation, or their parents fear their kids have “fallen in with the wrong crowd”. They enroll in on-line with an initial intent of using the on-line program as a short-term fix. For these kids, returning to the district school could arguably be a success, especially if those kids return and are not too far behind in their studies the next year. These students wouldn’t necessarily have been in an Alternative Education Campus before, or have been dropped out (the primary indicators the authors use to test this assertion).
But the idea that many students are intending to attend on-line schoolos only briefly is just a story if people can’t document it. And ten years into these programs, we don’t have any real data on what percent of kids are in this category or how these kids are doing after trying on-line as a temporary fix. These intentionally temporary students in on-line programs could be one percent of the on-line enrollment or they could be 50 percent. When pressed on their churn, the operators can regularly produce an individual kid or two with very compelling stories who fit this scenario; and then the operators claim that kids like these examples are causing all the school’s churn. Given low numbers coming from AECs or kids who were already out of school reported here, and the outcome results, it is now clearly incumbent on the operators to document the proportion of their enrollment that is due to kids in these situations, and to transparently provide real numbers. Instead, at this point, it remains an anecdotally-driven talking point.
This isn’t an unreasonable or impossible reporting task. The state has experience with identifying the at-risk population for Alternative Education Campuses (AECs). And perhaps more relevant to this case, many districts document a wide variety of childhood and familial risk factors when applying for funding under the Colorado Preschool Program. So it shouldn’t be an insurmountable burden for on-line operators to provide similar documentation to back-up their talking point. They could just ask the students why they enrolled in a survey when they enroll. As long as the on-line providers cannot or will not provide this data, trying to use this talking point as a defense for criticism about their high student mobility is increasingly problematic.
Great reporting !
But, very sad tale of the rollout of online in Colorado. Who are the accountable parties?
This seems to have parallels with the very sad story of most for-profit online higher ed providers. Because it is online, new, potentially innovative, it gets a pass on regulation, while it focuses on generating student FTEs. In both cases students are sure losers, and so to are other, legitimate providers.
Good regulation is supposed to separate the wheat from the chaf.
On-line schools should be working directly with the districts regarding who is best suited for on-line schools. I could not help but cringe when I read of GOAL recruiters hitting up students WHILE THEY WERE AT LUNCH!
Students move around because they, or their families, choose to move around. How do we balance “choice” with effectiveness or what is best for the student in the eyes of educators?
I would also like to know who is accountable. Adams 12 School District was penalized for the misadministration of CSAP by COVA in 2010. There were no consequences given to COVA but the district was penalized.
The issue is the same as it was with correspondence courses. – no real communication, resource support, interaction or social context for the youngsters. It all must lead to disengagement. There are better ways.
I saw this featured on KGNU and found it quite disturbing. The big trend in education is to move to privatized models and I think this makes a clear case why public dollars belong in public schools with public oversight. The public shouldn’t stand for public dollars going to CEO’ s and business investors. We want our investments to be directed at the educational needs of Colorado’s children.
Organizations like DFER, Stand for Children, The Legacy Foundation, The Daniel’s Fund, and the Colorado Children’s Campaign have strongly advocated for competition and charters. The Charter School Institute and private online and charter programs that operate outside of the authority of locally elected school boards have far less accountability.
I’m really sick and tired of these folks masquerading as reformers while they ransack the public education trust and dilute education. Readers do your homework. Take a look at the policy agendas and then connect the dots. These organizations are peddling policies that make more money for their funders and exploit the very children they claim to serve. Don’t stand for it!
Colorado Children’s Campaign
The Colorado Children’s Campaign is the leading voice for children in Colorado. Today, there are more than 1.1 million children in Colorado – and that number and their needs are growing. The Children’s Campaign’s mission is to create hope and opportunity for not just one of those children, or 100 children or 1,000 children – but one million Colorado children at a time.
His trust in the free market system made him a firm believer in competition and alternative approaches, particularly those that provide high-quality choices. The Daniels Fund honors his vision through its support of K-12 educational reform initiatives such as charter schools, portable vouchers for tuition assistance, and significant innovations that challenge the status quo.
Increase awareness of and access to public school choice by improving the
application procedures, transportation system, and overall understanding of
the choice process.
Democrats for Education Reform
http://www.dfer.org/2011/04/gov_john_kasich.php
I’ve provided the direct links but this blog identifies links as spam. I’ll have to submit links separately.
FOLLOW THE MONEY SO OUR CHILDREN WON’T HAVE TO:
Read pg. 24 & 25 of the McGraw-Hill Financial Fact Book to see the reasoning behind national policies and trends.
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/IROL/96/96562/reports/MHP10Book/downloads/MHP-Factbook-2010-2011-P23-39.pdf
WHY PRIVATE CHARTER SCHOOLS IS BIG BUSINESS:
http://www.lsba.com/PressRoom/PressRoomDisplay.asp?p1=4579&p2=Y&E=N
http://gg4g.indy.com/articles/letters-to-the-editor/thread/follow-the-money-in-school-privatization
http://www.openleft.com/diary/18640/evil-ed-inc-the-wall-streetcharter-school-connection
WHY PRIVATE CHARTER SCHOOLS ARE BIG BUSINESS:
http://choosingdemocracy.blogspot.com/2010/05/hedge-funds-and-charter-schools.html
http://news.firedoglake.com/2010/05/10/wall-street-hearts-charter-schools-gets-rich-off-them/
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/education/2010/05/07/2010-05-07_albany_charter_cash_cow_big_banks_making_a_bundle_on_new_construction_as_schools.html
My apologies for the multiple submissions;)
Finally… the direct links to the above text. For your convenience.
Corporate education links:
http://www.csi.state.co.us/links.htm
The Colorado Children’s Campaign
http://www.stand.org/Document.Doc?id=2975
Stand for Children
http://www.dfer.org/2011/04/gov_john_kasich.php
Democrats for Education Reform
So Denver lost 1664 students to online schools last year. Let’s put that in perspective. The same year Denver had 2536 students transfer to Jefferson County, 1156 to Douglas County, 828 to Aurora, 776 to Littleton, and over 1500 to other neighboring districts. That’s 6800 students transferring out of Denver – four times as many as transferred to online schools. Where is the outrage about that?
Is it because more of the online students transfer back to Denver mid-year, without funding? That’s a legitimate complaint, but it’s a complaint about the funding system that relies on a single count day. Online schools regularly receive a flood of enrollment requests after October 1 from students who have been actively encouraged by their home school to look for another alternative. Districts deny they do it, but it happens and it is well documented.
Most online schools are not philosophically opposed to taking students after count day, especially if they fill funded slots opened up when other students left. The problem is the accountability system kills a school that does that (CEDLA is Exhibit A).
Multiple count days? Let’s do it! Funding based on competency or course completion, rather than seat time? Great idea! But make sure it applies to everyone – not just online schools. We are not afraid of accountability. We are scared to death of ill-informed targeted campaigns designed to cripple the most serious competition the education establishment has faced in decades.
Randy,
Really? The “most serious competition”
Would that be the graduation rates:
Last year COVA reported a 12 percent graduation rate. That’s compared to a 72 percent average for all public high schools statewide.
http://www.kunc.org/post/k12-inc-public-online-schools-private-profits
Proficiency levels:
Hope online: Student achievement – 36% of students are proficient or advanced in reading, with a median growth percentile of 43; 21% of student are proficient or advanced in math, with a median growth percentile
of 39.
Retention rates:
“Half of online students wind up leaving within the year” Fifty percent attrition rate is higher than any public school in the entire state of CO.
Or is it the highly qualified teachers:
Never mind. Online schools don’t even have to hire real teachers. Lack of professional expertise is one of the topics this coverage fails to mention.
This isn’t serious competition, Randy, this is a license to steal. As a long-time proponent of accountability you should be figuring out how to deliver quality online education, not defend this incompetence.
I look forward to seeing you soon…maybe Sunday;) I welcome the dialogue.
I’m not sure if Ed News uses standards to review posts in response to articles, but some of the above seems to suggest a need for moderating.
Having been affiliated with both the Colorado Children’s Campaign and the CSI (which has its website linked next to the Children’s Campaign above for some reason), I believe Angela’s posts require a response. I’m not sure how linking the CSI’s list of references, that includes a link to the CCC “proves” that either organization is part of some corporate plot.
For readers who are interested in understanding a group that strongly advocates for quality in public education, and which has supported work to strengthen accountability and oversight since the beginnings of both Colorado’s charter movement and standards-based reforms, you can see what the Colorado Children’s
Campaign is about at their webiste. It is: coloradoKids.org.
Alex
What would be the point of a blog if everyone agreed. It seems to me that if you have a problem with the characterization of the Children’s Campaign, you should take that up with the Charter School Institute. It’s been posted for some time.
I appreciate the links Engel provided. As a parent I’ve been feeling for some time that many of the so called “reforms” in education haven’t done a thing to improve the education of our children.
I’m beginning to see the benefactors now and it’s not our kids.
Angela,
Last time I checked most of those organizations have been pushing for better and stronger accountability for all publicly funded schools (district managed, charter, innovation and online). Readers would be advised to review the websites of DFER, Colorado Children’s Campaign and Stand for Children to see their positions and records on school and district accountability.
You can also review posts on this site from folks like me, Alex Medler, Alex Ooms and others affiliated with these organizations to understand where these groups are coming from. Yes we would like to provide more kinds of school options with different governance structures but none of us are interested in supporting the development of schools with the results described in this series.
Readers should look more deeply into why Angela and others may be trying to protect the status quo. Is it to dramatically improve achievement or are there other reasons?
I did finally look at Angela’s website and while she is promoting her book it does appear that she is not directly part of some adult interest group. Deborah Meier, one my early education reform mentor/hero’s wrote a piece for her book which says a great deal. While I find myself now sometimes on a different page as Debbie and many other wonderful progressive educators when it comes to policy I do understand where they are coming from and respect their viewpoints. Most of the current tests that we are using are not terribly useful but until someone comes up with better ones I believe we have to have them (though I’d like to see less testing) to understand whether kids are learning to read, write and do math. Going back to an era where we knew little about how low-income or Latino students were doing on certain subjects at particular grades is not going to be helpful. This whole series on online would not have been possible without the current accountability framework. The only metrics we would have would have about online would be whether students could be recruited to sign up.
Well Van, I’m glad to hear you’ve done your homework. Author’s don’t make a living off of selling books. I take great offense to those who suggest I’m promoting myself. For the past twenty years I’ve been advocating for children and for the past 12 without a paycheck. The point of writing Seeds of Tomorrow was to promote a cause – the cause honor the lives and learning of our children. Now that we have that out of the way.
In response to you and Alex, I find an enormous contradiction in your organizations approach to accountability:
When it relates to public schools you advocate for more standards, more shaded bubbles, more tracking devices, more state department and federal control:
http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/SPA/BuechnerInstitute/Centers/CEPA/Publications/Documents/P20%20DataBrief.pdf
However, when it comes to charters you advocate for greater flexibility, autonomy, teacher and parent control.
http://www.coloradokids.org/our_issues/k12_education/projects.html
Readers will need to click on various links such as “Creating a Zone of Innovation in Denver”
The irony here is that standards and tests are the “status quo” and have been for the last 100-300 years (depending on which education historian you talk to). There isn’t anything innovative about a paper, pencil, a bubble sheet and the three R’s. The Eugenics Movement was an earlier version of tracking and testing.
The true education innovators, of which I am one, call for differentiation and personalization. It is the opposite of standardization and the one-size-fits-all model that’s been advanced through NCLB, Race to the Top, CAP4K, and SB191.
Education innovators promote learner-centered models, integrated subjects and concepts, multi-sensory instruction, experiential opportunities, real-world skill building, contextual assessments, and cooperative environments. You are the traditionalists – we are the innovators.
And we knew way more about our learners before high-stakes testing because we cared about our students and we wanted to know how they were learning; what their strengths were; interests; process, attitudes, learning behaviors and so forth. We learned that the affective domains conveyed more about the learner than the generalized measurement tools limited to multiple choice or graded by temp workers.
CSAP tests don’t tell you anymore about low-income or Latino students then you knew before. Socio-income is the highest correlating factor on standardized tests and always has been. Taxpayers have just spent a lot of money on what a zip code map can tell us. You see, parents and educators don’t care how our children are doing according to some department or corporate standard. We want to know about the individual strengths and needs of our kids. Each one of them is different.
If Sally learns how to ride a bike at 4-years-old and Jimmy learns how to ride a bike at 6, that won’t make Sally a better bike rider. What will determine who is a better bike rider is their love for bike riding. It is the same with reading, writing and all other important knowledge areas. A teacher listening to a child read on a weekly basis and asking in depth analytical questions will learn far more about that child’s reading ability than the shaded bubbles C, D, A, D, B. My eleven-year-old daughter brought home a CD last spring that included all of the writing she had done from kindergarten through fifth grade – that told us something about her writing. The real tragedy here that doesn’t seem to be catching on is the way in which our children’s education has been turned into an exercise in bean counting.
It is very sad and it makes me very angry.
Angela,
First off you seemed to miss the main point of these papers when it comes to transforming and improving our public school systems. Most of us are advocating for a system of diverse schools with different programs/approaches that are managed around student results (whether kids can read, write, compute, problem solve, etc). The idea is to allow for flexibility around how these schools to operate but hold them to some common standards so that schools can innovate and better meet the needs of students. We need more Montessori, Core Knowledge, KIPP, effective DPS schools and a host of other school designs that have yet to be developed.
As I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, the schools in Douglas County or Denver are still operating on an early 20th century factory model where kids and teachers are mostly treated like widgets. Denver has the added challenge that most kids are poor and entering a system designed to sort and select (like all other US public ed systems) which leads to fewer than 5% of low-income kids being prepared for work, college or life. We reformers are trying to change those percentages with schools like Beach Court, West Denver Prep, Odyssey and DSST.
I’m thrilled to know that you are an “education innovator.” I’d like to know what that means aside from your advocacy for dropping standardized tests and other accountability reforms. What new innovations are you promoting or creating?
You throw out a litany of educational jargon about practices that are mostly meaningless without more detail or examples. What are you talking about when you refer to “differentiation,” “integration,” “experiential” etc.
Is your innovation a new teaching practice? A new kind of school? A new teaching technology?
And I’d love to know what you hope to achieve in terms of student outcomes with this new innovation? More readers? Better readers? More graduates? Greater success in college? Better problem solving? Risk taking? Rule following? Love of learning?
And last how will you or any of us know it is working?
Assuming that you are as outraged as me about the results in districts like Aurora, Westminster, Pueblo and Denver, I’d really like to know what you’d suggest to we do about it?
That is assuming you believe it’s possible to change the results or are you one of those folks that believe that poverty is destiny when it comes to education? And that schools are doing the best they can with what they’ve got in terms of resources so we’ve somehow got to focus on getting kids out of poverty, give schools more funding and drop any accountability for results.
Last did I read correctly that you made a link between the eugenics movement and the current reform movement? Wow if true that’s a quite a claim which deserves a much longer discussion about history, race, school reform and standardized testing.
I have a pretty good idea of what you are against but I have little idea of what you are for in terms of changing the educational trajectories of low-income kids.
A number of people have asked questions about the data in the online series via these comment sections. I’ve tried to address all of the questions from the three parts in one document here – http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2011/10/06/25989-data-behind-the-online-education-series. I’ll post this in the comment sections of all three parts and link to it from the first-day story as well. We appreciate your close reading of what turned out to be a lengthy project and your desire to know more about the numbers.
Curious to know, how many students are enrolled in online schools as of the student count day?
Just a thought, why is all of the money disbursed after one count day in October? Why not disburse 50% of it then, and recount in say January and disburse the rest after the recount. If huge numbers of students have returned to the brick & mortar schools then shift the funds back to them.