Ben DeGrow is a public policy analyst with the Independence Institute, focusing on education labor issues.
Last October, Education News Colorado released its controversial series on full-time online schools. One of the leading claims in the story was that students transferring from online programs after the October 1 count date create an unfunded burden for many school districts:
In the tiny Florence School District outside Pueblo, [Laura] Johnson was one of 39 students who left Florence High School last year to sign up for online classes with GOAL Academy, one of the largest online schools in Colorado.
By January, she was back at Florence, disillusioned by the online experience and trying to make up for her lost time in class. She was joined by a dozen of her former online classmates.
Those 39 students who left Florence High School for GOAL represented one of every 10 students in the school. When they left, so did nearly a quarter million dollars in state funding – the equivalent of four to five teachers’ salaries. When a dozen of the students returned to Florence High mid-year, the funding to educate them did not come with them. GOAL got to keep it.
Unfortunately, the report lacked some key information that provides a significantly different perspective. A November 2011 legislative staff report tracked school districts’ October 1 3rd-through-11th grade enrollment counts and the numbers of spring math CSAP and ACT test-takers for the past five years. The results are illuminating. More than 80 percent of school districts have fewer students for spring test-taking than for the fall enrollment count. In the most recent year, the 34 net-gain school districts were all small in size, acquiring a total of 119 new students among them.
Laura Johnson, a senior at Florence High School outside Pueblo, left the school for an online program. She was back within a few months. Photo by Joe Mahoney/I-News
Jefferson County alone received funding for 750 more students than it ended up serving and testing in the 10 grades measured. Florence — the district highlighted in the story above — experienced a net loss of 30 students, or a 2.6 percent reduction, after October 1. Certainly, multi-district online schools shed students at a faster rate than most districts. To what extent is that the result of kids leaving traditional schools for an online credit recovery program of last resort, and some of them not catching on anywhere? I don’t know. But the problem is a systemic one, not one exclusive to cyberschools.
Along comes House Bill 1306, which is scheduled to make its first hearing in the House Education Committee next Monday. The gist of the legislation is to compensate districts that experience net student gains from count day to test day, at the standard online per-pupil rate (currently $5,913.93). The remaining schools and districts that are losing students after October 1 would be held harmless. Using last year’s numbers, the state would be on the hook for less than a million dollars all told.
Because of the likely fiscal note, HB 1306 may not be long for serious consideration in the current budget climate. Nor is its “band-aid” approach to a flawed enrollment count system nearly ideal. For one thing, it doesn’t address the incentives that make serving students at risk of dropping out a low priority. Instituting multiple count dates or average daily membership (ADM) will be needed instead for Colorado in part to achieve a fair, flexible and equitable student-centered funding system for the 21st century.
While not the best solution, HB 1306 as introduced helps to shine a bright light on a real educational trend neither well nor widely understood. That alone should make next Monday’s hearing one to watch.
As one of the journalists who worked on this series, I think it’s fair to point out some key differences between the work we did and the legislative report that’s cited by this writer. First, we obtained a database from the Colorado Department of Education that allowed us to follow actual students in and out of schools over five years. The legislative report appears to have looked simply at numbers of students enrolled by district during the student count in October and the numbers of students taking the CSAP in those districts several months later. Second, we focused on actual students in schools from one enrollment count date to the next, or over a one-year cycle, versus from one enrollment count date to the CSAP testing date.
Certainly, student movement between schools and district is not an issue confined to online schools. But as even this legislative report points out, online schools received funding for, on average, about 20 percent more students in October than were in those schools months later. The statewide average for non-online programs, meanwhile, was less than 3 percent in each of the past five years, according to the legislative report.
You can learn more about the data used in our series here – http://www.ednewscolorado.org/2011/10/06/25989-data-behind-the-online-education-series
Nancy, Thanks for the response. How would one be able to go about obtaining access to the same database from CDE? That might shed further light. As I asked in the post, is there a way to tell how many students were non-traditional, “last chance” transfers from district schools who entered online programs such as GOAL for credit recovery? Because if online programs are losing students after Oct 1, and so are districts — albeit at a smaller rate — where are most of these students going? What is their story?
Sure seems like, especially in this day and age, that enrollment could be counted and verified more often than once a year, and at a reasonable cost. If so, then funding could also be adjusted on a regular basis. It seems more fair.
I’ve long thought a prorating system would be fair. When a student moves from one Colorado public school district to another, calculate the percentage of the year that remains and forward funds based on a percentage of the original district’s per pupil funding. Ex. The student does one semester at School A and second semester at School B, so School A sends School B 50% of that which they got from the state for that student from the October count. This would discourage catch and release strategies that seem to occur with some charter schools, as well (provide incentives, then wait until after October 1 to tell the student and their parents the choice wasn’t a “good fit”).
Hi Ben. I believe it took us about two months to obtain the data, starting with a letter to former Commissioner Dwight Jones, repeated meetings with CDE staff and a request to go through their Institutional Review Board process. We agreed not to use the information to attempt to identify or contact any students – we didn’t have names, just random codes but they wanted to be careful – and to give them the opportunity to respond to what we found. We also agreed not to share the raw data. In any case, we looked at where students were coming from before entering online programs and where they went immediately after. In both cases, the single largest categories of students were coming from traditional brick-and-mortar schools and returning to them. It’s difficult to know about “last chance” transfers – few of the students entering online programs had been expelled or had been out of school longer than six weeks before entering those programs. But there are certainly other circumstances that might be classified as last chance transfers that are not captured by the state codes.