Report: Virtual learning no less expensive than schools

For those who advocate virtual learning as a cheaper way to "deliver" "education services" -- as if effective teaching could be bottled and distributed like Coca-Cola -- word comes this morning that a recent study suggesting was off-base.

Have to watch those studies; slap "study" on an issue and ideologues perk up like mini-Pinschers.

Says the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice:

A recent Thomas B. Fordham Institute report analyzing the cost drivers of virtual and blended-learning schools compared to traditional brick-and-mortar schools uses no empirical evidence to support its conclusion that it's significantly cheaper for students to be educated online, according to an academic review released today.

The Fordham report, The Costs of Online Learning, determined that virtual schools cost $6,400 per student on average, compared to $10,000 per student spent in brick-and-mortar schools. The report also claimed blended-learning schools cost $8,900 per student.

Jennifer King Rice, a professor at the University of Maryland, reviewed the report for the Think Twice think tank review project. The review was produced by the National Education Policy Center with funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

"It is surprising that this report cites no empirical evidence on the costs or effectiveness of the various approaches to online learning," Rice wrote in her review.

According to Rice, the approaches used in the report are too general and not evidenced-based. The report also does not review economies of scale that would influence the per-pupil costs of online learning.

"Given the growing use of technology in K-12 education as a way to improve student outcomes and decrease costs, policymakers need evidence on how best to invest limited resources. However, the report's lack of clarity surrounding the models being studied and methodological shortcomings limit its utility," Rice concluded.

Find Jennifer King Rice's review on the Great Lakes Center website at:
http://www.greatlakescenter.org

Find The Costs of Online Learning by Tamara Butler Battaglino, Matt Halderman, and Eleanor Laurens at:
http://www.edexcellence.net/publications/the-costs-of-online-learning.html

Think Twice, a project of the National Education Policy Center, provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected publications. The project is made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

The review is also available on the National Education Policy Center website at:
http://nepc.colorado.edu

Virtual schools aren't delivering the goods?

Here's another bit of information that virtual-school proponents -- and lawmakers who see virtual schools as a cheap way to deliver public education -- will ignore in their quest to dismantle traditional public schools. It seems that children enrolled in virtual schools don't perform well against children enrolled in real schools.

The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management organizations rose sharply last year, according to a new report being published Friday, and far fewer of them are proving proficient on standardized tests compared with their peers in other privately managed charter schools and in traditional public schools.

About 116,000 students were educated in 93 virtual schools — those where instruction is entirely or mainly provided over the Internet — run by private management companies in the 2010-11 school year, up 43 percent from the previous year, according to the report being published by the National Education Policy Center, a research center at the University of Colorado. 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.

Of course, there are plenty of criticisms to throw at this study and its conclusions. For one thing, it was done at the University of Colorado, and lawmakers in South Carolina love to discount studies conducted at far-off universities, particularly when those studies draw conclusions that oppose lawmakers' goals. It's the same as discounting science, and math, and The Colbert Report: When faced with facts, our electeds produce their own facts.

And if that's not enough, the study was reported by the New York Times. 'Nough said.

For the rest of us, however, the study delivers some interesting information, as the Times article explained.

“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.”

Did you catch that? Charter schools, though funded by public dollars, are increasingly privately owned and privately governed. Translation: Rather than use public dollars to maximum efficiency in traditional public schools, we are shipping increasing amounts of public revenue into the profit margins of private companies and corporations who run charter schools and, while they're at it, virtual schools.

Some of the management companies are nonprofit organizations — the largest is the KIPP Foundation, with 28,261 students — while others are for-profit companies (K12 Inc. leads this sector, with 65,396). The report focuses on those that have full-service agreements to run schools, as opposed to vendors that offer ancillary services like curriculum development.

The number of schools — virtual as well as brick-and-mortar — managed by for-profit E.M.O.’s dropped 2 percent in 2010-11 from the previous year, but the number of students leaped 5 percent to 394,096. In the nonprofit sector, there was a 12 percent increase in the number of schools to 1,170 and a 62 percent increase in students to 384,067. 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.”

Crude, indeed -- as educators in traditional public schools have been saying for a decade. But lawmakers didn't listen to them then, so it's fair to assume they won't listen to experts from the University of Colorado now.

If a South Carolina high school has no athletics program, does it exist?

In August, South Carolina's fifth artificial high school is scheduled to open in Cyberspace.

Cyberspace, as geography lessons reveal, cannot be found on a map of South Carolina. Yet it already is home to four artificial high schools enrolling South Carolina pupils, none of which have faculty parking lots, teacher workrooms, cafeterias or, most importantly, basketball courts and football fields.

Which leads to an obvious question: What do students enrolled in these schools do on Friday evenings?

Let's be serious. Homeschooling has its place, just as private schools have their place. But just as taxpayers don't subsidize parents' decisions to homeschool and to pay private school tuition, should taxpayers pay to experiment with online schooling, where effective interaction between instructor and pupil depends upon your bit rate?

Is not something being purposefully lost in eliminating the face-to-face teaching and learning between and among educators and students?

Surely, introverted adults and children will appreciate this mode of communication. And not having to ride a school bus to the desktop computer is a boon. But online education -- fine for adults with careers who want to earn advanced degrees on nights and weekends -- seems to strip a large part of childhood learning from the experience.

Where, for example, do these online-school biology students dissect their frogs? Or is that an artificial experience, too?

Where does a pupil deliver class presentations? Or is the imagination restricted to Powerpoints?

Do these artificial schools host artificial science fairs? If so, who pours the vinegar into the volcano's top to activate the baking soda lava?

The Charleston Post & Courier, in announcing the opening of this school, doesn't mention issues such as these. But it does tell us there are considerations to make before enrolling a child in one:

Even if virtual schools are accredited, students should still consider their post-graduation goals before applying to one. The military does not accept more than 10 percent of recruits with nontraditional high school diplomas. Many colleges accept degrees from virtual high schools only if they are regionally accredited by organizations such as SACS, rather than nationally accredited.

One last question: If an artificial school that exists only in cyberspace is sufficient to meet the needs of a modern high school student, why do we need five of them? Why isn't one sufficient?

Please don't tell me this is another example of out-of-state business interests earning a profit from South Carolina's public school budget.

Yep: It's an out-of-state business interest -- Morgantown, West Virginia, is not contained with South Carolina's borders at the present time -- earning a profit from South Carolina's public school budget. When will we learn?