The next phase of the unaccountability movement in education

Published March 6, 2015

By Chris Fitzsimon

by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, March 5, 2015.

If lessons from other states are any indication, get ready for scandals, the wasting of millions of dollars of taxpayer money, dreadful student achievement and maybe even fraud next fall as North Carolina turns over the education of thousands of students to a company with an astoundingly spotty record.

And amazingly, not many people seem too worried about it.

The budget the General Assembly passed last session included a provision directing the State Board of Education to approve two virtual charter schools as pilot programs. Only two companies applied to run the online schools, all but guaranteeing they would both be selected, and they both were.

One of the companies is K12, Inc. A recent report by a Washington think tank about a California virtual charter run by the company found a series of problems, including dramatically lower test scores than traditional public schools, startling high dropout rates, questionable attendance figures and a host of other problems.

On the heels of the report, NC Policy Watch reporter Lindsay Wagner talked with Jan Cox Golovich, a former teacher at the K-12 California virtual charter who was not involved with the study but recounted even more troubling practices at the online school.

Golovich, a former teacher in the traditional public schools, was excited about working at the virtual academy, a feeling that quickly faded after she realized how teachers were pressured to take student attendance, which determined how much money K12 was paid by the state.

Golovich couldn’t tell how long her students were actually logged into the virtual school and she started worrying when many of her students were struggling. After a training session with K12 officials, a tech person showed her how to determine how long her students were logged in and when she checked, she found that many were only in the online class for five minutes a day even though they were recorded as attending school.

K12 was getting its money from the taxpayers but the students weren’t getting an education. School administrators then started demanding that teachers check with parents to see how much time students were spending on school work offline, an impossible task since teachers were responsible for hundreds of students.

Golovich told Wagner that she eventually resigned because she didn’t want to put her teaching credentials at stake by lying about attendance figures.

And it’s not just California where K12, Inc. schools have had problems. The think tank report found that in every state where information was available, students at K12 virtual schools had lower math and reading test scores well below the state average.

Graduation rates at K12, Inc. schools were as much as 50 percent below the average in some states. But the company still gets its money.

Things got so bad in Tennessee that the state education commissioner called for the K12 virtual charter to be closed because academic performance was so bad.

Now it’s North Carolina’s turn to pay the company millions of dollars starting next fall, thanks to a secret provision snuck into last year’s budget.

Never mind the miserable track record of the company, the damage done to students’ education and the public money wasted in other states.

And all this from folks in North Carolina who keep pushing for more accountability in traditional public schools.

Maybe most shocking of all is that you probably haven’t heard much about K12 bringing its sketchy record to North Carolina to make millions of dollars off the taxpayers.

But you will. Stay tuned. The scandal’s coming.

- See more at: http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2015/03/05/the-next-phase-of-the-unaccountability-movement-in-education/#sthash.v2IbOEpQ.dpuf

March 6, 2015 at 9:05 am
Richard Bunce says:

Once again Chris believes government bureaucrats are more responsible than parents in deciding what is best for the parents child. Once again Chris ignores the decades of failure of traditional government schools to educate students. K12 gets zero dollars if no parent chooses to send their child to their virtual school. The failed traditional government school down the street their child has been assigned by an education bureaucrat gets dollars before the first student comes through the door.

Chris is a dutiful shill for the government education industrial complex where any alternative to traditional government schools must be eliminated, where any threat to their funding must be savaged, where online wealthy liberal parents must be allowed to send their children to an alternative school system.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/03/why-im-a-public-school-teacher-but-a-private-school-parent/386797/?utm_source=SFFB

March 7, 2015 at 8:41 am
Frank Burns says:

Do private schools need government oversight? They have been doing quite well without providing a better education than the public system. The learning environment is much better in the private system. All government oversight does is raise costs with more and more administrative layers. Government should only provide overall goals and guidance, then get out of the way.

March 7, 2015 at 11:47 pm
Richard Bunce says:

Private schools have parental oversight and parents who control basically all the funding for the school.

March 7, 2015 at 8:42 am
Mary Martin says:

Appreciate the information presented in this article. Without delving into the obvious potential waste of tax dollars and loss of valuable education time........bottom line, shouldn't parents be responsible for the educational choices of their minor-age children? Shouldn't parents do their research about those choices?

March 12, 2015 at 3:02 pm
Curt Budd says:

Parents DO have a choice. The ones who care, choose to live in a district with a strong public school system or they CHOOSE to go to a private school. But you CANNOT use public money to support schools that are allowed to discriminate by religion, gender, socio-economic status, etc. That is unethical and illegal. You guys continue to make the wrong argument. You spin it to "parental choice". Parents DO have a choice.

The #1 user of vouchers in NC, a school in Greensboro that only those that practice the same religion attend.

The #2 user of vouchers in NC, Word of God Academy in Raleigh, which is nothing but a front for an AAU Basketball team.

Could you imagine the uproar, if I set up the, Whites-Only, Free Will Baptist, school for potential NBA players charter school? And then taxpayer dollars were used to pay for scholarships to my school?

Finally, the amount of misinformation put out by the "Please Contribute to My Charter, Inc." companies is ridiculous. See

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article9499466.html

In. The. World.

March 13, 2015 at 11:19 pm
Richard L Bunce says:

The people you and Chris claim to speak for, the poor and disadvantaged, do NOT have a choice about where to send their children for their education unless you consider it a choice to send them to a failed traditional government school or drop out of any education system. I know all your wealthy limousine liberal friends do not want to see these children bail on the traditional government school systems that have failed them as that would harm the government education industrial complex in which your friends either make an excellent living or know some like minded folks who do. You do not know better than the parents of these children about the education choices for their child. It is time you removed your progressive foot from their backs?