Are virtual schools the new vouchers?
Eduwonk Andy thinks that merit pay is the new vouchers. (Actually now he says “everyone” knows that to be the case.) Not really. Merit pay is more like charters—an issue that is promoted primarily by Republicans (especially at the state level) but which enjoys significant support among reform-minded Democrats. A better analogy is virtual schools, particularly the no-holds-barred, outside-the-system versions, which are openly despised by the teachers unions and increasingly under fire.
I used to work at K12, a company that manages lots of these virtual charter schools around the country, and have been following their “public policy challenges” over the years. Consider this episode from Wisconsin, for example, where the unions led a legal fight to shut down these options. (Thankfully the legislature later forged a compromise to keep them open, after thousands of angry parents turned up the heat.) It’s easy to understand why the unions see this as a high-stakes debate: such schools replace labor (teachers) with capital (technology)—the great fear of organized workers. More specifically, by relying on parents or other guardians to provide much of the instruction, virtual charters are able to put in place much larger teacher-to-student ratios than brick-and-mortar schools can. (On the order of 50:1 instead of 25:1.)
And now it looks like the issue of virtual schools is shaping up to be a point of contention for the 2008 presidential election. (See this excellent Education Week article for the scoop.) The candidates are pretty close on merit pay—but far apart on virtual schools. So Andy, which would you consider to be the “new vouchers” now?
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July 25th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
How about you guys release Fordham’s elite investigative corp to winkle out the details about virtuals? What’s the growth rate? What’s their price? How do they rate in terms of student scores?
My own feeling is that virtuals share a common problem with vouchers: a bridge too far.
They’re too much of a leap for folks used to the conventional, public education system and the uneven utilization rates of voucher programs suggests that’s true. Charters, by contrast, are easy to understand. Charters are just public schools which is the fact that comforts parents uneasy with the novel.
Charters, however, represent the stepping stone to virtual schools and vouchers since taking the first step sets the stage for taking subsequent steps. There’s another wrinkle to charters with regard to vouchers and virtuals which that charters are much more likely to utilize and embrace vouchers as well as look into virtuals to help the charter do what it might not otherwise be capable of doing.
The big item though is that that all these alternatives, whether successful or not, fractures the educational monolith of the district-based school system and that’s always and everywhere good since the district is, for all intents and purposes, useless as far as education is concerned.
July 27th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Allen last paragraph is key. Remember that LEA’s have no radar for competition, only for the dollar streams coming their way. Virtual school will grow as the high speed internet expands and greatly increases in speed in the next few years. Korea’s average internet speed is roughly 10 times that which is common in the USA. That opens up much greater options for interactivity that I can’t really guess at today, but which will encourage certain families to go virtual with their children’s education.