Progress Texas Report: Virtual Schools Failing
A report released Tuesday by the liberal group Progress Texas is adding another layer to the controversy over virtual schools, claiming that despite their popularity, the programs have failed Texas students and are run by businesses seeking profit.
“It’s a $24 billion industry with zero accountability,” Progress Texas executive director Matt Glazer said in a statement. “Virtual schools provide unregulated financial windfalls to a few insiders by shortchanging our children’s education.”
The Progress Texas findings come in response to a March report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative Austin-based think tank that supported virtual schools. The ...
Comments (3)
Audrey Fisher via Texas Tribune on Facebook
TPPF is very proud of their ALEC connection - they say so! Pretty typical of TPPF - to only address a single side of the issue and ignore the pitfall and actual student outcomes. The TPR should be read by any parent who is actually considering the "virtual schools". The 10K college program has some serious downsides as well.
D.L. Bearden
I am a teacher at Texas Virtual School (TVS) and worked as a consultant doing course reviews and curriculum realignment for Region 4 Education Service Center (ESC) when the TxVSN launched. TxVSN is a consortium managed by Region 10 ESC and includes partnerships with the Education Development Center, Inc., ESC Region 1, ESC Region 4, ESC Region 11, ESC Region 16, Harris County Dept. of Education, Texas A&M University CDLR, University of Houston Clear Lake, PBS TeacherLine of Texas and LincoTower, LLC.
The Progress Texas Report is correct in its assessment but incorrectly states that the Texas Virtual School Network is the conduit for the for-profit virtual schools' expansion. The TxVSN website provides real time enrollment data <http://www.txvsn.org/custom/rpt_enrollments.aspx> that reveals enrollment in TxVSN courses skyrocketed in 2010 following passage of the virtual school act and plummeted in 2011 when the last Lege session pulled the funding mechanism that reimbursed public schools for enrolling students in fully accredited courses through the consortium. During this same time period enrollment in charter schools in Texas ballooned to the largest in the nation, even surpassing the vaunted Florida Virtual School, a public school district in the state of Florida that serves the entire state.
Dormand Long
While this report may reject the effectiveness of this single online schooling initiative, this educational
technology does offer solutions in two separate, but not mutually exclusive applications:
a ) in the rural areas of the state, it can be most challenging to gather a critical mass of students for a grade level in a given subject. For this niche, utilizing exceptional quality educators to offer high quality
instruction to students located over a wide area makes far more sense than attempting to utilize far less qualified teachers in a brick & mortar classroom. It is critical that the highest quality external sources such as the Khan Academy be integrated, rather than reinventing the wheel. Utilization of such tools as The Intelligent Essay Analyzer and EBSCO periodical data base could add substantial value.
b ) Much could be gained from having the local schools focus on the very basic academic courses, and provide the less used, but academically advanced courses through online technology. Due to our history in this state of awarding science teacher jobs to the person who could best coach a football or basketball team, we are cursed with a dire shortage of capable lab science teachers.
It would be far better to have an online class for thousands in a lab science taght by a Neil DeGrass Tyson than by a class on physics taught by a history major who just graduated from a school of education.