We, the parents of children who attend traditional brick and mortar schools, do not have to accept the placement of our children, without our knowledge or consent, in FLVS courses during regular school hours.
The first day of the 2012 – 2013 school year my daughter, a senior in a Miami high school, came home and told me that she was placed in a room with 60 other students and told she would be taking her Honors Government and Economics course online via Florida Virtual School (FLVS). There were less than 30 computers in the classroom that was monitored by a substitute teacher. Her father and I, both educators in Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) with knowledge of the high failure rate and high cheating rate of traditional public school students enrolled in FLVS courses, received no notification of this prior to her enrollment by her school site.
A day later I received an email welcoming me to the parent portal of FLVS. As her parents, we had questions and concerns:
•Why were we not contacted by M-DCPS, informed of a possible placement, and asked to give or withhold our consent?
•How can my daughter succeed in a challenging subject such as government and economics when she formed an aversion to online learning after taking Spanish I online the previous year?
•How can she do well in a class with 60 students, 30 computers, and no onsite certified history instructor?
•Is this a district mandate or a state mandate?
We proceeded to contact and meet with her onsite principal. The conversation revealed many interesting and some disconcerting facts:
•Taking a FLVS course for my daughter (class of 2013) is not a district mandate or state requirement for high school graduation.
•Taking a FLVS course (does not have to be a social studies/history course) is a state graduation requirement for the class of 2015 and beyond.
•The district encourages individual school sites to choose an online course to enroll students across the board regardless of student need, ability, or parental consent. Each high school makes their own decision on what course they enroll students. Most choose social studies or history courses such as ninth grade World History or twelfth grade Government and Economics.
•Some high schools seek parental consent prior to enrolling a student in an online course. Other schools do not, as in the case of my daughter’s school.
•In effort to facilitate graduation rates, my daughter’s school choose to put Honors Government and Economics’ students in the online classes due to the lack of success for regular level students enrolled in the online class. According to Florida Virtual's figures, 66 percent of students who enroll in a FLVS course do not finish it.
As an educator, I have witnessed many students struggle with online learning. I witnessed my own daughter struggle to complete assigned work for the FLVS class she took outside of the brick and mortar environment last school year. Due in part to her own negligence and in part to technical breakdowns in our home computer situation, she scrambled to complete the assigned work as the deadline neared. Even though she successfully completed her online course, many students for various reasons do not. SRI International, a California-based research institute released a study that analyzed completion rates, standardized test scores, and course grades for Florida Virtual and traditional students. The study revealed that lower-achieving and impoverished students failed to complete the coursework at a higher rate than their middle to upper class high–achieving counterparts. Moreover, feedback from high school teachers "suggested that motivation, technical aptitude and the availability of informal academic supports were likely to play roles in student success online.” It is evidential that students enrolled in FLVS fail the online courses in large numbers, many resort to cheating, and a significant amount of schools and private homes are short on computer availability.
In my daughter’s case her father and I agreed to transfer her out of the overcrowded online class with too few computers (M-DCPS is supposed to be sending more to the school site.)and no onsite certified social studies/history instructor, a situation that could turn out badly for her and far too many other students, as according to my daughter “students were in competition to see who could get a computer and those that lost out sat around talking loudly while the substitute attempted to get them under control.” Instead, we asked for options. We were told the only government and economic classes that offered the traditional style of education with a certified instructor were remedial, gifted, and Advanced Placement (AP) levels. We chose to have her transferred to the AP class knowing that she would be better suited for an honors level class and would be badly misplaced in a remedial class. Seems the “choice” factor touted by current education reformers provided us with little “choice.”
This experience prompted further exploration and questions on my part, two in particular: So why is there a push to place these students in situations that undermine parental consent and quality teaching and learning? Who is doing the pushing? Once again, I discovered many interesting and disconcerting facts. To begin, FLVS is a for profit entity that is owned and operated by the state of Florida and by Pearson, an education conglomerate based in England. Seems Pearson, via its active lobbying efforts, has seized control of many of America’s educational products and services, pre-k through graduate. In addition to virtual education, they either own or have a significant share of ownership in the following: public school text book publishing for elementary through college level, creation and scoring of standardized tests inclusive of state required tests for math and reading mandated by the Elementary and Secondary Education act(ESEA), Advance Placement testing, International Baccalaureate testing, SAT College Entrance testing, soon to be End of the Course Exams attached to Common Core State Standards (CCSS)adopted by 48 states in America, GED, state certification for aspiring teachers in college and university programs, National Board Certification for educators; data collection and dissemination of test results available to government agencies and private companies, teacher professional developmenttools, and much more. It is no coincidence that Pearson has produced a warehouse of outcome based educational products (linked more to behavioral control than growing and developing the intellect). This methodology that promotes standards, high stakes testing, and tying tests to teacher evaluation originates in England. Outcome Based Education (OBE) was implemented in1862 and eventually fought down by teachers. ” They abhorred the narrowness and mechanical character the system imposed on the educational process.”
Expanding beyond the borders of Florida, FLVS has become a global endeavor that intends on realizing huge profits. But for whom? Tampa Bay Times Staff WriterRebecca Catalanello reported in February of this year that, “The agreement with textbook giant Pearson Education Inc. was supposed to generate about $800,000 in net income in the first year alone, increasing every year to $44 million by 2015. Florida Virtual's 45 percent share meant a projected $43.76 million in net income over a five-year span.” Pearson's share is 55 percent. Last year lawmakers approved kicking another $119 million in tax revenues toward FLVS regardless of the fact the expected profits for 2011 were not realized nor realized was the goal to get FLVS off the taxpayer dole. To make matters worse, in an unsuspected move, Pearson bought Connection Academy, another online education vehicle that was one of FLVS’s competitors. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, founder of Foundation for Excellence on Education and one to usually love a public-private partnership, advised Florida Governor Rick Scott to sell FLVS as Florida officials scramble to renegotiate their contract with Pearson.
In the meantime, FLVS is shopping its online wares across the globe with the help of Jeb Bush. Catalanello went on to report in the Tampa Bay Times story that “ Its profit-making arm, the Global School, already sells courses outside Florida, reaching 49 states and 57 countries.” Last October, Maine's top education official, Stephen Bowen, attended Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education sales pitch summit. He returned to Maine armed with a promise of support from Executive Director Patricia Levesque, who runs Bush’s foundation. He expressed doubts that he could get the ball rolling in Maine. Her response, “Not to worry, Levesque replied; her staff in Florida would be happy to suggest policies, write laws and gubernatorial decrees, and develop strategies to ensure they were implemented.”
The fact that FLVS receives funding from tax payer money is disconcerting, not just for me, a Florida resident and taxpayer. Mark Pudlow, a spokesman for the Florida Education Association has gone on record in expressing his concern. He not only questions the efficacy of FLVS and its ability to educate all children that will come under the graduation mandate, but he questions the ethical practice of FLVS making a “profit from a program that was developed using public dollars. The startup and the clientele and the advertising have all been funded by the taxpayer," he says, adding, "It is difficult to say if they have it right or wrong." Following the assembled facts and logic of Alan Singer Social studies educator, Hofstra University; it can indeed be said they have it wrong. According to Singer, “Pearson's chief operating officers (all with dubious past business dealings), who are also heavily invested in the company, are busy trading stocks and racking up dollars and pounds while the corporation's financial situation is shaky. And their solution is to sell, sell, sell their products in the United States.” Singer asks the question, “Are these the people we want designing tests, lessons, and curriculum for our students and deciding who is qualified to become teachers?” I ask, once again, why is there a push to place these students in situations that undermine parental choice and quality teaching and learning
University of Colorado Boulder School of Education Alex Molnar, a professor who has studied private partnerships in public education, has concerns as well. "The whole thing stinks," said Molnar , who is associated with the National Education Policy Center. “While policy makers frequently support the kind of public-private blending that Florida Virtual has pursued it often comes at a cost to the taxpayer, especially in transparency and finance.” He has also noted that the policy makers are the same folk that have a vested interest in realizing a profit using tax payer money: "One of the striking things about these reforms is the extent to which they remove control of the schools from democratic governance and turn them over to corporate decision-making and appointed bodies. Education policy is now being made to some degree by people who have a financial stake in what they are making policy about." The foundation's Digital Learning Now! initiative receives funding from Pearson; K12; textbook publishing giants Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt and McGraw-Hill; technology companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft; and digital curriculum developers Apex Learning and IQ Innovations iQity. The initiative’s 10 point strategy focuses on securing public financing for virtual classes by doing the following:
•eliminate restrictions on online student-to-teacher ratios, enrollments, class sizes, budgets, providers, or the number of credits a student can earn;
•not regulate "seat time" in classes, or require that online providers, their teachers, or their governing board members be located in the state;
•avoid assessment of "inputs such as teacher certification, programmatic budgets and textbook reviews" and focus instead on "student learning data" from digital testing;
•fund digital learning "through the public per-pupil funding formula;"
•provide all students with access to "any and all" approved online providers;
•require students to take online courses in order to graduate;
•pay for the online classes of all students, including homeschoolers and those in private schools;
•ensure by law that full-time virtual schools are available for all students
•deprive school districts of "the ability to deny access to approved virtual schools and individual online courses" even as they pay for their students to use them out of their per-pupil budget allocation.
As parents, my husband and I advocated for the best available solution for our daughter. In doing so we discovered that we, the parents of children who attend traditional brick and mortar schools, do not have to accept the placement of our children, without our knowledge or consent, in FLVS courses during regular school hours. Still many of our initial questions continue to go unanswered, and more have emerged:
•How much Florida tax payer money is sponsoring Pearson's ability to sell and profit from FLVS as it is made available for anyone in any part of the country and world?
•How legal is it to enroll students in FLVS School without student and parent knowledge or consent?
•Why are whole groups of students being placed in FLVS classes when there is evidence of the aforementioned problems and outcomes?
•Shouldn't there be something illegal about offering virtual school classes inside actual schools, as there may be a double FTE issue with this?
I hope to provide the answers in Part II.