Imagining the “Wild West of Unregulated, Unaccountable Voucher Schools” in Cyberspace

In the spirit of never letting a good crisis go to waste, vultures are circling our public schools looking for ways to advance their privatization agenda. For example, the Covid pandemic has led to the closure of school campuses and a new push to allow the creation of publicly funded, private virtual schools – in other words, allowing the use of publicly funded vouchers at virtual private schools.  

What could go wrong? Let’s take a look at the track record for a similar product, virtual charter schools.

Remember that charter schools are publicly funded, privately managed schools which participate, in Florida, in the same accountability system as district managed public schools. Charter schools are given some flexibilities but must teach the same academic standards, participate in the same state assessments and are subject to state oversight. Charter school teachers must hold college degrees and teaching certifications. Charter schools are subject to some oversight by their local school board and must remain compliant with FLDOE mandates. In Florida, all charter schools must be non-profits, but they may be managed by for-profit management companies (which is where much of the profit making occurs).

In comparison, Florida’s private schools have no oversight from local school boards and very minimal oversight by the state. Private schools accepting publicly funded voucher are not “licensed, approved, accredited, or regulated” by the state, and therefore, according the the FLDOE, “can make its own decisions about facilities, teacher credentials and curriculum.” In what has been described as the “wild west of unregulated, unaccountable voucher schools,” voucher schools aren’t required to hire certified teachers and teachers need not have college degrees. Schools are not rated on student performance on standardized assessments nor required to report graduation rates. Voucher schools need not follow Florida’s academic standards and are free to teach religious curriculum – approximately 80% of current voucher students are enrolled in private religious schools. While there are some auditing requirements, private schools accepting publicly funded vouchers are not required to make their budgets public.

Voucher advocates constantly remind us that the primary accountability system for this billion dollar a year enterprise is that parents chose it and, therefore, can “vote with their feet.”

Brick and mortar charter schools serve approximately 300,000 students in Florida. Though they remain somewhat controversial, charter schools are not always “bad.” Most studies show similar academic (test scores) performance to traditional public schools, though, in Florida, charter schools serve a population that has fewer English Language Learners, students with disabilities and those qualifying for free and reduced lunch. Some of Florida’s charter schools are unique and quite good.

There is one type of charter school, however, that has consistently been overwhelmingly bad: the virtual ones.

A quick review of virtual charter schools reveals a seemingly unending list of poor academic performance and financial mismanagement:

A Colorado cyber charter school with a 19 percent graduation rate. An Ohio virtual school that inflated student attendance by nearly 500 percent. A Pennsylvania cyber charter founder who siphoned off $8 million in public money, including $300,000 to buy himself an airplane. A Hawaii cyber charter founder who hired her nephew as the athletic director—for a school with no sports teams.

In its 2016 investigation, Education Week uncovered “exclusive data on how rarely students use the learning software at Colorado’s largest cyber charter, the questionable management practices in online charters, and how lobbying in scores of states helps keep the sector growing.”

A 2015 national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, at Stanford University, found that students in these schools who receive no instruction from an “in-person teacher” showed academic results in math equivalent of what would be expected if a student skipped 180 days of school. The deficiency in reading was reported to be the equivalent of 72 days of school. The CREDO study project director concluded:

“There’s still some possibility that there’s positive learning, but it’s so statistically significantly different from the average, it is literally as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year.”

In The Public Interest (ITPI), a comprehensive research and policy center on privatization and responsible contracting, has released several reports online, including a recent research brief compiling current data and research on virtual charter schools, from student performance and scandals to student privacy.

In 2015, an ITPI report on CAVA: K12 Inc.’s California Virtual Academies showed that “students at CAVA are at risk of low quality educational outcomes, and some are falling through the cracks entirely, in a poorly resourced and troubled educational environment.” Additional findings:

“In every year since it began graduating students, except 2013, CAVA has had more dropouts than graduates. Its academic growth was negative for most of its history and it did not keep up with other demographically similar schools after 2005. Its Academic Performance Index scores consistently ranked poorly against other demographically similar schools and the state as a whole. Evidence of low quality educational materials, understaffing of clerical employees and low teacher salaries all indicates that an additional investment of resources in the classroom is necessary for improvement.”

K12 Inc., the parent company of CAVA, also runs Florida’s online charter, Connections Academy, which Floridians are likely familiar with because of its frequent television commercials. (Do you know why you don’t see frequent commercials for your local public schools? Because they typically spend their funds educating children.)

Cyber charter scandals continue to this day. In January 2018, Ohio’s Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT), a virtual charter school “fraught with fraud, mismanagement, and a shoddy academic record” abruptly closed its business after squandering hundreds of millions of state dollars. You can read all about it in this article titled “How Bad Do For-Profit, Virtual Charter Schools Have to Get?“

In Oklahoma, lawmakers are currently trying to hold its online charters accountable in an ongoing scandal which found that their online charter school, Epic, was recruiting “ghost students,” who were technically enrolled but received minimal instruction from teachers, allowing the company to legally divert more than $100 million in state funds, annually, for their own personal use. The Oklahoma State Department of Education official described the challenges of trying to devise oversight to these cyber charter schools as “riding a donkey into the space age.”   

Education Week explains, in a 2016 report, that well funded lobbying efforts keep the troubled cyber charter industry in business:

Despite more than a decade of state investigations, news media reports, and research that have documented startling failures and gross mismanagement in full-time online schools, the sector — dominated by two for-profit companies — continues to expand, spreading into new states and enrolling more students. Virtual charter schools, which collectively receive more than $1 billion in taxpayer money each year, are rarely shut down.

So, in summary, unlike brick and mortar charter schools, cyber charters have been a complete disaster when it comes to academics outcomes, with student outcomes “as if the kid did not go to school for an entire year.” The online charter school “industry” has been fraught with fiscal malfeasance, literally recruiting “ghost students” to pad their bottom line. The primary success story for these virtual charters has been that they are massive money makers for their parent companies, effectively funneling huge amounts of taxpayer dollars into the private sector, allowing them to afford massive lobbying efforts and television advertising budgets.

Now, imagine a similar system composed of private virtual schools, funded by tax dollars via vouchers. Current voucher schools have no requirements or expectations of oversight for academics or finances. Imagine the “wild west of unregulated, unaccountable voucher schools” in cyberspace… Again, what could go wrong?

Publicly funded vouchers for private cyber/virtual schools… This is the kind of “innovation” that ed reformer vultures like Florida Senator Manny Diaz Jr, Step Up For Students President Doug Tuthill and US Secretary Of Education Betsy DeVos are actively promoting during this Covid pandemic. They will not let this crisis go to waste. The result will further defund public schools, misuse public funds and rob children of a quality education.