Week 3

The readings this week reinforced some conceptions I had on charter schools. I thought a charter school would have more flexibility and it seems that that is true. It also seems that charters are under more scrutiny, which is detrimental to creating a new process or environment. I feel like we're in a place where we still don't know the full potential of what we could do, and it is an extraordinary challenge to simultaneously explore the potential, and put up guardrails around it in terms of funding policy, accountability and ownership. It would be such great research to have experimental programs that are free to think outside of the box and see what they come up with. We might learn some strategies to pick up from some and apply on a broader scale.

I had a conversation with Curt Fuchs last week. He is the coordinator of educational support services for the department of elementary and secondary education in Missouri. He has been overseeing their virtual school program. He had some really interesting information to share. I asked him about the funding cut that they recently suffered, and he said that while it's a challenge it has had its benefits too. At their height, they had 2,400 students enrolled in courses and while he didn't have a figure, he said the abondonment rate was significant. After the cuts, the new policy was that students who needed virtual education because of a fragile medical state could continue to take the classes and it would be paid for by the state, but other students who wanted to take classes would have to pay for it themselves, $300-$400 per class. He expected maybe 100 students to enroll. As it turns out they had over 300 students enroll and pay for their own classes - and their abandonment rate dropped significantly. A self selecting group of kids who take it seriously. Algebra is their biggest class for middle school students whose schools don't offer it. AP classes, foreign languages and physics also have high enrollment.

Another interesting thing he told me about was his difficulty in managing the providers. He had a number of horror stories. He said that generally speaking there is an overall lack of teacher student interaction. One provider (Kaplan) had a contract with the state that stipulated the student to teacher ratio was not to exceed 1:125, he discovered after the program was in place that the actual student teacher ratio was 1:400. He called them out on it, but they said it was the best they could do and it was common practice. He found one provider employing uncertified teachers which also violated their contract. Another provider had teachers who were only available via telephone office hours which were limited to 9 - 11pm. He had been getting feedback about one student having difficulty getting in touch with his teacher and Curt wanted to talk to the teacher about it. The provider, Apex, wouldn't give him the teachers' number. He said most of his job is spent making sure the providers are actually providing what they agreed to. He said his frustration is that these providers have huge lobbyists that have gotten legislation passed which limit his options, so legally he can only work with these big providers.

I asked him if he could establish the ideal system, what would he do. He said the only way to do it right is to hire your own teachers and develop your own course-ware.