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Cashing in On Charter School Failure
If Hillary truly has the nomination sewn up and wants to win the enthusiastic rather than grudging supports of progressives, one way she could do it is by admitting Wall Street driven K-12 public education "reform" is a failure and corrupt to the core, and that she will put education policy back in the hands of educators and academics not sociopaths on Wall Street pushing methods they would never tolerate at the pricy schools where they send their own kids.
If the DLC/New Dem/whatevers picked just one or two policy areas where they wouldn't let their big donors and past and future employers set the agenda, they might be able to hang onto power for another election or two.
You get what you pay for, right? When it comes to online charter schools, apparently not.
Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers, California Virtual Academies (CAVA), the state’s largest provider of online public education, is failing key tests used to measure educational success. According to an investigation by The San Jose Mercury News, fewer than half of the thousands of students who enroll in CAVA schools graduate, and almost none of them are qualified to attend the state’s public universities. All the while, the publicly traded corporation that owns the network, K12 Inc., continues to rake in massive profits.
Online charter schools — also known as “cyber” or “virtual” schools — are funded like charter schools with physical buildings and face-to-face interaction. When a student enrolls in an online school, the school receives most of the taxpayer funding that would have gone to the student’s local public school.
Without strong oversight, this can be a windfall for companies like K12 Inc. The Mercury News investigation reveals that CAVA teachers have been asked to inflate attendance and enrollment records used to determine public funding—students who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged into company software can be counted as present. And while records show that the company’s employees started each of K12 Inc.’s 17 online schools in California, the applications they filed to open the schools described the founders as a “group of parents,” none of whom were named.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/cashing-in-on-charter-sch_b_9853042.html
Despite receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from California’s taxpayers, California Virtual Academies (CAVA), the state’s largest provider of online public education, is failing key tests used to measure educational success. According to an investigation by The San Jose Mercury News, fewer than half of the thousands of students who enroll in CAVA schools graduate, and almost none of them are qualified to attend the state’s public universities. All the while, the publicly traded corporation that owns the network, K12 Inc., continues to rake in massive profits.
Online charter schools — also known as “cyber” or “virtual” schools — are funded like charter schools with physical buildings and face-to-face interaction. When a student enrolls in an online school, the school receives most of the taxpayer funding that would have gone to the student’s local public school.
Without strong oversight, this can be a windfall for companies like K12 Inc. The Mercury News investigation reveals that CAVA teachers have been asked to inflate attendance and enrollment records used to determine public funding—students who spend as little as one minute during a school day logged into company software can be counted as present. And while records show that the company’s employees started each of K12 Inc.’s 17 online schools in California, the applications they filed to open the schools described the founders as a “group of parents,” none of whom were named.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/donald-cohen/cashing-in-on-charter-sch_b_9853042.html
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