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Former FL Gov. Jeb Bush: Fully uanleashed, virtual education can transform

April 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

The explosion of digital technology over the past few decades has redefined the way we live, work and play. Imagine if its potential were fully unleashed in schools.

More than 14 years ago, Florida recognized the value of using technology to bring quality, customized education and established the nation’s first online school. The Sunshine State pioneered the digital-learning movement and has made strides using these valuable new tools to provide students with a personalized high-quality education. Currently, Florida Virtual School serves more than 150,000 full- and part-time students, and last year, lawmakers passed a law allowing virtual charter schools.

But implementing technology into public education can’t end there. As digital tools continue to advance, Florida has even more opportunities to enhance student learning, extend the reach of great teachers and promote accountability. We need to transform current education models and use available technology to maximize our teachers’ skills and capitalize on our students’ interests and capabilities.

Digital learning can transform education from a factory-style system into a personalized, achievement-based system. Its three basic components emphasize how these revolutionary tools can bring education into the digital age where learning is customized to prepare every student with the knowledge and skills to succeed in college and challenging careers.

First, digital learning transforms the delivery system. Digital learning does not change what students learn; it changes how they learn. Content remains the same, but how the material is presented, the pace at which students advance, and how understanding is assessed changes. Through today’s innovative tools, we can use interactive and adaptive software to capture student learning data in real-time, equipping teachers to immediately identify where students are excelling and struggling.

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Two Families, Two Takes on Virtual Schooling

December 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

With all the talk about online education lately, it’s clear that the vision evoked by the words “home schooling” is changing. The image of Mom and kids sitting at the kitchen table has given way to a child logging onto a virtual class from the home office.

The number of students in kindergarten through 12th grade enrolled in virtual schools nationwide has grown to 225,000 from 50,000 a decade ago—and 30% year over year since 2001, says Susan Patrick, chief executive of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning, a nonprofit advocacy group. Some parents choose virtual schooling to accommodate a heavy schedule of extracurricular classes or interests; others feel their children’s needs are better served outside a traditional classroom. Here are two families’ experiences.

Elana Whitehead, a stay-at-home mother in Cape Canaveral, Fla., enrolled her fourth- and sixth-grade boys in Brevard Virtual Instruction Program, the virtual arm of the Brevard County public school system, last year. “The kids’ friends were doing it and they were curious,” she says.

The Whiteheads received a box of books in August, and were given weekly course work. Adam, age 10, and Noah, 12, would log on for each subject. BVIP would present a slideshow about the day’s lesson, then direct them to read a chapter in a textbook and complete some worksheets. They would log back on later to do an assessment.

“Adam was online for less than an hour each day,” says Ms. Whitehead, “but Noah had more work online than offline.” No credentials were required for Ms. Whitehead, who sat with her sons as they logged hours playing with snap circuits, taking the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test and sitting in a virtual classroom with 60 other students.

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Virtual schools are in session

December 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Thirty states plus the District of Columbia have full-time online schools. And while those schools only educate about 200,000 students nationwide, that number is growing by about 25 percent each year. Florida opened one of the first online schools in 1997 and the Florida Virtual School is now the nation’s largest. California alone has 16 virtual schools.

In 2006, Michigan became the first state to make completion of at least one online class a high school graduation requirement. Since then, Alabama and Florida have followed. Reasons for attending a virtual school include physical disabilities or medical conditions, bullying problems at school, living in remote areas, or having caretaker or financial responsibilities at home.

Virtual schools also serve students whose careers in the arts or athletics make traditional school attendance impossible.

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Can Virtual Schools Really Replace Classrooms?

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The article reports that an estimated 250,000 students in 2010-11 attend school online, sometimes in the form of full-time public cyberschools, sometimes in a cyber “hybrid” school. These children aren’t “home schooled” from a statistical point of view; they’re enrolled in schools with names that sound like online degree factories (Georgia Cyber Academy, Florida Virtual School), but are legitimately run by states and districts or outsourced to for-profit corporations. They’re going to school. At home.

A quarter-million kids represent a tiny percentage of the 56 million kindergartners through 12th graders in the United States, but it’s a percentage that’s growing, according to The Journal’s numbers: up 40 percent in the last three years. It’s that increase, rather than the actual number of students affected, that makes these virtual schools worth talking about, and it’s an increase not just in children and parents willing to embrace this, but also in school districts. Georgia and Florida both say they spend substantially less on a student in their online schools. An Idaho school superintendent told The Journal that he was considering closing entire departments and outsourcing their courses to online providers. “It’s not ideal,” he said, “but Idaho is in a budget crisis, and this is a creative solution.”

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My Teacher Is an App

November 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The growth of cybereducation is likely to affect school staffing, which accounts for about 80% of school budgets. A teacher in a traditional high school might handle 150 students. An online teacher can supervise more than 250, since he or she doesn’t have to write lesson plans and most grading is done by computer.

In Idaho, Alan Dunn, superintendent of the Sugar-Salem School District, says that he may cut entire departments and outsource their courses to online providers. “It’s not ideal,” he says. “But Idaho is in a budget crisis, and this is a creative solution.”

Other states see potential savings as well. In Georgia, state and local taxpayers spend $7,650 a year to educate the average student in a traditional public school. They spend nearly 60% less—$3,200 a year—to educate a student in the statewide online Georgia Cyber Academy, saving state and local tax dollars. Florida saves $1,500 a year on every student enrolled online full time.

For individual school districts, though, competition from online schools can cause financial strain. The tiny Spring Cove School District in rural Pennsylvania lost 43 of its 1,850 students this year to online charter schools. By law, the district must send those students’ share of local and state tax dollars—in this case $340,000—to the cyberschool. Superintendent Rodney Green, already struggling to balance the budget, cut nine teaching jobs, eliminated middle-school Spanish and French and canceled the high-school musical, “Aida.”

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Virtual Schools Offer PD Programs for E-Teaching

October 25, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Because schools of education, with a few exceptions, have been slow to offer programs to develop virtual instructors, many of the nation’s leading online schools have, for more than a decade, crafted homegrown online and blended professional development.

And with the flexibility offered by the online classroom, instructors who also have face-to-face experience sometimes say the continuous, embedded professional development now in vogue is easier to achieve—be it in collaboration with colleagues, correspondence with advisers, or participation in supplemental education—in an online setting.

So it’s perhaps not surprising that, as more instructors from brick-and-mortar schools are seeking professional development online, virtual schools are exploring how to become providers to teachers as well as students.

“I think, really, we’re going to see us reaching out into more markets,” said Mary Mitchell, the director of professional learning at the 123,000-student Florida Virtual School, or FLVS, which is based in Orlando. “It doesn’t just have to be for virtual teachers, but it’s virtual, and it’s cost-effective. It can be entire districts, entire states.”

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Rick Scott’s education team urges giving parents more choices

December 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Families would have more educational choices while teachers would face radical changes in pay and job security under a package of recommendations presented this week to Gov.-elect Rick Scott by his education transition team.

Under the plan, students could enroll in any public school no matter what district they live in, those who graduate high school early would get college scholarships and, in a revived push toward voucher programs for all, students could use public school money to attend private or online schools.

Parents would get more power as well. They would have a say in remaking the structure of a school if a majority feel it’s not working and would be asked to give consent to having their children placed with certain teachers.

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Rick Scott’s School Plan for Scoundrels

December 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Even so, Scott appears ready to liberate public school parents to take their money anywhere they like, especially to online schools—a new cause célèbre for Jeb Bush, who recently launched an advocacy project called Digital Learning Now! to lobby against barriers to online public schools.

One of the hallmarks of Scott’s education reform plan is the idea that many kids don’t need to go to school at all; they can learn everything they need to in virtual classrooms. Online schools offer many cost-saving advantages, but unfortunately many of them are so bad that even the military won’t take people who graduate from them. Online schools also seem even more vulnerable to fraud than regular old charter schools.

In June, Bush spoke at a graduation ceremony at Electronic Classroom for Tomorrow, Ohio’s largest online school, which enrolls nearly 10,000 kids but only graduates 35 percent of them. ECOT didn’t get off to a stellar start, demonstrating some of the pitfalls of such schools. In its early years, the management company running the school overcharged the state $1.7 million in teaching hours it couldn’t document, as well as $500,000 in computer equipment that disappeared with students who never came back.

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School district enacts summer ‘redemption’ for expulsions

July 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The program does have some eligibility requirements to meet before a student can begin work on the criteria for summer completion of their expulsion.

First, an eighth-grader must have been expelled and recommended for alternative placement during the first six weeks of the last nine-week marking period of the school year.

“If they are expelled any later in the last quarter than that, there is not time for them to be placed in an alternative program and to complete the summer program’s expulsion criteria,” Wyrosdick said.

Then students must complete one online Florida Virtual School course that applies to their graduation plan. They must also complete an online substance abuse or non-smoking program.

“They cannot just go ahead and do that without contacting us since we have to enroll them into those programs,” Wyrosdick said.

They must also write a letter of apology to the school where they attended last year, and then sign a behavioral pledge at the high school they will be attending this fall.

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