In 2007, the Texas Legislature created a pilot program for a clearinghouse for online classes, a place where a large school districts around the state could offer specialized courses remotely to rural students, kids with special needs, or even students serving time in juvenile detention.
Since then, though, that pilot version of the Texas Virtual School Network has evolved into a much larger initiative, with some courses developed by public school districts and colleges, and others created by for-profit companies. It’s aged into a permanent program with few benchmarks and loose oversight, says one lawmaker who helped craft the pilot program.
While the program may be specific to Texas, it reflects a growing challenge across the country. An October New York Times/Texas Tribune story considered the “policy maze” officials in any state must navigate as online education grows:
It threatens many concepts that are fundamental to the identity of public education: districts defined by geographic boundaries and brick-and-mortar buildings. Among the challenges, however, is dealing with what it means to be publicly financed in a digital education world, where much of the curriculum and even employees can come from profit-making companies.
Gene V. Glass, a senior researcher at the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center, told the Tribune the for-profit nature of the industry, and its consolidation in the hands of five major companies, was problematic. “They are responsible to their shareholders, not to the kids or anyone else. They are in it for the money,” he said.
It’s a point underscored in a paper he co-authored that was released last week, “Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.” While full-time online schools pose tough policy issues for local school districts, the paper says, “the challenges are particularly acute for states, because states bear responsibility for sanctioning and chartering online providers.”
State Rep. Scott Hochberg (D-Houston) co-authored one of the bills that funded Texas’ virtual network, which was created in 2007. While it began as a pilot program, meant to test new ideas and develop a scaleable working model, he told the Texas Independent the network is much more entrenched now, managed by the Texas Education Agency and promoted by powerful private interests without meaningful benchmarks or evaluations.
A veteran of the Texas Legislature, and one of the capitol’s top education policy experts, Hochberg says the way the virtual network has developed speaks to the haphazard way online education is growing generally in Texas, where the sales pitch often counts for more than the results.
That scaleable model — the study of which courses work best online, or which students are best served by virtual classes — never materialized, Hochberg said.
“To my knowledge, there’s been no work on what is appropriate. Numbers have just been picked out of the air,” he said. “It’s not really being done with any rigor.”
Even the promise of offering specialized courses to rural students hasn’t truly panned out, Hochberg said.
“You hear from the rural schools that they need broader course offerings and that virtual may help, but nobody’s really picked up the ball in the part of Texas west of [Interstate] 35 and figured out a systematic way to offer the courses that are missing.”
The promise of online education also included lower costs, because the computer could stand in for a classroom teacher. But Hochberg points out that — especially for special needs students, or students in juvenile detention — you’d still need an adult in the room to keep an eye on students and offer help, so there are no savings in personnel costs.
“Where it does give you an opportunity is you can have varied lessons going on in the same classroom,” he said.
But instead of diversifying students’ options, he said schools are typically delivering core courses online in order to create flexibility in their schedules — offering the same classes, just at different times.
“They’re being used to time-shift the education and make schedules more convenient more than they’re offered to broaden the offerings,” he said. “I think that’s a waste of time and money.”
What the program does do well, he says, is entice local school districts to purchase online materials from software companies. By offering a popular online course, a school district can earn $400 per student, according to a TEA site. But he said it’s tough for a district to know just what they’re getting in return.
“The last time I asked, a district that wants to bring a course in through the Texas virtual course network has no way to review the course prior to adopting it.” (A TEA spokeswoman could not immediately answer whether that was still the case.)
Hochberg, who runs a software company along with his duties as a lawmaker, said he has seen what online providers are selling, and hasn’t been impressed. “There’s really nobody doing virtual educational stuff that I would call exciting or stimulating that I’ve seen,” he said.
Still, the Texas Virtual School Network’s enrollment has ballooned over the past few years, from 254 students in fall 2009 to 8,136 last summer. (It’s fallen to 1,290 this fall, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear. A TEA spokeswoman told us she’d look into it.)
Beyond that virtual course network, though, Texas also oversees a few full-time online schools for students from third to 12th grade, under its Electronic Course Program, or eCP. It includes three schools — two of which, the Texas Virtual Academy and Texas Connections Academy at Houston, were rated “Academically Unacceptable” by TEA measures last year.
The latter’s parent company, Connections Academy, was purchased by textbook giant Pearson earlier this fall. Connections Academy co-founer Mickey Revenaugh has helped draft legislation around the online education industry as co-chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s education committee.
After missing its performance targets for years, Texas Virtual Academy shuffled its paperwork to partner with a new charter school sponsor this year — as the Texas Observer reported in October — giving it a new lease on life, while using the very same online materials produced by industry giant K12 Inc.
“Virtual has a place, but I think the educational entrepreneur world overblows that place substantially, and really doesn’t bring much new to the table,” Hochberg said. “I think it’s easy enough to make money in the business that nobody’s been pushed to creat the top-notch product — and there’s not necesasrily any indication that you’ll make more by producing a top-notch product.”
For all its students, Texas still hasn’t bought into online schools the way that, say, Florida has. Hochberg said that still gives Texas the chance to do it right. He’s not opposed to online learning in general, he said, but the state needs to start operating on measures of quality — a problem that remains even with analog materials.
“We don’t know if Pearson’s textbook is any beter than McGraw Hill’s textbook, so it comes down to who does the best sales job,” he said.
“It comes down to a matter of the quality of the material. You can ask a thought-provoking question about the Civil War online or in person, and you can ask students to draw a timeline of Civil War battles online or in person. I would argue that the former would provoke critical thinking, and the latter does not,” Hochberg said. “The delivery method doesn’t matter.”
“I have this dream project of moving to electronic content delivery, and then going out and recording podcasts with the 10 best history teachers in the state, and embedding the podcasts in the electronic materials,” he said, though that doesn’t remove the need for the sort of thought-provoking interaction that happens in classrooms. “There still needs to be somebody who can inspire and draw the information out.”
So what’s the right balance of content delivery and critical conversation? Can online schools deliver both of those well? Hochberg said the Legislature had issues like that in mind when they began Texas’ virtual pilot, but nobody’s really looking for the answers anymore.
“These are all big questions that ought to be answered, and they are not,” he said, “in the rush to deliver stuff to the market that someone will buy.”