1/18/2024 0 Comments Nc virtual schoolsMeanwhile, a 2018 report – entitled “Profit Before Kids” – from the Center for American Progress elucidated the academic breakdowns and financial imbroglios of large virtual charters in several states, many of them run by – here comes my lunch! – K12 Inc. “K12 and its schools misled parents and the state of California by claiming taxpayer dollars for questionable student attendance, misstating student success and parent satisfaction, and loading nonprofit charities with debt.” “All children deserve, and are entitled under the law, to an equal education,” Harris said at the time. Virtual Academy, settled a lawsuit with then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris, agreeing to dispense millions in payments and debt relief over claims that they’d inflated test scores and attendance to bilk public money from the state, something they’d wholly denied. Virtual charter experiments in other states ended in bitter, expensive lawsuits. In 2015, a much-publicized report by Stanford researchers went spelunking in virtual charters’ deepest recesses, finding that math students were so delayed, it was as if they did not attend school – at all – for an entire year. In state after state, virtual charters have struggled mightily, lagging on test scores, academic growth and attendance, Education Week found. Their graduation woes are anything but atypical. In April, Education Week reported that nearly three-quarters of students enrolled in virtual charters nationwide attended a high school where less than half graduated in four years. And not a single shred of that is surprising. They have never met pre-set student growth goals. Since their launch in 2015, these two schools have never risen above a “D” school performance grade. The charter school bill now sits on the desk of Gov. It should ever be the growth of the North Carolina students housed within. Cyber Academy (formerly called Connections Academy) may be able to expand their enrollment by a generous 20 percent.Ī reminder to our legislators: The growth of the virtual charter’s business model is not your, or our, concern. Under the Senate bill, which is now on Gov. Just as legislators did Tuesday when the state Senate approved a package of school choice reforms in one bill, including, against all logic, another raft of concessions for two, for-profit virtual charters in North Carolina. I’m talking about those legislators who, in this case, would embrace a painfully obvious cognitive dissonance that allows them to suspend the laws of gravity, space, time, and reason if – in the twinkle of a lobbyist’s eye – they are asked to make exception for private companies. Perhaps that’s why I struggle with well-meaning legislators – those who often play the part of pragmatist – who are catastrophically wrong when it concerns virtual charters. Observe North Carolina lawmakers and you will learn that almost none of them – aside from a precious few – actually do. Talk to North Carolina lawmakers and you will be told that nearly all fall into the first camp. “Facts don’t do what I want them to,” David Byrne observed, caustically, in 1980, never knowing how far we’d ride this bleak wave. It is a shifting amorphous thing that they may, if the timing’s right, burn in effigy if it lands a higher office or appointment.Īnd, of course, the crusaders, the sort who ran for office on an issue or a mission, whether it’s indebted to the right or the left, the sort who you’ll have to keep an eye on because, God help us all, they’d never let a bit of research spoil their fun. The opportunists: If such lawmakers have an ideological reference point, it’s somewhere in the wild blue ether. Find the logic, find the rationale for a proposal and you may have an ally here. Theirs is an isolated, lonely caucus, and their agenda is a more nebulous sort. The pragmatists: Take a photo if you spy one of these. Linger long enough in Raleigh’s legislative lagoon and you’ll find there are three kinds of lawmakers:
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