From the Miami Examiner
by Jennie Smith
The bill's sponsor, state senator Anitere Flores (R-Miami), calls it "broadening the choices available to school children and their parents."
Teachers call it "outsourcing."
The bill, SB 1620, passed unanimously through a Senate committee yesterday, would create virtual charter schools, allowing students to sign up for them with or without school districts' permission. Companies worldwide would be able to provide online courses. They would be available to children from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Senator Flores said of her bill that it "can take our education system out of the farms and factories of the 20th century" and into the technology-based world in which students now live."
However, teachers, parents and students themselves know that a passion for video games or Facebook does not translate to a passion for sitting down in front of a computer screen and learning subjects like history, English language arts, Spanish or calculus, mainly through lengthy readings and answering questions in writing or multiple-choice formats.
The Florida Virtual School, created last year, has not enjoyed resounding success so far, at least in popular opinion.
Only 1% of the state's 2.6 million public school students were enrolled in it last year. And many of these were enrolled against their wishes and without parental permission, as districts scrambled to meet the hard caps of the 2002 Class Size Amendment without the necessary funding. The constitutional amendment mandates that the state fund the smaller class sizes, but the state legislature has consistently abnegated their duty to fund it. Republican lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to undo the class size amendment with their Amendment 8 ballot initiative in 2010; despite big wins in their elections, they did not garner enough votes for the amendment.
Districts, facing hefty fines (Miami-Dade County faces a fine over $6 million for not being 100% in compliance with the hard caps of the class size amendment), performed some tricky maneuvers to meet the requirements with their severely limited budgets. These maneuvers included combining classes with two teachers ("co-teachers," often required for special education students mainstreamed into general education classes, offset the teacher-student ratio in classes), piling large numbers of students into classes not considered "core" by the amendment (such as electives), and enrolling students in virtual school classes.
In those virtual school classes, students report to a computer lab just as they would report normally to a classroom; however, instead of sitting in a classroom with a group of students and a teacher, all learning the same subject, they sit in front of a computer and are expected to complete work on whatever subject they are enrolled in.
Many of my own students report that most kids in virtual schools "do nothing." Apparently, they sneak around the system to play video games, check their Facebook (the site is blocked by the district server but today's teenagers are very tech-savvy when it comes to avoiding classwork), or otherwise "zone out." There is a teacher in the computer lab supervising them, but not obviously not a teacher of every subject they are enrolled in. They have a teacher somewhere in Florida checking their work and reporting on their progress, but they are not necessarily online at the same time as that teacher. Therefore, some students have parents, relatives, big brothers or sisters, or friends who complete the work for them outside of school hours (according to my students). Others simply do not do their work, and fail the class.
In Miami-Dade County, there is a high rate of failure among students enrolled in virtual schools, particularly among lower-level readers.
Online courses require good reading skills, as well as a high level of motivation and discipline. As any parent or teacher can attest to, even when students are good readers, they are more often than not sorely lacking in the motivation and discipline departments.
Then, for classes such as science, one wonders how effective the course could possibly be on a computer. Where are the hands-on experiments that make scientific theories come alive and fascinate children? Reading about chemical reactions is one thing; creating them with one's own hands and watching them with one's own eyes is quite another.
Or what about music? Will students learn to sing or play the tuba through a computer? Art? Drama?
And foreign languages? I am a bonafide language addict. I speak French and Italian fluently as well as some Spanish, and in high school and college I also studied German and Japanese. Yet as an adult already very adept at, and passionate about, learning languages, with full appreciation of all the enrichment that knowing another language can bring to one's life through personal experience, I have found myself unable to discipline myself to study Spanish through computer programs. I have tried. Each time, I did a few exercises, but quickly lost interest and never picked back up. And that is me...a language teacher. Imagine a fourteen-year-old with little to no interest in learning a foreign language, no particular innate skill at it and no real motivation, since there is no teacher there to serve as an example of what the language will offer.
If this is truly offered as a choice and nothing more, it is not terribly threatening, for very few parents will choose for their children to sit in front of a computer all day, and most students won't want to, either...At school, they have their friends; they have their favorite teachers; they have some classes they hate but others they truly enjoy.
The fear is that, while it is being introduced in legislation as providing a "choice," it will be increasingly imposed upon unwilling students and parents, as it already has been in many instances this year.
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Furthermore, the fact that the legislation opens the "virtual charter" market to companies across not only the country but the world presents some problems of its own.
How will the state verify that the virtual "teachers" are qualified? If they are not operating in Florida, or even in the US, what will their "certification" look like?
Technology as a supplement or a tool in education is fine. A SmartBoard in the classroom can make lessons more visually appealing and interactive, and can sometimes help keep a child's attention (though studies and surveys show that it is not enough in and of itself to make something "boring" interesting). Using computers for research or to complete projects can be very practical and a necessary skill for college and beyond.
However, replacing live teachers with a computer screen? Most people I know would agree that this is not sound educational policy.
What it is, however, is cost savings for the state, as they prepare to slash as much as 7% from the education budget.
There is no class size requirement to meet.
There is no building to maintain. No custodians, cafeteria workers, security guards or clerical to pay. No equipment to buy.
Depending on where the company is based, maybe you don't even have to pay the teachers minimum wage.
When corporations move their manufacturing bases overseas to developing countries' infamous "export zones," paying workers as little as ten cents a day to work over twelve hours a day in sweatshops that would not meet the laxest fire code in the US, so that those corporations can sell the finished product of those exploited workers' labor for three hundred times the price the cost of production, we call it "outsourcing."
When politicians ask companies overseas to offer educational services online, deciding their teachers' qualifications and certifications however they like and paying them whatever they like, so that the politicians can continue to collect tax money and distribute it among their friends in the charter school business, virtual schools business, testing industry and in tax breaks to their friends heading corporations, they call it "choice."
Other ways the Republicans in Tallahassee are expanding "choices" for parents and students: making it nearly impossible for a school board to refuse authorization to a charter school company (SB 1546, sponsored by Sen. John Thrasher, R-Jacksonville, the sponsor of last year's vetoed SB 6) and expanding eligibility for the Corporate Tax Scholarship program (aka vouchers).
Outsourcing became a trend among corporations not because they could not make a profit manufacturing in the United States and paying their workers decent wages and benefits, but because they could make a bigger profit by paying workers elsewhere wages substandard even for the cost of living in those countries and without having to waste time or money on pesty little details like building codes or human rights. As they moved their operations overseas, they blamed the move on the unions. After all, if only they could pay American workers ten cents a day and no health or pension, if only they could force American workers to toil sixteen hours a day in firetraps with no ventilation with only a ten-minute break for lunch, then they would have no problem keeping their factories right here in the good old U.S. of A. But since those darned unions were so unreasonable...
Outsourcing teachers is now the up and coming trend among politicians on the right, not because they cannot afford to fund education adequately, but because they can give more tax breaks to their friends and provide more profits to their friends in the private education and testing industries by paying teachers less. SB 736 is a big step toward that goal. Now they will not have to pay teachers much at all unless they produce whatever gains they (the politicians) decide they want on a test their friends in the industry will write for them (at enormous cost). And they can conveniently get rid of them any time they want, so they will never accrue too much salary or too many benefits or any pension to speak of. SB 830 and HB 1023, the union-busting bills, in conjunction with SB 736, could quite effectively eliminate teachers' unions and thus their right to collective bargaining and due process.
But busting the unions is not enough for them. Even making charter schools (which pay on average $10,000 less than public schools, while many handily make profits for their operators while skimping on not only employee salaries but also on basic supplies like textbooks) easier to open than a corner grocery and harder to close than a statehouse is not enough. Even handing out more vouchers to encourage involved parents to move their children out of their neighborhood schools and into private ones is not enough.
Because, until they have their way with that legislation too, there is still a minimum wage in the United States.
But if you can hire teachers in China or India...?
And if you can have US-based corporations running those companies, soaking up state contracts and paying teachers in China and India the "going rate" there...?
Imagine the possibilities!
Imagine the campaign donations!
http://www.examiner.com/dade-county-education-policy-in-miami/florida-republicans-seek-to-outsource-teachers-further-privatize-education
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