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Barrett and Huppenthal: Outdated technology at agency stymies schools

April 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This is 2012. America is a country of innovation that continually pushes the edge of technology. Generations of phones, computers and tablets come and go in the blink of an eye. Communication of information continually gets faster, better and more efficient. Almost everything gets faster, better, more efficient.

As a leader in school choice, Arizona is the fertile ground for education innovation. More than any other state over the last two decades, we have put parents in charge of their children’s education. Our students enjoy open enrollment, charter schools, virtual schools, home schooling, dual enrollments, joint technological districts with great career and technical-education paths, and myriad opportunities to mix, match and customize their education.

It is possible to obtain a world-class education in Arizona if you are a diligent consumer of education, do your homework and exercise your best options.

While, for many students, Arizona can be the land of great educational opportunities, the education system, as a whole, is hampered by a major obstacle preventing our students from realizing optimum academic growth, limiting our teachers’ ability to be effective and causing our district and charter schools operational chaos: that obstacle is the Arizona Department of Education’s computer system.

It’s an enormous resource drain on education, siphoning funds out of our classrooms and creating limited value for students. Unfortunately, there is little incentive for legislators to fix it. Government technology systems don’t curry much public support or grab headlines. It is difficult to get voters to rise up and demand a fix to something they are not familiar with or that doesn’t touch them directly. But the Department of Education computer system is truly the silent enemy standing in the way of fixing our education system.

As a taxpayer, you need to know the state’s inadequate investment in technology infrastructure at the Department of Education results in you paying tens of millions of dollars to correct errors and to build and maintain redundant technology systems each year.

For the rest of the article, go to Barrett and Huppenthal: Outdated technology at agency stymies schools

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Education chief: Online academies will face scrutiny

February 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

In Arizona, K12 Inc. outsourced instructional responsibilities at the Arizona Virtual Academy to low-paid workers in India, according to a study Gene Glass co-authored.

Colorado spent nearly $100 million in taxpayer money last year on online schools, a 10-month investigation by EdNews Colorado showed. Of the 10,500 students enrolled in the state’s 10 largest online programs, half left the schools within a year. The schools produced three times as many dropouts as they did graduates, according to the investigation.

“Everyone is just waking up to it,” Gene Glass said. “Now you are starting to see bills written in legislatures trying to clamp down or impose restrictions or demand certified teachers and proctored exams. In a few legislatures, they will win those battles, but mostly they won’t because these companies have spent so much in lobbying that they have fought off most politicians.”

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Life Skills Centers Offers New, Online High School Program in Arizona

January 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Life Skills Centers is excited to announce that they have recently launched a distance learning program in Arizona: Life Skills Online. Life Skills Online allows Arizona high school students, ages 16-21 years old, to earn their high school diploma, in the comfort and safety of their own home. Students who enroll in the tuition-free virtual school will receive a free computer, internet reimbursement, and one-on-one attention without the pressures of a traditional public school.

The Life Skills Center of Arizona located in Phoenix will serve as a “home-base” for the distance learning students. “The differentiator between Life Skills Online and other online schools is a home-base that provides one-on-one attention,” says Administrator of LSC Arizona, Jared Kittelson, “it is extremely important for them to have someone to reach out to.”

For the rest of the article, go to Life Skills Centers Offers New, Online High School Program in Arizona

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Experts: Online schools in dire need of oversight

December 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Two years after Arizona dropped its limits on the number of online schools, some educators and leaders say the state needs to regulate schools more closely to ensure quality.

But Arizona’s loose regulation is not unique.

Nationally, experts who have studied online schools say no state has model regulations for them. A growing number of states are increasingly bent on ensuring there are fewer barriers to the growth of online schools. The belief is that the marketplace will bring the needed discipline to the system as parents and students choose good schools and reject bad ones.

Arizona online schools get state funds, and students attend for free. The number of online charter and district schools has grown from 14 to 66 in the past two years.

Some Arizona political leaders are talking about possible changes that would bring more regulation of online schools.

Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal was a strong supporter of online schools when he served in the Legislature. He says the state Department of Education needs to review the state’s online program and conduct a thorough analysis of student academic progress. He also favors random surveys of parents whose children are enrolled in the largest online providers to get their opinions on quality.

“I’m always in favor of more choices and more options, but I have more nervousness about this part of the K-through-12 environment than I have with other sectors because I always want to make sure there is real value being created for society by the public-education system,” Huppenthal said.

Sen. Rich Crandall, R-Mesa, chairman of the Senate’s Education Committee, favors changes that would encourage online schools to boost student achievement. Now that the state’s online program has been around for more than a decade, “it’s time to look at these policies in place and see, ‘Are we getting the best academic achievement for the money we’re spending?’ ” he said.

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Arizona online schools are rapidly expanding enrollment

December 11, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Online classes are expanding rapidly in Arizona’s public schools, reshaping the way children learn all the way down to kindergarten.

More K-12 Arizona students are trading in the traditional campus experience for learning by computer at home any time of day or night. The number of students in Arizona-approved online schools has more than tripled over the past six years. Nearly 36,000 students, or about 3 percent of public-school students in the state, took at least one online course in 2010-11.

Students attend for free because, like any public school, online schools get state funding.

The growth is being greeted with a mix of hope and alarm. Online education, a staple at colleges for years, holds a lot of promise because it strips away the limits of fixed time and place for school. It allows students in any place to be taught at any time, and at their own pace. It uses e-mail, chats, video, audio and animated graphics to engage. A dull lecture can become a compelling interactive lesson.

Two weeks into the 2009-10 school year, Peoria mom Stacy Gebhart was unhappy with the school her twins attended.

Class sizes had grown at West Wing School in the Deer Valley Unified district because of budget cuts. The sixth-grade lessons sometimes seemed full of fluff, Gebhart said. In one class, the first week of school was spent making a poster to illustrate life’s highlights.

A friend told her about online schools, so the family decided to try Arizona Virtual Academy. More than a year later, the stay-at-home mom says her 12-year-old daughters, Hannah and Sydney, are less stressed and more engaged in learning. They earned A’s and B’s in the online school, as they did at West Wing.

Stacy sees plenty of other benefits: No morning rush. No evening homework. No drama with other girls at school.

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Arizona grades its public schools

October 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Nearly 80 percent of charter schools earned an average letter grade or better, and of those, over 70 percent received an A or B. Schools that are small (125 students or less) were not graded, leaving many of Arizona’s charter schools off the list.

Among East Valley charters receiving As were Mesa Arts Academy, EduPrize in Gilbert and Tempe Preparatory Academy, which was recognized recently on the Global Report Card.

Two online charter programs – Arizona Virtual Academy and Arizona Connections Academy – received Cs.

ASU Preparatory Academy, an east Mesa charter school operated by Arizona State University, received a B.

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Virtual school attendence on the rise in Arizona

August 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Class is beginning for more than 4,000 students at Arizona Virtual Academy.

They learn all the same lessons and have the same teachers, but the children are often hundreds of miles apart.

“This offers flexibility for out students and our parents,” said Megan Henry, Head of School for Arizona Virtual Academy.

Students can “attend” class from anywhere an internet connection is accessible.

The academy is a charter school funded by tax dollars and no tuition is paid.

If a family cannot afford a computer with internet access, the school will provide one.

For the rest of the article, go to Virtual school attendence on the rise in Arizona

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Virtually There

July 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If Massachusetts has because of lack of leadership within the Board and the Department of Education, ground to a halt on digital learning, other states are moving fast. Let me give you two examples — one (Michigan) where the governor is particularly interested in digital learning and trying to make big changes fast; the other (Arizona) where “blended learning” is at the cutting edge.

A month or so ago, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder laid out his education agenda. Admittedly, Gov. Snyder comes to his new gig with a strong background in computer technology, having in the past helmed Gateway Computers. Drawing off research from a local think tank, he saw how digital learning programs could save money and increase student time on task.

Syder wants online learning to be an option available for students across the state, and not in a top-down structured manner. Instead, he wants to eliminate “seat-time” requirements for students and create something akin to what Florida did with its Virtual School (FLVS). (Snyder even stole FLVS’s slogan “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace.”) Unlike what we’ve seen in Massachusetts on this issue, Snyder calls for “leveraging technology” by giving

every child in Michigan who needs or wants up to two hours of daily online education must receive it. To help enable this policy, any enrollment caps or seat time requirements on virtual schools should be removed.

For the rest of the article, go to Virtually There

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Virtually Worlds Apart

June 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The bad news for Massachusetts is that states like Florida, Colorado, Michigan, Arizona and so many others are pushing forward with digital learning much faster than the Bay State is. In fact, the education bureaucracy is putting some of the strictest limits in the country on expanding digital learning. That may seem odd in a state better known than most for developing and leveraging technology.

In last year’s education reform law, several legislative leaders wanted to leverage technology more effectively after seeing the results in other states such as Florida, where students are getting more time on task and access to AP and other specialized courses digitally. It’s hard not to be impressed by what Florida has accomplished in this field, with funds being expended only when a student successfully completes a specific course.

After the passage of the 2010 ed reform law, the state Department of Education, bowing to pressure from school superintendents and other groups who feared competition on yet another front, decided to promulgate restrictive regulations for digital schools. These include limits on the number of students who can participate in a virtual school (500) and geographical limitations on who can access the programming (25+ percent have to come from within the district; no more than 2 percent of kids can come from any sending district).

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‘Hybrid’ Charter Schools on the Rise

June 26, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Another K12 Inc. school, the 4,700-student Arizona Virtual Academy, had been nearly all-virtual for most if its eight years until this school year, when officials partnered with YMCAs statewide to create drop-in centers, says Megan B. Henry, the head of school. Visiting the centers isn’t mandatory, however, and students attend in three-hour blocks. If students come more than three days a week, they get a free Y membership, Henry says.

About 250 students are using the drop-in centers. So far, the school has few statistics to determine whether those students get an academic boost, but Henry says retention rates have already increased.

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