Guest Blog: The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education

"The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education" is a policy brief released this month (April 2009) by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Written by education policy expert Gene Glass, the brief summarizes the growth in virtual schools over the past decade and discusses questions of costs, funding, and quality before recommending regulation, audits, accrediting and assessment in virtual schooling.

While we agree with the four policy recommendations offered in the brief and we share the author’s concern about the preponderance of private commercial involvement in virtual schooling, we call for a more thorough examination of the complexities in virtual schooling and a recognition of the great many high quality virtual school programs serving students. The brief paints virtual schools with a broad brush on the basis of a small number of studies and reports, many of which are outdated.

The brief’s statement that virtual schools require special attention because they are new implies that more traditional practices can expect protection from examination, without regard to quality and relevance. We welcome discussions of quality in virtual schools. We see a baby/bathwater problem in Glass’s discussions of quality, beginning with the definition of virtual schools as simulations of "real schooling." This definition of virtual school ignores both the labels developed by the virtual schools community and the millions of students and teachers who do very "real" teaching and learning without being in the same time and the same place, especially students who succeed in virtual schools after failing in "real" schools.

Glass makes the accurate assertion that virtual schools take a variety of forms and types. Unfortunately, the paper responds to that complexity by oversimplifying many key issues based on either outdated or incomplete sources. After a thorough description of the growth trends over the past decade using recent and credible sources, and a fair summary of the early effectiveness studies, the brief deviates into opinion studies involving surveys of populations who may or may not have first hand experience with quality virtual schools. We disagree that public acceptance of virtual schools can be used as a measure of their effectiveness. A great many data-driven measures of effectiveness are available. Such measures are included in studies of successful humanities courses in virtual schools, which refute the brief’s claim that "more complex areas of the curriculum (e.g., the arts) are beyond the reach of" virtual schools. For instance, the Florida Virtual School teaches several courses in the arts, including 2D Art for Middle School Students, Art Appreciation and AP Art History, some of which have been studied closely by researchers and were found to demonstrate high quality according to the standards of the art education community. It may be that Dr. Glass’s perspective of art education is limited to traditional media rather than the rich digital media now used in arts curricula. Seeing artists working with sophisticated computer-based tools to generate a wide range of digital media in most any graphic arts studio or modern art classroom would broaden this perspective. Given the trend of school boards and state boards of education to make budgetary cuts to the arts, online art programs provide a sanctuary for students who might not have the ability to develop their expressive talents in their local classrooms.

The policy brief accurately assesses the importance of online credit recovery courses for students who have not found success in their classroom courses. Indeed, credit recovery plays a very important role in K-12 virtual schooling, though it should be noted that there has been no national assessment conducted of student motivations for participating in online learning. State level data gathered in two states in the Southeastern United States through the UF Virtual School Clearinghouse program indicate that an overwhelming percentage of students utilize virtual schools to enable flexibility in their daily schedules or to accelerate their academic progress. In the states surveyed, student course retention and recovery was the 3rd most often cited reason for participation in a virtual school course.

It is unfortunate that Glass seems to assert online learning for credit recovery purposes may constitute a misallocation of resources. This couldn’t be further from the truth; several education programs in the United States utilize online courses to meet the needs of individuals who dropped out of high school. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in California alone, each year 120,000 individuals fail to earn a high school diploma by age 20. Those without high school diplomas are more likely to be unemployed, engaged in the criminal justice system and in receipt of state medical benefits. By providing flexible, differentiated online learning, it may be possible to reach individuals who have not been successful in traditional face-to-face classroom environments. The U.S. could learn a lesson from Mexico in this regard: a network of Mexican universities has launched a nation-wide system of virtual schooling specifically to increase the level of workforce productivity by making high school completion available to all adults, thus increasing the college-ready population.

According to Glass, "Whenever teacher and learner are not in a face-to-face relationship, suspicions run high that all or much of the work being assessed may not be that of the learners themselves." But research by University of Florida researchers in 2008 indicated that students do not perceive a greater level of academic dishonesty in online classes as compared to face-to-face. As any experienced online teacher knows, content and curriculum must be adapted for use online. In highly moderated online courses, teachers have far more personal interaction with students and their parents than they do during the traditional classroom course, and many effective virtual schools depend on partnerships with site-based guidance counselors and tutors for added assurance that students do their own work. Many virtual courses are project-based, relying on open-ended qualitative assessments of learning rather than tested skills. A formative evaluation provides a much richer and more personal opportunity for the student to convey understanding of a topic or concept. Given a rich dialog between learner and instructor, it becomes quite evident when a student receives external aid on a formative assignment.

The brief’s sections on cost, accreditation, and teacher certification are useful overviews of these critical issues, bringing to light important cautionary cases. Cost in virtual schools is a complex issue that has been reduced in the brief to three factors, masking important forces that vary by state and LEA. A more comprehensive analysis is needed.

We urge readers of "The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education" to take its policy recommendations seriously, become informed about issues of virtual school quality, and to learn from the cases of abuse of power. But these issues, like most of the issues addressed in the brief, apply to all forms of schooling. When assessing the effectiveness of any school or model, we should not assume that all schools in a category as broad as virtual schools resemble each other. Understanding of schooling models must be based on an understanding of the variety of forms and a recognition that schools, in particular online schools, undergo rapid evolution so that even the same school may not resemble itself after just a few years.

--Dr. Cathy Cavanaugh, Associate Professor of educational technology in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida and Erik W. Black, doctoral fellow at the University of Florida in the educational technology program. Both are affiliated with the University of Florida's Virtual School Clearinghouse research project.