Alaska: Voucher bill gains ground in the legislature. (Alaska Dispatch)
Florida: Florida Virtual School, a national model, comes under more scrutiny for its effectiveness. (Education Week.)
Indiana: Indiana Supreme Court agrees to hear voucher case. (Associated Press) More competition from school choice means school districts must step up marketing, a columnist argues. (Lafayette Journal & Courier) All-boys charter school coming to Indianapolis. (Indianapolis Star)
Minnesota: Big money being poured into school reform campaigns. (Minneapolis Star Tribune) (more…)
Editor's note: Florida has a national reputation as school choice central. And in the state legislative session that ended Friday, lawmakers again took up a wide range of choice proposals, including the parent trigger bill that drew so much attention. Here's a redefinED rundown of what happened from Amy Graham, senior policy analyst for Step Up for Students. The bills that passed both House and Senate are on their way to Gov. Rick Scott.
Charter Schools:
House Bill 903, by Rep. Janet Adkins. The bill requires the Commissioner of Education to annually determine a high-performing charter school or school system’s continued eligibility for “high performing” status, requires each charter school to maintain a website that lists any entity that owns, operates, or manages the charter school, and establishes criteria for charter schools serving students with disabilities. It also requires a sponsor to reimburse a charter school on a monthly basis with all federal funds available for the benefit of the charter school, and authorizes certain Florida College System institutions to establish one charter school.
Final action: Passed by House 86-30. Died in Senate Education Pre-K-12 Committee.
Senate Bill 1852, by Sen. Stephen Wise. Authorizes certain Florida College System institutions to establish one charter school, authorizes each district to share revenue generated by its capital outlay millage levy with charter schools on a per-student basis, and requires sponsors to distribute a charter school’s share of federal funds to the school within 60 days. It also revises certain restrictions on high-performing charter schools.
Final Action: Died in Senate Budget Committee. (more…)
Four school districts on Florida’s east coast are joining with Indian River State College and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the world's largest publisher of educational materials, to form a regional virtual school to compete with the Florida Virtual School (FLVS). Florida recently passed a law requiring every student to pass an online course to graduate and Florida districts are worried they’ll lose revenue if students meet this requirement by taking FLVS courses. We want “to keep the resources within the region,” said St. Lucie Schools Superintendent Michael Lannon.
After years of trying to protect their market share by denying parents choices, Florida school districts are increasingly acknowledging that parental choice is the new normal and they’ll need to improve their programs if they’re going to keep parents in district schools. Hopefully this greater emphasis on customer satisfaction will benefit students, educators, taxpayers and parents.
Florida school districts are increasingly adapting to a more market-driven public education system. They are aggressively expanding within-district choices via more magnet schools, career academies and dual enrollment programs, and they are grudgingly approving more charter schools. But it’s in online learning where the most significant transformation is occurring.
During the legislative session which begins in January 2012, school districts will be partnering with the Florida Virtual School and private online providers to support legislation making it easier for more families to access online learning. Personalities as diverse as Jim Horne, Florida's former education commissioner, Mark Maxwell, the Florida Virtual School's chief governmental affairs officer, and JoAnne Glenn, assistant principal with the Pasco County, Fla., district's eSchool, have been deliberating in an effort we call the Florida Alliance for Choices in Education, or F.A.C.E. The district online providers have concluded that using regulatory barriers to protect their market share is no longer viable, so they now support expanding the online market in hopes a smaller piece of an expanding pie will increase their enrollment numbers.
Given school districts still control 88 percent of the bricks-and-mortar market, they have shown no interest in abandoning their reliance on regulatory barriers to maintain this market share. But as their enrollment in this realm starts to slip, they will also begin rethinking their bricks-and-mortar strategy. The Miami-Dade school district, for instance, has already begun creating its own charter schools to keep charter school revenue within the district, and several other Florida school districts are expressing interest in following Dade’s lead.
The Berlin Wall in public education is slowing coming down, and as it does school districts are becoming more entrepreneurial and customer-focused. District online educators are ahead of the curve in navigating a more market-driven public education system, but their bricks-and-mortar colleagues are not far behind.
A bill that would turn Florida’s virtual education landscape into a public-private potpourri of learning options passed a Senate committee this afternoon without a peep of dissent.
In fact, among the Senate Education PreK-12 Committee members who voted in support was a newly elected Democrat, Bill Montford, who is also the CEO of the Florida Association of District School Superintendents. Among those who testified in favor of the bill, SB 1620, was an elected School Board member from a small northeast Florida county, Jim Adams, who said it would be an educational boon to students in rural areas and those in foster care. Most strikingly, among the organizations that signed up to voice support was the Florida Virtual School, the nation’s largest and most successful public virtual school.
The bill is sponsored by Miami Sen. Anitere Flores, who said the goal is to provide as many quality online education options as possible for all Florida students. She told the committee the bill is the work product of many groups that came together to endorse a plan that provides fulltime and part-time virtual options, creates multiple statewide virtual providers that would be approved by the Department of Education, expands Florida Virtual School to serve K-5 students, and creates virtual charter schools and blended-learning charter schools.
The bill is similar to a report issued by a choice working group called the Florida Alliance for Choices in Education, a group that included both private providers and Florida Virtual School representatives. Though it is getting a late start in the 2011 session, the bill looks likely to pick up momentum. The outgoing and respected education commissioner, Eric Smith, issued a statement in support: “Florida is a national leader when it comes to the use of virtual instruction in public education, showcasing programs and entire schools that are using technology to fulfill the academic dreams of students. Should this bill become law, it will mean the dawn of a new era of education innovation in our state, resulting in countless new learning opportunities for every student.” Additionally, a press conference is scheduled for Thursday to showcase the broad-based and bipartisan support.
A House bill introduced last week, HB 7197, is not nearly so ambitious, and the push is to conform the House approach with that of Sen. Flores.
A Florida House committee was treated Tuesday to a high-level discussion of digital learning that included the likes of former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise and national education reformer Tom Vander Ark, but the showstopper came from a different duo with a jaw-dropping accord. The policy director for the nation’s leading public virtual school and the president of a leading private virtual education company told lawmakers that competition is the best way to give students new online opportunities.
No, we’re not making this up.
Sitting around that committee room table were Holly Sagues, chief policy officer for Florida Virtual School, and Barbara Dreyer, president and CEO of Connections Academy. Florida Virtual is far and away the nation’s most successful public virtual school, whose 213,926 courses last year represented three times the rate of the next closest state. Dreyer and one of her own private competitors, K-12 Inc., have found common ground with Florida Virtual on a plan that would introduce statewide private providers for all forms of online learning.
They have agreed to a plan that is animated by two basic objectives. First: “To provide students throughout Florida with as many quality online education options as possible and to make those options available to every student regardless of where they live or whether they attend a district school.” Second: “To bring more consistency in the qualifications, funding, and accountability applied to all public and private providers.”
House K-12 Innovation Chairwoman Kelli Stargel is showing clear interest, and substantial legislative groundwork has been laid. Some two dozen online advocates worked collaboratively over the past eight months around those objectives and were able to avoid the acrimony and division that has characterized previous efforts. Their product could make Florida a national model in the arena of online education and includes:
The implications for legislation in this state this year are obvious, but the example being set by the Florida Virtual School is something that deserves its own form of awe. This is an innovative public school that has developed markets in other states and nations, and it is showing a disarming level of institutional confidence. At a time when many public educators are conditioned to see private options as an assault on their turf, Virtual School president and chief executive Julie Young is saying, essentially, bring it on. Maybe her real savvy is simply to make sure they all play by the same rules, but her moxy is something to behold.
