Looking for cheap solutions to Florida's education problems, legislators have earmarked $4.8-million for online elementary education next year.
Published June 1, 2003
Even the corporate proponents of online elementary education are careful to warn that, to use their operative phrase, "it isn't for every family."
In other words, a 5-year-old can't sit at home alone in front of a computer terminal for six hours a day and master the alphabet or learn how to use a pair of scissors or figure out how to resolve conflicts with other children. The online student's success depends on whether he or she gets daily oversight, instruction and reinforcement from a parent.
This is the tradeoff the Florida Legislature presumably accepts as it embarks on its latest, and perhaps most preposterous, venture into discount education. The state has set aside $4.8-million for virtual elementary schooling next year, and the House members who pushed for the voucher scheme didn't bother to conceal their motivations. Their quest was not for the best learning method but the cheapest one.
Perversely, they may get neither.
Lawmakers who have agreed to pay private companies $4,800 for each online student brag that the voucher is less than the $5,500 the state spends on actual schools. But online schools provide no buildings, no media centers, no cafeterias, no buses, no sports teams, no marching bands or chess clubs, no aides or special accommodations for disabled students, no psychologists or counselors, no nurses, no campus police, no assistant principals who enforce discipline. To pay $4,800 for instructional materials and online access, then, is hardly a bargain.
Just look at the private marketplace in which the Legislature invests so much confidence. The James Madison K12 Academy, a "private virtual school" created by former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett, has spent a year trying to sell its program to parents throughout Florida. But it has yet to attract a single private-paying student. Not one. Its total statewide enrollment for 2002-03 is 35 students, all of whom were financed by another state voucher, the corporate tax credit. That voucher, incidentally, pays James Madison only $3,500 per student (the company also offers course supplies to home-school students for $1,200), but a corporate spokesman says the $4,800 tuition is necessary for loaning computers to students who don't have them and building "a full public school curriculum."
The virtual vouchers speak to Florida's increasingly helter-skelter approach to education experimentation. No alternative is considered too far-fetched, and no market theory is out of bounds.
In four years, vouchers have grown from zero to $107.4-million of the state budget without a single evaluation of their educational effectiveness. Lawmakers increased the corporate tax-credit voucher this year from $50-million to $88-million without viewing the first financial audit of how the money is being spent. The state is so intent on opening new public charter schools that it now approves them even when locally elected School Boards think they are a bad idea.
Interestingly enough, Florida already operates the nation's largest virtual school. It began in 1997 as a joint project between the Alachua and Orange school districts, provided individual courses to 6,088 high school students this year, and has been cited by Gov. Jeb Bush as an "example of how our state leads the way in using information technology." But the Florida Virtual School's administrators declined to take part in the elementary school experiment. Says chief financial officer Mark Maxwell: "Quite honestly, we questioned the ability to do online learning at the K-5 level."
To lawmakers who don't see learning as the bottom line, though, teaching kindergarteners over the Internet is nothing more than a business transaction. Hire a company, write a check and keep a child out of a crowded classroom. Never mind whether the child learns. This is kindergarten, wired, and it is a depressing glimpse into Florida's education future.
