William Bennett discusses the K12 Inc. program Tuesday.
By REBECCA CATALANELLO
Published August 20, 2003
ALTAMONTE SPRINGS - William Bennett passed through Florida on Tuesday, touting his company's role in a publicly funded $4.8-million pilot program that promises to bring computer-based homeschooling to 1,000 public schoolchildren next month.
Bennett, a former U.S. secretary of education, said the premise of the program is to meld public education with strong parental involvement.
"You can't pay people to do the kind of job parents do," Bennett said, speaking to reporters before addressing a conference room filled with about 50 parents and children.
Bennett's Virginia-based K12 Inc. was one of two for-profit companies awarded $4,800-per-student contracts two weeks ago from the state of Florida. The idea of the pilot is to help move students out of overcrowded classrooms by equipping parents with free computers, Internet connections, curriculum and other materials so that they can teach their children at home.
Wisconsin-based Connections Academy was the other company chosen by the state. Connections was scheduled to hold a parental information session in Clearwater Tuesday night.
Though the Legislature designed the program for students in kindergarten through eighth grade, K12 Inc.'s Florida program, called the Florida Virtual Academy, goes only through seventh grade this year. Connections serves kindergarten through eighth grade.
Students in Grades 2-8 are eligible to participate in the program only if they were enrolled in a public school last year. Kindergarteners and first-graders who meet the state's age requirements for public school enrollment also can participate.
"This isn't homeschooling," Bennett said. "Florida Virtual Academy is a public school."
Students will be expected to take the FCAT at the end of the year. They are required to log 900 hours of academic work. And for Connections and K12 to receive reimbursement from the state, they must show that the children enrolled showed one year's academic growth.
About a third of the parents gathered raised their hands when asked whether they had homeschooled before. Others said they had thought about it.
"It's nice to have our tax dollars working for us for once," said Mark Lee, a father of three. He and his wife, Alisa, have been homeschooling their second-grader, but were encouraged that their kindergartener might have the chance to be homeschooled without the family shelling out more money for curriculum.
Computer-based education for young children has had its critics. And in other areas of the country, some factions of the homeschooling community have taken the government to task for trying to tap into homeschool families with programs such as those that K12 Inc. and Connections provide.
In Florida, about 41,000 students are homeschooled.
