for homeschoolers (CA)

This is front page on the sunday paper here in San Diego, CA. Thought it may be of interest to some of you:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cyber classrooms
A former education secretary’s traditional philosophy comes to home-schoolers as an Internet charter school, with the state picking up the tab.

By Chris Moran
STAFF WRITER

November 10, 2002

Linda Jahnke shopped for her children’s school the way she might shop for a car.

She asked friends, cruised the Internet and had her kids take test drives. In the end, she decided that sometimes the best choice is to build a Chevy in the garage.

For her do-it-yourself project – home-schooling her son Aaron – Jahnke needed a blueprint, and she found one in former Secretary of Education William Bennett’s online curriculum.

Jahnke was willing to pay the $1,195 a year that Bennett’s company, K12 Inc., charges for lessons in language arts, math, science, history, music and art, but she didn’t have to. She got it free.

The state picks up the tab because Bennett’s online home school is also a charter school – sanctioned by the state, yet granted freedom from many state regulations in exchange for meeting specified teaching goals.

San Diego is one of the first markets for Bennett’s vision of education via the cybercharter, an unlikely marriage between the orthodoxy of public education and the independence of home schooling.

K12 has been driven largely by the star power of Bennett, a skeptic of computers in the classroom and, by his own description, part of a fringe of critics of public education. Now he is banking on the public system as the path to reform and profit.

Other private companies, most notably Edison Schools, have entered the business of public education by taking over existing brick-and-mortar schools. K12’s cybercharter does away with schoolhouses. In Southern California, K12 has created a free online school, the California Virtual Academy, in homes across a four-county area.

California has hundreds of charter schools, but the cybercharter takes the experimental nature of charters one step further, making the parent the teacher and the principal. It’s up to the parent to decide how to teach the lessons and how fast to teach them.

Parents are finding out about K12 through well-established networks of home-schoolers, from the media attention that Bennett attracts and from his barnstorming tours, including two visits to San Diego this summer.

But public schooling at home is a troubling notion to many, and K12 has the distinction of pleasing neither side of the debate.

Home-schoolers say public home schooling is too public – meaning that rules come attached to the money. They worry that it excludes religious instruction as a condition for receiving government funds.

Some public educators say it’s too private – that kitchen-table educators aren’t accountable for the way they spend public money. Others don’t like that K12 aims to make money for its investors. The state’s per-pupil funding for California Virtual Academy is four times what K12 charges private customers.

“Bill Bennett is looking to sell education and make a profit, and I’m very, very suspicious of that,” said Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Association.

K12 is several years away from making a profit even by its founders’ projections. Its local franchise has been granted by Spencer Valley School District, whose enrollment is measured in the dozens. Although K12 is active in seven states, it has enrolled fewer than 10,000 youngsters in kindergarten through fifth grade.

But the debate is more about principle than profit.

“It doesn’t have to be big right away,” Bennett said, but, “I hope it has its impact if it exercises leverage on all of education.”

The reformer
Since the 1980s, Bennett has made a career as a bully pulpit reformer. The platform he’s enjoyed in a string of high-ranking jobs and as a best-selling author has made him, in one view, a “one-man ideology factory.”
As President Reagan’s secretary of education in the 1980s, he criticized teachers’ unions as obstacles to school improvement and advocated school vouchers. He even warmed to an idea that would have led to his own unemployment, the dissolution of the Department of Education.

He quit smoking to become former President Bush’s drug czar.

He has declared television the enemy of education, but he promulgates his ideas on “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation.”

As director of Empower America, he promotes free-market competition and freedom as the central principles for the reform of education and other institutions.

It is as an author that Bennett has had his greatest influence on American popular thought.

“The Book of Virtues” sold millions of copies and led to a series of related books and an animated television series. Another Bennett best seller, “The Educated Child,” lays out his philosophy of education that underlies K12.

He and his co-authors write that parents are the first and most important teachers, that learning requires discipline and discipline requires values, that some things are more important to know than others, and that common sense and devotion to a child go as far as an education degree in good teaching.

“The Educated Child” espouses another of Bennett’s tenets: that computers are overrated and perhaps even detrimental to education.

He and his co-authors write that there is “no good evidence that most uses of computers significantly improve learning.”

The backer
It wasn’t Bennett’s idea to make a school out of the book.
It was a reader’s. Ron Packard, a businessman whose firm invests in and operates several for-profit education companies, looked for an online math curriculum three years ago to tutor his daughter. He couldn’t find one.

Then he read “The Educated Child” and said to himself, “This is it!”

Packard approached Bennett with the idea of putting $10 million behind Bennett’s name and philosophy.

Bennett wanted assurance that K12 would be about knowledge, not technology, and he demanded that the team include David Gelernter.

The Yale computer science professor made headlines in the early 1990s when he was critically injured by the explosion of a package he received from the Unabomber. Bennett wanted Gelernter for his skepticism about the educational merits of the computer.

After Gelernter came on board, Bennett agreed to head an operation that would transform him from pontificator to practitioner.

“This was a chance not just to curse the darkness but light a candle,” he said. “We’re going to improve public education, not just criticize it.”

Packard said Bennett’s star power allowed him to attract renowned experts to the curriculum team. They have produced a kindergarten-through-fifth-grade curriculum. Today, Packard said, more than 90 people on K12’s staff of 140 are curriculum developers.

When they’re done with their work in three to four years, Bennett said, K12 will have produced “every lesson every day for 13 years.”

The believer
Linda Jahnke said it was like Christmas when the six boxes came in September. They were late, but they delivered the goods, including large three-ring binder teaching guides, phonics primers, a junior great books series, seeds, goggles, a magnifying glass, instruments, CDs, paints and clay.
The boxes even contained an IBM computer and a color printer.

Aaron and his mom recently did a K12 first-grade history lesson on ancient Egypt by logging onto www.k12.com and clicking their way through the story of Osiris, god of the underworld. It gave Aaron an introduction to the concept of myth. The reference to the crying Nile had Aaron dabbling in figurative language.

Jahnke said seeing Bennett’s name attached to K12 was a “huge, huge, absolutely huge” factor in her decision to enroll Aaron. Jahnke said she likes how Bennett is partnering with public education instead of rejecting it.

“The weight of educating your kids is enormous,” she said. “I don’t want to pick a curriculum that is faulty.”

Without ever leaving his home, Aaron is considered a student in the Spencer Valley School District, where 36 students attend classes in a two-room schoolhouse about 25 miles away, between Ramona and Julian.

Packard said K12 likes to use tiny districts as its base camps because they are less bureaucratic and quicker to act.

Spencer Valley Superintendent Julie Weaver sees another advantage: “We’re very low profile, in that it’s probably politically easier to have these types of things acceptable in a smaller place.”

As K12’s local administrator and accountant, Spencer Valley gets free gear – several computers, books and other supplies, plus 1 percent of the take.

If enrollment meets the goals the California Virtual Academy submitted to the state Department of Education, there will be 750 kindergarten-through-fifth-grade students on the books by the end of the year. At about $4,800 per student reimbursement from the state, that would set up Spencer Valley for about $36,000 – chump change in a larger district, but a quarter of Weaver’s teaching payroll.

It’s not much of a gamble from Weaver’s standpoint. Spencer Valley isn’t on the hook for any obligation but to keep accounts current for the home-schoolers. Weaver saw K12’s early results in other states. A report commissioned by the Pennsylvania Department of Education last year, for example, praised K12’s cybercharter school in that state as a high-quality program. She saw credibility in Bennett.

“If someone came to you and put (10) million dollars’ worth of thought into something, wouldn’t you consider it for your child?” she asked.

The arguments
Money and celebrity have given K12 early momentum. Still, the concept of public home schooling is not an easy sell.
The National Education Association says K12 and other home-schooling operations deputize amateurs to do a professional’s job.

Educational policy is based on “people who have been prepared and licensed to teach,” said Barbara Stein, senior research analyst for the association, which has condemned home schooling. “I don’t know that you want to use public money to change that policy and do something else.”

Guadalupe Vander Ploeg of Ramona disagrees. She visits the Jahnkes monthly as one of K12’s educational consultants. She’s a credentialed teacher contracted by K12 to manage the education of 29 students. In addition to house calls, she holds monthly phone conferences with parents and organizes field trips for K12 families.

She said she feels she’s doing a better job teaching students online and through home visits than when she was trying to teach algebra to as many as 45 middle schoolers in a class.

“To actually say I was teaching was a joke,” Vander Ploeg said.

Home-schooling associations are in league with the educational association in their opposition to K12-type operations, though for different reasons.

Some home-school leaders see in K12 and other cybercharters a threat to the academic freedom that motivates people to home-school in the first place. Taking public funds means accepting mandatory state testing, a schedule of vaccinations, requirements to submit attendance records and adherence to state curriculum guidelines.

If too many home-schoolers are seduced by K12’s free computers, textbooks, art supplies and science equipment, “a lot of home-school freedom could be in jeopardy,” said Tom Washburne of the Home School Legal Defense Association. “What has made home schooling as successful as it is today is its wide freedom to do what’s successful for your children.”

And if too many families are co-opted by the public schools, he said, there will be no constituency left to defend home-schoolers’ rights.

One of the most important rights to many home-schoolers is the right to teach religion. K12 does not include religious instruction, which would cost it state support. Instead, it incorporates the Bennett philosophy that schooling should focus on traditional subjects, that children should be introduced to humankind’s great legacies and that parents know what’s best for their kids.

Bernie Hanlon, head of schools for California Virtual Academies, K12’s California charter school network based in Oakland, said K12 has nothing against religion, it just doesn’t teach it online. Parents are free to teach what they want once they log off.

To the teachers’ union arguments that K12 puts students’ education in the hands of untrained teachers, Bennett responded there are several teachers in a K12 classroom: the expert educators who put together the curriculum, the visiting teachers and the parents.

Jahnke conceded that she can’t do a better job in her Poway home than local public school teachers, but she’s concerned about school crowding, peer pressure and drugs. And, she said, she has some unique qualifications.

“I do know my child better than everybody, and I love him more than anybody. Those two things equip me to teach him effectively,” she said.

To home-schoolers and union leaders alike, Bennett says, “Judge us by the results. If the kids learn, what’s the beef?”

Bennett’s free-market approach seeks to inject competition into a government monopoly to improve schools.

Many educators say some forms of competition, particularly vouchers, are harmful to public education. They argue that instead of making all schools better, choice programs drain money from public schools and exacerbate their problems.

K12 is a viable alternative to one-size-fits-all education, said California Virtual Academies’ Hanlon.

“If you go buy a car, does it have to be a black one, and does it have to be a Chevy Impala?” Hanlon asked. “Choice has never been a bad thing.”

––––––––––––––––––––––––––—
Chris Moran: (619) 498-6637; [email protected]

Union-Tribune library researchers Michelle Gilchrist and Denise Davidson contributed to this report.

Copyright 2002 Union-Tribune Publishing Co.