Stop allowing Wal-Mart versions of public schools by Bryan Mann

Shopping at Wal-Mart provides the benefit of low prices, but often at the sacrifice of quality. For example, if one wants to purchase a premier suit or dress, he or she will likely receive higher quality by getting it personally tailored. The same rings true when the quality of fast food is compared to local restaurants. Quality is expensive and often comes when products are personally crafted and closer to home. The argument is especially relevant in the discussions surrounding local versus national control of schooling, specifically in the growing practice of replacing local schools with cyber charter schools.

Cyber charter schools have emerged from a reform climate focused on choice, and although Democrats and Republicans have used the local school argument in various iterations (helpful and subversive) to promote portions of their agenda in the past, both have muted the benefits of local school ideas in promoting choice agendas. Democrats typically have advocated for choice programs, such as charter schools, as a way to provide more schooling options for disadvantaged communities. Republicans have favored charter schools and vouchers because they align with market-based principles. Consequently, many charter school policies have enabled high-enrollment cyber charter schools to sprout, making it so that there are now students who receive the Wal-Mart version of schooling with no party-based political agenda to put an end to the practice.

High-enrollment cyber charter schools—schools that have thousands of students from vast demographic areas—enact ideals found in corporate mass production by utilizing economies of scale to provide academic services to an extensive student population. In turn, the mass-produced version of schooling shortchanges enrolled students because it does not allow them to have organic, daily interaction with teachers and other students. To state it simply, more than a half century of Social Development Theory, built upon the foundations created by Vygotsky, has shown that learning is built upon and enhanced through social processes and needs various manifestations of interaction to be successful. Thus, high-enrollment cyber charter schools are inherently void of some of the interaction needed to enhance learning for young children.

In having a platform not capable of delivering in-person interaction, cyber charter schools miss many of the nuances often overlooked in a well-rounded public education. For example, an eight-year-old student in a cyber charter program may get the knowledge of a math concept from afar, but he or she won’t get a hug, high-five, or pat on the back from the school’s headquarters. There is something to be said for having a teacher look a student in the eye and offer praise for overcoming the obstacles of a difficult home life to achieve high marks on a recent assignment. Personal support can change lives, and there is something mechanic and impersonal in receiving praise via email from a teacher the student hardly knows.

The lack of organic services becomes especially alarming as reports begin to show that cyber charter schools have failed academically, such as in Pennsylvania where not a single cyber charter school met Annual Yearly Progress standards in 2011–2012. A specific example of shortcomings of a high-enrollment cyber charter school is shown through many of the failed schools affiliated with national cyber charter company K₁₂ Inc. The company runs online schools or offers curricula to online schools in various states and trades on the New York Stock Exchange (click here for its current quote). A policy brief from the National Educational Policy Center shows that K₁₂’s schools have had significantly worse test scores and graduation rates than brick-and-mortar schools.

A final element that should cause concern about cyber charter schools is that not only do massive cyber schools fail to provide effective services found in quality local public schools, but they also cripple efforts of local public schools to improve. Again using Pennsylvania as an example, the funding formula for charter schools in the Commonwealth dictates that a local district has to pay the per-pupil cost for each one of its students that attends a cyber charter school. This means that school districts in places like Philadelphia have tens of millions of dollars scraped off their budget at times when they try to improve their own practices. These concerns are best expressed in The Notebook’s blog article about cyber charter school reform and in Penn State Professor Ali Carr-Chellman’s TEDxTalk on the issue.

So, while I am not arguing that school choice policies are all bad, I am arguing that a school choice policy needs to end when it allows a remote organization to replace local educational services for children. It hurts both the children going to the remote cyber school and also the children who remain in the local public school system. Lawmakers need to stop high-enrollment cyber charter schools and continue to promote sound public education. If they do not, they are going to allow the admonition of the common cliché to ring true: they will get what they pay for.