Jada Rosario
On a typical school day last year, Jada Rosario got up, ate breakfast and brushed her teeth. Then, she logged on to her computer—“You know, still in my pajamas”—and started taking classes. Around noon, she would break for lunch, and maybe watch a movie. Most days, she wrapped up her studies by early afternoon.
Rosario, who graduated high school in the spring, was a member of Cougar Academy, a virtual school within the Harrisburg School District. Cougar students work remotely, using software that delivers their coursework and quizzes, and they can phone in or visit the school’s drop-in center if they require personal instruction. The district provides laptops and printers to participants and reimburses families for Internet costs. When the school first opened, in the fall of last year, more than 100 students enrolled.
Rosario, a cheerful, articulate young woman who wants to become a paralegal, like her mother, signed up for Cougar in the hopes of bringing up her grades. At first, she thought online learning would be boring, but soon she settled in. She raced through her English lessons, doing “up to, like, 10 lessons” each morning, and saved math for evenings or the end of the week, when her mother could assist her. Around Christmas, she had the option of returning to traditional school, but she declined.
“I was more focused,” she said. “I wasn’t in the halls, playing around like I was in school.” She wound up finishing her coursework early, and graduated May 26.
Rosario’s experience in Cougar Academy, as it happens, was rare. Of the total number of students who enrolled, only 21 were left by the end of the year. More than 80 were removed because of poor grades or low attendance, and, of the ones who remained, 10 were failing. In the final tally, a mere nine students of the initial 103 passed the majority of their classes.
Part of the trouble was the freedom. Allison Burris, a teacher who helped direct Cougar Academy last year, said that students struggled to complete assignments on time, often letting coursework pile up until the last minute. “You had to log in by 2 p.m. every day,” Burris said. “You could ‘log in’ at 2, but do all of the work on the weekend. You could see the influx of work at the end of each marking period.” In addition, about half of the students were “re-entry,” meaning they had previously dropped out or gotten into trouble with the law, making them risky candidates for less supervised study online.
Then there was the problem of the loaned computers. “The risk of borrowing equipment was an issue to me,” Burris told me. “It’s a $300 charge to us, and if it goes missing, it’s supposed to be the student who pays, but they just don’t pay it. So we absorb that cost.” Of all the equipment loaned last year, Burris said, about half was returned with something missing or damaged. She worried that, in the case of most students, the program was a “waste of money.”
Harrisburg’s in-district cyber-education program is not the only online school whose performance has been called into question. Last May, the National Education Policy Center, a University of Colorado think tank, published “Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2013,” a scathing survey of 311 online schools across the country. “Despite virtual schools’ track record of students falling behind their peers academically or dropping out at higher rates,” the study’s authors wrote, “states and districts continue to expand virtual schools and online offerings to their students, at high cost to taxpayers.”
Indeed, Cougar Academy is slated to expand. In January, the district will pilot an option for full-time online study for the fifth through eighth grades. In 2015, the program will be available from the first grade onwards. Gene Veno, who was appointed Chief Recovery Officer for the district in December of last year, has included the expansion of cyber offerings as part of his recovery plan.
“In terms of meeting the needs of parents and students, the predominance of cyber enrollment presents a competitive opportunity for the Harrisburg School District,” Veno wrote. “The issue and challenge for the District is to understand the goals and objectives of the students enrolled in cyber schools, and to present a District-operated alternative that meets or exceeds the performance of the non-District cyber schools.”
Why would Harrisburg expand a program that had achieved such dubious results? I put this question, in various ways, to a number of education professionals inside and outside the district. As it turns out, the answer has little to do with whether the instruction is working, and everything to do with what it costs.
*****
The Harrisburg School District, like the city itself, projects an agitated mood. Its many efforts at reform and renewal are shadowed by recurrent crisis. Every year for the past 10 years, one or more of its schools has failed to meet state goals for attendance and academic performance. In 2010 and 2011, the district closed five schools and eliminated almost 400 positions. Enrollment, which was just under 9,000 in 2005, had fallen to 6,340 by the end of last year.
In spite of the contraction, the district continues to face intense budgetary pressures. Its expenditures last year were approximately $137 million—about the same as they were in 2011, before the closures. The recovery plan, extrapolating from recent trends, projects that costs will increase to $174 million by 2018. Among the factors the plan cites in its projection are a prolonged spike in health care and energy costs and an increase in the district’s annual debt service. Even in the wake of events like the one in October, when the chief financial officer discovered an unaccounted $11.5 million in funds, no one denies that the district is en route to debilitating shortfalls. “The sum of all the assumptions produces a grim picture,” Veno’s plan says. “If the District does nothing, it will be out of business.”
An increasingly significant source of expense is the exodus of district students to charter schools. Last year, 672 Harrisburg students enrolled in charter school, more than double the number in 2010. Of these, about 70 percent have opted for a “cyber charter”—that is, a school where courses are provided mostly or entirely online.
The cost to the district is substantial. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers have prioritized families’ freedom of choice, providing for tuition-free enrollment at both public and charter schools. To achieve this, the law requires each student’s home district to reimburse the charter school for the cost of the student’s education. The reimbursement amount is determined by a complicated formula and is based on the per-student cost within the district—an amount calculated by taking the district’s annual budget and dividing by the number of students. If the overall number of students declines, the district’s budget is spread over a smaller pool, leading to even higher reimbursements.
In Harrisburg, the effect has been dramatic. According to Tim Eller, at the state Department of Education, Harrisburg’s reimbursement payment for a non-special education student was $9,646 in 2011-12. A year later, it had climbed to $10,804; this year, the payment will be $11,829. (For special education students, the payments are $20,536, $26,311 and $28,473, respectively.) The charge also applies when parents enroll previously homeschooled students directly in a cyber charter, which is a frequent occurrence, given that cyber school is essentially homeschooling with tech support. In the 2012-13 school year, the total cost of charter-school reimbursements for the Harrisburg School District was around $9 million.
Within the district, the financial pressure of cyber-charter enrollment has produced a kind of schizophrenia. Administrators have their doubts about the efficacy of online instruction, but they also know that an in-house cyber option can realize substantial savings. The cost of educating a student at Cougar can be as low as $3,000—almost a fourth of the cost of sending a non-special education student to a cyber school outside the district.
In June, I spoke with the district’s superintendent, Dr. Sybil Knight-Burney, and Mary Lou Sypolt, the coordinator of pupil services, in the district’s administrative offices on Front Street. Initially, when I asked for an overview of Cougar Academy, their comments were positive. But when pressed for measures of success, they struggled to produce meaningful answers. “I’ve seen cases of success, but I don’t have any research,” Sypolt said. Knight-Burney could think of just one example: a girl who had gotten pregnant and used the online courses to catch up on missed work. They began to qualify their assessment. “To be honest with you, when we had about 88 kids starting, we thought this could be successful,” Knight-Burney said. “We learned, ‘Wow, this is very tough coursework.’”
When I observed that other Pennsylvania cyber charters had struggled to produce good results, Knight-Burney suddenly sounded relieved. She, too, had doubts about the benefits of learning online. “Now we’re finding out the reality of it,” she said. “We’re getting kids back and seeing the education’s not working.” She mentioned a phone call her staff had received from some concerned neighbors, who had approached a young woman they’d repeatedly seen wandering the street in the middle of the day. “I’m doing cyber school,” the girl had told them. They asked what time of day she did her online classes. “Oh, whenever I get a chance,” she replied.
Despite these doubts, Sypolt and Knight-Burney still believed the program had potential. Sypolt felt Cougar Academy was the district’s chance to address “cutting-edge technology.” They were also developing criteria to determine whether students were likely to succeed online. But, depending on how strictly the academy screens applicants, it may wind up at cross-purposes with Veno’s plan. If students feel the district is too restrictive, they’ll migrate somewhere else.
*****
When money follows a cyber student out of the district, where does it go? In August, I met with Michael Wilson from Commonwealth Connections Academy, a cyber school with a drop-in center on Reily Street, next to Brothers Pizzeria. The school, which last year enrolled more than 6,600 students from across the state, is one of Pennsylvania’s five largest charters. (Of the remaining four, all but one are cyber charters.) Like many other online schools, Commonwealth Connections is the local branch of a nationwide education provider—in this case, Connections Academy, which has schools in 24 states. On the occasion of the launch of a new curriculum initiative, the academy was hosting an open house.
Wilson greeted me out front, wearing a pinstripe suit and a glossy pink tie. An administrator at the school in 2010 and 2011, he had left briefly to work under the former state education secretary, Ron Tomalis, as a special assistant focusing on the department’s oversight of charter schools. He returned to Commonwealth Connections over the summer, following Gov. Tom Corbett’s abrupt dismissal of Tomalis in May, and now serves as the school’s director of government relations and outreach.
We walked to an empty classroom equipped with a Smart Board and projector, the room still smelling fresh and new. Wilson, an ardent defender of cyber schools, had advised me in an email that there was “so much misunderstanding and misinformation out there” about online education. He told me that a cyber school like Commonwealth Connections was suited to any number of needs. It could free up a student’s schedule to focus on athletics, dance or acting; it could allow them to complete school while holding down a job; it could enable faster study for the gifted. Online learning, he said, was geared to the current generation of young people, whom he described as “digital natives.” “Everything they do is customized, geared towards ‘me,’” he said.
We headed outside, where he showed me one of the school’s signature assets: a mobile classroom, a 38-foot orange bus retrofitted with WiFi, computers and lab equipment, which travels around the region providing cyber students with hands-on activities. On board, surrounded by a multitude of brand-new equipment, I raised the topic of funding for cyber schools.
Wilson has no doubt that charter funding is equitable; if anything, he thinks local districts keep more money than they’re due. When a district reimburses a charter school, he estimated, the formula allows it to retain about 20 percent of tuition costs, “even though they don’t participate in the education of that student.”
“When a student ends up here, there’s a reason they’ve made that choice,” he said. “The bottom line is, they’ve made that choice. It’s not a school that’s entitled to funding. It’s taxpayer dollars.”
I had a similar experience with representatives of Agora Cyber Charter, another of the state’s largest online schools. Kevin Corcoran, Agora’s assistant head of school, told me he saw cyber learning as a viable alternative for “kids who don’t feel satisfied or served” in traditional public school. He invited me to attend Agora’s statewide graduation ceremony, which took place at Hershey Park stadium in June, and where I watched a diverse crowd of evidently proud parents applaud as their sons and daughters accepted their diplomas.
But when it came to questions about funding, it was difficult to get clear answers. Agora, like most cyber charters, contracts with a for-profit service provider, purchasing a bundle of services, including curriculum, tech support and management consulting. I wanted to know what it actually cost Agora to educate an individual student, but, because of the structure of the law’s funding formula, Agora does not valuate its services in this way. Instead, starting from the guaranteed reimbursements from local districts, the school comes up with its per-student purchasing power. Several years ago, Corcoran told me, the average reimbursement was in the “low 7,000s,” but, by last year, it had climbed to between $8,700 and $8,900.
According to Corcoran, the higher the average reimbursement rate, the better the services Agora can purchase for its students. “What school wouldn’t want more money?” he said. But the money also flows to its provider, K12, Inc., where it buys things that aren’t expressly about education. Some of the money is spent on advertising, though the school would not disclose the exact amount, saying only that K12 “provides certain advertising to the school as part of a school management fee.” And some of the money is spent at the statehouse. Nationwide, K12 has spent more than $1.2 million on lobbying over the past 10 years, according to data from FollowthMoney.org. In Pennsylvania, it has employed 11 different lobbyists since 2009.
It’s true that cyber schools can incur substantial costs, especially for special education, and that they must find a way to provide services under fixed revenues, just like a traditional school. Yet a review of the services online schools do provide suggests they’re able to deploy substantial, costly resources. A Connections Academy promotional video, for instance, advertises “more personal attention from teachers,” who “connect with students through phone calls, emails, live online sessions and sometimes even in person.” So, while Harrisburg experiences teacher layoffs and salary cuts, Connections Academy is able to provide one-on-one instruction on demand—and still have money left over to run a first-class website, retrofit a mobile lab and purchase advertising to attract more students to the fold.
*****
Alongside the question of funding, of course, looms a more basic question: can a student be successfully educated online?
During my tour with Wilson, parents and students were attending a workshop on roller coaster design. The workshop was simultaneously a supplement for students and a media event, a not-uncommon combination in the world of cyber charters. Later, the group would have a virtual chat with a Hershey Park engineer, through something known as “LiveLesson technology.”
Towards the back of the room, I met the parents of a high school student who, they said, “loves” his online schooling. “As a teenager, he doesn’t have to get up in the morning,” his father said. After homeschooling their son for years, they had enrolled him in a traditional public school for seventh grade, but found that “disruptive” students in the classroom bothered him. Now that he was able to work at his own pace, he was thriving. In addition, they felt free to “not worry about the scariness of what goes on in high school.” In the school next to where they lived, in Carlisle, “there’s drugs and there’s violence,” they said.
A mother sitting nearby chimed in. She, too, had been delighted with her experience. Her son, who was dyslexic, had struggled in a traditional classroom, but in the cyber school, she said, “he gets to be him. He doesn’t have to bend so much.” Like the other parents, she found it a relief to have options outside the district. “My kids were horrified to go to public. But my son likes this atmosphere. It’s small. It’s private. It’s a chance for him to spread his wings far more than he ever could in a traditional public school.”
A common refrain among cyber-charter advocates is that online study allows students to work “at their own pace.” This can occasionally mean at a pace slower than in a traditional classroom, but most often it implies convenience and speed. One of the Commonwealth Connections parents, for instance, mentioned a nephew who graduated high school a full two years early. “There’s no reason for them to sit around and do nothing,” she said. Another was pleased with the possibility that students primarily interested in science, for example, could accelerate through subjects that held less interest. “They could conceivably have all their liberal arts stuff done before they get to college,” he said.
If that’s true, then perhaps the emergence of cyber school reflects a more radical change: not just in educational technology, but in what is expected of an education. I recalled what Jada Rosario, the Cougar Academy student, repeatedly said about her English courses being “easy.” Over the summer, I had paid a visit to Holly Brzycki, the director of the Capital Area Online Learning Association, or CAOLA, which provided online courses and support staff for Cougar Academy.
During a walkthrough of CAOLA’s online learning software, which included a visit to a virtual campus with an art gallery and an arcade, Brzycki opened a sample lesson in American Literature with text from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story “Winter Dreams.” At the end of the lesson was a quiz consisting of five multiple-choice questions. Brzycki explained that a student would have to score at least an 80 percent before she could move forward to the next lesson.
The first question asked which Fitzgerald novel was an extension of the themes in “Winter Dreams.” Of the four possible answers, only one, “The Great Gatsby,” was written by Fitzgerald. It occurred to me that a student could use Google to confirm this without ever having identified the themes of either “Gatsby” or “Winter Dreams.” But, when I asked Brzycki about this, she sounded unconcerned. For one, she said, students can cheat in brick-and-mortar classrooms, too. Anyway, in her belief, knowing how to Google for answers is part of what makes a well-rounded student in the 21st century. “Isn’t that a skill we want them to graduate with?” she asked.
Despite our best guesses, we scored only 60 percent, which meant we had to review the lesson and try again. This time, a “Learn More” link appeared, which took us to a supplementary video about narrative structure and anachronisms. It showed a series of short clips, including one of a man with a Mozart bouffant playing a Game Boy. The connection to “Winter Dreams” was beyond me, but no matter—the student was not required to watch and could click out of the video after about five seconds. After the video, we took the quiz again. This time, four of the five questions had us identify parts of speech. We passed.
I thought about this later when, interviewing Rosario, I asked her what sorts of things she had read for her online English class. She thought for a moment, and then said, “I think I did read ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ I think that was one of the books I had to read.”
“You think?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure,” she said. “I don’t really remember, because it was, like, a while ago.”
Rosario is only one student, of course, but I wondered whether her inability to remember what she’d read might reflect a fact about cyber school. From my experience with Brzycki, it appeared it was possible to pass online English through some combination of guesswork and skimming. Without a teacher in the room, how do cyber schools ensure that students are learning and not just racing through the quizzes?
*****
Over the summer, Cougar Academy got an overhaul. In August, the district appointed Kathy Ames-Borrel, a former ESL supervisor and John Harris High School alum, as the program’s full-time director. For her interview for the post, Ames-Borrel drafted a three-year plan for expanding the academy in accordance with the recovery officer’s recommendations. To address the problem of failing students, she added phone interviews to the application process to try to ensure that parents and students would be the right fit for the cyber option. “We want to go with the mindset that cyber is not for everyone, and bricks and mortar is not for everyone,” she said.
A month and a half into the year, her adjustments seem to have met with some success. Of the 26 students enrolled at the time of this writing, seven had returned to the district from cyber charters. Another Ames-Borrel initiative was to divide the online school into several tiers, requiring students to demonstrate self-discipline before being granted complete independence. Upon enrollment, students enter a 45-day trial period, during which they take their classes on laptops, but do so in the confines of the drop-in center at the school, supervised by teachers. At the end of the trial period, they can progress to full-time study at home, or to a mixture of home and classroom study. (They can also have their trial period extended, if they haven’t successfully adapted to learning online.)
Not everyone is thrilled with the new arrangement. Allison Burris, who moved this year to SciTech Campus, a smaller, selective school within the district, regards the trial period as essentially a negation of the purpose of online learning. “You can’t require a kid to come in,” she said. “That isn’t cyber school.” There are rumors of resentment among teachers, who feel they’ve been reduced to the role of babysitter. Burris had heard stories of students spending the whole day on cell phones or looking at YouTube videos.
In addition, there are signs that the pressure to meet financial objectives has led to haphazard implementation. Just before the start of the year, the district abruptly changed service providers, abandoning CAOLA in favor of a group called Compass Learning. Veno, the recovery officer, told me the choice was a cost-cutting measure: the school already subscribed to Compass for online supplements, which could easily be adapted for full-time study. But the decision will also require the district to negotiate out of its two-year contract with CAOLA, which Brzycki, CAOLA’s director, said she intends to enforce, at a cost of $26,000. (Some have suspected other motives for the switch. One John Harris teacher, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that the school “got Compass because it’s easier for our students to pass.”)
To some extent, the recent growth of cyber learning parallels the emergence of any disruptive technology. Institutions, in their effort to catch up with the latest invention, will naturally find themselves stumbling through a transitional phase. What’s unique about the cyber-school proliferation, though, is that the primary incentive—the need to compete financially—is largely a creature of the legislature’s making. The state, in applying the current funding formula, has put extraordinary pressure on districts to make changes that they might otherwise have avoided.
In late September, I spoke with Ames-Borrel about how Cougar’s second year was going. Our conversations had soured somewhat, after she and Veno had declined my request to visit the classroom itself, on the grounds that the program was “still in its infancy.” But she was able to explain some of the reasons she thought cyber education could help certain students. The computer program had the ability to detect which skills were most difficult for each student and could tailor future lessons to address those areas. It could also create individualized reports for the teachers, who could then pull the student aside for “targeted intervention.”
Are these things that teachers couldn’t do without computers? I thought of a passage in “Player Piano,” the Kurt Vonnegut novel about a society run by engineers, in which a manager asks his subordinate to come up with an instrument for detecting mice in a factory. Meanwhile, he is holding and petting a cat.
Ames-Borrel and I went back and forth for several minutes about what, exactly, a teacher did in the classroom of Cougar Academy. I couldn’t understand how a single math teacher, for example, could provide instruction to a room full of students across all four years, all simultaneously working on different subjects. I observed that, in my high school math class, if a student started doing science homework, he’d get in trouble. Was that not the case at Cougar?
“No, and—” Ames-Borrel sounded frustrated. “I don’t even know where these questions are coming from. Like, really? It’s online learning. There isn’t a true comparison. What we’re trying to do in these 45 days is teach the students how to be online learners. So, in the course of your day, you may decide, ‘I’m gonna check email first, then I’m gonna do this, then I’m gonna check my Facebook, then I’ll do Twitter.’ Those are all things that you do because you have unlimited access to those resources, because you’re online. One of the things about online learning is that you have the option to choose and do the things that interest you, or whatever. There is no prescribed time.”
In that case, I thought, teachers at Cougar Academy were hardly teachers at all—they were more like instructional training wheels, to help the students transition to self-guided learning at home. Of course, that’s ultimately the experiment of cyber school: to see whether some or all of a teacher’s functions can be fulfilled by programmable devices.
I thought of a moment during my walkthrough with Brzycki in June. At one point, in the school’s virtual study hall, we entered what’s known as a “whiteboard session,” an interval of teacher-led instruction on a digital chalkboard. A handful of student avatars stood in the room, along with a pair of teachers. Brzycki approached one, and a chat box opened. She explained she was an administrator on a tour.
Where are you? Brzycki typed into the chat box.
Pittsburgh, the teacher replied.
What do you teach?
Math.
We asked the teacher for a whiteboard session on how to solve for x. But, for reasons unknown to Brzycki, the program was acting buggy. There were long lags between the teacher’s marks on the board, and for a while the screen went black. When we finally exited the session, the virtual lab was empty, and Brzycki’s avatar stood alone. “Uh-oh,” she said. She clicked around in vain.
“Our teachers are gone,” she said.
Correction: The print edition of this article contained an inaccurate statement about the way in which charter school reimbursements are calculated. When a student leaves a school district to attend a charter or cyber charter school, her departure does not affect the total number of district students in the reimbursement formula, as was originally reported.
