1 / 13

Virtual Charter Schools Realities and Unknowns

Virtual Charter Schools Realities and Unknowns. Daniela Torre UCEA Graduate Student Summit November 14, 2012. What is a Virtual Charter School?.

amos-bishop
Télécharger la présentation

Virtual Charter Schools Realities and Unknowns

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Virtual Charter Schools Realities and Unknowns Daniela Torre UCEA Graduate Student Summit November 14, 2012

  2. What is a Virtual Charter School? “…wholly public educational organization that offers full-time instruction at the K-12 level at least partially through Internet-based methods, with time and/or distance separating the teacher and learner (Rhim & Kowal, 2010, p.4). • Enhancement vs. replacement vs. blended (Means et al., 2010) • Location: home, school, third place • Instructor: parent, computer program, other adults • Asynchronous vs. Synchronous

  3. VCS Landscape • Privatization & School Choice • Provides incentives for providers to innovate • Supports pluralism and parent choice • Weakens government monopoly (Minow, 2003) • Homeschooling movement • Most extreme form of school choice • Rapid growth since the 1990s • Relationship to for-profit companies • 75% of students enrolled in VCS attend school managed by a for profit company

  4. VCS Growth • Difficult to measure • Failure to disaggregate online programs by authorizer type or distinguish between replacement and supplemental programs.

  5. Who Enrolls in VCS? • Students who were previously home-schooled • Minorities may be underrepresented (Guarino, et al., 2005). • High concentration of special needs students in some schools (Baker, Bouras, Hartwig & McNair, 2005).

  6. Equitable Access • Digital divide • Race/ethnicity gap • Urban/rural gap • SES gap • Home Support

  7. Why VCS? • Students and Families • Individualized instruction • Expand community of learners • For former homeschooled children, less financial burden • Part of a movement (Means et al., 2009) • States or Districts • Expand access to students • Reduce geographic barriers of teacher labor force • Expand choices for constituents • Reduce costs and increase efficiency

  8. Instruction • Teacher • Work load • Student teacher ratio • Level of support • Parent • Level of support • Role within program • Computer • Variability in programs • Ongoing assessment

  9. The Costs of VCS • Fixed costs • Curriculum development • $4,500 to more than $1,000,000 • Server access and set up • Variable costs • Phones and phone service for teachers • Computers • Internet access • Teacher compensation • Student funding • How much? • Who pays?

  10. VCS and Accountability • Instructional hours and Enrollment • Should be calculated over a longer span of time • Alabama: Clock hours • Florida: courses completed • Quality of instruction • Teacher certification mirrors that for charter schools • Parent qualifications? • Quality of student work • Academic dishonesty • Quality of assessments • Constraints due to format • Data collection • Monitoring • Contact between parents and students

  11. VCS Outcomes • Few empirical studies “Those making policy should be clear on this key point: there exists no evidence from research that full-time virtual schooling at the K-12 level is an adequate replacement for traditional face-to-face teaching and learning” (2011, p.5). • Positive findings • Blended learning • Programs that explicitly teach time management • Asynchronous learning • Negative findings • Student experiences • High turnover and drop out rates • Lower achievement on standardized assessments

  12. Future Research • Quantitative study of student achievement outcomes controlling for selection bias and other factors • Qualitative study about the experiences of students and teachers within VCS • The differential experiences of students in VCS depending on age. • Study access to VCS by breaking down enrollment data according to race/ethnicity, gender, El status, special needs status.

  13. Thank You Daniela Torre Vanderbilt University daniela.torre@vanderbilt.edu

More Related