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Louisiana is poised to establish the nation's most expansive system of school choice by adopting a package of vouchers and other tools that would give many parents control over the use of tax dollars to educate their children. The initiative would effectively redefine vouchers, which have typically helped lower-income public-school students pay for private schools. Vouchers could now also be used by students to pay for state-approved apprenticeships at local businesses, as well as college courses and private online classes, while they are still in public schools.

Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories, wanted the school to institute austerity measures and re-engineer its academic offerings around inexpensive, online education, the emails reveal. Led by Rector Helen Dragas, a real estate developer appointed six years ago, the board shared a guiding vision that the university could, and indeed should, be run like a Fortune 500 company.

"The National Press Club Newsmaker Program holds a discussion on school choice programs in Washington, D.C. Speakers discuss whether the choice options work for students and how options such as charter schools, vouchers, online education and homeschooling compare to traditional public schools. They also examine what political candidates are saying about school choice options and whether their claims are true. Participants include: Dr. Kevin Welner of the University of Colorado and Dir. of the Natl. Education Policy Center; Dr. Gary Miron of Western Michigan University; Policy and Advocacy for the Natl. Association of Charter School Authorizers Vice President Alex Medler; Executive Director of the District of Columbia's 21st Century School Fund Mary Filardo; and Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute Policy Analyst Adam Schaeffer. Drs. Kevin Welner and Gary Miron are contributors to the book: Exploring the School Choice Universe: Evidence and Recommendations, being released this week. The book raises critical questions about the performance of choice programs."

Traditional teacher certification is hardly ideal, but it is a paragon compared with online, for-profit programs. A closer look at what is taking place in Texas leads to the inescapable conclusion that the alternative process has gone too far.

In the span of the last two weeks, three articles were published about the role of for-profit corporations in K-12 online learning. Individually and collectively, they are serious and comprehensive pieces of investigative journalism and they all reach similar conclusions and raise serious concerns about the role of these companies, especially K12, Inc., in the public education landscape.

A couple of days ago, my friend Howard Blumenthal sent along this essay that his 86-year-old father wrote in response to a post here about online learning from a few weeks ago. I thought it might make for some uplifting Sunday reading, so I'm sharing it here. Enjoy!

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum - a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan's experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises.

I always thought that the only kids getting their entire public schooling online were in the hospital, living in the Alaskan tundra, or pursuing a career as a singing orphan in the road company of "Annie." Not so. There are now around 250,000 cyberschool students in kindergarten through high school and the number is growing fast.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Faced with scandals and complaints involving teachers who misuse social media, school districts across the country are imposing strict new guidelines that ban private conversations between teachers and their students on cellphones and online platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The most famous teacher in the United States right now is Salman Khan, creator of Khan Academy.  Khan Academy is a collection of nearly 3,000 online youtube tutorials mainly about math and science.  Bill Gates watches the videos with his kids, and has made Khan a household name.  Because of Khan, a new buzz-word in education is the 'flipped' classroom where kids are expected to watch videos the night before and then do their 'homework' in class, supervised by the teacher.

Guest blogger Ron Packard is CEO of K12 Inc., the country's largest online learning company. In this post, he responds to criticisms of the effectiveness and cost of K12′s schools raised in a New York Times report last week.

Today, Rachel Monahan reported in the Daily News that the DOE is going forward with a contract for Joel Rose's new company to run the School of One in NYC public schools. Joel Rose devised and ran the "School of One" for DOE, a much-hyped online program to teach middle school math, starting in the summer of 2009.  Rose has had a pretty standard trajectory for a corporate reformer: he started as a TFA recruit, then worked for seven years at Edison charter schools under Chris Cerf, moved over to DOE as Cerf's chief of staff in 2006, and started the "School of One" as a summer school program in a few middle schools.

Khan's idea does not represent a "revolution." Posting video tutorials online is a great idea, and I have no doubt that some teachers find value in "flipping" the curriculum so that students can utilize class time to get one-on-one help. But to suggest that this is a revolution-or that it will have even a modest impact on our overall education system-is pure delusion.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing. Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll. By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Some intended learning sticks with us, some slips away into oblivion and most hovers somewhere in between. The determinants are nuanced and complex. In all of the current enthusiasm for so-called flipped classrooms and the wonders of the Khan Academy's online lectures these distinction are often overlooked.

A new report released today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado shows that students at K12 Inc., the nation's largest virtual school company, are falling further behind in reading and math scores than students in brick-and-mortar schools. These virtual schools students are also less likely to remain at their schools for the full year, and the schools have low graduation rates. "Our in-depth look into K12 Inc. raises enormous red flags," said NEPC Director Kevin Welner. The report's findings will be presented in Washington today to a national meeting of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), where the report's lead author, Dr. Gary Miron, is scheduled to debate Dr. Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. The report is titled, Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools.

The Beaver County-based Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School, which was searched by federal agents Thursday, pays tens of millions of dollars a year to a network of nonprofit and for-profit companies run by former executives of the state's largest online public school. The relationships between the school and those businesses were a concern to former Gov. Ed Rendell's administration, which late in its tenure asked PA Cyber for better accounting of its payments to spin-off entities. Gov. Tom Corbett's Department of Education, though, opted early on to let the relationships continue without heightened accountability. The amount of public money that flows to PA Cyber, and then out through its spinoffs, has grown dramatically as the school's enrollment has surged to around 11,300 students statewide.

As attendees stood up to leave the hall, the phalanx of lobbyists surrounding the room converged, buttonholing legislators and school officials. On a floor above the main hall, an expo center had been set up, with companies like McGraw-Hill, Connections Academy, K12 Inc., proud sponsors of the event, providing information on how to work with politicians to make education technology a reality.