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K12 Inc. enrolls more public school students than any other private education management organization in the U.S. Much has been written about K12 Inc. (referred to in this report simply as "K12") by financial analysts and investigative journalists because it is a large, publicly traded company and is the dominant player in the operation and expansion of full-time virtual schools. This report provides a new perspective on the nation's largest virtual school provider through a systematic review and analysis of student characteristics, school finance, and school performance of K12-operated schools. Using federal and state data, this report provides a description of the students served by K12 and the public revenues received and spent by the company at the school level. Further, the report presents evidence from a range of school performance measures and strives to understand and explain the overall weak performance of these virtual schools.

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.

Sunday's newspaper featured a story about full-time public virtual schools, a new model of education that's growing fast even though critics say there's scant evidence that it is an effective way to teach kids. The story focused on Herndon-based K12 Inc., the nation's largest operator of virtual schools. Its schools (which educate about 95,000 students in 29 states and the District) tend to have lower state test scores and graduation rates than brick and mortar schools.

As an increasing number of cash-strapped states turn to virtual schools - where computers replace classmates and students learn via the Internet - a new study is raising questions about their quality and oversight. In research to be released Tuesday, scholars Kevin G. Welner and Gene V. Glass at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado assert that full-time virtual schools are largely unregulated.

Hundreds of students, parents and teachers from the Teaneck, N.J. Public school system rallied in the high school gymnasium Wednesday against a virtual charter school proposed for their town. As the school board was first told by the state, the diversion of taxpayer dollars to the virtual charter could mean the loss of as much as $15.4 million to the public schools. "Ultimately public schools will be losing 40 to 50 per cent of their budgets after a couple of years," said Shelley Worrell, co-president of the P.T.O. Council.

The number of students in virtual schools run by educational management organizations rose sharply last year, according to a new report being published Friday, and far fewer of them are proving proficient on standardized tests compared with their peers in other privately managed charter schools and in traditional public schools.

There was a time when working at the Bronx High School of Science seemed like the pinnacle of a teaching career in the New York public schools. Along with Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science is one of the city's most storied high schools and among its most celebrated public institutions of any kind-part of a select fraternity that promises a free education of the highest quality to anyone with the intelligence to qualify. Together, the three schools reflect some of the city's most prized values: achievement, brains, democracy. Founded in 1938, Bronx Science counts E. L. Doctorow and Stokely Carmichael among its alumni, as well as seven Nobel laureates and six Pulitzer Prize winners. It has spawned 135 Intel science-competition finalists-more than any other high school in America. Virtually every senior last year gained acceptance to one of the country's top colleges. The faculty has long been known as among the best, most beloved anywhere. Teachers have traditionally held on to their jobs for decades; some have come to teach the children of their former students. This spring and summer, however, more than a third of the school's social-studies department-eight of the twenty teachers-announced they wouldn't be returning for the 2011 school year. Their departure came after similar exoduses in other departments. In 2009, it was math; before that, English. In 2010, nearly a quarter of the teachers at Bronx Science had less than three years of experience; the corresponding numbers at Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech were 6 percent and 1 percent, respectively. The reason for the seismic upheaval, virtually everyone agrees, is Valerie Reidy.

Over just the past decade, online learning at the K-12 level has grown from a novelty to a movement. Often using the authority and mechanism of state charters, and in league with home schoolers and other allies, private companies and some state entities are now providing full-time online schooling to a rapidly increasing number of students in the U.S. Yet little or no research is available on the outcomes of such full-time virtual schooling. The rapid growth of virtual schooling raises several immediate, critical questions for legislators regarding matters such as cost, funding, and quality. This policy brief offers recommendations in these and other areas, and the accompanying legal brief offers legislative language to implement the recommendations.

For the past few weeks, I have been corresponding with some film producers who-encouraged perhaps by the commercial success of "Waiting for Superman"-have an inkling that some very important things are happening with public education in America...some things like crony capitalism, and an economy shifting to public risk and private profit. Recently they asked me whether the virtual schools trend was important. I offered the reply copied below.

Things are bad everywhere but nowhere is it worse than in Louisiana, where Gov. Bobby Jindal and State Superintendent John White threaten to annihilate the state's public schools with budget cuts, vouchers, the expansion of virtual charters, the erosion of teacher rights, and other forms of noxious corporate reform.  The following is by  Don Whittinghill , a consultant to the Louisiana School Boards Association (LSBA), a non-profit service organization representing local school board members in 69 local systems.

One of the leading criticisms of voucher programs-and charter and virtual schools for that matter-is that they undermine traditional public schools' finances by sucking away their per-pupil funding and resources. A new paper published by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, which supports public and private school choice, challenges that assertion.

The virtual teacher has arrived - flickering away on a screen on a school bus, in a bunk bed or in the shade of a beach umbrella, and turning traditional education on its head.

Lee Fang talks about the national movement to reform public education through vouchers, charters, and privatization, and the rise of "virtual schools"-charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet. His article "How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools" appears in the December 5 issue of The Nation.

A Virginia company leading a national movement to replace classrooms with computers - in which children as young as 5 can learn at home at taxpayer expense - is facing a backlash from critics who are questioning its funding, quality and oversight.

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.

Five for-profit companies control the cyberschool market: K12 Inc., Connections Academy, Educational Options, Apex Learning, and Plato. These virtual charter school providers supply course material, keep track of student achievement and hire educators.   

A shareholder in Virginia-based K12 Inc. has filed a lawsuit against the virtual-schools operator in federal court, alleging that the firm violated securities law by making false statements to investors about students' poor performance on standardized tests. The class-action complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, also accuses K12 of boosting its enrollment and revenues through "deceptive recruiting" practices.

Many of the so-called "reformers" and many of their allies among Republican governors and legislators seem to - after all, that is why they have been pushing this particular approach for a number years. If you have any interest in this topic, I am going to strongly urge you to read a just-released policy brief from the National Education Policy Center.  Titled Understanding and Improving Full-Time Virtual Schools, and has a subtitle which reads "A Study of Student Characteristics, School Finance, and School Performance in Schools Operated by K12 Inc.: The authors are Gary Miron, a professor at Western Michigan University, and Jessica L. Urschel, a doctoral student at the University.  K12 Inc. is the nation's largest operator of online charter schools, and is controversial enough that New Jersey, whose governor Chris Christie has been actively involved in undermining public education in that state, just postponed acting on a request from K12 to open a charter in that state.

Documents expose the flow of money and influence from corporations that stand to profit from state leaders' efforts to expand and deregulate digital education.

Teachers who give standardized tests are required to sign affidavits swearing they will not copy the tests, or divulge their contents. Thus teachers are forbidden from airing concerns they might have about the contents of the tests. The tests have become the ultimate authorities in our schools, and the test publishers are virtually unquestionable. The standardized testing technocracy has convinced our policy makers that the only way we will be competitive in the world is if everyone learns the same information, and has that learning measured in ever-finer increments. We are not supposed to look behind the curtain to see the way this data is arrived at.