Mr. Number Looks at K12 Inc.’s “Additional Cost” Claim

by David Safier

NOTE: You can read all my posts on the topic of AZVA, K12 Inc. and outsourcing here. If you only want to read one post, An Explanation of the AZVA Outsourcing Process pulls most of the threads together.

I’ve said in earlier posts that I think K12 Inc. sent student papers to India from Arizona Virtual Academy and other of its schools to save money and increase profits. But in the recent Education Week article on the subject, a K12 representative disagrees:

The essay-review program aimed to save teachers time so they could offer students other activities, such as online writing workshops, and reduce the delay between students’ submissions of essay drafts and their receipt of feedback, Mr. Kwitowski said. He flatly rejected another of Mr. Safier’s assertions, that the use of the reviewers was a cost-cutting measure.

“That is absolutely incorrect—it was an additional cost on K12,” Mr. Kwitowski said.

An additional cost, he says. To dispute that claim, instead of calling on Dr. Word, I’m going to get Mr. Number to look at the math.

(Dr. Word and Mr. Number? I seem to remember a Robert Louis Stevenson novel with a similar name. “All day, Dr. Word sits in his study poring over his twenty volume Oxford English Dictionary. By night, he transforms into Mr. Number, prowling Tucson’s dark streets and dangerous back alleys terrorizing citizens with questions about polynomials and quadratic equations. The police have laboured in vain to discover the fiend’s identity and have found only a discarded slide rule covered with jagged teeth marks.”)

True, K12 spent money hiring the India-based scorers. But someone had to go over those papers, and if it wasn’t the Indian workers, it would have fallen onto the shoulders of AZVA’s teachers.

As an English teacher, I have some idea of how long it takes to grade a student’s paper conscientiously and carefully. An experienced teacher can read, comment on and grade a normal student essay in about 4-7 minutes. If the teacher has to fill out the rubric AZVA uses — scoring the essay from 1-5 in five different categories and writing a short explanation of the paper’s strength and weaknesses in each category, the time goes up to 7-8 minutes per paper. I’ll generously say this figure includes time to sip coffee, talk briefly with a colleague and bang one’s head on the table muttering, “If I have to grade one more paper today, I’m going to go out of my mind.”

So let’s say the India-based scorer/commenter spends about 7.5 minutes per paper. That’s 8 papers per hour. The class lists I viewed from AZVA had about 180 students. That means it would take about 22 hours to grade one complete set of papers. (I’ll bet those of you who never taught English had no idea how many hours we slaved over your papers, did you?)

Each writing assignment has three separate parts: Planning, First Draft and Final Draft. So that totals 66 hours of grading per essay per class of 180 students.

For a teacher working a 40 hour week, that’s a week and three days. Each student writes about an essay a month.

Can AZVA English teachers devote a week and three days each month to grading essays and still have time for their other duties? I’m guessing the answer is no. So K12 either has to hire more teachers at U.S. wages to lessen the workload, or hire India-based graders at a fraction of the cost.

Mr. Number concludes Mr. Kwitowski is incorrect when he says the India-based paper graders were “an additional cost on K12.” To me, it looks like a considerable saving.

Since we’re talking numbers, let’s do a word problem,shall we? “If AZVA has approximately 4,000 students, and its website lists about 80 teachers, what is the school’s student-teacher ratio?”

I’ll give you the answer. The ratio is 50-1. I’ve never heard of a brick-and-mortar school with a ratio anywhere near that high. Since AZVA gets the same amount of money from the state per student as every other charter school, it seems to me it can afford to hire a few more teachers instead of farming out paper grading to India.

Oh, and there’s a passage in an article about virtual charter schools in the Star that makes it seem like AZVA spends less on each teacher than other schools. According to the article, Dan Tucker, who teaches high school math at AZVA and used to teach at a brick-and-mortar charter school, likes the online work even though “the benefits aren’t comparable to those of the public system.”

So, let’s put this all together. AZVA has fewer teachers per student than most schools and spends less per teacher. But it sends its students’ essays to India instead of hiring more teachers it could well afford if it cared more about its students and less about the bottom line. And that’s called “an additional cost on K12.”

Mr. Number says, K12’s numbers don’t add up.