The Star Covers AZVA, Including Outsourcing

by David Safier

The front-page-with-photo story in today’s Star is ‘Attending’ school on the Web. The reporter, Rhonda Bodfield, does her usual thorough job, pulling together a variety of perspectives into an article that leaves you knowing a great deal more about the subject than when you began reading.

But since my blog posts about Arizona Virtual Academy and my discussions with Bodfield are part of the story, I know enough to be frustrated by the roads not taken and the leads not followed. So I’m taking advantage of my platform on BlogforArizona to look at portions of her story.

Much of the article is a glowing description of the possibilities of online schools, focusing on a student who’s flourishing at Arizona Virtual Academy and an online school teacher who likes what he’s doing. I have no real objection to that angle. As I’ve said before, I have problems with the virtual school model, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t be an option for families. Who am I to tell parents what kind of education their children should have? And I have no problem with the idea of state-funded virtual schools.

Bodfield discusses the important question of whether virtual schools should get the same funding as brick-and-mortar schools, but she misses a crucial point. Online charter schools are given more-or-less the same state funding as other charter schools, and once they receive the funds, they spend them as they please with little or no oversight. If a school decides to pay administrators inflated salaries, as some of them do, the state doesn’t care. If a for profit school like AZVA spends less on students and keeps the rest as profits, that’s OK too. Here’s the point Bodfield should have made more forcefully: state education dollars are being spent with little or no accounting of where the money goes, and that’s wrong no matter what kind of school is spending the money. The problem is most obvious when it comes to virtual schools because they get the same funding as other charter schools but have significantly lower expenses.

Bodfield writes about my reporting on K12 Inc.’s outsourcing:

Safier broke the news on his blog that K12 had outsourced grading to India, a practice the provider has discontinued.

The story came to light after some parents noticed mixed-up pronouns on graded papers. Safier accuses the company of breaching the trust of parents and students. He said he isn’t convinced that the Indian workers, who weren’t subject to fingerprinting, didn’t have access to student data, although a K12 spokeswoman said the data were scrubbed of identifying details.

What frustrates me about this passage is the “He said, She said” approach to my assertion that the India-based workers had access to student information. I go crazy when I see this kind of reporting in print and on television. Either I have it right or the K12 spokeswoman does. This isn’t a difference of opinion, it’s a question of whether student names went to India along with the student papers or they didn’t. And Bodfield understates my position on the subject when she writes in the double negative, “He said he isn’t convinced that the Indian workers, who weren’t subject to fingerprinting, didn’t have access to student data.” The fact is, I’m convinced by the hard evidence I possess that student names were on the papers that went to India, as I’ve stated in a number of posts. It’s possible my evidence is faulty, but I doubt it.

Bodfield shouldn’t let K12 off this easily. She should have asked the spokeswoman specific questions: Have you checked to see if student names were left on papers that went to India? Have you checked to see if numerous grade tracking sheets, each with the names of as many as 180 students, went to India? K12 should answer those questions definitively,or Bodfield should report that the company refused to answer.

Maybe Bodfield plans a follow up article where she goes into that question in more detail. If not, she dropped the ball on the most important part of what I uncovered. If names and other information about the students and their families followed the papers to India, that is at the very least a breach of student privacy and security, and very possibly a violation of Arizona law. If K12 is lying about “scrubbing” the papers of identifying details, it’s guilty of a cover up as well.

Bodfield misstated one thing I said, though I think the problem was the way I wandered from point to point as we spoke, so let me correct the record. She writes:

Safier also has concerns about quality, fretting that some online providers, using what he dubs “lesson plans in a can,” are flirting with replacing teachers altogether.

What I meant to say was, the K12 educational model uses a prepackaged curriculum, which I referred to by the term teachers sometimes use, “lesson plan in a can.” The idea isn’t that K12 wants to get rid of teachers; it wants to marginalize their importance in the educational process. K12’s model is to use teachers as interchangeable workers whose job is to assist the students in absorbing a preset curriculum. It’s an assembly line approach to education, where the students are so many identical machines being assembled by workers trained to perform a series of rote tasks the same way, over and over.

No wonder K12 thinks outsourcing grading to people in India who have absolutely no contact with the students is fine. That’s in keeping with the corporation’s “lesson plan in a can” model of education.

Finally, two items in the article are interesting if they’re accurate. The first is that K12 claims it’s no longer outsourcing grading to India. That may be true, but I would like to ask a follow up question: “Does that mean that no student work is being sent out of the country from any K12 schools for any reason?” When I spoke with Mary Gifford earlier, she went to great lengths to assert that no “grading” or “teaching” was being done in India. The papers were being “scored,” not graded. It would be nice to find out if the answer Bodfield received was a straight forward answer or a linguistic evasion.

The second is:

The school now will standardize communication so parents will be universally informed if someone other than the teacher reviews class work.

You’ve heard of non-denial denials. Now you’ve read a non-admission admission. If parents will be “universally informed if someone other than the teacher reviews class work,” that tells me they weren’t “universally informed” before. If that’s true, it’s good to know K12 will tell their parents the truth on this front from now on. It would be nice if they openly admitted that they didn’t “universally inform” parents in the past.