“The teachers from India had access to student records”

by David Safier

When I first wrote about Arizona Virtual Academy sending student papers to India, I received a comment from “Suji” who claimed to be one of the people who worked on the papers in India. I use the word “claimed” because I have no way of knowing the identity of the commenter. However, the comments seemed to demonstrate knowledge of the situation as I understand it, so I find them credible.

I received a second comment from Suji a few days ago. Here it is:

I was initially involved in this project, but no longer associated with it. During the 2006-2007 year, the teachers from India had access to student records. In fact, the teachers were listed as “secondary teachers” on courses – there was one US based teacher and another India based secondary teacher for the course. The teacher in India had additional teachers helping with the review of written work.

Our job was to help young students become better writers – we were not simply grading, but actually inspiring students to write better. There were back and forth asynchronous interactions between the student and the teachers in India.

As in the earlier comment, Suji stated that “the teachers from India had access to student records.” When I spoke to Mary Gifford of K12, she assured me the papers were “scrubbed” of any personal information. There’s no way both of those statements can be true. Suji goes on to say “the teachers were listed as ‘secondary teachers’ on courses.” Gifford referred to the people in India as “outside scorers.” She went out of her way to diminish their importance, as if they were just there to give AZVA teachers a little bit of help with their heavy grading schedules. She insisted they were neither tutors nor teachers.

Suji clearly takes pride in the work done in India, which may be deserved. As I said earlier, I’m not questioning the qualifications of the workers or the quality of their work. In fact, this would be something K12, Inc. might take pride in as well if the publicly traded company actually believed what it was doing had educational value. But instead it tried to hide the practice of sending papers to India from parents, which tells me it didn’t believe the practice was defensible. I have reason to believe that AZVA went even further and told parents it was no longer sending papers to India when the parents complained, then continued the practice through the school year. That’s an inexcusable breach of trust.

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