New York Times Targets K12, Online Schools In Severely Biased Article

Since we began learning at home as a family, my daughter has had a couple of rough days. Call it a rough week, even. But compared to having her come home with injuries from bullies, having her self-esteem chipped at on a daily basis, and the fact that she started to develop tummy aches about getting on the bus each day when she used to grin ear to ear every morning anticipating the day she would be old enough to ride that bus to school, I'd call our rough week a mere bump in the road. As for my son, he hasn't had one day of learning at home that I could consider rough. He craves knowledge and literally begs me to continue teaching on weekends, a request I am happy to indulge. I can make choices about the children my children associate with. I'm aware of what they are learning and I can always easily slip curriculum-enriching things into our day. We don't have homework in the traditional sense, so our evenings are family time instead of a mad dash to finish a mountain of homework, take baths, throw down some dinner, and get into bed. And academically, they are excelling. The experience has made us all happier.

Homeschooling has been a wonderful option for us, and I can't say enough good things about K12. But apparently, people feel threatened by school choice (or is it the loss of funds for their districts?) and feel the need to attack online schools. A recent New York Times article was a catalyst for some major misconceptions about K12 and similar schools. I, and many others, took great offense to how K12 and the families enrolled in their school were portrayed.

My daughter attended a bricks and mortar school for two arduous years. While I will quickly admit that her classroom teachers were both excellent - even exceptional, I was profoundly unimpressed by everything else. Perhaps most disturbing was having a school system telling me how - and if - I could parent my own child for the great majority of the day, five days a week, while they failed to do even a mediocre job of protecting her or following their own policies. The lack of predictability, reliability, and safety were major concerns. The only thing predictable about sending my child out that door each day was that, at some point, I was going to get a call about some kid doing some thing to my child. Again.

I'm quite certain that having parents regaining control of their children's lives scares some people in this country to their very cores. Independent thinkers? Oh my. People like that are so much more difficult to control and manipulate, and they tend not to believe everything they're told. They ask questions. That could be bad for those who wish to maintain control over the masses.

The New York Times article, Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools throws out a real golden nugget of revelation with the statement, "Kids mean money." Wow, really? Anyone with a functioning brain above their stem realizes this as fact, but let's examine how this affects people on a personal level. The article attempts to make it sound like this is some kind of proof that K12 has profits over kids in mind, but I challenge any parent in any school district to take a good hard look and tell me if that isn't true for bricks and mortar schools - to a much greater degree. At public school, my child contributed thousands of dollars each year just by existing there. To her personally, that translated into a sub-standard school environment, heavily-used books and materials, and parents contributing a lot of time and money from our own pockets. On the other hand, I enrolled my children in K12, and I had 100 pounds of brand new school supplies delivered to my door. Free. Yes, free. We paid nothing. I had to go buy a bookshelf to dedicate to just the books, CDs, and DVDs alone, and I had to clear an entire cabinet in the kitchen for all of the science materials, paints, clay, and other materials. And comparatively speaking, my children cost taxpayers much less as homeschoolers than they would if they had continued to attend our local public schools.

The article presents another epic failure of an argument with this little gem: "Current and former staff members of K12 Inc. schools say problems begin with intense recruitment efforts that fail to filter out students who are not suited for the program, which requires strong parental commitment and self-motivated students." Here's a newsflash: any form of education requires strong parental commitment. Whether a child is attending a bricks and mortar school, an online school, a private school, or a traditional homeschool, parental involvement is the number one factor in a child's success. Uninvolved parents who do not participate in their child's education can turn the brightest child with the greatest potential for success into an academic failure with zero motivation, and it happens all the time in public schools.

I'm quite tired of parents being painted as morons who are incapable of contributing to their children's academic success. An Agora teacher paints a profoundly biased picture with the statement, "When you have the television and the Xbox and no parental figure at home, sometimes it’s hard to do your schoolwork." First of all, we don't even own a game console. Second, my children have never been left alone in their lives. And finally, K12 kids are assessed regularly. If they are not making it, there is accountability. We are responsible for making sure our children are progressing; there is not the huge disconnect portrayed in the article. Further, they quote a mother, Mrs. Ubiarco, as saying, "I called the teacher the other day to find out what a simple predicate is...She said it’s the verb. I said why don’t they just say that?" To this I say, wow. You needed to call a teacher for that? Try Google. Better yet, that handy little teacher's guide you get with every course might be helpful, too. The New York Times apparently left out all of the many successful examples of K12 students and found a handful of disgruntled teachers, and a few parents who use videogames to babysit their children, don't know how to tell their child to put the iPod away, and manage their time very poorly to represent our online school. Bias much?

Of our attendance requirements, the same Agora teacher who made the Xbox comment said, "Students need simply to log in to be marked present for the day." While it is true that K12 is not sending someone to the door of each and every homeschooled student each day to be sure each child has pencil to paper, the academic progress and assessments speak for themselves. A child who is not "attending" regularly is not going to meet standards, plain and simple.

And then, because you can't have any good, irrational anti-homeschool argument without bringing the topic of "socialization" into it, the deputy superintendent of Memphis City Schools, Irving Hamer, offered the following: “The early development of children requires lots of interaction with other children for purposes of socialization, developing collaboration and teamwork, and self-definition." Fascinating. Children couldn't possibly garner these skills from, say, Scouts, homeschool co-ops, neighborhood children, friends of the family, siblings, K12's field trips and other opportunities for social development, community sports or classes, or anywhere other than public school? I'd like to inquire as to when children are obtaining these wonderful social skills in school; would it be on the playground, the school bus, or in the lunch room? As far as my personal experience tells me, those are basically the only times children are doing any socializing in bricks and mortar schools - and it is largely unsupervised and where most bullying takes place. Ah, but Mr. Hamer's pompous assertions probably shouldn't surprise me, since a quick Google search revealed that he handles people who disagree with his policies by telling them to "go flip burgers". Nice. I think I'll pass on any social advice he proffers, particularly since Mr. Hamer's degree is in education and not child psychology.

The article (yes, it's quite lengthy) goes on to say that schools like K12 have "aggressive recruitment campaigns". I prefer to view them as awareness campaigns, which are rather necessary with anti-homeschool propaganda such as the New York Times article that prompted this blog post. K12 and schools like it do try to provide many informative opportunities for parents who have been brainwashed into believing that they cannot contribute much to their child's education beyond buying school clothes and supplies, and joining the PTA. Parents need to become aware of how much they really mean to their children in terms of learning and education. I cannot begin to count how many times people say to me, upon learning that I homeschool two advanced learners, "I could never do that." My response is always the same, "Yes, you absolutely could." Any parent with the time and desire to teach their child can teach their child. K12 has amazing teacher support. You are never alone. But public schools do everything they can to convince you that homeschooled children will be socially-awkward, poorly educated nitwits who will never go on to college. K12 has students go on to Harvard. But those students were not included in the Times article. I'd laugh at how utterly ridiculous the Times article is, if I didn't know so many people really believe that.

Is K12 perfect? No. But it's lightyears ahead of bricks and mortar schools in every way, in my opinion. Nothing is perfect. This is a relatively new concept and there will be bumps. Overall, I think this is a wonderful thing. There will always be naysayers who don't like change or who are just too uninformed to make any kind of judgment about this type of education. As for the New York Times, I'm not (nor was I ever) sure why people give that rag so much credibility. The reporting is poor and biased, the stories are highly sensationalized, and I wouldn't use that publication to line my cat's litter pan.