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Progress Texas doesn’t much like the virtual school movement that has drawn increasing numbers of the state’s grade-school students away from real classrooms, many of them full-time. For one thing, it’s proven ineffective, the group argues in a report released yesterday.
Case in point: Texas Virtual Academy, an online charter school founded shortly after the state legislature allowed virtual schools in 2007, did not meet state academic standards for two years in a row yet somehow managed to remain open.
Since schools are allowed to subcontract for curriculum development, the virtual education movement is allowing for-profit corporations to pump large sums of cash from an already underfunded public school system.
Orchestrating the nationwide push for virtual schooling, which has been most successful in Florida with more than 120,000, is the American Legislative Exchange Council, the now-famous conservative bill factory behind such legislation as the Stand-Your-Ground laws.
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ALEC’s enforcer on virtual schools in Texas, at least according to Progress Texas, is retiring state Sen. Florence Shapiro of Plano. Shapiro sits on ALEC’s Education Task Force and, in last year’s legislative session, as chair of the Senate Education Committee, appended a provision to an education funding bill giving virtual schools access to the same level of per-student foundation funding from the state as their physical counterparts.
Which Progress Texas says makes Shapiro a hypocrite and a shill for the private education industry.
I’m waiting on word from Shapiro’s offices, but according to the Quorum Report, she brushed off the attacks as an attempt to maintain the status quo.
If you strip away Progress Texas’ pronounced leftward tilt and obsession with ALEC, what you’re left with is a portrait of a poorly regulated offshoot of public education in which corporate money seems to have disconcerting influence.
But if the Shapiro-ALEC-corporate triad has so effectively pushed the virtual school agenday, why, according to this, was funding cut from $10 million to $4 million? And why does enrollment seem to have dropped by more than four-fifths from highs last year? Something to look into.
Invisible Schools, Invisible Success
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