Additionally, the governor is proposing legislation that would cap enrollment of low-performing cyber charters until performance improves, impose a moratorium on new cyber charter schools, subject charter management companies to the state’s Right to Know Law, and establish a new funding formula for charters.

“Pennsylvania’s charter school law is the worst in the nation and is failing students, teachers, school districts and taxpayers,” Wolf said in a news release. “There are high-quality charter schools, but some of them, especially some cyber charter schools, are underperforming.

This means that for over a decade and a half, the most vulnerable and struggling districts lost proportionally the most students along with their per-pupil funding.

companies providing the service

Over the three growth periods in this study, the typical charter school student in Pennsylvania hadsimilar academic growth in reading and weaker math growth compared to their TPS counterparts. Inmath, the learning difference is about the equivalent to losing 30 days of learning compared to theirTPS peers. In the first two growth periods of the study, students in Pennsylvania charter schoolsexperience growth similar to their TPS peers in reading, while experiencing weaker growth in math. Bythe third growth period, students in Pennsylvania charter schools exhibit similar growth to their TPScounterparts in both reading and math.

The third set of analysis illustrates the impact of online charter schools in Pennsylvania, also referredto as cyber charter schools.

The 2011 findings also showed wide variation in student andschool performance, with a quarter of charter schools outperforming their local school options inreading and over half outpacing their local TPS in math.

"I'd tell my teacher, 'I don't get this,' and she'd say, 'You have to figure it out for yourself,' and I'd say, 'But I don't get it,'"

"I was told that in the student-centered model, my role as a teacher was primarily to supervise students to make sure they were using Buzz."

The companies needed the EAA's students to do well in order to prove the effectiveness of their products when making sales pitches to other schools and districts;

met students where they were academically rather than forcing them to march lock-step through the traditional, age-based grade system.

"Usually these teams are built around the more experienced teachers. It is problematic when novice or non-teachers are in charge of creating school-based curriculum and course content."

"We're building this plane as we fly it," is a phrase numerous sources we've interviewed have attributed to Mary Esselman, who was in the thick of the technological planning.

"We do have too many failing schools in our state," he said. "If you look at us statewide, only 16 percent of our kids are college-ready. That's absolutely unacceptable.

So, once again, we have proof that, instead of investing the resources necessary to accomplish the goal of turning around our worst-performing schools as quickly as possible, the EAA operated on the cheap, using an untested, unproven, beta stage software platform with the teachers and students the beta testing guinea pigs.

Instead of being a model for implementing a computer-based teaching model, BUZZ crashed regularly, had major content deficiencies, and was so hard to use that its benefits were all but overwhelmed by its flaws.

help you identify your high opportunity students

If you are a Canvas-user, enable the Notes column in your gradebook and record brief notes about what each student has shared with you.

building community is at the heart of learning, whether on-ground, online, or hybrid.

The pedagogies of most online classes, then, are fixed in advance.

Sometimes, clear objectives or outcomes are important at the outset of an assignment or course, but we need to leave room for those outcomes to be more roughly handled.

I so often hear variations of “my students won’t do this assignment if it’s not worth points.” We need to give students reasons less banal than points to do the work of learning.

Those of us responsible for education (both its formation and care) are hugging too tightly to what we’ve helped build, its pillars, policies, economies, and institutions. None of these, though, map promisingly into digital space.

and lackluster (or lack of) pedagogy

We should not try to fix what’s wrong with online learning now; instead, we should pretend it never happened, start from scratch, and begin playfully outside the borders of how we’ve always taught and how we relate to the machines that can help us teach

adoptable

“How can we eliminate a text book?” “How can we make assignments that are meaningful, student-centered, and relevant?” “How can we make this course equally accessible to native English speakers and second language learners?”

we should never let its design decisions — its architecture — dictate our pedagogies.

Online and hybrid course design should be motivated not by cost savings but by the pedagogical benefits of learning that happens and persists beyond the classroom.

The chunks, though, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, semesters, quarters, are arbitrary. The course is not always the best container for learning.

At many institutions there’s a problematic divide between instructional designers and teachers — between those building online courses and those teaching them. Expert teachers need to build their own online courses or we need to create closer collaborative relationships between teachers and instructional designers.

Rigor has to be fostered through genuine engagement.

What we need is to ignore the hype and misrepresentations (on both sides of the debate) and gather together more people willing to carefully reflect on how, where, and why we learn online.

Grading is based on student mastery of a set of standards and assessments that are created at the networklevel.

The tools and resources are then linked to their curriculum map so teachers can understand howto meaningfully integrate digital content or tools into their lessons.

Ifwe can’t do it in all schools, we don’t do it in any schools.

students go through an intake with the teachersto understand why they failed the chapter test and what skills they are deficient in.

Much depends,however, on whetherone considers a teacher-created Google document,slides, or spreadsheetto be online content

Online curriculum, instructional materials, andonline drills that do not include the full scopeand sequence of a for-credit course.

The education programwas created to fill gaps in student learning, to challenge students who have exceptionally high ability levels,to provide high school credit opportunities for students who are eligible to do so but struggle with certaincurricula, and to create opportunities for students who need to have an alternate route to graduation.

it’s really a time for them to interact with me

“no significant differencesbetween online and face-to-face students in pass ratesin subsequent math classesor their likelihood of beingon track for graduationat the end of the secondyear of high school.”

Urban schools were more likely to offercredit recovery than suburban schools,high-poverty more likely than low-poverty, and large schools more likelythan small schools

Some, like the Missouri Virtual Instructional Program andWest Virginia Virtual, mostly or entirely rely on courses and teachers from private vendors, which they thenprovide to schools across their state.

RVA’s online course catalog offers studentsaccess to a variety of courses, many more than what most of the small districts in the consortium wouldotherwise be able to provide.

Most online school studentshave needs that are not wellmet by traditional schools,desire a high level of timeflexibility, and have parents/families who are able tosupport their learningat home.

The categories overlap; for example, online schools use data and assessment extensively. Traditionalschools, however, often use data and assessment in the absence of online courses, which is why weput data and assessment in its own category