Should cyber schools be paid based on annual retention?

It has been suggested that Cyber Schools should be paid based upon how they retain students annually. Students choose cyber schools for many reasons. Among them is what I like to call the three B’s.

1. Bad grades which require remediation services.

2. Bullying which can be removed by providing an alternative individualized instructional environment.

3. Bad behavior which does not matter because social interaction is limited to purposeful choices of interaction in an asynchronous learning environment.

Today I will discuss #1 of the three B’s. I disagree with changing the funding formula to annual retention because remediation will suffer for the following reasons…

1. Paying us for retention instead of instruction is to devalue the legitimate remediation services that we are providing and students are choosing.
2. Students who attend Cyber School also choose to go back to their schools after they have experienced success in a cyber environment. This is because their reason for leaving is gone after their grades have come back up.
3. Not all cyber schools have surpluses. Each cyber schools practices should be evaluated before a formula for funding is put in place. Perhaps some schools are investing more time in individual students.
4. We need to increase the cycle of enrollment and discharge so that the independent learner can be retained and served. To pay Cyber Schools to retain will discourage this process.
5. Paying us for retention can discourage innovative practices to reach greater individualized cases. Charter schools were introduced to be the laboratories of innovation in the educational system. When a funding formula is put in place which prioritizes stability, then innovation will suffer. Cyber schools have not been around long enough to develop the best practices possible. 

These are five reasons that I have come up with in the last half hour. I am sure my colleagues would be able to include many more.  Ultimately, as Jim Collins has said, "Good is the enemy of great". When we short change education reform, then we can never reach the greatness that change can bring.

Our cyber charter is moving toward more blended programs

 

http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/nepc-rb-k12-miron.pdf

This is a discouraging report. Our cyber charter is moving toward more blended programs. We call them brick and click schools. These are places where a group of parents pay facilitators to supervise 20 - 100 students. They move their computers to this location and attend school 2 to 3 days per week.

Math is a problem in cyber school, but it is also a problem in our schools in general. Perhaps multiple choice assessments need to be supplemented with a more scaffold ed approach.

As far as funding goes, not all cyber schools are working with the same economy of scale. If our cyber funding was cut by $4000- $5000 per per pupil we would need to change our model to a more correspondence type of instruction. There is nothing new or innovative about a correspondence course delivery system. We are not able to recruit students at the same rate as before. There is much more competition with traditional schools in Pennsylvania offering cyber options. In short I think that cyber schools are still too new to make this kind of radical funding change. Will the new cyber schools being introduced by traditional schools also experience these funding cuts?