Dive Brief:
- Alabama State Superintendent Michael Sentance said he has "questions" around the finances and academic rigor surrounding virtual classes in state schools, according to AL.com.
- The Eufala and Athens school districts have both seen a surge in enrollment since offering virtual schools, which has resulted in a surge in funding, since Alabama, like many other states, allocates money based on enrollment.
- Director of Innovative Programs Dr. Rick Carter said virtual schools are actually not less expensive education options, and emphasized the idea that students considered "at-risk" require more funding than students who are on-grade level.
Dive Insight:
The questions Sentance raised are similar to the questions surrounding for-profit education in higher ed. Much of the recent scrutiny over for-profit providers, both in the K-12 and higher ed space, is around the financial incentive to enroll as many students as possible, and the lack of incentive to ensure these students are successful in school and well-prepared for life after graduation. However, increasingly, these are the same concerns with traditional schooling, where "financial incentive" may be replaced by demographic necessity.
Online courses and schooling have largely taken off in popularity as an answer to the overcrowding in traditional courses due to a lack of funding and teacher shortages across the country. Potential benefits to students are endless: For example, students may be afforded the opportunity to receive instruction in more languages than a school can provide foreign language staff to teach. And as the gig economy spreads to education, the opportunity to interact with students and instructors in different parts of the country or the world helps bring new perspectives into traditional subjects like science and reading.
