Michael B. Horn: Colorado's Crummy Policies Lead to Crummy Virtual Schools

An investigation of Colorado’s full-time virtual schools has revealed some dubious results and practices, which led the state’s Senate President to call for an emergency audit of all of Colorado’s virtual schools.
But the state shouldn’t be shocked by the report. As the truism goes, you get what you pay for.
Colorado’s policy environment incentivizes exactly what it’s getting from its full-time virtual schools—and arguably not just its virtual schools, but all of its schools statewide.
The biggest problem is this: It pays a school all of its funds on a “count day” on October 1 based on the number of students enrolled on that day. If students leave afterward, the original school keeps the funds. If students enroll elsewhere, the new school receives no funds.
This incentivizes providers to enroll students, but there are few incentives in place to focus on what happens after that. As a result, a significant number of online providers seem to have followed these incentives and done exactly what Colorado paid them to do. The end result isn’t pretty for students, as a great number of them allegedly leave soon after the count day and enroll back in district schools if they enroll elsewhere at all.
Some are using this to bash all online learning, as well as for-profit providers that are seizing this revenue-making opportunity (as many such providers did in higher education), but in so doing, these critics are missing the point.
As I’ve written numerous times, studying whether online learning is more or less effective than traditional learning is invariably asking the wrong question. Online and blended learning have the potential to dramatically transform our education system by being able to individualize for each student’s distinct learning needs, but whether it does so will have a lot to do with policy—whether we change the incentives and focus not on merely serving students and micro-managing the inputs, but instead focusing on the student outcomes and leaving behind an antiquated factory-model system for a student-centric one.
Click here to read my complete post on this. And you know what the biggest shame in all of this? By focusing on the wrong part of the story, it may set back our opportunity to leverage the rise of digital learning to transform our system into the student-centric one that each student deserves