In the News
PUBLIC EDUCATION GROUP HONORS PEARCE
East Valley Tribune
July 26, 2011
Senate President Russell Pearce, R-Mesa, has been named the 2011 Golden Apple Winner by Arizona Parents for Education, a grassroots group promoting the state's public school online instruction programs.
More than 20,000 students participate in online instruction statewide, according to a news release put out by the group.
PRESS RELEASE: 2011 GOLDEN APPLE AWARD WINNER: SENATE PRESIDENT RUSSELL PEARCE
July 26, 2011
PHOENIX, Ariz. – Today, Arizona Parents for Education, a grassroots group promoting the interests of Arizona's public school distance learning programs, today announced that Senate President Russell Pearce was named the 2011 Golden Apple Award Winner. Previous winners include Governor Jan Brewer, former Senate President Tim Bee, former state Representative David Lujan, and Senator Linda Lopez.
"Arizona is fortunate to have Senate President Pearce fighting for our children," Arizona Parents for Education President Ann Robinett said. "Russell has been a tireless advocate for education in our great state. His steadfast support for distance learning and educational choice has improved education for our children at every level, and we can't thank him enough for his efforts," concluded Robinett.
There are more than 20,000 Arizona students who participate in Arizona Online Instruction programs statewide. For more information visit us on the web at www.azparents.org.
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SEQUOIA PATHWAY ACADEMY HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT GRADUATES A YEAR AND A HALF BEFORE HER CLASS
May 23, 2011
On Friday, May 27th, Sequoia Pathway Academy student, Lisa Geier, will put on her graduation robe and tassel and receive her High School diploma with other students. What makes Lisa's graduation different; it is a year and a half early.
Lisa earned only three credits her freshman year at her previous high school, half of what most 9th graders should have. Lisa transferred to Sequoia Pathway Academy and took advantage of the schools unique online hybrid learning model, which enabled her to work at her own pace and take as many online classes as she wanted with one-on-one guidance from highly qualified Teachers.
ONLINE COURSES ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY FOR K-12 STUDENTS
Arizona Daily Sun
April 21, 2011
First came online classes at the college level.
Northern Arizona University, designated the state's "distance learning" institution by the Board of Regents, moved quickly from ITV to Web-based courses as the teaching tools on the Internet became more interactive and the technology more available to students.
Today, many NAU courses are a hybrid of in-person classroom instruction, Web learning modules and online student collaboration. The Internet has become so ubiquitous in the workaday world that students have come to expect their courses to contain an online component.
AN OP-ED FROM GOVERNORS JEB BUSH AND BOB WISE
Digital Learning Now
March 8, 2011
Governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise have written this Op-Ed as Utah legislators are considering the expansion of digital learning.
Wednesday, the Utah Senate passed legislation that will put Utah and its students at the forefront of K-12 Digital learning policy in the country. Unleashing the power of technology in education expands access to high quality education regardless of a student's language, zip code, income levels or special needs.
As Governors, we learned firsthand the high stakes when it comes to preparing students with the knowledge and skills to succeed in college and careers. Digital learning has the power to transform education to address the individual needs of students in a way never before possible.
ARIZONA SCHOOLS SEE INCREASE IN TAX-CREDIT DONATIONA
The Arizona Republic
March 6, 2011
New sports fees, out-of-state field trips and extra marketing campaigns were just some of the reasons attributed to the increase in 2010 tax-credit donations for many Arizona school districts and charter schools.
Preliminary totals show public schools received $42.3 million in tax-credit money given for extracurricular activities and character-building programs. This number is expected to increase at least another $1 million as the numbers continue to trickle into the Arizona Department of Revenue, said Darlene Teller, a senior economist with its Office of Economic Research and Analysis.
Teller said she expected a 1.5 percent to 2 percent increase in donations from the previous year.
THE IDEA ECONOMOY REQUIRES DIGITAL LEARNING NOW
The Huffington Post
March 1, 2011
We live in an idea economy, where a compelling premise can become an industry. Microsoft was the idea that computers could make us more productive. Google was the idea that search could be better. Walmart was the idea that retail could be more efficient. eBay was the idea that the web could be a marketplace. K¹² was the idea that schools could be online. Each of these ideas attracted investment, created jobs, and launched an industry segment.
This idea economy runs on an engine of innovation and is particularly strong in America. As a result of several factors: a culture of independent thinking, financial markets and a venture capital sector adept at taking ideas to scale, and a strong, rich and diverse higher education sector, and a non-corrupt bureaucracy.
ARIZONA'S PUBLIC-SCHOOL FUNDING STILL BATTERED BY RECESSION
The Arizona Republic
February 27, 2011
For the first time in two decades, Arizona is facing two, possibly three, consecutive years of declines in basic per-student funding for K-12 schools.
The Great Recession battered the state's take from sales, property and income taxes and public-land sales, causing Arizona to chop its per-student funding, hike the sales tax and patch in with federal stimulus aid. Basic funding slipped in fiscal 2010 and 2011.
The stimulus money will vanish in 2012, likely forcing further budget cuts.
ARIZONA SCHOOLS CHIEF TO STUDY FLORIDA EDUCATION SYSTEM
The Arizona Republic
February 8, 2011
Arizona's newly installed superintendent of public instruction plans to take his cues from Florida as he tries to improve the state's K-12 education system.
John Huppenthal, a former Republican state legislator who took office in January, said he hoped to replicate successes that the Sunshine State has shown when it comes to educating children.
"We're studying everything Florida is doing," he told members of the state House Education Committee on Monday in his first state of education speech, which outlined priorities.
FAST FACTS ABOUT ONLINE LEARNING
International Association for K-12 Online Learning
Research, Trends and Statistics
K-12 Online Learning and Virtual Schools: Expanding Option
- K-12 online learning is a new field consisting of an estimated $507 million market, which is growing at an estimated annual pace of 30% annually.
- Supplemental or full-time online learning opportunities are available to at least some students in 48 of the 50 states plus Washington, DC.
- 27 states, as well as Washington, DC, have statewide full-time online schools.
- 38 states have state virtual schools or state-led online initiatives, and Alaska is planning to open a statewide online learning network in 2011.
- Many virtual schools show annual growth rates between 20% and 45%.
- 75% of school districts had one or more students enrolled in an online or blended learning course.
DIGITAL LEARNING NOW
The Huffington Post
December 5, 2010
On Wednesday, Governors Jeb Bush and Bob Wise released a road map for the future of American Education. In a letter to governors, they described their shared vision:
"Our vision is an education that maximizes every child's potential for learning, prepares every child with the knowledge and skills to succeed in college and careers, and launches every child into the world with the ability to pursue his or her dreams. By unleashing the power of digital learning, America has the ability to realize that vision today.
Digital learning can customize and personalize education so all students learn in their own style at their own pace, which maximizes their chances for success in school and beyond. With digital learning, every student -- from rural communities to inner cities -- can access high quality and rigorous courses in every subject, including foreign languages, math and science."
ARIZONA EXPANDS K-12 ONLINE LEARNING
The Arizona Republic
September 24, 2009
More Arizona students will soon be able to attend their high-school algebra class while in their bedroom, or their chemistry class while at the kitchen counter.
This year, the state has joined a national effort to increase the number of students participating in "virtual" lessons, whether it's inside a classroom with a teacher, in a computer lab with an aide or slumped in front of a television with a laptop.
The changes arising from a new state law are being met with mixed reaction.
MYSTIFYING SEC'Y DUNCAN
New York Post
April 3, 2009
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stopped by The Post yesterday, and he looked mighty perplexed when he learned how De Facto Gov. Sheldon Silver and his partners in perfidy are treating charter schools in New York state.
Traditional schools -- that is, teachers-union franchises -- get a half-billion bucks more in the Silver-crafted budget now wending its way through Albany's legislative labyrinth.
Charters -- public, non-traditional and largely non-union schools -- are targeted by Silver for slow starvation; they get not a nickel of new money.
And Duncan doesn't understand why.
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Online school helping families at Thanksgiving
By William Roller, Sun Staff Writer
November 19, 2008 - 1:32PM
An enterprising teacher at an online school has stepped up to the plate to deliver the goods this Thanksgiving by offering Yuma County families with staples to brighten their holiday.
For the second year in a row, Arizona Virtual Academy (AZVA) teacher Jena Kugel organized volunteers to "adopt" three families in need to augment their holiday larder.
"I know my my families intimately and I know if there's a special need in a family, if a parent gets laid off or if a grandparent becomes ill," Kugel said. "Students confide in me because I'm a teacher and they trust me."
East Valley Tribune (AZ)
Commentary: Embracing online learning¹s promise
Susan Patrick
Hours before the sun rose and you opened your newspaper this morning, a Mesa high school senior reported for calculus class and turned in an assignment to her teacher.
A 12-year-old competitive ice skater headed for the rink in Tempe with her entire school tucked into her gym bag. A third grader from Gilbert battling
cancer slept peacefully having finished all November¹s curriculum in preparation for his next bout of chemotherapy.
These Arizona students and thousands like them around the state are pioneers in the 21st century education phenomenon known as K-12 online learning. Aided by technology and guided by licensed, specially trained Arizona teachers, these students can truly learn anytime and anywhere, whether for one course or their entire school program. The virtual schools that serve them have headquarters around the state, with several of the largest, including Mesa Unified's Distance Learning Program and two independent charter schools, clustered in the East Valley. Arizona's online learning community is the toast of the town as more than 1,200 online educators from every state and around the globe gather in Metro Phoenix for the annual Virtual School Symposium of the North American Council for Online Learning.
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Education Week
Scholars Discuss 'Disruptive Innovation' in K-12
By Andrew Trotter
Oct 28, 2008
A latecomer to a panel discussion this week on “disruptive innovation” in K-12 education and health care may have suspected that he or she had entered the wrong room.
The main speaker, Clayton M. Christensen, was talking about the steel industry, not education or health. Then he discussed the automobile, radio, microchip, and software industries.
To Mr. Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, those industries offer profound lessons for K-12 schooling. In every case, the introduction of a new technology led to the upending of the established leaders by upstart entrants, he explained at an Oct. 27 panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Christensen, the lead author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, said similar changes will soon happen to public school districts, as providers of virtual schooling gradually claim more and more students, starting with those who are poorly served by their current schools.
The book, published last spring and co-authored by Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson, predicts that those changes will accelerate until, by 2019, roughly half of all high school courses will be taken online.
‘No Villains and No Stupidity’
To the roomful of policy experts and educators at the think tank’s luncheon meeting, Mr. Christensen explained that the leading companies did not lose their primacy through their managers’ incompetence. Instead, it was because they obeyed two hallowed principles of business: First, listen to your best customers and give them what they want; and second, invest where the profit margin is most attractive.
Rather, businesses need to be willing to act in ways that may be opposed to their short-term interests, and that lower their costs and simplify their products or services, making them more attractive to a larger pool of potential customers.
“It’s a story with no villains and no stupidity,” noted Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the AEI and the moderator of the discussion.
Mr. Horn, who runs Innosight Institute, a think tank in Watertown, Mass., devoted to Mr. Christensen’s theories, was on a panel at the event. Outlining the application to education, he cited Harvard education professor Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and said “children’s need for customization collides with schools’ imperative for standardization.”
The billions of dollars that have been invested to put computers into schools have failed to make a difference because “we have crammed them into conventional classrooms,” said Mr. Horn.
Schools and students have not been able to reap the benefits of technology, he said, because of the web of constraints—called “interdependencies”—that schools have not been able to escape, including the organization of the school day, the division of learning in academic disciplines, the architecture of school buildings, and the federal, state, and local mandates that educators must obey.
‘Individualization and Customization’
On hand at the Oct. 27 event as the official “responder and raconteur” was education expert Chester E. Finn Jr., the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington.
Perhaps to the surprise of some in the audience, Mr. Finn generally agreed with Mr. Christensen’s and Mr. Horn’s arguments.
Mr. Finn, who served in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan administration, had two main points of contention. First, he disliked the authors’ reliance on Mr. Gardner’s theories, which, he asserted, are dismissed by “respectable cognitive psychologists.”
On that point, the authors are “wrong, but it doesn’t matter,” he concluded. “Gardner or no, I’m still in favor of greater individualization and customization of education.”
Second, Mr. Finn said, he thinks the authors have underestimated the power of politics to stymie the change in education, because in most cases it is the schools, not the students, that are the purchasers of the new technology-driven forms of education.
That means virtual schools will face “resistance and pushback and hubris, and a sort of smugness” from public education, Mr. Finn said.
As a result, he said, he did not expect regular public schools to become the “main route” for new technologies to be applied to K-12 education.
Mr. Finn added that a more likely route was for charter schools and families to purchase the technology directly, possibly in the form of supplemental private education, perhaps subsidized by philanthropies.
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NACOL Releases Report on Socialization in Online Programs:
Third in Promising Practices in Online Learning Series
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27, 2008/PRNewswire-USNewswire
The North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) is pleased to announce the release of a new report, Socialization in Online Programs, providing research on socialization issues in online learning and highlighting case studies. This paper explores the research and issues around socialization in online schools and how online programs are addressing these issues. This is the third report in the NACOL Promising Practices in Online Learning series.
Online schools put significant resources into creating ways to foster social interaction. This effort stems in part from the concern that students may otherwise be isolated, but it also builds on the recognition that the online environment is a natural way for 21st century students to interact and that the Internet allows for new student-student interactions across geographical boundaries that transcend beyond what is possible within physical school settings.
Susan Patrick, President of NACOL, states, "Online programs offer socialization opportunities that go beyond what many traditional schools can provide. Understanding the realities of how the online environment eliminates, or greatly reduces, issues that may create social friction with kids, such as appearance, physical disabilities, gender, age, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status -- can enhance a student's ability to focus on academic progress in their courses while engaging in rich discussions and projects with classmates they might never have the opportunity to know otherwise."
Students participate in science competitions, project-based learning, field trips to museums, and global opportunities for learning with students overseas and build a strong network connecting online with peers from diverse backgrounds.
According to author John Watson, of Evergreen Consulting Associates, "Online learning's capacity to foster interaction and collaboration among a diverse and geographically dispersed group of students is among its most positive attributes."
NACOL's Promising Practices in Online Learning Series is supported by K12 Inc., Apex Learning, Connections Academy, and Florida Virtual School.
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Proposal to cut funding for public virtual schools is shortsighted
Ann Robinett
Special for the Republic
Jun. 1, 2008 - 12:00 AM
In our 21st-century economy, work is done around the clock. The numbers of workers who telecommute are growing daily. Time and distance are less relevant today than ever before. What's most important is progress. The same can be applied to public education.
Since 1999, Arizona has embraced public virtual schools. These public schools are open 24/7, teaching Arizona kids anytime, anywhere, any place and continue to prove a lifesaver for many children.
But now, Arizona leaders are considering a proposal to arbitrarily cut funding for my children's public virtual school. The proposed cuts are deep and put a significant risk to the quality programs I and other Arizona parents have come to rely on for their children.
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Hill: Lawmakers schooled on distance learning
Austin Hill
East Valley Tribune
May 1, 2008 - 2:47 PM
What do you call it when a gathering on the state Capitol lawn creates such a “buzz,” and garners so much attention, that members of the Legislature and a statewide elected official are compelled to come out of their offices and address the crowd?
When the gathering consists of charter school and virtual school students and parents, you call this a “political hot potato.”
Such was the case two days ago, when about 500 bannercarrying moms, dads and kids gathered for the third annual “Distance Learning Day” and “Charter School Day” at the Capitol. And — to carry out the metaphor even further — making the potato “even hotter” was the sense of urgency brought about by the state government’s current budget crisis, and threats of funding cuts for these more contemporary educational programs.
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Students protest cuts of distance learning
Distance-learning supporters fear budget reductions
Scott Wong
The Arizona Republic
Apr. 30, 2008 - 12:00 AM
The rally typified many Arizonans' uncertainty over the state's 2009 budget predicament. Nobody knows the extent of the cuts the schools might face as lawmakers try to offset a $1.9 billion deficit for the coming year. So far, legislative leaders have provided no specifics as to which programs they plan to trim.
But the students, teachers and parents weren't waiting until more facts become known.
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Online-learning backers protest proposed 20% funding cut
Cronkite News Service
Published: 04.30.2008
PHOENIX - About 800 students, parents and teachers marched and carried signs on the Capitol lawn Tuesday to protest funding cuts to distance learning programs proposed during closed-door budget meetings.
Organizers said students from 11 of the state's 14 distance-education schools participated.
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