Union challenges virtual school — that used union teachers

Internet Strategies for Education Markets: The Heller Report, Dec, 2002

Okay, you're going to have to follow the bouncing ball a little on this one. A lawsuit filed by the state teacher's union in Wisconsin is being eyed as a potential new wrinkle that could derail such schools before they even get up and running. Appleton School District recently opened the Wisconsin Connections Academy, an online charter school with a student body of about 300 kids from nearly 100 districts. Under current state open enrollment rules, the Appleton School District gets about $5,000 in state aid for each of these students, $3,000 or so of which goes to Wisconsin Connections Academy and Connections Academy (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sylvan Ventures), the provider of curriculum and services to the non-profit school. The rest of the monies pay for the union principal and six union teachers at the school. In theory, you'd think that WEAC would be glad that the group is hiring union workers, and also uses other 'bricks and mortar' type products, such as textbooks.

Indeed, according to all concerned, this is a legal issue, and not one concerning the quality of the program or its instructors. But by challenging the legal base for funding the school, and arguing that legislators must first iron out the extremely sticky issues surrounding student enrollment fees before opening virtual schools, will the suit act as a nail in the coffin of cyber education?

"Wisconsin law simply does not permit virtual charter schools to enroll students outside of the district," claims Lucy Brown, legal counsel for Wisconsin Education Association Council (WEAC, http://www.weac.org). Brown argues that the state legislature should have dealt with the funding mechanisms before the school was opened. "The laws did not anticipate that students would not live where a school is located," Brown argues. "Wisconsin Connections Academy is drawing students from hundreds of miles away."

Wisconsin isn't the first state to face a challenge to its virtual school plans. The Pennsylvania School Boards Association claimed last year that the state's seven virtual charter schools were educating mostly home-schooled children at the expense of local school districts. They lost their case, but a new Pennsylvania law now allows school districts to get some reimbursement for per-pupil funding when their students enroll in alternative schools such as a cyber program. And this law also gives the state education department the final authority for establishing cyber charter schools and ensuring quality control.

Barbara J. Dreyer, president of Connections Academy, says anytime you have something new coming into education, it creates a lot of discussion. While she wishes WEAC had found a different way of working out differences, she thinks Connections Academy and the union are actually closer to agreeing than it might appear. "We're all focused on quality," she explains, noting that the Pennsylvanian resolution should be something other states look at, as it emphasizes accountability and full disclosure by any virtual school in existence. In fact, Dreyer argues that Connection Academy uses union teachers and includes hard copy textbooks in their program because quality really is "job one" to them. "Frankly, we have many things in alignment with the unions," she notes.

Money, Money, Money?

Brown insists that WEAC has no official opposition to virtual schools, and in fact, says the group has helped set up distance learning courses itself. That said, Brown remains concerned. "Obviously, we're concerned that a for-profit school will be making money educating students," she says. "Wisconsin needs to take a look at the direction it wants to go. We've got a huge budget deficit. Is this really where they want to spend money?" Brown says that WEAC also wants to make sure that virtual schools are under some quality control. Given all those issues, she'd like to see the authority for virtual charter schools reside at the state level, as it now does in Pennsylvania, rather than in individual districts such as Appleton. "There are horror stories from around the country, in Pennsylvania and Texas, where schools have been chartered in individual districts," she worries.

So despite the case's emphasis on funding, WEAC does see other problems, and is clearly using the suit to try to slow growth of such schools in the near future. Does that concern the folk at Connections Academy? "It's actually a very good time for us," Dreyer says. "The WEAC suit has not been an issue for school districts. Our quality and the specific offering we bring to the table are the one thing that seems to matter in the decision."

Dreyer says that doesn't mean that they don't take the suit in Wisconsin seriously. But she thinks the WEAC case exemplifies an age-old problem in education -- funding formulas that don't allow for changes that occur rapidly. She points to a district that finds it's got a mass of new students who've moved into a new development in town -- but won't get money for educating these kids until the next fiscal year. "The funding mechanisms simply don't work for physical or virtual schools," Dreyer insists. And she notes that no one is getting rich at the moment -- Connections Academy is spending more than $10,000 a pupil in Wisconsin all told, so unless the virtual school adoption rate continues to grow and the per pupil spending rate can be amortized over more students, new cyber programs will simply be unprofitable.