Who will control POST-COVID online K-12: The perils of rushing into a market-led future

Image from Angelqiu122 (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ESL_online_learning.jpg)

​In 2012, Global Silicon Valley (GSV) Advisors, an investment firm specializing in educational technology, released their Fall of the Wall report. In it, they enthusiastically outlined the profits to be made in the K-12 education sector as public school systems in the United States became more market-oriented. Following in a long tradition of market enthusiasts, GSV Advisors compared the marketization of public schools to the fall of the Berlin wall. With public schools increasingly being run by private organizations like charter schools, GSV Advisors stated that “the ‘wall’ of opposition to investing in education has come down, for now, bringing in a welcome flood of financial and entrepreneurial capital” (2012: p. 90).

Educational technologies (#edtech) offered by private companies, suddenly everywhere as public schools go online, have been a central focus of the capital 'flooding' the education sector. Given the size of public expenditures on education and the economies of scale unlocked by online education, Wall Street investors and tech companies have enthusiastically sought entryways into this market and its public dollars through edtech offerings. 

While seemingly coming to the rescue as schools are closed in the face of COVID-19, edtech and its attempts to break into public markets have a troubling past. Indeed, the recent history of this sector and its political advocacy raises many questions about how (and whether) public educational institutions should engage with edtech companies and the potential risks of this engagement.

As a means of exploring the politics of this moment, I highlight what the recent history of the promotion of edtech can tell us about its potential to shape the future of online schooling. Most importantly, I outline how experiments with edtech have proceeded hand-in-hand with the marketization and privatization of public school systems, often with disastrous consequences for students.

This will be done in three parts: 1) an examination of the connection between edtech and privatization; 2) the perils of this connection; and 3) lessons for the current moment.

Profit-making, K-12 schooling, and edtech

As the Fall of the Wall report exemplifies, the K-12 market has long been viewed as a potential profit center by investment firms and large corporations but one where profit-making opportunities in places like the United States and Canada were difficult due to the ‘public sector monopoly.’ The Fall of the Wall report, for example, argued that education presented “theoretically huge end markets” but that access to these markets were hindered by resistance to profitmaking and market-based systems within K-12 education circles. In other words, there was money to be made if they could get past, as one investor put it, “ingrained, self-interested parties including unions, public school bureaucracies, and parents” (GSV Advisors, 2012: p. 43).

The key to unlocking the profits envisioned by GSV Advisors and others has therefore been the removal of decision-making from the public sector and the dismantling of union and parent power. This has linked speculative capital investments in edtech with wider projects that seek to reduce public control over the practices of schooling. In the United States, for example, marketization schemes which have turned over the operation of schooling to private actors such as charter schools[1] have been an important strategy for those seeking to monetize K-12 education and roll out educational technologies. If private companies could directly run schools without strong public oversight and the opposition of a unionized workforce, then barriers to the extraction of profits could be greatly minimized. For partly this reason, over the past decade the charter school movement has been heavily funded by the same hedge fund and tech billionaires who extol the virtues of edtech.

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Dan Cohen

Is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Planning at Queen's University who studies the marketization of social services. 

Once you remove pesky costs such as (unionized) teachers and buildings, the real profit extraction can begin.

Assignment letter for the EAA which refers to the schools as "the future" and highlights their use of the "latest technology,"

​For those seeking to unlock profits in the K-12 schooling sector, edtech has been a particularly enticing avenue for investment. For one, it allows the unlocking of economies of scale. If you create one technology-based learning system, then you can roll out that system through a network of schools (in-person or online) without adding significantly to your costs. This includes attempts to build ‘virtual’ schools where students attend schools entirely online as well as ‘personalized learning’ systems where software carries the heavy load of teaching (determining and rolling out lesson plans) and thereby allows larger student-to-teacher ratios. Once you remove pesky costs such as (unionized) teachers and buildings, the real profit extraction can begin and edtech interventions are an important part of this strategy.

Two of the largest actors in the American edtech and online education industry, K12 Inc. and Pearson’s Connections Academy, exemplify this connection between profitmaking and the privatization of schooling. These companies, often working alongside neoconservative advocacy groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have contributed heavily to campaigns advocating for the creation of lightly-regulated and entirely online charter schools. A 2013 model bill promoted by ALEC with input from K12 Inc., for example, the ‘Virtual Public Schools Act’ was implemented in many states and requires that online schools receive the same funding level as brick-and-mortar schools despite lower operating costs. Similarly, in Florida and other American states, these companies have lobbied for bills that require students attend at least one course online, helping push students (and public money) towards their courses. Long before the current crisis drove students online, companies like K12 have thus actively used public legislation to ensure that for-profit companies are able to take advantage of a shift to virtual schooling that foregrounds private over public options.

Policy, geography, and schooling markets

In my dissertation research on the promotion and adoption of charter school policies in two American states, Michigan and Oregon, I did not set out to study edtech but the connections between charters and edtech was hard to ignore. In both cases, the creation of markets unlocked new experiments in edtech that had harmful consequences for students and public education, especially for the most marginalized students.

The Michigan story

In Michigan, the advocacy of billionaire charter school advocates such as the DeVos and Broad families, has created an environment where market strategies for education dominate the state. However, this was felt most severely in majority Black communities like Detroit where the state’s Republican leadership, powered by the state’s environment of anti-Black racism, used emergency management[2] laws to seize control of local school districts and implement some of the most radical market experiments in the US.

This was most clearly exhibited in the formation of a state body, the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), which was granted the power to take over ‘failing schools’ and implement experimental learning strategies. While ostensibly a state-wide body, the EAA only took over schools within Detroit and used this power to test out a new personalized learning software created by Agilax Labs, named ‘Buzz.’ Buzz was designed to guide students through the learning process with little-to-no teacher input and EAA schools were subsequently staffed by inexperienced college graduates provided by Teach for America.[3] As outlined in sharp detail by reporter Curt Guyette (2014) for the Detroit Metro Times, the software was flawed from the beginning with lessons and student work disappearing from the system and students able to access pornographic websites despite controls supposedly being in place. Most damningly, internal e-mails reveal that the software’s flaws were known by Agilax and that the company was using some of the poorest students in the country to work out these flaws. 
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Both the EAA and Buzz were abandoned a few years later after resistance to its expansion to white suburbs by suburban groups. However, this did not happen until after students left the EAA-run schools en masse after spending years in a substandard, and unsupervised, learning environment. What the case does reveal however, is how the use of experimental, for-profit software was combined with a lack of public oversight and geographies of inequality to create a disaster for students. Because the public system (and its oversight) had been taken over by the State of Michigan and its appointed managers believed that a private sector-led 'personalized learning' software was "the future," marginalized students became the guinea pigs for an untested and failing piece of software. The fact that the EAA and Buzz were able to do this in Detroit, but failed an attempt to expand to majority-white suburbs, highlights the reality of who will most likely feel the impact of any failures of an online pivot.

At around the same time as the EAA was in operation a ‘skunk works’ project called the “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace Program” was being formulated by a collection of state bureaucrats, technology company employees, and charter school advocates (but intentionally with no educators "so that [they] could get some fresh ideas”). This group was secretly planning a move towards a voucher-type system by developing a ‘Michigan Education Card’ that students would be able to use to purchase access to individual courses using public money, as well as the prospects of developing a system of low-cost, online schools that could deliver such courses (Clark, 2013). This would have radically changed public education as public schools lost revenue to these online schools a course at a time while still providing the essentials and extra-curricular activities for those students. Although abandoned when discovered by local journalists, here again we saw how market-oriented reformers to public education were working hand-in-hand with corporate actors in attempt to create a system of online education driven by imperatives of lower costs and higher profits - a coalition that will likely continue as public schools struggle with budgets in a post-pandemic world.

In Michigan then, markets and state power were used explicitly to create opportunities for profit-making that both undermined public education (closing schools, attacking their funding) and resulted in substandard learning environments. That those who bore the brunt of these attacks were Black students already suffering from disinvestment and discrimination is a feature of how such market systems operate, maximizing extraction from those without the power to resist experiments with untested technologies or poor (but cheap) products. While the EAA was able to marshal state power to experiment on Black students in Detroit, it was quickly shut down when attempts were made to takeover schools in white suburbs. While inequalities plague public schooling systems in many countries, the Michigan case highlights how a market-led online future might accelerate those inequalities.

The Oregon story

In Oregon, where the influence of market reformers has not been as strong as in Michigan, virtual models of schooling have emerged in opposition to, rather than with the support of, most of the state government. However, Oregon’s own experiments with charter schools provided the mechanism through which companies like K12 Inc. and Connections Academy were able to open within the state – using a loophole in that system and the ability of online education to skirt geographic boundaries to do so.

Unlike Michigan, Oregon created a charter school system with a strong, regulatory framework. By placing school districts in charge of which charter schools opened within their boundaries, the state has largely prevented the entry of for-profit companies into its system. However, virtual charter schools, which allow students to attend school entirely online, were not envisioned when Oregon’s charter school law was passed in 1999. This allowed a loophole that the Oregon Connections Academy (ORCA) exploited by opening in the tiny Scio school district (696 students), while advertising its services to students throughout the state. Scio, in turn, agreed to keep only 5% of state funding rather than the 20% allowed by state legislation, increasing the profit margin for ORCA while presenting a windfall for the school district. Using this base of operations ORCA was able to skirt the state’s system of regulation and enroll students statewide.

This has meant that ORCA has been able to leverage its power over small school districts to evade attempts at regulation. This is a real issue, as virtual charter schools across the United States have faced scandals around billing governments for phantom students[4] and the poor test scores and graduation rates of their student body. These scandals have become so bad, and the resulting education so poor, that virtual charters are controversial even for many staunch charter advocates and many states have sought to limit their growth. Furthermore, at the individual student level, research on virtual schooling raises real equity concerns around how students facing barriers are able to interact with unstructured learning environments as opposed to privileged students with support at home (see Farhadi, 2019).

In Oregon, the ability of these schools to use online environments to escape regulation has changed the dynamics of public schooling to the detriment of many students. This lack of public oversight has exacerbated concerns over inequality within online learning environments while also allowing companies to increase their profits. While online learning may be an option desired by many Oregon students, its roll out through the private charter system meant that maximizing profits over educational outcomes determined its shape.

COVID-19 and the threat of privatized infrastructure of online learning

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Image by 3D Animation Production Company from Pixabay

​As schools close their brick-and-mortar sites, it is no surprise that virtual schools like the Connections Academy and personalized learning software like Buzz have come to the foreground. Educators are struggling with the transition to teaching remotely and the pre-existing technology solutions offered by edtech firms are no doubt appealing to public school administrators. Indeed, many companies are offering their services for free (for now at least) and perhaps helping lock public school systems into a privately-run future.

K12, for instance, announced to educators that they have "more than twenty years of experience serving thousands of districts, institutional customers and students with virtual education platforms worldwide… we are uniquely ready, willing and able to support education.” My conversations with teachers have revealed similar patterns, with edtech companies rushing into the void with free offerings for software that will eventually come at a price.

Financial markets and large institutional actors have taken note of this potential. BMO Capital Markets for instance, wrote “while we are uncomfortable citing ‘winners’ in the coronavirus situation, some companies may be positioned better than others. Specifically, those that specialize in online education could see increased interest should the situation worsen." Likewise, the OECD’s education director has extolled the potential for an expansion of edtech in this moment, stating “All the red tape that keeps things away is gone and people are looking for solutions that in the past they did not want to see. … Real change takes place in deep crisis. You will not stop the momentum that will build” (cited in Williamson, 2020).

There is little doubt that COVID-19 is going to have longstanding ramifications for how education is delivered, a reality that financial markets and edtech companies are well aware of. As students and teachers get used to remote teaching and learning, and as this crisis may result in waves of self isolation, a new educational infrastructure is emerging. The question now is: who will build this infrastructure and for what purpose - profits or learning?

As the cases outlined above show, there is a longstanding movement with a headstart that wants to use edtech to create a privatized education system that can unlock profits for corporations and investors and find any avenue to cut costs to maximize gains. More than ever this moment represents a potential ‘fall of the wall’ that has served to keep K-12 education in many countries largely public. Past experience shows that the system that would result from a profit-led edtech future would be an even more unequal one, with poor educational outcomes for those who do not have the power to resist the imposition of cheap, low-cost offerings. As we move into a more online educational environment, these experiences must be kept in mind and we must be prepared to fight for an online infrastructure that is kept under public control.

Footnotes
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[1] Charter schools are schools that receive permission (a ‘charter’) from a public entity to operate and receive public money per student to operate but which are run by private organizations with less oversight than traditional public schools.
[2] Emergency management laws allow the State of Michigan to take over municipal bodies (including school districts) in moments of financial crisis. However, they have been used almost exclusively in Black communities.
[3] One teacher described to the Detroit Metro Times (Guyette, 2014) that they were “told that in the student-centered model, my role as a teacher was primarily to supervise students to make sure they were using Buzz.”
[4] Students that are on the books for payment purposes but which never attend classes.

Works Cited

Clark, A. (2013, June 19). Detroit News noses out a school reform ‘skunk works’. Columbia Journalism Review.  Retrieved from: http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/detroit_news_noses_out_a_school_reform_skunk_works.php

Farhadi, B. (2019). ‘The Sky’s the Limit’: On the Impossible Promise of E-learning in the Toronto District School Board [Thesis]. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/97442
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GSV Advisors. (2012). Fall of the Wall: Capital Flows to Education Innovation. Global Silicon Valley Advisors.

Guyette, C. (2014, September 24). The EAA Exposed: An investigative report. Detroit Metro Times.  Retrieved from: https://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/the-eaa-exposed-an-investigative-report/Content?oid=2249513

Williamson, B. (2020, April 1). New pandemic edtech power networks. Code Acts in Education.  Retrieved from: https://codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/new-pandemic-edtech-power-networks/