The House Committee on Public Education recently heard testimony on what detractors are calling the first voucher bill of the season: HB 1445 by Rep. Jerry Madden, R-Plano, which would establish a network of virtual schools in Texas. The idea, says Madden, is to give kids who are sick or mobile a way to keep up with their classes remotely and a way for rural kids in small schools to take specialized classes offered by other districts. “This is the future of education,” Madden said.
But detractors say they smell vouchers: First, the bill allows districts to contract with private companies to provide the courses. And, because private and home-schooled students would be allowed to take the courses at state expense, they say the arrangement is akin to the state paying private school tuition. “The fact that the courses are offered online instead of in the classroom doesn’t change the fact that this bill creates vouchers,” said Kathy Miller of the Texas Freedom Network. Committee Chair Kent Grusendorf, R-Arlington, expressed bafflement, and invited Miller back “when we have a real voucher bill.”
But “virtual vouchers” weren’t the only concern of the teacher groups who testified against the bill. They wondered whether the $23 million program is the best use of that money, and whether it’s a little premature to call online courses the future of education. Lindsay Gustafson of the Texas Classroom Teachers Association pointed out that the Texas Education Agency was already running a pilot program to assess how well kids learn in an online environment. “It seems it would make sense, since we have a pilot program, to wait and see what the results of the pilot are,” she said. But there are other reasons why some may want to forge ahead. A teacher who had taught online kindergarten in Wisconsin, for example, testified that her online classes had a student-teacher ratio of 50-1, drawing appreciative murmurs from Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, about the courses’ revolutionary potential for increasing teacher “productivity.”
This article appears in “The AC” Gen Y Magazine Debuts.