AZ Online Charter School Outsources Education

Note from Mike Bryan: David Safier has been doing a great job covering aspects of the education scene on BlogforArizona that are largely ignored by the MSM (and he's become quite a wit with his missives from the McCain "Ranch"). In his first endeavor at an investigative piece, on outsourcing at one of Arizona’s online charter schools, David has brought together an impressive amount of material and information, and this post is just his first cut at bringing this material into public view.

I hope you will take time to read his post, and stop by regularly to read what David exposes next about the state of Arizona education.

by David Safier

In 2006, Arizona Virtual Academy (AZVA) began outsourcing the grading of middle school student papers to India, apparently without parents’ knowledge or consent. When some parents guessed what was happening from comments on their children’s papers, they complained, and the school promised to end the practice. But AZVA continued to send middle school papers to India for most of the school year and possibly longer. The practice was implemented at the high school during the 2007-2008 school year, and the school says it is currently considering whether to use the paper scoring service at the high school level for the current school year.

This feels wrong to me on a number of levels.

• First, AZVA is a for profit school, and I suspect it outsourced parts of its students’ educations to cut costs without regard to the impact on the students’ learning.
  
• Second, the school decided to leave the parents in the dark about the outsourcing, which is a serious breach of trust between school and parent.
  
• Third, Arizona requires fingerprints and criminal history checks of all personnel, which could mean the school is in violation of state law.

When I taught high school English, I found the best way to help students improve their writing was by learning their individual strengths and weaknesses and helping them improve paper by paper. When paper grading is farmed out to strangers like this, with a different stranger grading and commenting on each new assignment, teachers lose one of their most valuable teaching tools, and students lose the personal instruction that is so critical to writing growth. It looks like AZVA is attempting to educate on the cheap by hiring fewer teachers than it needs and outsourcing some of the work to India to take up the slack.

I spoke with Mary Gifford at the Arizona Virtual Academy about the school's practice of sending student papers to India to be scored and commented on. Toward the end of this post, I'll write about our interview.

I invite anyone who knows more about this situation – parents, AZVA staff and others - to add what you know in the comments at the end of this post. A wonderful feature of the blog format is that it allows readers to add and correct information while expanding the scope of the discussion.

About Online Charter Schools
Most people know very little about Arizona’s charter school system and even less about online charter schools. Even a knowledgeable, experienced state legislator I spoke with recently wasn’t clear on the concept of online charter schools until I explained it. So here is a brief explanation to get readers up to speed.

Charter Schools are basically public schools run outside the public school system. Once a school is granted a charter, it receives state funds for every student it enrolls. In many ways, charters run like private schools with some, but not much, oversight from the State Department of Education, though unlike private schools, the students are required to take the AIMS test.

Online Charter Schools like AZVA have no buildings and no classrooms. Their students work from home and can live anywhere in the state. (The students are not “home schooled” in the usual definition of the term, since home schoolers receive no state funds and have virtually complete freedom from state regulation.) Online students get much of their instruction and curriculum through the internet, though they may get some of it in the form of textbooks and other materials. Students’ contacts with their teachers usually happen online or over the phone. Sometimes an online school will host events, but since the students are scattered all over Arizona, that kind of contact is limited.

Arizona Virtual Academy’s Use of Offshore Education Workers
Arizona Virtual Academy is a for profit school which was based in Tucson until fairly recently when it moved to Phoenix. It is one of many online schools run by a publicly traded corporation, K12 Inc., which was started by Bill Bennett, Reagan’s Education Secretary, and others. According to K12 Inc.’s 2007 public offering, AZVA brought in $14 million in 2007, which accounted for 10% of the corporation’s income.

That’s fourteen million Arizona tax dollars.

Sometime in 2006, probably near the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year, AZVA began sending middle school students’ papers to India to have them commented on and scored by educational workers. This involved multiple interactions between each student and the assigned Indian worker for each paper – planning the paper, writing a first draft, writing a second draft, etc. The school didn’t inform parents they were doing this.

AZVA lists a teaching staff of about 80 teachers on its website, so parents had every reason to believe the local staff was responsible for their children’s educations, including grading and commenting on papers. But when parents saw the first set of papers, some of them could tell by the way the comments were worded that the graders weren’t from the U.S.

The parents complained quickly and loudly to AZVA. I can’t say with certainty what happened next. My understanding is that AZVA promised parents the school would no longer use people in India to score student papers. In fact, the practice continued at least until the spring of 2007. It may have been discontinued after that in the middle school, but it was picked up at the high school, where student papers were sent to India during the 2007-2008 school year. According to Mary Gifford at AZVA, the school is considering continuing the practice at the high school for the 2008-2009 school year.

(As an aside, I'm not questioning the education or training of the people doing the paper scoring in India since I haven’t seen their work. India is known for producing a well educated workforce, and these people are possibly competent to perform the tasks required of them. The qualifications of the people doing the outsourced work are not the issue here.)

Socratic Learning, Inc.
Through K12 Inc., Arizona Virtual Academy contracted with Socratic Learning, Inc., to handle the outsourcing of student papers to India. Socratic Learning, based in Plano, Texas, contracts with schools and offers private tutoring as well. It has a history of misrepresenting its workers as being based in the U.S., which led the New York City Public Schools to cancel its tutoring contract in August, 2006 – the same timeframe when AZVA began using Socratic Learning’s services.

Socratic Learning had a contract to tutor students in New York schools. The work was done online after school. Socratic claimed it had “a network of tutors on different college campuses,” and the tutors themselves claimed to be from Texas. In fact, all the tutors were located in Chennai, India. The NY Schools likely would not have uncovered this deception, except that they were investigating the company’s promise to parents that their children would get free laptop computers if they completed the tutoring program. According to a lengthy report from Richard J. Condon, Special Commissioner of Investigation for the New York City School District, in the process of investigating the giveaway which violated the school district’s rules, the investigator uncovered Socratic Learning’s attempt “to disguise the fact that the on-line tutors who were employed to have contact with New York City schoolchildren were located in India.”

For the NY Public Schools, the most troublesome part of the deception was that they had no idea who these tutors were. “In one of the more significant failures,” Condon wrote, “Socratic permitted its employees to interact with New York City public schoolchildren without obtaining the proper fingerprint and background checks.” The school system forbids any direct contact between students and people who have not completed a background check. Though Socratic Learning agreed that the term “direct contact” as used by the Department of Education includes internet communication, it “attempted to dispute the definition and proclaimed that Socratic should be exempt from the security procedures related to this type of interaction.”

An interesting side note: K12 Inc. filed a Letter of Intent to acquire Socratic Learning on July 3, 2007, then withdrew its Letter of Intent on September 28, 2007.

Arizona Laws and Regulations about Fingerprinting
AZVA knowingly deceived the families of children enrolled in the school by not mentioning that it sent student papers to India to be scored and commented on. It may also be true that the school compounded the deception by continuing the practice after promising parents it would stop.

But there’s another layer here, a possible violation of state law. Like New York, Arizona’s schools have regulations regarding fingerprinting and background checks.

In a 2002 document addressed to “Charter School Holders, Administrators & Staff,” Kristen Jordison, then the Executive Director of the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools, explained the fingerprinting requirements for charter schools. It breaks the requirements into two basic categories: Charter school personnel who have teaching duties directly or indirectly, and all other charter school personnel. The personnel with teaching duties must obtain a Fingerprint Clearance Card, and the others must have a Fingerprint Criminal History Check.

In a Q&A section, Jordison explains that the law, SB 1008,

Requires all charter school persons to be fingerprinted pursuant to laws associated with fingerprinting of non-certificated personnel. Prior to employing, you [the charter school operator] are required to make documented, good faith efforts to contact previous employers of the person to obtain information and recommendations that may be relevant to the person’s fitness for employment as prescribed in A.R.S. 15-512.F.

Do the workers in India fit the legal definition of teacher or other personnel? Since they are commenting on and scoring papers which are required parts of the students’ coursework, it could be argued that they fit into the category of “teacher.” If not, they most probably qualify as other charter school personnel, even if they haven’t been hired directly by the school. If the school contracts with a cleaning service, the custodians hired by that service who work in the school would be considered school personnel and be required to have background checks. The same would apply to workers hired by Socratic Learning.

Do workers who are halfway around the world need to be fingerprinted for background checks? For the New York Public Schools, the answer was a definite yes. And anyone who knows anything about the growing problem of adults prowling the web for underage people to exploit, the answer has to be yes as well.

AZVA did not see the need to require fingerprints or background checks on the people who score student papers. It maintains that there is no direct contact between student and scorer, and the papers are scrubbed of any information that would identify the student.

My Interview with Mary Gifford of the Arizona Virtual Academy
Ms. Gifford confirmed that my basic facts are correct. AZVA used Socratic Learning to send student papers to India. She said she believed Socratic Learning was no longer in business (the company still has a website, though I did not check if it was still being used), and in any event AZVA has not used Socratic Learning since Fall, 2007. She said she did not know the name of the company AZVA used with high school students during the 2007-2008 school year. Those contracts were handled by K12 Inc., she said, which supplies the school’s curriculum.

Gifford dodged the question of whether all parents were informed that the school planned to send middle school papers to India. She made vague assertions that parents were informed verbally during town hall meetings, but she did not know of any written information that was handed to the parents about using an outside scoring service. I commented that not all parents would have attended the meetings and asked if AZVA communicated with parents about this using some form of computer-based communication sent to the parents’ homes. She said she wasn’t sure. When I asked if the school would have archived communications of that nature to the parents, she repeated that she wasn’t sure if there was electronic communication on the subject.

Gifford said only two parents complained. She said they noticed that the comments on student papers used the wrong gender pronoun to refer to the student. The school found a third student where the gender was incorrect and contacted that family. She said she did not know if parents discussed this issue online. The school has a number of avenues for parents to communicate with other parents, but she said the school doesn't look at parent-to-parent communication. I asked if any more parents complained to the school later about the use of an outside scoring service. She said she wasn’t aware of any complaints.

Gifford is well aware of the laws concerning fingerprinting and background checks I wrote about earlier. However, she said, because of the way AZVA has set up the transmission of papers, the regulations do not apply to any outside scoring service, whether it is based in India or the U.S. She said that student papers first go though an AZVA teacher, who scrubs the papers of names and other personal information, so the scorer has no idea the identity of the student. She compared it to the people hired by Arizona to score the AIMS essays. She said the AIMS scorers are not fingerprinted, and the papers are sent to scorers all over the country.

There’s More to the Story
This is a first pass over the basic information about Arizona Virtual Academy sending student papers to India. There is a great deal more to be said on this matter. As an outsider, I don’t know all the details about what the parents did and didn’t know, nor have I checked the information about the use of paper scorers with high school students. But I know I'm concerned about the for-profit school's feeling that parents can be misled about who is commenting on and scoring student work. K12 Inc, which runs the school, had the option of cutting each teacher's student load and hiring more certified staff so each teacher would be responsible for all phases of his or her students' work. Instead it chose to use less expensive labor in India. That sounds like a corporation that cares more about the bottom line than the quality of its students' educations.

If you are involved with Arizona Virtual Academy in any way and can confirm or refute anything I have written, or you have information to add, please make comments to this post.

A Note on Making Blog Comments: If you have never commented on a blog, it’s very simple. Click on “Comments” at the end of this post and you’ll be taken to a page where you can write as much as you wish. You can use your name, or you can post anonymously by creating a name for yourself. Pretty much any type of name will do. You have to enter your email, but it will not be displayed with the comment.

If you want to send an email rather than putting a comment online, click on the “Email Me” button on the right column of the blog.

Comments

[Admin]

I feel that one of the approaches of countering the above problems should be by making an impact on impressionable minds..the citizens of tommorrow..by introducing them to such issues and involve them in problem solving by introducing some enhancements in their current curriculum. We see hundreds of subjects being studied but nothing that to a large extent introduces students to high priority daily life issues like above which are hindering the overall quality of life & growth of the city/state/country.

[RA]

I think there is no harm in sending the papers to India, as long as, the teachers in India are certified. After all, even our most complex work is being outsourced to India now. Also, since the school is run for profit, the authorities have to be concerned of the cost. I am sure the teachers in India are equally educated than our staff, and do their work sincerely.

[JT]

Here is an idea - outsource to India. Pass on the savings to the parents so they can use it send their kids to college.

Want to be educated by American teachers - 10K / year

Want to be educated by Indian teachers - 2K / year + 8K credit for college!

[Jen]

Because this is a partisan Obama blog,
there is no need for Ms. Gifford of AZVA
to hide behind Clintonian language such
as "no direct contact....".

AZVA - come out clean. We know there is more to
this. Just curious - why
outsource English? I thought
Indians are good in Math & Science!

[CJ]

AIMS testing - the testpapers are never sent back to the students. Only a score is reported back.

It is not clear what happened between a teacher
in India and a student in Arizona? What is
asynchronous teaching? Did the students receive
their graded work back?

There is a difference. Assuming the students got their papers back and further assuming that an
Indian teacher (there are bad apples everywhere) wrote "here is my e-mail. Please send me your
picture, hopefully one in a sexy outfit" how would
AZVA catch such a comment?

Ofcourse Mr. Gifford would reply "our teachers
went through all comments" - if the AZVA teachers
had time to go through all comments, was there any
need to outsource in the first place?

[Rajesh]

I work in the BPO industry in India. The
financial sector of the BPO industry processes
sensitive information: credit card numbers,
tax returns, bank accounts, salary data, etc.

Children are precious. The essay written by
a student or the identity of a student is very
precious to a parent or a grand parent.

A stolen credit card information has more
street value or transaction value than say an
essay written by a middle schooler.

Whatever information may have been sent from
Arizona to India, please be assured they are
safe.

[David Safier]

Rajesh, if you're trying to make me feel the AZVA children are safe because their identities and information are being treated with the same care as credit card numbers and other financial data...

It's a bit callous, don't you think, to compare the safety of people's credit card numbers with the safety of their children?

And if you read the U.S. papers, you'll see that thefts of entire identities, social security numbers and bank account numbers are nearly a daily occurrence, and most of it is done via computer.

So tell me again, please, how your examples of financial data sharing should assure me these children are safe. I must have missed something.

[Francine Shacter]

Stop!!!! this is going in the wrong direction. The issue is not "outsourcing" grading papers - the issue is whether or not we will have a public school system in this country that involves the public - our public - our communities. That is the real issue here. The public school system not only imparts information to the students - it socializes those students, too. If there is to be community-wide agreement that we will make "factory" schools, then that is a whole 'nother issue. Forgive me for referring to my own experience - that is the best I can go on - and it is also the experience of my children who were educated in the public schools in Maryland, another of the 50 States.

We went to neighborhood schools. We interacted with the teachers - they taught us, tested us on what we learned and interacted with us (that "interacted with us" is very critical to me) on a daily basis. Schools should not be factories into which we put raw material - a kid - and come out with a product - a kid who can (maybe) read, write and do arithmetic. There is something gross and mechanical about this whole concept that is repulsive to me. This is not an assembly line.

I remember very well Miss Grundy (Grundy for Queen, we used to say) who taught English and Mr. Sarno who taught critical thinking under the guise of current affairs. This personal interaction with teachers enriches the children who are learning - all are part of the process - a very precious process, I might add. My idea of a school is one which is in a neighborhood to which a child can walk, as I did, as my children did. It is part and parcel of the community.

Fingerprints are not the issue - personal contact and interaction and give and take - these are the ingredients of education. The wealthy have often sent their children to boarding schools and gotten them back later - hopefully educated and "finished". But the preponderance of the population have been educated in public schools which were part and parcel of the community. We should not be making our children available for experimentation of the kind envisaged by this kind of impersonal information imparting system. There is no room for some of the most necessary parts of education - the interaction of teachers with students and students with each other!

Just my 2 cents!!!!

[Francine Shacter]

I finished and posted my comment and then reflected that it failed to include a very necessary part of education - cooperation among students such as occurs in school bands and orchestras. The value of these bands and orchestras is the emphasis on the input of each individual student. Let's face it, one wrong note and the music does not sound as it should. Our children learn the value, significance and importance of each and every individual, the importance of the unique input of each and every one. That can't be outsourced for grading!

Well, I guess it is quite evident how appalling I find all of this!

[Suji]

I was one of the educators who was closely involved
in this project, on the Indian side.

Every paper I reviewed (it was not mere grading, there
was extensive asynchronous teaching involved, we provided two to three pages of suggestions for improving writing) had the student's name and a numerical ID (school ID). It is likely the teachers
at AZVA did not want to do extra work, did not take out the student names and sent them with the names to
India.

[Francine Shacter]

Suji, I am not questioning the quality of your work as a grader of papers. The issue is what is/should the job be? and "grading papers" without the benefit of direct interaction with students implies a depersonalization in education which I believe defeats one of the goals of education (and if it isn't a goal, it should be), namely the ability of students to interact/question and discuss with their teachers/graders on the various subjects. The kind of grading involved in sending papers to any other place, not the quality of the grading of information is the issue. Depersonalizing education of children - that is the issue. There is a lot more to education and what goes on when papers are graded and then returned to a student - and that is the possibility for a stimulating interaction between students and their teachers!

[David Safier]

Francine, you may have missed an important part of Suji's comment.

In my post, I wrote, "She [Gifford] said that student papers first go though an AZVA teacher, who scrubs the papers of names and other personal information, so the scorer has no idea the identity of the student."

Suji wrote, every paper he reviewed "had the student's name and a numerical ID (school ID). It is likely the teachers at AZVA did not want to do extra work, did not take out the student names and sent them with the names to India."

Suji's comment contradicts Gifford's comment. The safety of the students' identity has been compromised if their names are revealed. If I had the name of a 14 year old and knew that child lived in Arizona (and something in the paper might reveal the student's location even more specifically), is there a chance I could find a way to contact that student out of school by doing an internet search? If so, the background and character of the people looking at students' papers in India takes on a great deal more importance.

[Francine Shacter]

Sorry, David, that is still not the most important point - for me. In our society, we are all wrapped around the axle of fear and your very real concern for what could/might happen to an individual student whose identity is not scrubbed from the paper is an expression of that fear. That is, as they say, a whole 'nother subject and just a side-trip getting us away from the important function of an education - not only learning facts but the very important interaction between the teacher and the student. You can take finger prints and line them end on end around the world to "protect" the student and by outsourcing grading papers, the end result will still be the same sterile process - no direct interaction between student and teacher which must be an intrinsic part of the learning process.

Concern with the safety of our children, brings immediately to my mind the whole messy story of pedophilia that afflicted the Catholic church. These children were thought to be in the safest possible place - with their dedicated priests - and look what happened and what havoc was wrought.

[Misty_Gendal]

They lied to all K12 parents, everywhere, plain and simple. Mary Gifford confirms this when she said it's K12 who hired the India reviewers. This is what they say the teacher does on their website. "They have one subject-specific teacher for each subject studied. These teachers are responsible for reviewing all student work and providing instructional feedback." What other lies have they told? They say clearly that there is one teacher for each subject and THAT teacher is responsible for reviewing all student work. What are we paying for? For sure not all virtual schools are doing this. I am not in Arizona, but I'm happy to find out that K12 was doing this in my state too. I'm taking my student someplace that respects my right to know whats going on.

Thank you very much for bringing this out in the open. I've cancelled other services because I didn't like calling India. If I had known about this I wouldn't have sent my child to this school either.

[Once_a_virtual_schooler]

I didn't find out about this 'out sourcing' topic until I joined an AZVA Yahoo! Message Board. When I initially came across the post on the board, I asked a general question in relation, but didn't get any information. It seemed to be hush-hush. So, I went away believing that this whole thing was a misunderstanding. Well, I went to another virtual academy school board and there I found the same comments. Still, no answers. Then I stumbled upon this blog and I am so glad that I did.

Needless to say today will be my son's last day. And as far as my origninal thoughts about joining Connections Academy, that is a no, as well. If CAVA out sourced, what makes me believe that the other affiliated states with the academic program won't outsource as well.

This deception hits me at my core. I am upset at the fact that both of these virtual schools scream parent and teacher participation to facilitate the furtherance in excellence as it relates to the education of our children. However, I can see that the fact of the matter is, we can't trust anyone.

Our children should be our top priority. Would we post our children's information on a webpage for everyone to view? Would we pick up a phone book and begin to call random individuals and willingly offer personal information about our children? Would we stand up in Church and shout from the pulpit our children's information? No! We wouldn't do it!

One mother stated that she wasn't concerned about any of this because her children are with her all day long. But, your children have to grow up one day. And their information is now in another country. Let's think about this...just because your purse is with you all day long doesn't mean that someone hasn't stolen your identity. I don't understand how some people take certain things so lightly. When it comes to the safety of our children, shouldn't we be on the look out?! It isn't enough for me to have my children by my side, but just as I don't allow my children to answer the telephone for unidentified callers or run to the front door and open it for ANYONE...why would I allow someone else in another country, or in this country, have my children's personal information for the purposes of grading papers?

On the topic of grading papers, what are teachers paid for? Here I am busting my butt, daily, educating my child. But I get labeled as the ""LEARNING COACH"". I do the teaching, I do the assessment preparation. My teacher, who is very sweet, calls me once every two weeks, sends me feedback regarding my sons' math lessons and his writing abilities. She contacts me via email most frequently, to share new information. Yet, these teachers that are being paid with tax dollars and get ADA (Average Daily Attendance) funds for my child on a daily basis, can't grade a writing assignment?

In the brick and mortar schools teachers don't get paid to teach, and to grade lessons and read papers. What happened to this way of school? Have we gotten so caught up in what is easier for us that we have lost sight of the safety of others?

I, personally, can't be a willing participant of anything that is deceptive. Is it any wonder why a good majority of these parents help their children cheat on lessons and attendance...the apple doesn't fall very far from the tree.

One last thing, redundant I know, but...say for instance your child is in public school. You run into someone at the grocery store and you are just chatting about education and the like. The two of you exchange contact information so you can pick up your conversation later. On the back of the piece of paper the other person gave you, you see your son's name, phone number, birthdate, school, age, (everything that the virtual schools are passing around). You ask where s/he got your son's info. S/he says, "Oh, I got it from some teacher who just wanted me to contact her about a program for her students." You mean to tell me that you wouldn't be upset?

Okay, enough of my rambling. But I speak the truth in my opinion.

[Sandy]

There is something you have to understand about this outsourcing mess. As pointed out, AZVA is operated by K12, which is a publicly traded corporation. It's not likely that the decision to outsource was made on a school by school basis - it's far more likely that this was a decision made by accounting or some other twerp at the corporate office which was forced on the schools.

To the last commenter: you get labeled as "learning coach" because there are legal guidelines in every state about who can be a teacher and who can't. Unless you've gone through a teacher education program, passed the state's licensing tests, and hold a valid teaching certificate, you can't legally be a teacher.