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The Future of Public Education


This week, Amy and I have been working on enrolling Mara, Peter, Neeva and Meyrick in Utah Virtual Academy. UTVA is a partially online charter school, headquartered in Murray, and operated by the K12 corporation. I believe that this type of school represents the future of publicly funded education. Here's why:


Unless you've been living in a cave for the last two years, you know that the economy has been in a lengthy recession. Although the talking heads in Washington have been talking about "green shoots" and telling us that the bottom is near, and recovery immenent, the basic cancer that caused the recession hasn't been corrected, and has, in fact, been made significantly worse. Mssrs Bernanke, Geitner and Obama have a Herculean task ahead of them: They have to adjust the inflation of the money supply such that they neither cause the economy to slide into a deflationary depression or get sucked into hyper-inflation. They're hoping that they have enough wiggle room to create a, more or less, soft landing. This post isn't about why they're destined to eventually fail, so I'm only going to say that the future doesn't look good for public education funding, which is dependant (in Utah) on property and income tax collections.


Utah's Granite School District has already had to cut $27 million from their budget for 2009-10, and I'm betting more cuts will come. So the big question becomes, "How to we continue to provide a quality education with a broad based curriculum?"


The answer is through programs like Utah Virtual Academy and K-12. Utah Virtual Academy provides a full curriculum for students from Kindergarten through High School. Each student is provided with a computer and a printer (in our case, the four children will share one computer & printer provided by UTVA; though normally it's one computer for every 3 students in a home), books and other curriculum materials to learn at home. Each family is also assigned a professional teacher. The teacher is a resource for the students and the parent, and also supervises the students progress; receiving reports and sample work.


Because the curriculum is custom tailored to the individual student and the individual instruction comes from the parent, a much broader choice of curriculum can be made available. For example, each of my children will be taking a foreign language; Mara picked French, Peter picked German, Neeva and Meyrick picked Spanish. A typical elementary school cannot provide this range of subjects.


Meanwhile, having mom doing the teaching with the professional teacher as back-up, provides the potential for a huge budget savings over the traditional brick and mortar school. Granite School District claims that it has a student to teacher ration of about 23:1, and the payroll for "instructional staff" is the biggest expense a traditional school has. Since the teachers at UTVA can supervise the instruction of many more students than a typical classroom teacher, the payroll expense of UTVA is significantly less than for a public school, making the arrangement significantly more cost effective.


Finally, since the instruction takes place at home, the problems associated with large schools are avoided. The student gets one-on-one attention when needed, there is no play ground bullying and no "smokin' in the boys room" type of misbehavior.


It all adds up to a wonderful solution to diminishing budgets. All the advantages of economy of scale without the pitfalls. Oh, and testing data indicate that students do just as well, if not better, in this type of school than in traditional brick and mortar schools.


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