A major debate among education reformers over how best to reduce the achievement gap broke out during the 2008 presidential campaign. Most advocates on both sides backed Barack Obama, but they urged him to pursue different policies. The Education Equality Project (EEP) supported a continuation of accountability and other school-focused reforms. The coalition for A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education claimed that the greatest gains could be achieved by addressing health, housing, and other social ills (see “Straddling the Democratic Divide,” features, Spring 2009).

A close look at recent changes in education in the state of Florida sheds light on that debate. One finds in this southern state, a closing of the achievement gap that has eluded allegedly more progressive states. When it comes to education progress, Florida is a star performer. Moreover, its success has come in spite of a challenging student demographic profile and relatively modest resources.

Let us begin with a basic demographic fact often cited by those in the Broader, Bolder camp. Over the past 20 years, the schools of Florida, California, Texas, and New Mexico have all seen rapid growth in their Hispanic populations. Compared to other groups, Hispanic students underperform academically, drop out of school in higher numbers, and attend college in lower numbers. A straight projection of the recent past into the future looks bleak for these students and their educational outcomes.

But demography need not be destiny. Over the past decade, Florida has succeeded in improving student achievement despite its demographic profile. Low-income students (those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) make up almost half of Florida’s K–12 student body. Florida has a “majority minority” mix of students, with non-Hispanic white students making up 48.3 percent of the total, African Americans about 24 percent, and Hispanics 25 percent. But the educational situation is not as bleak as those statistics might imply: both minority groups have recently made academic strides forward.

Florida has managed to realize such gains although the state’s per-student funding is below the national average. More than making up for its fiscal limitations, the state, led by former governor Jeb Bush, implemented a series of school reforms that together appear to have had dramatic consequences for student performance. Upon taking office in 1999, the governor pursued a multipronged strategy of education reform: an emphasis on reading, standards and accountability for public schools, and new choice options for students. The bulk of the reforms passed in his first year in office. Subsequently, those initial measures were buttressed by additional innovations, including the curtailing of social promotion for students who failed to learn to read in the early elementary grades.

Academic Achievement

Prior to the introduction of those innovations, Florida’s educational record was little short of abysmal. Among the 43 states that in 1998 were gathering information on their students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Florida had the fifth-lowest 4th-grade reading scores. But over the next decade those scores moved sharply upward so that by 2007, Florida’s scores were tied for 8th highest among all the states. As the state moved up the leader board, Florida students, on average, were making strikingly larger gains on NAEP exams than the average student nationwide (see Figures 1 and 2). Nor were gains occurring only in reading. Fourth-grade math scores were climbing at an even faster rate. In 8th grade, reading and math gains in Florida were less impressive but they still outpaced the nation.

Those statewide trends could have been masking a widening of the achievement gap between whites and minorities. But exactly the opposite was happening. Far from lagging behind, Florida’s minority students were doing much to drive the overall rise in test-score performance. In the decade after the education reforms began, the average NAEP reading score for Hispanic 4th graders in Florida rose steeply so that by 2007 scores were higher than the average NAEP reading scores of all students (regardless of ethnicity) in 15 states (see Figure 3).

One might think that rising scores among Hispanic students reflect their families’ movement up the income ladder into the middle class. But even Florida’s low-income Hispanic students scored, on average, equal to or higher than nine statewide averages for all students (regardless of income). Average scores of all Florida low-income students, regardless of ethnicity, tied or exceeded the statewide average for all students in seven states. Many of these differences are small and thus within the margin of NAEP sampling error, so should be thought of statistically as ties. The margin of error cuts both ways, however, as the 2007 statewide averages for all students in Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Texas all fell within two points of Florida’s average for Hispanics on the 4th-grade reading exam. Indeed, the national average for all students falls within this same narrow margin.

Comparison of trends in Florida with those in California is particularly intriguing. Both are large states with growing Hispanic populations. California’s median family income is 12 percent higher than Florida’s, meaning families have more resources to devote to their children’s education. But California has largely eschewed the kinds of accountability and choice reforms that Florida adopted.

The consequences for students range between noteworthy and startling, as shown in Figure 4. The chart displays the differences in the NAEP gains 4th- and 8th-grade students made in the two states. As they did in 4th-grade reading, Florida’s Hispanic students outperformed California students in 4th-grade math and 8th-grade reading; they tied the California average in 8th-grade mathematics.

Explaining Florida’s Success

Not everyone thinks that something remarkable has been happening in Florida. The state’s success is only an apparent one, says Boston College education professor Walter Haney. He discounts Florida’s progress on 4th-grade NAEP scores, on the grounds that Florida’s worst-performing readers repeat 3rd grade and thus are not included in the 4th-grade NAEP. Without the low-performing 4th graders who have been held back for a year, the average scores of the remainder jump upward.

Haney’s critique is worth considering. One of the pillars of the Florida accountability reforms has been the policy, introduced in 2003, of not promoting 3rd graders unless they perform at a minimally acceptable level on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT).

But a more careful look at the data shows that Florida’s NAEP scores were rising before implementation of the retention policy. Between 1992 and 1998, Florida’s average NAEP score in 4th-grade reading dropped by two points. Between 1998 and 2002 (before the social promotion policy affected 4th grade), however, it increased by eight points. One of the reasons for lower retention rates was improved 3rd-grade performance on the state’s examination. In 2002, 27 percent of 3rd graders scored at the lowest level on the reading portion of FCAT, but by 2008 only 16 percent did so, a 40 percent reduction in the pool of students eligible for retention. This helps explain why actual retention rates declined by 40 percent between 2002 and 2007.

One would expect, if Haney’s interpretation is correct, to see an upward spike in 4th-grade test scores in 2003 followed by a steady decline in test performance in subsequent years. But in fact the trend line shows no such spike and decline, only a steady movement upward.

Perhaps Florida’s gains are only apparent for another reason: its low starting point in 1998. Is it possible that gains are realized most easily when scores are initially very low? On this question, opinion is quite divided. Some think gains are more easily realized if students are already accomplished, while others think those with high scores have neared a ceiling, making it difficult to raise their scores further. However that issue is settled in principle, it cannot account for the fact that Florida made striking gains while states with equally low scores did not. For example, on the 1998 4th-grade reading test Florida was near the bottom, with Arizona, California, Hawaii, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico. In 2007, all those states but Florida were still clustered near the bottom.

But if the Florida achievement gains are genuine, and not imaginary, they might still be attributed to factors over which schools have little or no control, for example, demographic changes in the state. Such is the claim of those who say that demography is destiny. Were demographic change the best explanation, however, student performance in Florida would be worse than ever. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 45 percent of Florida children attending public schools in 1998 were of minority background. By 2005, that percentage had climbed to just over 50 percent. Similarly, the percentage from low-income backgrounds (eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) rose from 43 to 45 percent between 1998 and 2007.

Another plausible explanation for the Florida success story is the 2002 passage of an amendment to the state’s constitution mandating universal preschool education for all those who would like to participate. But however valuable the program may prove to be, it cannot explain the gains in achievement observed thus far. The amendment did not require implementation until 2005, and none of the students participating in the Florida early childhood program had reached the 4th grade by 2007, the most recent year for which NAEP data are available.

Much the same can be said for a second constitutional amendment—the class-size reduction amendment—approved by Florida voters in 2002. As in the case of preschool, there is some research evidence that suggests class-size reduction can yield significant gains in student achievement in the early grades. Florida state law now mandates no more than 18 students per classroom in grades K through 3, and no more than 22 students in grades 4 through 8. But the constitutional amendment is being implemented slowly. Through the 2008–09 school year, administrators have been considered in compliance if their schoolwide average class sizes were under the constitutional limits. According to the state department of education, from 2002 to 2008, average class sizes in the early grades were reduced from roughly 23 to 16 students in pre-K to grade 3 and from 24 to 18 students in grades 4 to 8. Still, if class-size reductions had any effect on achievement gains between 1998 and 2007, it could only have been toward the end of the period.

Nor can the gains in education be easily attributed to changes in public school funding. Florida’s average spending per pupil rose from $7,183 in 1998–99 to $7,683 in 2004–05, in constant dollars. This was less than half the increase in the national average over the same period.

One can pretty much rule out these possible explanations for the Florida success story. The gains are not an artifact of the elimination of social promotion in 3rd grade or of the ease with which low test scores can be lifted. Nor can they be attributed to demographic change, the introduction of preschool education or class-size reduction, or greater per pupil expenditure. One must look elsewhere for an explanation. The most likely remaining candidate is school-focused reforms, which have the vigorous support of the EEP side of the education reform debate.

The Florida Reforms

Over the past decade, Florida has introduced a comprehensive program of school reform that has five main points: school accountability, literacy enhancement, student accountability, teacher quality, and school choice. Together, the reforms created a system that appears to have focused teachers and students on the task of learning in a way that has yielded the dividends we have highlighted above.

School Accountability.  In 1999, the state legislature enacted a law that required students in grades 3 through 10 to take annual tests in reading and mathematics, known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT. The assessment had two distinctive features lacking in most other accountability systems, including the one prescribed by the federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). First, it gave each school in the state a very clear grade of A to F based on the results from the test and offered a specific fiscal incentive to schools to try to reach as high a grade as possible. Bonuses were given for obtaining an A or raising one’s grade from one year to the next. Conversely, schools receiving an F grade twice over a four-year period were asked to carry out a variety of reforms. The law offered students at “double F” schools the opportunity to attend private schools until a court decision disallowed the practice in 2006.

Beginning in 2002, the accountability system included measures of student progress from one year to the next, a feature not incorporated into NCLB. That gave schools with low-performing students an opportunity to raise their grades without imposing upon them the extremely difficult task of matching the performances of schools whose student body enjoyed a preferred demographic portfolio. Clear, realistic incentives to improve were made available to schools across the state.

Focus on Literacy.  Along with its accountability system, Florida in 2002 introduced a statewide program known as “Just Read, Florida!” The effort created new academies to train teachers in reading instruction and provided for the hiring of 2,000 additional reading coaches. Teachers in grades K–3 took mandatory reading training courses over a three-year period. Students in grades 6 through 12 who demonstrated insufficient reading skills were provided remedial instruction.

Student Accountability. Beginning in 2003, Florida students were asked to pass a more demanding examination if they were to be given a high school diploma. In addition, Florida lawmakers, as discussed above, curtailed the social promotion of 3rd-grade students who performed at very low levels in reading. According to a careful evaluation by Jay Greene and Marcus Winters at the University of Arkansas (see “Getting Ahead by Staying Behind,” research, Spring 2006), the program had a positive impact on the performance of all 3rd graders, including those who were retained in that grade. Apparently, they benefited more from an additional year of instruction than they would have had they been pushed on to 4th grade when they were not well prepared for the more challenging material.

Teacher Recruitment.  Florida enacted new policies for broadening the pool from which teachers were being selected. Previously, teachers were required to earn a certificate by attending one of the state’s schools of education. Florida supplemented that channel of recruitment with a variety of alternative paths. The state opened “Educator Preparation Institutes” to facilitate the transition into teaching. Districts were allowed to offer alternative certification. Today, more than one-third of all new teachers in Florida are coming to the profession through alternative certification programs. The state’s teaching workforce has become the nation’s third most ethnically representative (see “What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?” check the facts, Winter 2009).

The alternative certification program may have had a particularly significant impact on Hispanic students. Florida enjoys a large immigrant population that fled from Cuba in the years following the establishment of Castro’s communist regime. Many of the immigrants were middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs, and they have established a strong economic, political, and cultural presence in southern Florida. That population provides a pool of potential educators of high talent who speak both English and Spanish. Just how important alternative certification was to the recruitment of highly qualified bilingual instructors is unknown, but it cannot be ruled out as a potential explanation for the particularly large gains Florida’s Hispanic students have made. On the other hand, it cannot be the whole story, as African American and non-Hispanic white students also made strong gains during this period. Moreover, the percentage of Hispanics of Cuban origin has declined during the past decade (though this may not have affected the size of the pool of qualified bilingual teachers).

School Choice. Florida is well known for the range of school choice legislation it has enacted over the past decade. Charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, and online education all provide students and families with greater choice in 2008 than they had in 1998. For example, 105,329 students were enrolled in the state’s 358 public charter schools in 2007–08. That same year 19,852 students eligible for special education took advantage of the opportunity to use a voucher to attend private schools, and 21,493 students received scholarships averaging $3,750 from a tax credit program that opened private schooling to students from low-income families. The state-funded Florida Virtual School currently offers students more than 90 online courses (ranging from GED to Advanced Placement courses). Middle and high school students anywhere in Florida can access these classes free of charge. The state projects that 168,000 courses will be taken and completed during the 2008–09 school year (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features). Multiple evaluations, by organizations ranging from the Manhattan Institute to the Urban League, have found the choice programs to have had a positive impact on Florida public schools.

Despite the numbers, the school choice programs are not large enough to have had more than a limited statewide impact on the millions of students attending Florida’s public schools. Yet they helped create a climate in which public schools may have wanted to demonstrate their effectiveness for fear that choice opportunities would continue to expand.

Identifying what has caused the rise in Florida student performance cannot be done with perfect certainty. It might have been the accountability system, or the state’s reading program, or its decision to expect more from students, or its alternative certification program, or its plethora of school choice innovations, or some combination of all of them. But the results from Florida do suggest that concerted efforts to improve the quality of an education system can pay dividends for students. It is probably not a coincidence that the one state that has outdone the others in its efforts to reform its schools has made outsize gains in student performance. Exactly which of the many reforms Florida undertook was the key to success may never be known, but the reform package offers other states—and the nation as a whole—a clear path on which they, too, can move forward.

Matthew Ladner is vice president for policy at the Goldwater Institute. Dan Lips is senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

Education reform often appears a zero-sum battle , one that pits crusaders demanding accountability and choice against much of the traditional education establishment, including teachers unions. The political skirmishes in Florida, including court fights over vouchers and charter schools, and ongoing struggles over a parade of different merit pay plans for teachers, give credence to the standard portrayal.

But state-run Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a decade-old public education experiment, departs from this conventional script. This most radical of choice based schools—where students and teachers never meet in physical classrooms and state funding flows on a performance-based, demand-driven model—has largely avoided the political and legal tangles that have stymied other reform efforts. And, free from the geographic constraints and facilities costs of traditional schools, FLVS has grown rapidly, scaling up to match the considerable demand for the school’s courses. In the 2008–09 school year, approximately 84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, a 10-fold increase since 2002–03.

To accomplish this rare feat, the school has adroitly walked a fine line. It has built a distinct educational philosophy, approach, and culture. At the same time, it has maintained its identity as a public school and remains part of the system. This unique positioning, far enough outside to do business in a different way yet sufficiently inside the system to avoid political backlash, has been a key element in the school’s success. Mark Pudlow, spokesperson for the Florida Education Association, the teachers union that has fought pitched battles against many of Florida’s recent initiatives, acknowledges the result of Florida Virtual School’s approach: “[It] never developed the kind of mistrust that tends to be associated with other reform ideas.” Savvy leadership, strong political support, and a series of well-timed decisions around growth have helped FLVS become the country’s most successful virtual school, and perhaps one of its most important reform stories as well.

School on Demand

FLVS is a supplemental virtual school: most students attend brick-and-mortar schools and take FLVS courses in addition to their traditional classes. While the vast majority of FLVS students come from district schools (82 percent in 2007-08), the school is open to charter, private, and home-schooled students (see “Virtual Schools,” forum , Winter 2009).Much of the school’s recent growth has been driven by minority enrollments. Between June 2007 and July 2008, African-American enrollments grew by 49 percent, Hispanic enrollments by 42 percent, and Native American enrollments by 41 percent. Students enroll for a variety of reasons, but most come to fulfill graduation requirements, make up credits for missed or failed classes, or take Advanced Placement (AP) and other courses that are not available at their physical school (see Figure 1).

The FLVS motto, “any time, any place, any path, any pace,” emphasizes the school’s flexible and mastery-based approach to learning. Here, the content remains constant, but the time required—be it 16, 18, or 22 weeks—adjusts. Students at FLVS choose an accelerated, traditional, or extended pace for a particular course, taking extra time if needed to review and receive additional guidance on lessons or move through a course at a quicker pace than is typical. Moreover, FLVS students don’t have to wait for the semester to begin; they can choose the month in which they would like to start.

While its courses are virtual, FLVS strives for highly personalized instruction. The school employs more than 715 fulltime and 29 adjunct teachers—all Florida-certified and “highly qualified” under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Depending on the course, teachers use a variety of methods to engage students, including live one-to-one or small group virtual whiteboard sessions, asynchronous discussion, and even a new experimental, immersive online game for an American history course. Given the school’s flexible pacing, there isn’t a set class size, but full-time teachers are limited to 150 students each and individualized feedback is extensive. Instructors are expected to respond to student questions and provide comments on assignments within 24 hours. In addition, teachers phone students at least monthly, many times using oral assessments to ensure that students’ work is their own. Via the online course site, teachers post syllabi, readings, assignments, and other course materials.

Non-Adversarial Relationships

FLVS’s “inside the system” status originated in 1995 in efforts to develop Internet-based high-school programs in two Florida counties, Alachua (Gainesville) and Orange (Orlando). Both districts launched pilot programs and then formed an alliance to compete for state grant funding. In August 1997, FLVS began as Florida High School, with 77 course enrollments.

Nicholas Gledich, supervisor of Orange County’s initial program (he now serves as chief operating officer of Orange County Schools and is an FLVS trustee), recalls that from the beginning the school made a concerted effort to build relationships with a wide range of constituencies. While there was strong initial interest from home-schooling families, he says, it was important “to reach a diverse group of students” and establish “personal contact with districts and schools.”

Julie Young, who at the time worked for Gledich and is now CEO of FLVS, points to another important, early decision that helped set the precedent for a nonadversarial relationship with traditional district schools. Rather than become a diploma-granting institution and directly compete with traditional high schools, FLVS chose to supplement the brick-and-mortar high school. Instead of offering a full-time program that drew students away from traditional settings, the program focused on filling curricular gaps and expanding access to additional courses and learning opportunities. Young says the decision was “a huge deal.” We didn’t steal students from traditional schools; we “gave kids back to their schools in good shape.”

The grant-based funding mechanism provided early capacity-building funds, allowing FLVS to establish its courses, faculty, and credibility. Importantly, funds flowing to FLVS were over and above those received by traditional schools. Traditional high schools did not lose funds when students opted to take classes with FLVS. “If we went after FTE [regular school funding] we would be putting our head in the lion’s cage,” says Frank Brogan, Florida’s commissioner of education at the time of the school’s founding and later, in 2000, lieutenant governor under Jeb Bush. The fights begin “when you go after people’s money.”

Success Pays

From 1997 to 2003, FLVS enjoyed impressive growth, from the initial 77 course enrollments to more than 12,000. The school’s funding continued on a year-to-year appropriation, but strong political support in the governor’s office, the state department of education, and key legislative committees ensured that total funding rose from $1.3 to $6.9 million in the same time frame.

While FLVS’s political support was impressive, the annual appropriations funding mechanism not only was risky—it was subject to year-to-year budget decisions—but also essentially capped growth. And, despite the strong grant funding, the school could not keep up with student demand. In the summer of 2002, 8,000 students were on FLVS waiting lists after traditional summer school classes fell victim to budget cuts. The school decided it was time to seek a permanent funding mechanism through inclusion in the state’s school funding formula. Not only had the school proved highly effective and popular, but it had also grown large enough to develop its own political constituency, serving students from across Florida’s legislative districts.

In 2003, the Florida legislature voted to establish a performance-based funding model for the school. Under this model, the school’s funding is based on students’ successful completion of their courses, a step that places far more pressure on FLVS to ensure its students’ success than exists in traditional public school systems. Florida funds six credits per high-school student per year, so each time a student successfully completes a one-credit course, FLVS receives one-sixth of its per-pupil funding level ($1,054 per credit for 2008–09). Brogan calls this act an “absolute statement that the program had arrived.” This critical legislative action established the school as a permanent component of the state’s funding formula, providing stable and predictable funding outside of the yearly legislative allotment.

For the first time, this action also put FLVS in competition for funding with traditional school systems. “We would have preferred that it would have been funded outside the FEFP [Florida Education Finance Program],” said Ruth H. Melton, the director of legislative relations for the Florida School Boards Association, in a June 2003 EducationWeek article reporting on the legislation. Despite this opposition, FLVS was only a minor irritation among a number of controversial education reform programs. Melton concluded, “school boards are less concerned about losing funding to the virtual school than to the various voucher programs.” Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, reflecting on the legislative action, echoed Melton’s sentiment: “[At the time] we were doing so many different things that were provocative, this didn’t seem as radical.”

According to state rules, a student’s full-time school may not deny access to courses offered by FLVS. Taken together, the performance-based funding model and school choice provisions provide incentives for FLVS to be responsive to student, parent, and educational needs, an alignment not commonly found among district-run schools. Since there are no barriers to enrollment and funding is not capped at a preset amount, FLVS can increase its revenue by enrolling additional students and ensuring that those students successfully complete courses.

“Part of what Florida did is set it up in a way that gave direct access to parents and students, but structurally left kids enrolled in their district. [This has enabled] Florida to reach scale,” explains Barbara Dreyer, president and CEO of Connections Academy, a for-profit, full-time virtual school provider and partner of FLVS. “Many other states are caught in a catch-22: [Their programs] do not have enough scale so they are not cheap, but because they are not cheap they can’t get to scale.”

New Challenges

Despite FLVS’s success and national recognition—in December 2008 Florida governor Charlie Crist accepted a plaque from the Center for Digital Education recognizing Florida as the top provider of virtual education in the nation—the school still faces a number of operational and political challenges. The school is experiencing staggering growth; in the eight months from July 2008 to February 2009, it hired more than 300 new full-time teachers (see Figure 2). After a long period of extremely solid support in Tallahassee, the state’s executive and legislative leaders have begun to turn over.

The school was surprised at the end of 2007 when key state senate committee leaders convened a two-day workshop to hear from a variety of additional virtual school vendors, researchers, and district officials. While every legislator and speaker at the hearing expressed strong admiration and support for FLVS’s programs, it was clear that FLVS was no longer driving the agenda.

In 2008, spurred by a stated desire to increase school choice, but also partly motivated by fiscal concerns and vendor lobbying, the legislature voted to change the state’s other virtual school provisions that regulated full-time programs. In addition to FLVS’s supplemental programs, the state had contracted with two private providers, the similarly named Florida Virtual Academy, run by K12, Inc., and Florida Connections Academy, to offer fully online, fulltime, statewide virtual school programs for elementary- and middle-school students. The new law phased out the statewide programs, mandating that beginning in the 2009–10 school year, each Florida school district must develop its own offering or contract with a provider to offer a K–8 full-time online school option.

FLVS had to scramble quickly to respond. While the legislation did not directly impact FLVS’s supplemental programs or funding, it presented another, possibly more dangerous, issue. With 67 districts mandated to begin their own online programs and funding incentives for these districts to contract with low-cost providers and pocket the difference, FLVS feared that virtual education would be tainted by low-quality programs. Over the past five years, the school had watched as a number of other states, such as Colorado and Pennsylvania, conducted audits and investigations to root out mismanaged programs, casting doubt on quality programs in the process.

FLVS did not serve elementary-school students and operated on a supplementary basis. But the school already had “franchise” relationships with eight Florida counties, including Broward (Fort Lauderdale), Dade (Miami), and Hillsborough (Tampa). Under this agreement, the counties’ district schools use their own teachers in conjunction with FLVS’s courses and technology platform to offer online courses. For instance, in Broward County, the district offers a full-time alternative high-school program. These districts were mandated to begin K–8 full-time programs, but FLVS could only offer courses in 6th through 12th grade.

Faced with the possibility of being a nonplayer and not necessarily in a position to start its own program, FLVS decided to partner. The school issued an open solicitation for proposals and developed a partnership with private Connections Academy to jointly solicit and run K–8 programs for Florida school districts. Dreyer, when asked about the partnership, notes FLVS’s strong national reputation and the credibility it brings to her company.

Christopher McGuire, new principal at Broward Virtual School, an FLVS franchisee, continues the school’s philosophy of operating both within and outside of the system: “This is a healthy alternative to the conventional school model…we’re competing on a different plane: ‘Come to Broward Virtual School if the traditional model is not working for you.’”

A Winning Strategy

More than a decade after the school’s founding, Brogan recognizes the narrow path that FLVS has navigated between accommodation and confrontation. “Education has a unique ability to fend off and co-opt reform, drag it into a cul-de-sac and strangle it.” At the other extreme, “reformers can become such zealots. What is a great idea is lost in the translation of zealot status, lost in a wash of defensiveness.”

Bush, Brogan, and Gledich are all quick to point out that despite the school’s political support, it would not have succeeded without consistent leadership and a high-quality program. Former governor Bush says that a “poor quality product would have failed.” While much more research is needed to understand the effectiveness of virtual schooling for students in K–12, the small body of research available points to no significant differences in student performance in online courses versus face-to-face learning. At FLVS, the early evidence, including scores from its students’ AP exams, is positive (see Figure 3).

While it is still too early to determine the ultimate effect of FLVS on public schooling in Florida, the program’s growth is evidence that its political strategy has succeeded. Quietly, without the polarizing rhetoric or bruising battles of other reform efforts, the school has expanded options for students. For a virtual school, that’s a concrete achievement.

Bill Tucker is managing director at Education Sector

Imagining life far off in the future is the stuff of science fiction. Imagining life a few decades from now, however, is a subject of serious inquiry for military strategists, urban planners, and marketers. Why not for educators?

In the following pages, we sketch a vision of learning that may seem “gee whiz” but which is grounded in technologies—for visual display, interaction, content creation, learning science, virtual reality, and more—that exist or are in development today. (See Technology Notes for a sample of companies and products.)

We envision 10-year-old Jevon learning, in his home, a history lesson that is suited to his learning level yet has the capacity to challenge him, creates opportunities for interdisciplinary study of critically important content and skills, and encourages independent thinking and exploration. This 2025 immersive learning environment is not unlike interactive globally connected games such as World of Warcraft, Second Life, and others that today engage children and teens in roleplaying, strategizing, and mock battles. Students in each 3D world speak, type, touch the screen, and use handheld controllers to explore and become part of the eras and subjects they study, interacting with real and synthetic people, places, and scenes.

Within a wide array of these worlds, learners master common core sets of objectives at a pace that suits them, guided and encouraged by an avatar (an appealing virtual character operated by a computer) who engages the student in ongoing conversation. In our example, Jevon has fashioned his teacher avatar from a character named “Yoda” he had seen in an old movie.

As they work to mastery, students can explore related side topics via hyperlinks and interactions, while the pacing and guidance systems ensure a complete curriculum is covered in an effective sequence. Using the tools of artificial intelligence together with data gathered from watching this learner and millions of others, the system over time comes to “understand” the style, capability, and learning history of each student, and uses that understanding to adjust activities and pacing.

Jevon’s Experience

Regardless of students’ physical location, they can learn with friends and peers from around the world. Yan, an 11-year-old girl from a city near Beijing, China, joins Jevon as he listens to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Automatic language translation enables the two students to interact in real time. Jevon and Yan position themselves in the crowd to converse with virtual characters in the audience. In the side bar, we continue the dialogue, imagining how Jevon and Yan might interact with each other, with characters from the history they are studying, and with the teaching avatar Yoda.

After one set of objectives has been met, the system can use the same 3-D environment for other goals, such as learning to estimate. Any single objective can appear in many contexts, promoting creative and flexible triggering of ideas and skills, exactly how instructional expertise is supposed to benefit learners in the real world.

Students can work together via webcam and avatar, all monitored and recorded for security and analysis. They can work in groups of a particular age or learning level, sharing and manipulating materials together, discussing what they are learning. The use of avatars may ease the potential awkwardness of a particularly advanced 10-year-old, for example, working with older students in some subjects.

The system can be accessed anytime. Younger children, teenagers, and adults all have different sleep and learning cycles; a teenager may prefer literature discussions at 4 PM and math at 11 PM. There will always be countless students available for collaboration.

Periodically, depending on Jevon’s progress and needs, an educator-advisor or academic “coach” spends time reviewing his results, monitoring his system usage (perhaps targeting particularly difficult and important concepts and skills for Jevon), and sending feedback to Jevon’s parents.

A System That Learns

The system leverages data from millions of learners individually experiencing thousands of learning activities each year. Similar to how today’s Google, amazon.com and Last.fm work, after each of Jevon’s interactions with Yoda, the system can compare his responses to those of his peers within this vast database. If Jevon had struggled with estimating the size of the crowd, the system would add this to the database. At the same time, the system would draw on information about similar learners to help Jevon master the material; the avatar would use an educator’s guiding question that had helped similar students apply estimation techniques.

Driven by Educators

Educators create content and activities for the system based on the targeted skills and concepts in each subject area, what is known about how children learn (from neural imaging and studies of typical development sequences), and what is understood to be effective for teaching specific topics (from deep databases of histories organized by learner characteristics). The content is peer reviewed and field tested. As information flows in from hundreds of thousands of children, educators are able to see what activities work best for children with different learning histories, and adjust the content (who sees what, and what they do) to optimize instruction for each type of child. There is no “standard” learning sequence, although each version targets the same underlying objectives.

Beyond creating content, educators participate in various ways: reviewing student performance that the system has flagged as needing attention, giving one-on-one or one-to-many instruction, either virtually (mostly) or in person for children for whom in person learning is optimal. Teachers can take up roles within simulations or inhabit virtual tutors for specific topics; they can also manage “community time” activities, in person or virtually. Like today’s busy children, learners schedule real world social interaction into the school day or week. Kids from the local area may play games and sports, practice music, or put on skits and plays.

An education system such as we have envisioned here is closer than you might think. Growing understanding about how students learn, together with technologies that are already engaging children and technologies now in development, will soon enable educators to customize each child’s learning experiences to make them more enjoyable and more effective.

Technology Notes Growing understanding about how students learn, together with technologies that are already engaging children and technologies in development, such as those listed below, will enable educators to customize each child’s experience to optimize learning. Multitouch Displays: Microsoft Surface is planning to start with commercial applications but head for the home. www.microsoft.com/surfaceJeff Han from New York University has started a company to market his wall-sized multitouch displays. www.perceptivepixel.com Telepresence: Life-sized images in high definition for video conferencing.HP Halo. www.hp.com; Cisco TelePresence. www.cisco.com 3-D Immersive Environments: Second Life. www.secondlife.comThe Sims game (sample movie from a contest). thesims2.ea.com/contests/winners/RunnerUp_newbeginnings.wmv World of Warcraft. www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath/ulduar.xml Collaborative Filtering: Google, Amazon, NetFlix, Last.fm all use such systems to analyze taste and interest data from millions of people to make more accurate recommendations. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres reports on the “crunching” of massive amounts of data. Natural Language Processing: Dragon NaturallySpeaking handles normal speed continuous speech dictation (converting voice into text) but does not “understand” what the speaker is saying. Truly conversational systems are still years away. www.nuance.com/naturallyspeaking Intelligent Software: MIT Media Lab is working on “intelligent agents” that have common-sense understanding. www.media.mit.edu/research/23CyberTwin is marketed as a “software clone.” mycybertwin.com Converting Pictures to 3-D Virtual Spaces: Microsoft has Photosynth technology that is starting down this path. photosynth.netUpNext generates 3-D city views from aerial photos. www.upnext.com Educational Simulations: Henry Leitner of Harvard University presented “Innovations in Online Education: 3D Virtual Worlds, Gaming and Simulation” at the 2007 University Continuing Education Association conference. See also “Virtual Reality/Simulations” by Nicole Strangman & Tracey Hall, National Center on Accessing the General Curriculum, 2003 (paper). www.cast.org/publications/ncac/ncac_vr.html Immersive elearning: Minneapolis-based elearning company w/ uses avatars and 3D environments to create immersive learning courses that help businesses simulate real-world scenarios in which employees can practice selling techniques and master social situations. www.wslash.net

Gerald Huff is director of the Technology Innovation Group at Intuit, Inc. Bror Saxberg is chief learning officer at K12, Inc., a creator and manager of online learning curricula and programs serving both public and private customers.

“Human capital” is quickly becoming the new site-based management. While few are sure what it means, everyone craves it, has a model to deliver it, and is quick to tout its restorative powers. It’s trendy and impressive sounding, but too often settles for recycling familiar nostrums or half-baked ideas in the guise of new jargon.

Our schools are in a constant, unending race to recruit and then retain some 200,000 teachers annually. Given that U.S. colleges issue perhaps 1.4 million four-year diplomas a year, schools are seeking to bring nearly one of seven new graduates into the teaching profession. No wonder shortages are endemic and quality a persistent concern.

It does not have to be this hard. Our massive, three-decade national experiment in class-size reduction has exacerbated the challenge of finding enough effective teachers. There are other options. Researchers Martin West and Ludger Woessmann have pointed out that several nations that perform impressively on international assessments, including South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan, boast average middle-school class sizes of more than 35 students per teacher.

To improve schooling, the U.S. has adopted the peculiar policy of hiring ever more teachers and asking them each to do the same job in roughly the same way. This dilutes the talent pool while spreading training and salaries over ever more bodies. As Chester Finn wryly observed in Troublemaker, the U.S. has opted to “invest in many more teachers rather than abler ones.… No wonder teaching salaries have barely kept pace with inflation, despite escalating education budgets.” Since the early 1970s, growth in the teaching force has outstripped growth in student enrollment by 50 percent. In this decade, as states overextended their commitments during the real estate boom, the ranks of teachers grew at nearly twice the rate of student enrollment. If policymakers had maintained the same overall teacher-to-student ratio since the 1970s, we would need 1 million fewer teachers, training could be focused on a smaller and more able population, and average teacher pay would be close to $75,000 per year.

Even without the constraint of limits on class size, trying to retrofit an outdated model of teaching is a fool’s errand. Today’s teaching profession is the product of a mid-20th-century labor model that relied on a captive pool of female workers, assumed educators were largely interchangeable, and counted on male principals and superintendents to micromanage a female teaching workforce. Preparation programs were geared to train generalists who operated with little recourse to data or technology. Teaching has clung to these industrial rhythms while professional norms and the larger labor market have changed. By the 1970s, however, schools could no longer depend on an influx of talented young women, as those who once would have entered teaching began to take jobs in engineering and law. The likelihood that a new teacher was a woman who ranked in the top 10 percent of her high school cohort fell by 50 percent between 1964 and 2000. Meanwhile, policymakers and educators were slow to tap new pools of talent; it was not until the late 1980s that they started tinkering with alternative licensure and midcareer recruitment. Even then, they did little to reconfigure professional development, compensation, or career opportunities accordingly.

Even “cutting-edge” proposals typically do not challenge established routines, but instead focus on filling that 200,000-a-year quota with talented 22-year-olds who want to teach into the 2040s. Perhaps the most widely discussed critique of teacher preparation of the past decade, the hotly debated 2006 study by the National Center for Policy Analysis, Educating School Teachers, simply presumed that teacher recruitment ought to be geared toward new college graduates who would complete beefed-up versions of familiar training programs before being cleared to enter the same old jobs. Absent was any reconsideration of who should be teaching or any inclination to question the design of the enterprise.

There are smarter, better ways to approach the challenge at hand: expand the hiring pool beyond recent college graduates; staff schools in ways that squeeze more value out of talented teachers; and use technology to make it easier for teachers to be highly effective. A 21st-century human-capital strategy for education should step back from the status quo and revisit existing assumptions.

Who Should Teach?

Recruiting new college graduates for teaching positions made sense 40 years ago, when the typical graduate could expect to hold just five jobs in an entire career. Today, graduates may have held four jobs by age 30. This early career transience, coupled with the increasing prevalence of midcareer transitions, makes it impractical at best to try to identify future teachers at age 20, fully train them before they enter the profession, and then expect them to remain in teaching jobs for decades. That is a sure-fire recipe for repelling today’s most talented entrants. The composition of the teaching force is changing of its own accord—even in the absence of coherent new strategies to support this shift. In the 1990–91 federal Schools and Staffing Survey, among teachers of grades 9–12, 70 percent had entered the profession by age 25 and just 6 percent had entered after age 35. In the 2003–04 survey, the most recent data available, the number who had entered by age 25 had declined to just over half (56 percent), while 16 percent had started after age 35. Thus, those who entered the teaching profession after the age of 25 made up just one-tenth of 1 percent of all teachers in 1990–91 but 4.1 percent of all teachers in 2003–04.

Highly effective teaching entails not only the application of research-based methods, but also leadership, content knowledge, life experience, organization, commitment, wisdom, enthusiasm, and applied knowledge (including a practical sense of how schooling can be put to use). The median working adult who transfers laterally into teaching has likely enjoyed more opportunities to develop these qualities and skills than has the average new college graduate.

The population of college-educated workers already well into their first or second career, made comfortable by early success and now open to more rewarding, meaningful, and engaging work, appears to be substantial. One can safely estimate this population to be in the millions. A 2008 survey by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation reported that 42 percent of college-educated Americans aged 24 to 60 would consider becoming a teacher, and would be more likely to do so if they could count on quality training and support and expect to start at salaries of $50,000 or more. Those who expressed an interest in teaching as a second career were more academically accomplished than those who were not interested. Given current life spans and career trajectories, it is reasonable to imagine that many 35- or 45-year-old entrants might teach for 20 years or more.

It is entirely plausible that a recruitment strategy that seeks to attract a larger percentage of mature entrants could reduce rates of attrition. In 2002, Anthony Morris, now a Mississippi superintendent, studied 1,895 Mississippi teachers and found that older, second-career teachers were more likely to stay in teaching than younger entrants. The National Center for Education Information has concluded, “Individuals who have entered teaching through alternate routes at older ages are more inclined to stay in teaching for longer than people entering teaching in their early-to-late 20s and 30s.”

The evidence at hand recommends abandoning the presumption that new college graduates be the backbone of new teacher recruitment. We should not discourage young entrants or discount the notion that some 22-year-olds are ready to play a valuable role in schools, either for a limited period of time (e.g., the private school or Teach For America model) or by committing to a career of classroom teaching. Such recruits, when promising, should be courted and welcomed. But there are good reasons not to presume that the just-out-of-college-teacher should be the modal recruit.

The 68 Percent Problem

Currently, there are approximately 3.3 million K–12 teachers in the United States, representing nearly 10 percent of the college-educated workforce. It should be no great surprise that some educators are far more skilled than others at teaching reading or mentoring at-risk youth. Yet schools and school systems casually waste scarce talent by operating on the implicit assumption that most teachers will be similarly adept at everything. In a routine day, a terrific 4th-grade reading teacher might give lessons in reading for just one hour, while spending another five hours teaching other subjects in which she is less effective, filling out paperwork, and so on. This is an extravagant waste of talent, especially when there is widespread agreement that reading is an area of high-impact instruction that deserves special emphasis. In fact, general enthusiasm for mainstreaming children with special needs, untracked classrooms, and “differentiated instruction” have increased the breadth of demands placed on a typical teacher. Although about 60 percent of today’s K–12 teachers have a master’s or specialist’s degree, these credentials generally have little impact on work routines or the scope of an individual’s responsibilities.

Schools require all teachers to devote time and energy to bureaucratic duties, patrolling hallways and cafeterias, taking attendance, and compiling report cards. The problem here is that school and district officials are conscious of expenses related to salary and materials but fail to account for the opportunity costs of not leveraging the talent already in the schools. Even schools that tout their commitment to professional development and data-driven instruction press teachers to operate as generalists rather than leveraging their particular skills.

Two decades of surveys by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) suggest that the typical teacher spends only about 68 percent of classroom time on instruction related to core academic subjects, with the remainder consumed by administrative tasks, fund-raising, assemblies, socialization, and so forth. Provisions for substantial numbers of sick days as well as collective bargaining agreements and management practices that result in the universal imposition of noninstructional responsibilities have all conspired to ensure that schools do not maximize the contributions from the talent they do have.

Rewriting the Job Description

The challenge, in short, is to find ways to “squeeze more juice from the orange” by using support staff, instructional specialization, and technology to ensure that effective educators are devoting more of their time to educating students. There are a number of possible approaches to the problem.

One course of action would entail hiring support staff who have not undergone as much training as teachers and are relatively inexpensive. Assigning administrative and other noninstructional tasks to the support staff would free up teachers to perform the work for which they are best suited. Teachers would be deployed according to their particular talents and focused preparation. Elementary reading instruction, for example, might be recognized as a role distinct from other tasks, with research-based preparation for diagnosing, instructing, and supporting early readers taught in highly specialized training programs. Teaching in remedial math at the secondary level might be another area suited to taking advantage of specific skills and training. Alternatively, rather than continuing to accept the notion that one either is a teacher or is not, schools might embrace hybrid positions to allow talented educators to grow by leveraging their skills in new ways, even as they continue teaching. A district might downsize its central office and invest those dollars in freeing up talented veterans to take on half-time teaching loads, with the other 50 percent of their time devoted to such responsibilities as professional development, curriculum development, or parent outreach. Rather than walling off instruction from these kinds of positions, teachers might be given the chance to grow in the course of their professional life without having to abandon the classroom.

K–12 schooling already employs a large number of school-based personnel who are not teachers; support staff (including aides, librarians, guidance counselors, and so forth) account for about 30 percent of school employees. NCES reports that there are more than 600,000 “instructional aides” in K–12 schools, but the scant evidence available leaves one skeptical that these employees are utilized in a fashion that maximizes teacher effectiveness or alleviates teacher responsibilities. Indeed, the two populations have grown in tandem in recent decades.

Other professions arrange work patterns much differently. In medicine, a century’s worth of gains has been reaped by increasing specialization: the American Medical Association now recognizes 199 specialties. Today there are 5 million medical professionals in the U.S., but just 500,000 physicians. The rest are trained practitioners with complementary talents. In a well-run medical practice, surgeons do not spend time filling out patient charts or negotiating with insurance companies; these responsibilities are left to nurses or support staff. Similarly, not even junior attorneys are expected to file their own paperwork, compile their billing reports, or type letters to clients. These tasks are performed by paralegals and secretaries.

Such efforts to fully utilize talent and expertise have been largely absent in schooling, apart from some small-scale initiatives. One innovation worth exploring employs community resources to augment school staff. Boston-based Citizen Schools, for example, provides highly regarded after-school instruction and career-based learning by arranging for local volunteers to work with students on a regular basis. Rather than simply mentoring or tutoring students, participants teach weekly modules that tackle complex projects with interested students. Citizen Schools leverages the expertise of local professionals on a part-time (and cost-free) basis and points to the promise of approaches that do not wholly depend on full-time, career-long staffing. The key is to stop thinking of teaching as an “all-or-nothing” job and to create models that include the support and opportunity for steady part-timers who also have other obligations or complementary jobs. This “consultant” approach could reflect the way other kinds of organizations tap into particular expertise or retain the service of talented professionals despite changing life circumstances.

Another approach would utilize technology for tasks where teachers are able to add limited value. For instance, monitoring student achievement via technology might alleviate the need for teachers to devote substantial time to administering, grading, and entering data generated by formative assessments. One such example is provided by Wireless Generation software, which enables elementary school teachers to use Palm Pilots as tools in assessing and tracking early reading performance. This saves teachers substantial time in the assessment and data-entry process, and makes immediately available a wealth of easily manipulated information on student performance.

Technology can also be used to change the way some education services are delivered. Today’s model requires schools with many classrooms, each featuring a teacher working face-to-face with a particular group of students. This “people-everywhere” strategy is expensive and limits the available talent pool, as some potentially effective educators may be unwilling to relocate to the communities where they are needed. Thus far this has not been a challenge for the premier school districts, like those in Westchester (New York), Montgomery (Maryland), or Fairfax (Virginia) counties, or for charter school operators like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) or Uncommon Schools, but it does impose a ceiling on the number of schools and districts that can rely on the people and strategies that drive success in these organizations. In accepting the assumption that each classroom should include a generic “teacher” and as few children as possible, these schools are entirely dependent on their ability to attract talented, high-energy staff, dramatically limiting the likelihood that these admired programs will be able to achieve the hoped-for scale.

Perhaps the most significant impact of education technology is its potential to eliminate obstacles posed by geography. Web-based delivery systems can take advantage of the wealth of highly educated, English-speaking people in nations like India willing to tutor children at relatively inexpensive rates. Washington, D.C.–based SMARTHINKING, Inc., uses American and international tutors to provide intensive instruction to students. Students can log on to the company’s web site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and work in real time with experts in various academic subjects.

When technology is used to deliver instruction or tutoring from a distance, it offers opportunities to create “classrooms” with large numbers of children (as in South Korea or Singapore) and to streamline the “teacher’s” role. In either case, the challenge of finding enough high-quality local personnel becomes more manageable. Technology also makes it easier for schools in different locations to communicate or share staff and enables central administrators to deliver support to campuses hundreds of miles away.

Some skeptics have suggested that technology cannot be substituted for and very likely cannot meaningfully augment the work that teachers do. This argument underlies the dismal failure in education to use new technologies, from the television to the PC to the Internet, as labor-saving devices (see “How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008). Schools similarly have foundered under a “supplement, not supplant” mind-set in which there has been fierce resistance to fully utilizing cutting-edge innovations. Too often, discussions about the use of computers, web-based delivery, and instructional software fail to consider what needs to be done in policy, school organization, or within the teaching profession to take full advantage of those tools.

Different Pay for Different Work

Rethinking recruitment assumptions and job descriptions requires new models for salaries and benefits. If the ideal new teacher is a recent college graduate who intends to remain in the profession for decades, there is a logic to relying on seniority to allocate salary and positional perks. If, however, the ideal entrant is someone aged 30 to 55 who has worked for several years in another field and accumulated experience and skills, this paradigm is needlessly constraining. Benefit systems that penalize shorter terms of service are a stumbling block for second-career teachers; comparable salaries and a defined-contribution 401(k)-type retirement plan make a lateral move more attractive.

While the aim should be to create a profession with various roles and specializations, it should not be presumed that differential compensation requires finely graded hierarchies. Even seemingly sophisticated proponents of compensation reform have too often advocated variations on the blunt Pavlovian approach of paying more for higher student test scores while neglecting the broader design of the profession. After all, every teacher under a Denver Public Schools ProComp-style system still enters teaching at roughly the same salary and with roughly the same job description. Every teacher pursues the same bonuses and seeks to climb the same career ladder. This would be akin to a law firm requiring every new J.D. to start as a paralegal and then eventually become a lawyer, or hospitals requiring every new M.D. to begin as a nurse, then become a general practitioner, and eventually a specialist.

Law and medicine have weakened or even severed the link between an employee’s formal place in an organizational hierarchy and expected compensation. By allowing pay to reflect perceived value, these fields have fostered norms whereby accomplished attorneys or doctors spend their careers making use of their skills and earn outsized compensation without ever moving into management or administration. That kind of a model in education would permit truly revolutionary approaches to recruiting and retaining quality educators.

In moving away from the familiar pay scale, it’s not enough to simply add bonuses atop the existing arrangement. If teachers are tutoring over the web or providing support services, their compensation needs to be reshaped accordingly. Payment might be by the hour, for each student successfully served, or in some other fashion—but it requires systemic redesign that even radical reformers have yet to undertake.

Ultimately, the goal is to rethink the teacher challenges of the 21st century. We are feeling our way toward a new and hopefully more fruitful era of teaching and learning. We have been slowed by habits of mind, culture, and institutional inertia that imagine a future for schools and school districts that embodies today’s familiar assumptions. While we should recognize that institutions change slowly and celebrate incremental advances, we should not allow that to obscure the goal: to recruit the most promising talent and then foster a more flexible, rewarding, and performance-focused profession.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

How much does it cost to provide a high school math course? What about remedial English? An Advanced Placement (AP) course in history? As the economic outlook continues to darken, school districts will be looking for ways to cut costs, and they will no doubt wrestle with some difficult issues. When does it make sense to keep classes small? When does it make sense to increase class sizes to cut costs? Such debates are often carried out in the absence of information about what actually happens in schools or what the options might be for reallocating scarce resources.

School districts produce reams of financial data to check off the right boxes on accounting and compliance reports required by states and the federal government. Typically missing is any financial analysis that follows the money into the school building to the classroom. Yet the classroom is where the mission-critical work happens and where the conversion of resources into services affects student performance. Educators need indicators that tell them whether the basic design and operation of their high schools direct resources in ways that sustain and enhance the district’s academic strategies and priorities. Academic outcomes are one such indicator. A measure of spending that enables comparison across service areas is another.

Computing spending patterns is not difficult. Per-pupil service expenditures can easily be determined at the classroom level. This analysis computes and reports spending on various services for high schools in three anonymous districts. The findings reveal the ways in which per-pupil spending varies by subject and course level.

While the findings are not intended to be suggestive of all districts in the country, the work does demonstrate how such fiscal metrics can reveal the financial implications of the inner workings of individual high schools. How much does a high school pay to offer electives, and how does that compare to what is spent on core subject courses? What are the cost implications of decisions regarding the structure of the school schedule, which courses to offer, and who teaches what course?

The findings presented in this article demonstrate how isolating spending on discrete services can 1) identify the relationships between priorities, current spending, and outcomes; 2) clarify both relative spending on discrete services and the organizational practices that influence how resources are deployed; and 3) establish the current cost of providing high school services as a necessary precursor to identifying whether there are better ways to provide some services.

Spending on Services

The spending-on-services approach to cost analysis aims to inform strategic resource decisionmaking by zeroing in on what is provided. This approach breaks out per-pupil expenditures by the discrete services students receive. This service-costing method is most appropriately categorized as a management tool, to be used on a periodic basis, rather than a new accounting system requiring continuous and extensive record keeping.

Service costing is not a wholly unexplored idea. In 1996, analyst David Monk and associates determined per-pupil expenditures for various courses in six high schools in four New York districts. They calculated per-course spending using actual teacher and aide salaries, course schedules, and course enrollments. These calculations indicated that the highest per-pupil course expenditures were associated with foreign language, music, and science instruction (excluding special education costs).

In 1999, Jay Chambers of the American Institutes for Research merged unique state-level databases containing information on teacher salaries, teacher course assignments, and course enrollment data to calculate per-pupil expenditures by course for students in Ohio. The results indicated wide variation in spending by course, with some elective courses—including Latin, AP Spanish, and drafting—costing twice as much on a per-pupil basis as algebra, literature, and composition.

In 2007 and 2008, the research summarized in this article added to this body of work by determining expenditures associated with a variety of services in high schools in three districts: District 1 is a small western district with one comprehensive high school; District 2 is a midsize eastern district with 10 comprehensive high schools; and District 3 is a midsize western district with six high schools, each divided into small learning communities.

The districts provided information on teacher salaries and stipends, teacher assignments and teaching loads, course offerings and schedules, teacher aide salaries and placements, and student participation in various courses. Each teacher’s actual salary (including stipends, where relevant) was then divided proportionately among the courses taught and the number of participating students. The approach yielded a per-pupil expenditure based on the proportionate teacher and aide compensation. This per-pupil figure does not fully recognize all inherent expenditures (for instance, the costs of school leadership, school facilities, and district-provided shared services). It does, however, provide a means of making comparisons in spending across courses, as the excluded costs don’t vary. The expenditure data were aggregated to allow for comparisons across subjects (e.g., math vs. foreign language), types of courses (e.g., core courses vs. electives or foreign language), course levels (remedial vs. honors), and grade levels (9th vs. 12th).

The following sections provide examples of spending-on-service findings from the three districts studied.

Results

Figure 1 shows the range of per-pupil costs in District 1: electives came at a cost of $512 per pupil versus $328 per math class, $434 per English class, and $564 per class in a foreign language.

District 2 also spent less per pupil on average for core courses (math, science, English/literature, and social studies/history/economics) than for noncore courses, which include electives and foreign language. District 3, however, directed a larger share of its dollars into core courses, so on average 19 percent more was spent per pupil on core courses than on noncore courses. Thus, the spending patterns varied among the three districts studied, indicating that one cannot assume that patterns found in one locale apply everywhere.

What drives these cost differences? As the reader would expect, teacher salary and class size are key variables, since these expenditure figures are computed primarily by dividing each teacher’s salary across that teacher’s course obligations and then dividing the per-course values by the number of pupils enrolled. A comparison of these variables in District 2 indicates that both lower class sizes and higher salaries in the noncore courses contributed to the differences in per-pupil course spending (see Figure 2). Teachers in some subjects taught fewer classes, which also had implications for the spending differences.

Here again, the pattern varied a bit among the districts, but in all three, the average salary of teachers who teach electives was meaningfully higher than that of core course teachers. In District 3, where per-pupil spending per noncore course was lower than for core courses, it was because the noncore courses had larger class sizes, not because the core teachers received higher salaries. Art and photography courses, for instance, were filled with many more students than English and math classes.

Comparing across Levels

The high schools studied spent more per pupil on higher-level courses than on mid-level or low-level courses. For example, in District 2, average spending across high schools on AP courses was $1,660 per pupil per course, while spending on regular courses averaged $739 per pupil and spending on remedial courses averaged $713 per pupil (see Figure 3). Advanced Placement teachers earned more than teachers of remedial courses ($16,656 more) and taught smaller classes on average (14 students vs. 19 students). While it wasn’t district policy to place more senior, higher-paid teachers in AP posts, district officials acknowledged that more senior teachers were given their choice of courses and most often opted to teach at the AP level. Differences in class size were in part a function of a state-imposed limit on AP class size.

In District 3, spending on regular and honors courses was on par, while the cost per student was 28 percent higher for the International Baccalaureate courses. In District 1, per-pupil spending on honors and AP classes exceeded spending on regular classes by 80 percent in math and 23 percent in English (the two subjects where courses were broken out by level).

We can also use these results to estimate what is being spent on a set of core courses (say, junior level math and English, U.S. history, Spanish III, and chemistry) for different segments of the student population. For a junior taking these five courses at the honors level in District 2, for example, expenditure would total $6,910. For a junior taking these same five courses at the regular level, the expenditure would total $2,767.

Implications for Public Education

The policy landscape includes many school and district leaders engaged in high school redesign. While redesign has generally been considered a strategy to improve outcomes for students, with budget tightening ahead redesign may also be a strategy for enabling schools to do more with less. Relevant questions include, What factors contribute to relatively high costs for some subject areas and course levels? In what areas are higher investments accompanied by strong (or weak) outcomes? How can district and school leaders use the information to manage their resources efficiently and effectively?

To take the next step, school leaders need to look at outcomes. Where expenditures on a high-priority service are relatively low and there is dissatisfaction with the outcomes, then the question is, What changes are needed to improve outcomes? The cost-of-services model can also uncover relatively high spending in an area of low priority. Making changes to reduce costs in one place frees up funds for redirection to a high-priority area.

For management, the exercise is to identify the key cost drivers, recognize how various organizational features such as class sizes, teacher assignments, and the school schedule work to affect spending, and then make decisions deliberately about how best to use resources. In the schools studied here, staff compensation and class size were two obvious key cost drivers, but other factors played a role as well. What follows are selected cost factors that present opportunities to make trade-offs between services. In education, where investments have risen steadily for several decades, providing new services has often meant raising new funds. With current projections forecasting more constrained public funds in coming months, the resource landscape will likely be one of greater scarcity, which will only increase the likelihood that schools will have to consider such trade-offs.

Teacher salary schedules and assignments. Schools may have difficulty attracting or retaining effective teachers to positions that are deemed high priority, such as teaching remedial courses in core subjects. A relatively low per-pupil cost for those courses may be viewed as underinvestment. If so, education leaders might want to make available more funds for the salaries of teachers of remedial courses and, if necessary, look for other areas in which costs can be reduced. Calls for teacher salary differentials as a tool for recruiting teachers in hard-to-staff subjects indicate some interest in the idea.

In the three districts studied here, teachers taught a set number of courses. Reducing responsibilities for some teachers and increasing them for others is another way of reallocating resources.

Class size and course offerings. Recognizing how class size affects the per-pupil cost of delivering services can aid in strategic allocation of scarce resources. Faced with relatively high per-pupil costs for music classes and limited funds, District 3 chose to offer fewer (larger) music classes as a deliberate strategy to free funds for more (smaller) core courses. This decision to shift resources reflects a trade-off in which something is both gained and lost. Smaller classes in the core are made possible by accepting larger enrollments and fewer offerings in music. Some states or districts limit class sizes for AP or gifted courses, which increases the per-pupil cost for these courses. The trade-off is fewer resources for other courses.

School schedules. The daily school schedule affects the way resources are deployed across subjects. In the three districts studied, each course was allocated equal time on the daily and weekly schedule, resulting in an even allocation of each teacher’s salary across the courses taught. If school leaders wish to increase investment in core classes, one option is to lengthen the class periods for those classes. Some schools provide double blocks (class periods that are twice as long as a regular class period but still meet every day or nearly every day) in math, science, and literacy. Increasing the time allocated to core courses requires a trade-off that may imply shorter or less-frequent classes for noncore courses (for example, a photography course may meet two or three days a week instead of five) or a reduction in the number of noncore courses students can take.

Fueling Innovation

Spending-on-services calculations can be used to establish current per-pupil costs as a precursor to seeking better ways to provide certain services to students. In a market economy, the cost of a service or product is determined by what sellers and buyers agree to. This occurs in higher education, resulting in a range of educational options at a variety of costs. But K–12 public education for the most part functions as a monopoly, and expenditures are far removed from recipients (or their parents) and often are not even known by their providers (schools and districts).

In Out of the Box: Fundamental Change in School Funding, David Monk discusses the idea of schools providing a limited base program but then allowing parents to pay for extra services not deemed part of the base (such as music). For such an idea to work, Monk acknowledges that schools would need to create a closer link between these extra services received and prices paid. Similarly, Frederick Hess and Bruno Manno call for “unbundling” services, whereby schools might contract out some of the services they provide as a way to open up demand and encourage new suppliers of school services. For instance, schools might contract with local providers to offer electives or sports and might pay a distance-learning provider to offer AP courses.

Spending-on-services analysis fits well with this angle on innovation in that it defines the costs of each service in a way not regularly considered in K–12 schooling. Defining investments in per-participant terms can help spur cost comparisons to services offered by alternative providers. For instance, before school leaders move to eliminate relatively high-cost art or music classes, they may look to see whether local providers (community centers, local colleges, etc.) can or already do provide similar services at better prices. Where schools pay a high per-pupil amount to offer some courses (for example, AP Spanish or remedial reading) to a small number of students, they may find lower-cost options exist via distance learning or contracted services. By freeing up resources in those areas, education leaders can direct more resources to other subjects and students.

Conclusion

In most large, complex organizations the cost of mission-critical functions is closely tracked so that leaders can take stock of how different practices come together to affect resource use. The approach outlined here provides one means to do just that in high schools. Application of the spending-on-services model to high schools clarifies per-pupil costs and the influence of organizational features on resource allocation.

In the coming years, forecasts suggest that education leaders will likely be asked to do more with less. While in the near term the implementation of some of the options noted above may be impeded by contracts and other obligations, over the long term the spending-on-services approach can provide a new lens through which education leaders can view high school redesign. In sum, the spending-on-services approach takes the blinders off, providing education leaders with a powerful tool to inform local resource decisionmaking.

Marguerite Roza is senior scholar at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a research associate professor at the University of Washington College of Education.

As the visitor approaches the handsome new quarters of Florida Virtual School near Orlando’s Valencia Community College, nothing tells him that he is about to enter the nerve center of one of the state’s largest schools. The four-story, rectangular, well-windowed structure is devoid of markings save for the massive number 2145, presumably the structure’s address, not an estimate of the year virtual education is to be fully realized.

Walking out of the second-floor elevator, one enters a football-field-length waiting area with a single, if very substantial, desk visible down near where a virtual goal post would stand. As the day progresses, one moves from one capacious office to another, all decked out with large, well-appointed work stations and sizable meeting areas that enjoy the Sunshine State’s prized natural resource. Florida Virtual School is clearly doing very well (see “Florida’s Online Option,” <em”>features).

So well that the visitor is regularly informed that the furnishings have been donated and the school’s lease costs less than the rent once paid for cramped quarters within the Orange County school system.

Florida Virtual’s success is no accident. Its chief executive officer, Julie Young, has constructed an energetic, dedicated team who watch the clock no more closely than does the inner core of an entrepreneurial Internet start-up. The school’s mission is carefully crafted to fit in with—not fight with—that of Florida’s school districts. The school offers courses that are not available at district schools, or that do not fit well into a student’s schedule, or that a student has to take for a second time.

Florida Virtual also offers instruction to home schoolers. But it eschews any hint of social conservatism in favor of a progressive-style approach that frees students from the prison of the bell and clock. Students are even given a four-week grace period during which they can withdraw from a course without penalty.

Florida Virtual does not collect any state dollars if a student withdraws or does not earn at least a D. If that is not much of a standard, it beats the one Florida imposes on its district schools. They get their state per-pupil funding whether a student stays or drops out, passes or flunks.

Some competition between the virtual school and district schools persists. If a student takes two semesters’ worth of virtual courses, it costs the district one-sixth of the state’s per-pupil allocation. But Florida Virtual can save districts headaches by offering replacement courses if a district loses a physics teacher or can’t afford to offer an elective course. So the virtual school’s course enrollments have soared above the 150,000 mark.

One of the school’s most popular courses—physical education—is required of all high school students, but is one that some do not wish to pursue via the school locker room. The course emphasizes good health practices. Students report their health objectives, exercise and eating habits, and changes in pulse and weight. The course appears to have provided one student with the incentive to lose 80 pounds.

Every effort is made to make sure the academic work submitted is the student’s own. Students take tests throughout the course period, and they write essays and papers. These are electronically scanned to check and see if material was copied from another student paper or from something on the Internet. Teachers grade and give feedback on assignments, and they call students at least once a month, and much more frequently if distress signals are detected. An honor code is given heavy emphasis.

Only one barely perceptible fly can be found in the virtual ointment: As elsewhere in American education, but even more so when teacher and student are physically separated, it is not always easy to detect whether students have mastered the material. Apart from those in Advanced Placement or other courses subject to an external exam, only a small portion of the total, students take no proctored examinations. But without such exams, the teacher in the end must infer just how much is being learned. May both virtual and district schools learn how to surmount this challenge well before the year 2145.

— Paul E. Peterson