State budgets are racing toward a budget cliff that is expected to be a cumulative $140 billion in fiscal year 2012. As K-12 education spending eats up a third or more of state budget revenues, a sizable portion of these funding cuts will likely need to come out of allocations for schools.
It is not surprising in this climate of trying to do more with less that many states and school districts are turning to computer-based technologies as a way to ensure the delivery of high-quality instruction to students at lower costs. Further, there is movement toward the creation of ???hybrid??? or ???blended??? models of instruction that marry computer-based instruction with targeted face-to-face instruction with teachers.
Rocketship Education claims up to $500,000 in savings per school, while John Chubb writes in Stretching the School Dollar that:
If online instruction is supervised in double-sized student groups in K-8 and triple-sized groups in high school, the teacher savings are, for elementary schools, 7 percent fewer teachers; for middle schools, 14 percent fewer teachers; and for high schools, 29 percent fewer teachers. Given the different numbers of years that each school spans, the weighted potential teacher savings across all grade levels is 15.4 percent. With schools spending 52 percent of their total budgets on instructional salaries and benefits, the teacher savings from online courses could average nearly 8 percent annually ??? or $800 per student in a $10,000 per-year per-student school budget.
But, are stand alone e-schools and hybrid models of schooling really cost savers, or are districts and states chasing fool's gold? This has been an issue of contention in Ohio, where close to 30,000 children now attend an e-school. Two Buckeye State e-schools, the Ohio Virtual Academy and the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow serve over 7,500 students apiece.
In 2005, the Ohio Senate put forth legislative language that would have reduced funding for e-schools to 80 percent of what bricks-and-mortar charters received. Lawmakers argued that e-schools could operate on less per pupil funding because they had economies of scale, didn't have to pay for facilities or other overhead, didn't have to transport children, and could offer larger class sizes. E-school proponents countered that they had other costs that didn't apply to traditional schools???more technology, constant changes to the curriculum, and myriad licensing fees???that made their models as expensive as traditional schools. Their arguments???self-interested as they may have been???won out, and today e-schools and bricks-and-mortar charters in Ohio still receive the same per-pupil levels of funding.
Fast forward to the budget crises of today, and many cost-cutters are looking to technology to provide savings in K-12 education. Technology has improved productivity in almost every sector of the American economy so why shouldn't the same apply to schools and schooling?
Flypaper readers, are there cost savings to be found in e-schools and hybrid education models? Let us know what you think or what your experience has been on this front.
???Terry Ryan
