Kudos to the Foundation for Excellence in Education’s Digital Learning Now! team: Its new fifty-state analysis of digital-learning policies offers a comprehensive, navigable, and timely look at the state-policy landscape for digital and blended education. The report scores each state’s policies against DLN’s ten “elements of high-quality digital learning” (including student access, funding, and quality choices), measured by the group’s thirty-nine underlying “metrics,” or policy criterion by which states are officially scored. Under “funding,” for example, is the metric “funding is provided on a fractional, per course basis to pay providers for individual online courses.” Overall, Utah comes out on top, garnering the lone A-minus. Another five states—Florida, Minnesota, Georgia, Virginia, and Kansas—earn Bs. Twenty-one states register Fs. The report doesn’t simply shame those with inadequate digital-learning policies, though. It provides numerous best-practice cases of states that passed quality digital-education legislation in 2012, including Georgia, Louisiana, and Rhode Island. And through its interactive web module, the report articulates state-specific recommendations. Most importantly, it stresses the need to ensure the quality of digital instruction through state policy—even though it stumbles a bit over how to define or ensure that quality. (According to the report, forty-four states have “quality content” for digital courses, which they define as content “aligned to state standards or the Common Core.” But it makes no mention of who determines or verifies that alignment—or if it is done at all.) Still and all, there’s much value here for everyone engaged in state-level policy for digital learning.
SOURCE: Digital Learning Now!, 2012 Digital Learning Report Card (Foundation for Excellence in Education, 2013).
