John O'Connor is the Miami-based education reporter for StateImpact Florida. John previously covered politics, the budget and taxes for The (Columbia, S.C) State. He is a graduate of Allegheny College and the University of Maryland.
Amendment 8 would delete language from the Florida Constitution banning public money spent “directly or indirectly in aid of any church, sect or religious denomination or in aid of any sectarian institution.”
The Arkansas Teacher Retirement System filed the lawsuit, which alleges the company misled investors in what K12 did and did not report about how it makes money.
A judge must decide whether the suit can go forward. If it does, K12 could be forced to reveal new information about its operations.
The Florida Virtual School wants you to know they are not under investigation.
The news Florida is investigating K12, Inc, the nation’s largest online educator, has created confusion about Florida’s similarly named online schools.
In addition, non-profit groups in many counties have applied to open independent online charter schools run by K12 but overseen by a non-profit board. Those schools would also carry the Florida Virtual Academy brand, such as the proposed Florida Virtual Academy at Marion County.
By contrast, the Florida Virtual School is the state-run online option.
K12 is the nation's largest online education company and served Florida students in 43 school districts.
Student-teacher ratios at K12, the nation’s largest online educator, are nearly twice as high as Florida’s state-run virtual school, according to internal company documents obtained by the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting and StateImpact Florida.
A high school teacher working for K12 may have as many as 275 students, compared to Florida Virtual School, which has a maximum class size of 150.
“The concept of one teacher managing 275 or 300 students — it just doesn’t make sense,” said Luis Huerta, a Columbia University education professor who studies online education. “It’s hard to believe one person could do that. You have teacher-pupil ratios that are ten times what it would be in a traditional school.”
According to company documents, K12 provides better student-teacher ratios to schools that pay more per student, though even the best ratios are higher than the state-run competitor’s.
The publicly traded K12 operates in 43 Florida school districts, including in Miami-Dade, Broward, Hillsborough, Orange and Duval counties, with students ranging in education level from kindergarten to high school.
Seminole County schools surveyed parents to see if they recognized the teacher reported by K12.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated from the version originally published.
Seminole County teacher Amy Capelle had to make a decision.
Her supervisor at the nation’s largest online school, K12, asked her to sign a roster saying she’d taught 112 kids.
She’d only taught seven.
“If you see your name next to a student that might not be yours, it’s because you are qualified to teach that subject, and we needed to put your name there,” wrote K12 supervisor Samantha Gilormini in an e-mail.
Capelle refused, and now state officials are investigating whether K12 used improperly certified teachers and asked employees to cover it up.
Seminole County officials say this problem may reach far beyond their borders.
But many Florida school districts have no way to know whether K12 students are actually being taught by properly certified teachers, according to a review by StateImpact Florida and Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
Packard said K12 always uses Florida-certified teachers, but the company’s internal review found “minor mistakes” in matching grade and course certifications to students.
Packard said the story has been wrapped in an “unbelievable amount of rumor-mongering and absurd extrapolations.
Online education firm K12 did not reveal Florida was investigating the company in their last quarterly earnings report.
Editor’s note: Trevor Aaronson is with the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
Executives for K12, the nation’s largest for-profit online educator, discovered in May that the Florida Department of Education had launched an investigation of the company’s practices in Seminole County. The state probe was examining whether K12 employees in Florida used teachers with improper certifications, a violation of state law, and then asked employees to cover this up.
At that time, the Virginia-based online educator launched an internal investigation. But K12, a publicly traded company, did not disclose the state investigation to its investors.
Under U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regulations, publicly traded companies must disclose what is known as material information — any information that would affect a reasonable investor’s decision to buy, sell or hold a stock. Publicly traded companies notify investors of changes or outside developments, such as investigations or lawsuits, through an SEC public disclosure document known as a Form 8-K.
The county will survey parents of students who took courses through K12 to make sure the listed teacher actually taught the student. Seminole County schools conducted a similar survey earlier this year and found more than a third of parents said the teacher listed did not teach their child.
As StateImpact Florida and the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting told you earlier this week, emails and other documents show K12 employees asking teachers to sign off on student rosters that included students they did not teach.
The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow found out about the incident only after the hired student complained to the school about not being paid. ECOT, as the school is known, fired the teacher, Marilyn Hiestand, the following week. The State Board of Education is set to revoke her teaching licenses next week.
“She had in essence outsourced parts of her job to a former ECOT student and that’s clearly against our policy,” ECOT spokesperson Nick Wilson said.
In response to ECOT’s notice of her termination, Hiestand wrote, “I hired a former student to assist me. I did not realize this was a hiring offense.”
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