I’m amazed at the different ways in which the internet and Moores Law continually enhance and disrupt our society in new and interesting ways. Lately I’ve joined in the debate over cyber charter schools in my home state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania currently leads the US with our innovative cyber charter schools, but there is a movement afoot to cripple or dismantle them in favor of the status quo public schools; PA House Bill 446.
I think people just don’t “get it” yet. And that is completely normal! I was part of the original team that created mapquest.com, an innovation that came from Lancaster, PA – NOT Silicon Valley. We created mapquest in 1995/96, long before high speed internet, Google and YouTube (as of May 07, mapquest is still ahead of YouTube). At that time, we had many detractors who could not understand why anyone would want to use a slow modem and clunky personal computer to get driving directions or find nearby businesses, but we proved the doubters wrong. Like mapquest, many people cannot see how cyber charter schools will work in our future but it is a future worth working for.
There has been a lot of posturing and polemics from both sides, including an absurd opinion piece in the Philadelphia Enquirer. The closest thing that I’ve found to a netutral treatment of the subject is in the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal.
I believe the real issue is that traditional public schools suffer from a very high fixed overhead and cannot respond to the rapid fluctuations in student populations inflicted on them by cyber charter schools. Conversely, the cyber charter schools, with their low overhead and technology focus, can quite easily ramp up and down in response to demand and thus are more free to take risks on innovative programs. Traditional schools are like General Motors and cyber schools are like Silicon Valley. Just as with GM, public schools struggle to deal with the pace of our times, while cyber charter schools, like the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, are naturally responsive. Just as in the business world, our public policy should support BOTH institutions and acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of each!
So how do we do that? One way to deal with high fixed overhead is to amortize costs over time. Why not provide relief to to public schools by spreading the cost of change over three years instead of one year? The mechanisms are already in place, since the current costs are calculated by averaging the number of students over the past year. This would let districts make and keep long term commitments while still allowing cyber charter schools to continue to serve in their own niche. This type of program would provide stability for our present while still encouraging innovation for our future.
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