CAmom, I'm interested in your take on the rise of virtual charter schools-- that is, the giants K12 and Connections.
In most ways, those fit neither the 'local' control nor the district or state-level one, budgetarily speaking.
The LEA tends to contract for (or simply turn over) all the cash for operations, and the national organization provides "services" which it considers adequate and sufficient.
My own experience has been that this model, when run by a for-profit EMO nationally, leads to cost cutting that hurts students, and that corporate interests tend to muzzle dissent from parents, students, teachers, and even local administrators.
There's a reason that I refer to Baltimore as "our corporate overlords." Educators like Steve Guttentag may have at one time been running the show, but no more. It's cheaper to have all electronic (clunky PDF) textbooks... and when you can make a 'deal' for 5K of those, the costs get even lower. Nevermind that some kids hate them, or that they are developmentally inappropriate for many children (AMA/AAP recommendations for screen time in children)... the important thing is that since you can go IN-HOUSE (now that Pearson bought Connections, what a bonus for their bottom line, no matter whether or not the Pearson text is the BEST... it's often the 'cheapest' and that is what matters most, right?) you can cut a LOT of costs there.
There are a lot of things like that.
It is also the case that the school has a tendency to stonewall with students who are struggling. Grade inflation seems to be the first thing that gets tried, but if that is impossible or if parents/students refuse to cooperate with it, demanding actual improvements in learning... well, then suddenly you don't get return phone calls.
I see this not as a failure of the idea of this model, but in implementation, yes, abject failure for most students. Because corporate doesn't want to SPEND what it actually costs to do this RIGHT. Yes, for special education students, this is an even more serious problem, since those students are even further from the mythical "average" student needs, which is pretty much all anyone gets with one of these schools. I'm very familiar with "but this IS our option for gifted students," and having a DD in the SpEd side allows me a window into THAT, as well-- the amount of special assistance available to those kids isn't much, honestly, and it, too, is mostly a kind of 'one-size-fits-most' approach.
Parents that object to this state of affairs can just go away, basically.
