Such virtual schools appear to be a risky public investment, according to this new research from the National Education Policy Center. The report reviewed 311 full-time virtual schools with 200,000 students, the majority in "charters" operated by education management organizations such as K12 Inc., the management organization for the Arkansas Virtual Academy's elementary and middle schools. Bottom line:

Compared with conventional public schools, researchers found that full-time virtual schools serve relatively few Black and Hispanic students [Arkansas's "virtual" schoolers are 90 percent white], students who are poor, and special education students. In addition, on the common metrics of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), state performance rankings, and graduation rates, full-time virtual schools lag significantly behind traditional brick-and-mortar schools. [In the report, the Arkansas virtual school in 2011, the most recent data available, didn't meet the annual yearly progress standard}

Also:

To date, claims made in support of expanding virtual education are largely unsupported by high quality research evidence.

Among the recommendations:

Policymakers should slow or stop growth of virtual schools until the reasons for their relatively poor performance have been identified and addressed.

Too late for Arkansas.

Good story from Rob Moritz of Stephens Media on an underhanded little ol' amendment from Sen. Johnny Key of Mountain Home to open the flood gates of state money to support home schoolers with tax dollars.

State Education Director Tom Kimbrell and others have objected to multiplying the 500-student cap on allowable state funding for the Arkansas Virtual Academy to 5,000 and allow it to move into getting money for high school students. This could put $28 million into a venture that is nothing like a real school.

The virtual acadlemy is styled as a charter school. It began as an offshoot of a scam developed by slot machine junkie Bill Bennett and others. They came up with a private corporation to sell assistance to home schoolers. Then they set about pushing ways to transfer funding equivalent to the amount states spend on conventional public school students to the likes of the Virtual Academy. No gyms. No cafeterias. No full faculties. No buses. Etc. But the same funding that real schools receive for each student enrolled, in Arkansas more than $6,000 per student per year. It makes a voucher system for private church schools, even those teaching magic in place of science, seem positiviely responsible.

Anyone is welcome to home school. Private enterprise is welcome to sell material and support to those who choose to do so. But transfer $6,000-plus a year to enrich operators of this system for each student?

And for what? Results across the country haven't been impressive. A sample bit of commentary from Diane Ravitch, the education who's marked virtual school failures all over the country:

So far, there is not a scintilla of evidence that virtual instruction is good education, at least not in the way it is being sold by its advocates. Test scores are low; graduation rates are low; attrition is high. And why in the world should children in grades K-8 be isolated from any peer interactions during their formative years?

More and more evidence is emerging about the importance of non-cognitive skills, such as the ability to communicate with others and work with others. Can that be learned in isolation?

This finding is truly from the stuck record of reports on education research. Nobody has yet demonstrated that charter schools, school vouchers or any other Billionaire Boys Club flavor of the day has yet demonstrated on any replicable basis that they best real public schools in educating children.

But this finding is particularly important because it comes from a group explicitly supportive of the miracle of "school choice."

NEW ORLEANS — A new report by the Scott S. Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University that focused on the success of school choice as a policy of educational reform concluded that the current environment of choice, particularly from the perspective of parents, falls short.

The authors of “Spotlight on Choice” wrote “Based on the focus group discussions, we conclude that, due to limited seats at high quality schools and a complicated application process, school choice in New Orleans currently does an inadequate job providing all parents with access to the best schools for their children.”

The 42-page study, released late last month, focuses on the experiences of 81 racially, ethnically and socioeconomically diverse families representing approximately 132 students.

... Choice is a two-sided coin, said Jill Zimmerman, research manager at the institute and one of the report’s authors. When choice works, and parents indeed have the opportunity to send their kids to a good school, it’s a great concept. But when the choices of great schools are limited, especially in a landscape where 66 percent of schools received either a “D” or an “F” as their latest state-calculated school performance score, it can be very stressful for parents to take on the responsibility of choice, Zimmerman said.

New Orleans has gone to an 80 percent charter model. The experience in Arkansas is much smaller. Some high-quality chart schools, with the help of additional money and tough participation rules that tend to weed out families with kids least likely to succeed, do well. Many more don't. But the Billionaire Boys Club wants to put laxer regulators in charge and open the floodgates on charter school creation in Arkansas. Sympathetic researchers in Louisiana — Louisiana! — suggest that might not be a good idea.

Sen. Jimmy Jeffress passed modest legislation for charter school accountability in 2012. Among others, it required after the first quarter of the year that charter schools file a report with:

1) The number of applications for enrollment received.

2) The number of applicants with a federally defined disability. (One of the knocks on charter schools is that they must bear far less of the added cost of educating disabled students that real public schools.)

3) The number of applications for enrollment the public charter school denied and an explanation of the reason for each denial.

And how was compliance?

You be the judge by perusing the filings here.

You'll find that several didn't report applications from disabled students, citing the excuse that the information wasn't requested on application forms. Convenient.

More interesting is how several charter schools — including eStem and KIPP schools — dodged complying with the law on the number of and reason applications were rejected. eStem's response for its elementary, middle and high schools was that students are placed on a waiting list until spots become available. What? No one was denied admission? I see. They were merely not allowed to attend for the time being, perhaps the entirety of their school career. This looks disingenuous to me. It is certainly not in keeping with the spirit of the law. The KIPP school in Helena provided an equally disingenuous response. On the near-universal failure to report disabled applicants the KIPP school in Blytheville did reveal the number of students with disabilities it admitted after the selection process.

Several schools' reports, including those from LISA, indicated no student was denied admission.

End-of-year reporting under the Jeffress law will require reports on dropouts, expulsions and test scores.

• IN ARKANSAS TODAY: Jeb Bush.

I wish the following news conference had been held this morning.

Corporate Interests Pay to Play to Shape State Education Policy, Reap Profits
Emails Show Bush-Led Organization’s ALEC-Like Role in State Policymaking

Emails between the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), founded and chaired by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, and state education officials show that the foundation is writing state education laws and regulations in ways that could benefit its corporate funders. Education advocates will host a press call TOMORROW, January 30th at 1:30pm EST to discuss these findings.

The emails, obtained through public records requests, reveal that the organization, sometimes working through its Chiefs For Change affiliate, wrote and edited laws, regulations and executive orders, often in ways that improved profit opportunities for the organization’s financial backers.

The emails conclusively reveal that FEE staff acted to promote their corporate funders’ priorities, and demonstrate the dangerous role that corporate money plays in shaping our education policy. Correspondence in Florida, New Mexico, Maine, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, and Louisiana paint a graphic picture of corporate money distorting democracy.

Please join us at 1:30pm EST on Wednesday, January 30 to learn more about how FEE staff is involved in shaping state education policy in order to benefit its corporate funders.

In the Public Interest will announce the new digital housing for all of the emails, which is accessible to parents, reporters, and the general public.

Corporate money shape education policy? Surely not in Arkansas. That panel underway at the noon hour featuring Jim Walton, Bill Dillard III, Claiborne Deming and Walter Hussman is just a bunch of humble grassroots activists. Their paid lobbyists, Luke Gordy and Laurie Lee? The Walton-funded school of "education reform" at the UA? The Walton-funded Public School Resource Center (which also enjoys public support)? The Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity? All the campaign contributions to Republican majorities on legislative education committees? More greenery. But I'm not talking about grass.

The mention of charter schools in the last item reminded me:

I mentioned before that the Billionaire Boys Club bill to strip the state Board of Education of its power to approve and regulate charter schools had been introduced by Republican Rep. Mark "Bourbon and Bacon" Biviano. No one has yet offered a specific reason for creating an expensive and duplicative new piece of state bureacracy to replace a gubernatorially appointed body that has, particularly in recent years, demonstrated integrity and care in the task of reviewing charter schools.

The problem seems to be that the Board doesn't approve every single application and occasonally calls down schools that haven't lived up to their promises. Who knows what the problem is? The Billionaires don't talk to the public, only to their camp followers and rented lawmakers.

But I should elaborate on my mention earlier that the state Board of Education is not exactly a hotbed of anti-charter sentiment. A recent past chairman, Naccaman Williams, actually worked for the Walton Family Foundation, which has spent a billion and counting on schoool "reform", not counting separate Walton family political expenditures, while voting on charter applications.

Vicki Saviers of Little Rock was a founder of the eStem charter school in Little Rock, one of the most richly financed of the billionaires' projects. Joe Black of Newport works for Southern Bancorp, whose activities include support and financing of charter schools around the state. Jim Cooper of Melbourne has served on the board of one of the lobby groups, the Public School Resource Center, created by the billionaires to promote their school agenda. Saviers also has been a board member of the billionaires' lobby group, Arkansans for Education Reform, headed by richly paid lobbyist Luke Gordy, himself a former member of the state Board of Education. Board member Alice Mahony runs the El Dorado education foundation financed by Murphy Oil money, a key part of the billionaires' pro-charter coalition. What's not to like about these good people?

Finally, on the hypocrisy beat (a grueling task in the days of the new Republican majority), we have Prissy Hickerson, one of the legislative co-sponsors of the board of education-stripping legislation. She joined a group from her hometown of Texarkana a few years ago in urging state Board of Education denial of a charter school application in Texarkana. Her successful mission is believed to underlie some of the billionaires' unhappiness with the state board.

Could it be that the current nine-member group of regulators is tough, fair-minded and, the record shows, quite receptive on balance to establishment and continuation of charter schools? Could it be that the billionaires think that appointees of the Republican majority- and billionaire-controlled legislature who'd make up the new charter school commission (four of five would be legislative appointees) would be far more pliable?

Duh.

• CHARTER BILL SPONSOR: Mark Biviano.

Of all people, the lead sponsor was Searcy's Rep. Mark "Bourbon and Bacon" Biviano, the terror of Markham Street traffic. Who knew of his interest in public schools? The bill has 29 sponsors in the House. All Republicans.

The state Board of Education has turned down some charter applications and noted when some existing charters have failed to live up to their early promises. This is unacceptable to the Waltons and their running dogs, like former Education Board member Luke Gordy, who makes a fat salary lobbying for them. Approve 'em and keep 'em coming is their philosophy.

Ironically, this legislation would neuter a board that devotes a powerful amount of time to the whole of Arkansas education and includes a founding board member of the eStem charter school and a banker for charter schools. The Waltons would put the legislature they helped elect in charge. The five-member commission would have a gubernatorial appointee, one from the House speaker and one from the president pro tem of the Senates (both Republican) and one each from the chairs of the House and Senate education committees (one Democrat and one Republican, but a Republican majority in both cases).

Have the Waltons or anyone else explained what's broken about the current system that requires this "fix"? They have not. Don't hold your breath.

PS — Do I really need to mention that the party of smaller government here would create a brand new, additional branch of government? Another layer of bureaucracy with which to "streamline" education?