In 2012, the Iowa legislature agreed to a three-year experiment with the the Iowa Virtual Academy, despite problems reported with for-profit, online schools run by the same corporation in other states. The Iowa Virtual Academy promises “Iowa students in grades K-6 an exceptional learning experience” with “individualized learning approaches.”

Darcy Bedortha, a former lead teacher at a virtual charter school, paints a very different picture in this must-read post at the Education Week blog. I’ve enclosed a few excerpts after the jump, but you should click through and read the whole thing. Bedortha confirmed that her former employer is the same company that runs Iowa’s virtual school. Diane Ravitch commented that Bedortha

confirms all the worst fears of critics of virtual charters.

They make a lot of money. They are passionate about profits, not students.

Students need one-to-one contact with a human being. They don’t get it.

I hope state lawmakers and staffers at the Iowa Department of Education are closely scrutinizing the Iowa Virtual Academy’s work. If it’s anything like what Bedortha describes, the experiment should be shut down at the end of next academic year.

Excerpt from Darcy Bedortha, 15 Months in Virtual Charter Hell: A Teacher’s Tale:

I became a teacher because I am an advocate for youth and social justice. However, this purpose was hard to fulfill working in a K12 Inc. school. With the kind of technology, systems and process management needed to keep the enrollment machine running (and the machine is priority), there is never much time to actually teach. In my former school, each class met for 30 minutes in an interactive-blackboard setting one day each week. Fewer than 10 percent of students actually attended these “classes.” Other than that time and any one-on-one sessions a teacher and student might set up (which, in my experience, almost never happened), there is no room for direct instruction.

Given the extensive needs of the students, this set up does not serve them well. Most of my contact with students was by email, through which I answered questions about everything from login issues and technology glitches to clarifying of assignments, and even that communication was only accessed by a very small percentage of students. […]

For most of last year I was Lead Teacher at the school, which required me to attend national staff meetings each week. At first the marketing focus of the conversations turned my stomach, and then it made me furious. In my experience, the conversation was never about how our students were struggling, how we could support those who were trying to learn the English Language, how we could support those who were homeless or how we could support those with special needs. It was never about how we could support our teachers. It seemed to me like the focus was often about enrollment, about data, about numbers of students who had not taken the proper number of tests, about ranking schools and ranking teachers. And there was marketing: how to get more children enrolled, how to reach more families, how to be sure they were pre-registered for next year, how to get Facebook pages and other marketing information “pushed out” to students.

The state-level staff meetings were not much better. Teachers were occasionally bullied and disrespected by the head administrator. […]

How does anyone offer anything close to personal attention for over three-hundred students, most of whom you never see? Practices such as excusing (eliminating) assignments were the norm at the school. K12 Inc. calls it a “proficiency model” but it amounts to an easy route to course completion. Even the students who were more or less on pace were not learning deeply; they were often merely filling out digital worksheets as quickly as they could. The most motivated of my students regularly finished more than a dozen assignments in a day.  What kind of depth of learning could that offer?