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Cyber
House Rules
The
Potter's School has demonstrated that a
"virtual" high school can work in a home-
school
environment. The question: Can the model be applied
elsewhere?
Janna
and Jeff Gilbert have always educated their children at home. As the kids,
now teenagers, grew
older and their studies became more advanced, the
Gilberts sought support from other home-school
families. They formed home-school cooperatives and
experimented with technology.
Eventually, Janna, a stay-at-home mom, found herself
trying things that no one else in the multi-billion
U.S.
education
industry had ever attempted before.
About
five years ago, the Gilberts hooked up with First
Virtual Communications, a Silicon Valley-based
designer of Web-based teleconferencing and
collaboration software, to create classes that
students could take online. A number of independent
instructors deliver distance-learning courses to the
home school market. But to the Gilberts’
knowledge, their operation – based in the basement
of their house in
Springfield,
Va. –
is the only fully fledged “virtual” high
school in the country or, for that matter, the
world.
In
the first year, the Gilberts put 20 kids online, the
second year 60. The Potter’s School, as they named
their not-for-profit initiative, grew exponentially.
Today, it provides high school-level courses for 810
home-schooled American students scattered across two
dozen countries. “We have waiting lists,” says
Janna Gilbert. “I could have seated 50 percent
more students this year.”
The
implications
of the Potter’s School experiment are momentous.
The Gilberts’ lean, flexible, technology-driven
educational model does not merely bypass local
public schools – it frees parents from geographic
constraints entirely.
Virginia
doesn’t
allow charter schools? Doesn’t matter. The state
won’t fund vouchers? Doesn’t matter. Traditional
private schools are too expensive? Doesn’t matter.
A rich and varied market in educational services,
once limited to higher education,
is fast coming to families across
America.
Defenders
of public school monopolies, and even traditional
private schools, have been put on notice: Their cost
structures are grotesquely high. The Potter’s
School provides a quality education for a fraction
of the cost of traditional, bricks-and-mortars
schools. The
Gilberts charge $350 per course, or $1,750 for a
full course-load of five classes. Throw in
textbooks, and the cost typically runs about $2,000
per student. By contrast, public schools across Virginia
spent
more than $7,600 per student in fiscal 2001
– nearly four times as much.
As
Gilbert is the first to admit, home schooling is not
for everyone: At the Potter’s School, parents
grade daily work, uphold test integrity and
basically function as “home-school principals.”
That parental involvement helps keep expenses down.
But that’s not the only reason the school is so
cost competitive. Gilbert notes three other factors.
First, she keeps overhead low. She takes on all
administrative tasks; her husband, working nights
and weekends, keeps the technology working.
“We’re the opposite of top heavy,” she says.
Second, installing technology is cheaper than
erecting buildings: The school’s physical plant
– an office and network servers, mostly -- reside
in the basement of their home.
Third,
and perhaps more applicable on a broader scale,
Potter’s School instructors operate as independent
contractors. With their income dependent upon
tuition fees, instructors are highly motivated. The
pay is good and the hours are flexible. One teacher
makes twice the money she did in private school.
Others make about the same amount, but teach fewer
courses and enjoy more free time. As contractors,
however, instructors give up union or civil
service-like protections. Gilbert has a free hand to
terminate under-
performers.
Could
the Potter’s School provide a model for the
educational establishment? Gilbert doesn’t think
in such grandiose terms: “It’s not like we set
out to do this,” she says. “It just grew
organically. It just kind of exploded.”
The
home school movement has come a long way since its
inception two decades ago. Yvonne Bunn, executive
director of the Home Educators Association of
Virginia, estimates that there are 20,000
home-school families in Virginia,
and the number is growing 15 to 20 percent per year.
In
the
earliest days, home school families were
somewhat isolated. But as the movement grew,
families connected with one another, forming co-ops
and sharing resources. One parent might be
proficient in mathematics, while another might be better
qualified to teach literature. In
Virginia,
home schoolers organize
field trips, art fairs, music festivals, science
fairs and even athletic events. The home-school
market is getting so big that businesses are taking
notice, Bunn says. The Science Museum of Virginia
offers special tours and membership packages. Busch
Gardens
hosted
a three-day event, bringing in NASA and the Hampton
Air and Space
Museum
for
special programs. The most recent state home school
convention, held
in Richmond,
drew 7,200 parents.
Meanwhile,
concerns that home-schooling provides an inferior
education have long since dissipated. Standardized
test scores of home-school students are
significantly higher than national norms, says Bunn,
who has home-schooled her own three children.
Indeed, many home schoolers blast through the
high-school curricula so rapidly that they wind up
taking classes in community college until they’re
old enough to leave home. Bunn's son went to college
with 43 college credits, entering as a
second-semester sophomore.
Parents
choose to home school for many reasons. Many see it
as a way to pass on their own values to their
children. Evangelical Christians, appalled by the
secular worldview and loose standards of behavior
permeating public schools, have been especially
active in the movement. But others turn to home
schooling in order to give their children, whether
exceptionally bright or hobbled by learning
disabilities, the individual attention they need.
Free from the regimented structure of the classroom,
parents focus on their children’s
individual needs, Bunn says. “You don’t have to
put down the chemistry book after 45 minutes. You
can keep on going until you finish the chapter.”
The
Internet has accelerated the home-schooling
movement. E-mail helps parents share knowledge and
support one another, while distance-learning
technologies enable institutions like the Potter’s
School to fill gaps in the parents’ teaching competence
for an affordable price.
Bunn
thinks home schooling, which has a two percent
market share in Virginia,
still has considerable growth potential. By its
nature, home schooling requires at least one parent
to supervise the children at home, so it's limited
to those families that are willing to live on one
income while one parent, usually the mother, stays
at home. It’s also hard work: “Not
every parent wants to do this, not every parent is
capable.” But Bunn speculates that the number of
home-school families in Virginia
could double before the trend tops out.
Bunn's
guesstimate may well be conservative. To this point,
home schooling has been driven mainly by the passion
of individual families seeking a better education
for their children. It’s a movement, not a
business. As a cottage industry, home schooling still
awaits the transforming power of investment capital
and entrepreneurial energy.
Whether
the Gilberts are the people to turn home schooling
and distance learning into
a major business, I don't know. The couple certainly
displays an entrepreneur’s instinct for spotting
new niches. The Potter’s School, for instance, has
found a significant market among American families
living overseas that don’t want to send their
children away to boarding school. Meanwhile, the
Gilberts have identified another potential market in
helping small bricks-and-mortar schools plug gaps in
their curricula. The virtual school has contracted
with a private school in
Temple
Hills,
Md.,
to deliver biology, chemistry and second-year
Spanish classes online. “They use us to help them
do their job better,” Gilbert says. “We can
deliver the courses at higher quality and less cost
than the school can itself.”
However,
funded on a shoestring, the Potter’s School is not
in a position to exploit these opportunities very
aggressively. Janna Gilbert doesn’t foresee the
school growing much for a couple of more years,
until her husband Jeff retires from the U.S. Navy
and can devote more time to expanding the school’s
technical infrastructure. For all the potential that
exists to better serve home school families, the
Gilberts aren’t in it for the money. “We
grow,” she says, “because of the need.”
But
you can’t unbreak an egg. The Gilberts have shown
that it’s possible to deliver a quality education
for a third of what it costs the public schools.
They’ve proven that a “virtual” high school
can work. If they, for whatever reason, don’t push
the idea as far as it can go, those who follow
surely will.
--
Sept. 30,
2002
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