The school in question, the New York Flex Charter High School, is planned for Manhattan's District 2, which covers much of downtown and midtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side. Its board is led by a team of private investors. And it is designed to deliver a "hybrid" learning model that employs individualized online learning and virtual instruction, along with actual instruction by classroom teachers.
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At the proposed New York Flex Charter High School, a company called K12 Classroom LLC will supply the curriculum to support that model, along with other services. The involvement of K12—whose chairman, Andrew H. Tisch, is the brother-in-law of New York State Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch—could be a test of the state's new charter-schools law, passed in late May, which forbids for-profit charter school management. At the very least, the proposal raises questions about what kind of educational approaches are fair game for New York's charter schools.
Bricks, mortar and monitors
Andrew Tisch is a longtime philanthropist with ongoing education and civic interests. He led Lorillard Tobacco during the 1990s—appearing on its behalf during infamous 1994 Congressional hearings, where he testified that he did not believe cigarettes cause cancer. Tisch currently serves as co-chairman of the board of his family business, the Loews Corporation, which has interests in insurance, hotels, natural gas pipelines and a Texas-based offshore oil-drilling company, among other ventures.
K12, founded in 1999 and traded on the New York Stock Exchange, is the "nation's premier provider of online curriculum," Jeff Kwitowski, company spokesperson, tells City Limits. K12 classes are conducted on line, some in real time ("synchronous")and others in self-paced and self-directed modes.
K12 Teachers "can handle a larger class load," Kwitowski explains, with class sizes of approximately 40 students in the elementary grades, primarily because "there are no classroom management issues" with remote instruction. "But numbers can vary," he adds. "Some lectures that may not involve as much interactivity may have more students in the class. Most of the learning for high school students is asynchronous, meaning students work individually on their lessons."
K12 curricula are now used by 70,000 public-school and home-schooled students, Kwitowski says, in 27 states and the District of Columbia. The company supports the Youth Connection Charter School in Chicago (developed in partnership with current U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan) and opened the San Francisco Flex Charter High School just this year. Company documents show 2009 revenue of $316 million.
In New York City, K12 partners with the DOE for online courses via the NYC iZone, as well as with nearly 100 schools across New York State for credit-recovery coursework and other offerings.
The iZone aims to reform urban education by upending traditional practices via "disruptive new models that restructure and rethink K-12 education," according to the DOE. At the NYC iSchool, a selective high school that opened in 2008, for example, students use a "blended" learning model, where online studies of core academics, including those that will be tested by Regents exit exams, are supplemented by traditional, in-person instruction.
