Illinois Gov Pat Quinn signed legislation on May 24 putting a one-year moratorium on new online charter schools outside Chicago at the urging of a handful of west suburban school districts, the Chicago Tribune reports.
“This legislation will allow the state more time to better evaluate and understand the impact of virtual charter schools in Illinois,” the Tribune quoted the governor’s office as saying in a statement.
The new law came as a disappointment to Sharnell Jackson, president of the Virtual Learning Solutions nonprofit, which proposed a virtual charter school to 18 school districts around the Fox River Valley, including some big ones like U-46 in Elgin, Indian Prairie District 204 in Aurora, and District 300 in Carpentersville. Ms Jackson resigned from the nonprofit last week, the Aurora Beacon-News reported.
All 18 districts rejected the charter application, and Virtual Learning Solutions and their curriculum partner, K12 Inc., were planning to appeal to the Illinois State Charter School Commission. The new law makes the appeal moot, at least for now. (The ISCSC has the authority to overrule boards of education and their democratically elected officials, but it does not have the authority to break the law.)
Now the commission has been directed by the new legislation to consider how laws that create virtual charter schools might be rewritten to accommodate the needs of students including support services, needs of school districts including funding for curriculum and teacher professional development, etc.
“I think 18 local school boards have spoken very loudly in the fact they are not in support of this virtual charter, and I appreciate the governor’s support of the legislature in putting a halt to that at this time until they have a process and regulations in place around a 100-percent virtual charter,” the Tribune quoted Kathy Birkett, superintendent of Indian Prairie School District 204, as saying.
Illinois’s new law is a sharp contrast to a new law in Michigan, signed by Gov Rick Snyder, a Republican, which expands the cap on enrollment and the number of virtual schools in the state. Writes Jennifer Williams Flinn, a lawyer in Little Rock, Ark., who also serves as an adjunct professor of law at the Bowen School of Law at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock:
Because of the inconsistencies in funding, enrollment, and accountability in virtual schools in each state throughout the country, there’s a lack of data and research available on the effectiveness of these schools. Are virtual schools the answer to many of our students’ educational problems, or do they simply provide a high profit margin with our tax dollars for for-profit companies? I guess only time will tell.
We hope the research conducted by the ISCSC in Illinois, as required by the new law, will provide more data related to virtual charter schools and their effectiveness and costs. Whether or not other states use any data Illinois finds is another question altogether.