Virtual charter schools in Ohio are ramping up their advertising, but most of it seems aimed not at kids who would benefit from an online school, but at kids who are lazy or want to spend more time on their childhood muse.
Some charter schools in Ohio reportedly spend as much as $400 per student to peel them away from their traditional public schools and toward a new class of school: the virtual, or online, charter school, the Akron Beacon-Journal reports.
The ads tend to appeal to students who are unhappy and feel bullied at school, using words like free, flexible, one-on-one, and “find your future,” and a wide range of media, including radio, TV, billboards, and even robo-calls. As we reported for virtual charter schools in Iowa, here, ads tend to attract not the students who could honestly benefit from an online-only school but those who don’t like taking tests, want more free time for personal muses, such as private gymnastic study or music, or are just too lazy to get up early and need more flexibility in their schedule.
A video, “I Choose Life Skills,” posted in October, features a testimonial by a student identified as Tanya. In it, she says she can work at her own pace, with a highly qualified teacher or, if she chooses, from home “in my comfy PJs.”
At that point, she is shown relaxing in a recliner, with a computer on her lap, while eating grapes. She also promotes the flexible class schedule that allows her to keep an outside job to take care of her family while earning a diploma.
The 30-second advertisement ends with the student saying, “I choose free tuition. I choose to take control of my life. I choose Life Skills high school. What do you choose?”
Picking a certain school should not be based on the ability to do schoolwork in your PJs, in my opinion. It’s a shame that’s where most of the advertising focuses, because virtual charter schools have a niche if they play their cards right. As one commenter pointed out on our Iowa story, a virtual charter school can be exactly right for some students, just not for a very large number.
And when it comes to education funding, it’s a numbers game.
Ohio charter schools, about 400 of them, enroll about 7 percent of the state’s students but receive about 11 percent of all state funds set aside for primary and secondary education, the Beacon-Journal reported.
No wonder they’re willing to spend so much on advertising. The more students they get, the more money flows into the profits of the charter organization. Some charter schools are run by nonprofits, but that doesn’t mean the executives, who are sometimes people like hedge fund managers, not educators, don’t make exorbitant salaries.
