Do Students In Missouri Telescreen Classes Dream Of Electric Teachers?

Maybe they could use all that money to ... hire more teachers?

A Missouri school district has come up with a terrific solution to the teacher shortage: Pay a for-profit company a hell of a lot more per classroom than it would cost to hire one entire teacher, and then the company provides classes remotely, with the school's students sitting in classrooms and the teacher a few states away, teaching on a screen, while the students mostly zone out. The school also pays to have a live facilitator in the classroom to help keep some kind of order, although that person is often a temp from Kelly Services. The whole mess works out to a total of around $160,000 per classroom, or around$80,000 more per classroom than a full year's salary and benefits for the school's human teachers — a sum one would think might attract plenty of in real life candidates using only a nice portion!

Oh, hey, we didn't mean it was a terrific solution for the students or for the schools as a whole. But it's pretty freaking awesome for the private company, Stride Learning Resources, based in Herndon, Virginia, which is making huge money and has lots of investors very very happy. 

You'll want to go read the full story at the Riverfront Times, because the hell of it is that this batshit model of providing public education may be showing up in many more school districts that are having trouble hiring teachers in our long post-pandemic education crisis. It's a jaw-dropper.

The quasi-virtual classes are being served up to about 4,800 middle school and high school students in the Hazelwood School District in St. Louis County, which serves an outer suburb of St. Louis. That's about a third of the district's students who since August 2022 have been attending classes where the teacher beams in remotely from as far away as Texas or California. The teachers do at least have Missouri teaching certificates, regardless of where they're located in meatworld.

Also too, the Riverfront Times points out, this $8.2 million a year experiment is being run in a mostly-minority school district, though Crom only knows where the money will come from. About 80 percent of Hazelwood students are Black, with more than 60 percent of the kids qualifying for free or reduced-price school meals.

By early June last year, school administrators faced a staffing crisis:

There were 83 teacher vacancies in the district's high schools and middle schools. More than half of these vacancies — 44 — were in middle school math, science and English, according to a district memo provided to the board of education at its July 19 meeting. [...]

In August, Stride signed a deal with the district to provide 50 virtual teachers for the 2022-23 school year.

The deal's annual cost: more than $8 million — or about $5 million more than if the district were to hire traditional in-person teachers, according to a school district internal analysis.

Jordyn Elston, the district's communications director, disputed that $8.2 million price in an email to the Riverfront Times, but also "declines to break down the costs or state what the district considered the Stride program's true cost, either per classroom or overall." But it's not that much, OK? How much is it? Look, it's less than that. 

The story explains that the average teacher salary in Hazelwood is $63,000 plus benefits, while the total cost per class for Stride is "up to $160,000" — some of the variability depends on whether the in-class facilitators are district staff or temps from Kelly Services. Those facilitators' duties "include helping answer student questions about online lessons, as well as taking attendance and making sure students stay off their phones and remain in class."

Stride is what's called an "Education Management Organization," or EMO, and the story notes that Stride is "the biggest EMO in the nation," which surprised us since we thought Kylo Ren in The Force Awakens was the biggest Emo anywhere. (Here, Dok fires himself, saving Rebecca the trouble.)

As the Riverfront Times reviews in quite a bit of detail, Stride had a colorful history elsewhere under its previous corporate name, K12 Inc. — although apparently K12's troubles weren't known by the Hazelwood school board when it signed the contract. (A Stride spox pointed out, sensibly enough, that the company's history is "a matter of public record," which is true enough, but you'd have to google it.)

When the company contracted with Miami-Dade schools in 2020, in a $15 million no-bid deal, the arrangement

ended abruptly when the district school board voted to sever ties with K12 only two weeks after the new school year began — in large part because the K12 platform became an easy target for a series of cyberattacks, including one launched by a 16-year-old Miami-Dade student.

See? At least one student learned something in that deal. The company rebranded as Stride a couple months later, for some reason. There were also great big kerfuffles involving the company in Georgia and California, which you can read about in the Riverfront Times story because they too are a matter of public record.

The story also details some of the problems teachers faced even trying to teach the Hazelwood classes. Sheila Soleau, who taught seventh-grade math for a month from her home in Huntington Beach, California, said the whole setup was ridiculously disorganized, and that at the beginning, she didn't even know the name of the school, although she also noted that there were no students on the other end of her monitor for the first two weeks, so we suppose she got the name of the school in that time.

"I'd ask my supervisor, 'Where are all the students?" Soleau recalls. "She'd say, 'We don't know.'"

But only after Soleau received her classes of students did the real problems begin.

"These kids needed some kind of structure," she says. "They wouldn't even do the problems with me. I'd open up a quiz and do a quiz with them. 'C'mon, you guys, let's do it together.'"

Soleau says she'd write out the math problems, but "they wouldn't even do it. Some of those kids all had zeroes because they wouldn't even do one thing."

An in-class facilitator was assigned to Soleau's classroom, but she wasn't much help.

"She said they wouldn't listen to her, so she gave up."

We should note that Soleau was fired by Stride following a weird chaotic incident at the school during an intruder drill; we won't go into the Rashomon details about whether she said something racist or not because holy crap that's almost an article in itself.

The Riverf  ront Times also discusses a series of emails between another virtual teacher, in Texas, and her facilitator in a sixth-grade math class in Hazelwood; in those emails, the teacher seems almost desperate to find ways to get the kids to stay in their seats and to engage with the lessons, because for Crom's sake why is anyone trying to teach middle school math remotely? I've subbed in middle school math classes, which are by nature a little crazy-making even in person.

High school students interviewed for the story said that the classes are far from their favorites, noting that "we don't have a real teacher" and that they've mostly had to resign themselves to making the best of it. One high school junior thought his English class, taught by a teacher in Kansas, had "worked out pretty good," although a friend said that his own remote chemistry class was frustrating since hands-on learning was impossible. Neither liked the idea of finishing high school taking virtual classes, but as one said, "there's nothing I can do about it. I might as well just finish it and get it over with."

Ah, the adventures of learning in the greatest nation on earth. At least someone's making bank off it.

[ Riverfront Times / Riverfront Times / image generated using DreamStudio Lite AI ]

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