BILL ANALYSIS
AB 837
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Date of Hearing: April 15, 2009
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Julia Brownley, Chair
AB 837 (Torlakson) - As Amended: March 31, 2009
SUBJECT : School attendance: online education
SUMMARY : Relaxes the requirements placed on school districts,
county offices of education (COE) and charter schools for
calculating and funding average daily attendance (ADA) for
pupils enrolled for the minimum day in classes that include both
a classroom based setting and at least one class offered online.
Specifically, this bill allows a school district, COE, or
charter school to claim a unit of ADA on the basis of a pupil's
attendance in the classroom-based setting.
EXISTING LAW :
1)Allows any school district to offer high school online
classes, while claiming attendance credit, in a classroom
setting, through Independent Study (IS), in a charter school,
or to any pupil who is otherwise attending for the minimum
day.
2)Allows any school district to offer online classes to any
pupil, if the district is not claiming attendance credit for
that class time.
3)Establishes the minimum school day for a high school student
to be 240 instructional minutes in a classroom, in IS, or in a
combination of the two settings, and requires students taking
a combination to meet attendance standards for both the
classroom and IS courses in order for a district to claim a
pupil's attendance for funding purposes.
4)Requires that pupils in grades 9 through 12 attend school for
at least 64,800 minutes per year in no less than 180 days,
which generally requires pupil attendance for an average of
360 minutes per day.
FISCAL EFFECT : Unknown, but potential increases in ongoing
General Fund Proposition 98 costs due to increased payments for
revenue limits and ADA-based categorical funding resulting from
the increase in reported ADA.
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COMMENTS : School districts are already allowed to implement and
offer online courses, and many do. There are four situations
under which districts are currently able to offer online courses
for high school pupils and still receive ADA credit toward
funding for that pupil's time in the same way the district would
if the pupil were not engaged in online instruction.
1)Pupils receiving online instruction in a classroom setting
with a certificated employee of the district supervising the
classroom.
2)Pupils enrolled in IS; this enrollment can be full-time or
part-time, meaning that the pupil could be enrolled in regular
classroom courses and enrolled in IS only for the purpose of
taking the online course.
3)Pupils who have met the minimum day requirement of 240 minutes
of classroom instruction; these pupils have already generated
a full day of ADA credit and could take the online course in
addition with no penalty or loss to the district's attendance
or funding calculations. Note that pupils should be attending
school for an average of 360 minutes in order to meet the
yearly required minutes.
4)Pupils enrolled in a charter school; less strict requirements
for funding and attendance accounting exist for charter
schools.
The state has also experimented with opening other avenues for
districts to provide online coursework. AB 885 (Daucher),
Chapter 801, Statutes of 2002, authorized participation by high
school students in the Online Classroom Pilot (OCP) program,
which allowed the use of an asynchronous, interactive (a teacher
and student interact online, but not necessarily at the same
time) curriculum as immediate supervision in order to count this
participation as instructional time for the purpose of
generating ADA and associated funding. The pilot program was
authorized until January 1, 2007, and was designed to monitor
and evaluate pupil participation in these online instructional
programs conducted over the Internet. This pilot program
addressed the need to provide expanded educational opportunities
for pupils attending schools with limited educational offerings,
access to advanced placement courses where none were available,
and quality educational services in courses for hard-to-staff
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subject areas in schools where a shortage of teachers existed.
Forty high schools in eleven school districts, with no more than
five schools per district, initially selected through an
application process administered the California Department of
Education (CDE); by statute, no more than fifteen percent of the
total enrollment of any of the school sites were allowed to
participate in the program.
AB 885 grew out of the author's concerns over a school district
that had enrolled students in online courses and reported ADA
for those students; that ADA was disallowed upon audit because
the students were not under the immediate supervision of a
teacher, were not in IS, and did not complete the minimum day.
These infractions occurred at Canyon High School in the Orange
Unified School District; Orange Unified School District is a
sponsor of this bill, according to the author. This district
was also a participant in the OCP program.
In a required report issued by the CDE, it was reported that
nine of the school districts continued as active participants in
OCP, offering courses such as Economics, Health, Biology, and
World History. The CDE reported that benefits of OCP included
more flexible student schedules and access to a greater number
of courses, including AP and other courses that might not be
offered in their school. On the negative side, the Department
listed the restrictions imposed by the authorizing legislation
and "lack of funding" even though the online courses were
generating full ADA and thus revenue limit support.
Participating districts reported that online courses were more
expensive to operate than traditional classroom-based courses.
The CDE has also historically expressed concerns over attendance
accounting and teacher supervision for students in online
courses. Related concerns exist over the inability of teachers
to know who, if anyone, is actually "attending" (i.e., online
and engaged in the coursework) in an online setting where the
student is not in visual range of the teacher as in a classroom
setting. This would be a particular concern in an asynchronous
application, as was allowed by OCP, where the teacher and the
pupil are not required to be online at the same time.
It is unfortunate that this pilot program required neither a
formal evaluation nor any analysis of measurable outcomes from
the program. The required reporting by the CDE, while meeting
the statutory mandate, did not provide the kind of evaluative
analysis upon which a decision to renew or expand a previously
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implemented program should be based.
This bill makes a new proposal in two parts; this proposal
concerns pupils enrolled for the minimum day in a mix of
classroom-based and online courses, and where the student is not
enrolled in IS. The first part of the proposal would authorize
school districts, COEs and charter schools to claim a day of
attendance counted toward ADA for a pupil who attends any part
of their classroom-based classes for that day. Given the
situations in current law whereby a student in an online course
receives ADA credit toward funding, this proposal only deals
with one scenario - a non-IS student who is enrolled for at
least the minimum day when you sum the pupil's minutes for that
day in both classroom-based courses and online courses, but
would not be enrolled for the minimum day if the online course
minutes were not included in that day's total. Even this
scenario could count toward funding, if the student were instead
enrolled in IS (even if only for the online course), in a
charter school, or if the online instruction were done in a
teacher-supervised classroom. Under current law, in this
scenario the district or COE would lose all ADA for that pupil
for the day, effectively a one hundred percent "penalty,"
because the student did not meet the minimum day enrollment
standard; even if the student were completing the online course
under IS, the district would lose all ADA credit for the day
unless the student both attended a classroom course and
completed their daily work in the online course. However, under
this proposal there is no penalty if the student does not
complete any online coursework as long as the student attends a
classroom-based course. In other words, a full day of
attendance is credited as long as the student attends in the
classroom at some point in time during the day. In total, this
proposal eliminates the need for a district to enroll a student
taking an online course in IS and the need for that student to
complete their daily online work, in order for the district to
receive full attendance credit for the student. As the author
indicates this would provide an incentive for districts and COEs
to enroll students in (and get them to attend) online courses,
but this incentive would only exist for that subset of students
described in this scenario.
According to the author, the problem that this bill is
addressing "mostly occurs in high schools, and most often with
seniors, who have completed much of the core curricular courses
and may schedule only the minimum day (typically 240 minutes) in
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order to work, attend a ROC/P or community college." However,
online course work is also used extensively in dropout and
credit recovery programs for at-risk students. Under current
attendance accounting statute and regulation, if this high
school student is enrolled only in classroom-based courses and
attends one period of their schedule, then the district is
entitled to one day of credit in calculating its ADA; if the
same student were enrolled only in online courses through IS and
completed a days worth of work output under there is agreement,
then the district is also entitled to one day of credit in
calculating its ADA. However, if that student is enrolled in a
mix of classroom-based and online courses, then the student must
both attend for part of the classroom-based day and complete the
required work product for the IS course(s) in order for the
district to receive credit for one day of attendance; failure to
meet either the classroom-based or IS standard leads to no
attendance credit for the district. This proposal would allow
one day of attendance credit as long as the classroom-based
standard was met.
It should be noted that this bill proposes to address an issue
that prevents districts and COEs from claiming attendance credit
for funding purposes for students who are most likely enrolled
for an amount of time that is at or near the minimum day of 240
minutes. This bill does not address the fact that a 240 minute
instructional day probably falls short from an educational
perspective in the first place. In the typical high school, 240
minutes is comparable to a 4 period day. A student enrolled for
a 4 period day through high school would not generally meet
local credit requirements for graduation, would likely be unable
to meet California's public university admission requirements,
and certainly would fall short of the state requirement that
pupils in grades 9 through 12 attend school for at least 64,800
minutes per year in no less than 180 days (which generally
requires attendance for an average of 360 minutes per day).
Thus this proposal creates issues concerning time that are
unrelated to attendance accounting, but are clearly germane to
broader educational goals and expectations.
The second part of the proposal would allow this new attendance
accounting model to be applied to pupils enrolled in "high
quality online course offerings." Rather than allowing
flexibility in the provision of online instruction in the
context of IS or a pilot such as the OCP program - both of which
were highly structured with requirements and restrictions that
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ensured that the quality of instruction online was at least on
par with instruction in the same course taught in a
classroom-based setting - this proposal is undefined in terms of
what constitutes "high quality online" instruction. Previous
online instruction had the assurances of requirements on
student-teacher ratios and evaluation of work product (IS), or
requirements on teacher-student interactions and course content
(OCP) to work against low quality instruction, but this proposal
seems to have no requirements attached; as a worse-case example
under this proposal, an online course could be taught with no
content relationship to the state's content standards, with no
associated assessment or accountability, with no iterative
interaction with teachers, or, in fact, with no teacher working
with the student at all - as long as the district felt that the
online course was "high quality".
The immediate supervision of a certificated teacher not only
lies at the heart of the delivery of education services, but is
also the foundation of the state's current attendance accounting
and revenue limit funding system. Elimination of teachers
through implementation of online coursework that is not
conducted with either synchronous (teacher and student online
simultaneously) or asynchronous (teacher checking the students
work online at different times) supervision by a teacher
presents numerous risks to student learning, particularly for
students with special needs and students in need of remediation.
In addition, elimination of immediate teacher supervision means
that the state has no mechanism to ensure that a student is
actually engaged in the coursework. From the perspective of the
state's interest, these are situations where the state would be
unable to ensure that its investment in education is spent
directly on instruction. The Legislature's unease with
instructional circumstances without immediate supervision was
made clear with the passage of SB 740 (O'Connell), Chapter 892,
Statutes of 2001, which limited funding for charter schools that
are primarily non-classroom based. The Legislature was
concerned that these schools were receiving funds in excess of
what was required to fund non-classroom based instruction, and
that it was not clear to what extent and intensity instruction
was being delivered to pupils. Online instruction raises many
of the same questions, particularly as this bill fails to
provide standards for instruction, accountability, teacher
involvement, or teacher qualifications in the online courses.
Currently, only in limited circumstances (e.g., IS) are school
districts funded for instruction that occurs without a pupil
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being under the immediate supervision of certificated staff
(though in such circumstances the pupil is always under the
periodic supervision of a teacher); such circumstances are
subject to rigorous requirements and restrictions beyond what
would be required under this bill; those requirements and
restrictions generally ensure instructional quality in terms of
issues such as student-teacher ratios, teacher qualifications,
curriculum and content, and student assessment.
The usefulness of online curriculum and instruction is becoming
more apparent as delivery systems mature and more electronic
instructional materials are developed, and the potential use of
online education in addressing issues regarding students with
low motivation, dropout and credit recovery, and remedial
instruction is heartening. However, it is not yet clear how the
state should move forward to further authorize and fund online
K-12 educational services, since it is necessary at the same
time to guarantee that the quality of the educational services
provided to a student online is equivalent to that provided in
the classroom, that the state's financial investment in a
pupil's education is served by online education, and that there
are no unintended consequences (e.g., inequities in access to
online instruction, loss of the speaking skills required in the
language arts standards, or losses in personal and social
skills) that might result from increasing this means of
delivering education services.
Committee amendments: In line with the Legislature's historical
willingness to move forward incrementally with online education
by creating a pilot and setting requirements and standards that
were required of these courses, Committee staff recommends the
following amendments, many of which are designed for the
protection of students participating in online education under
the provisions of this bill:
1)Delete charter schools from this bill. Charter schools are
funded differently from school districts and COEs, and are not
subject to the same restrictions on course offerings,
attendance accounting, or instructional delivery. The
concepts of ADA, IS, and minimum day, from a statutory
perspective, are irrelevant to charter schools. Thus the
inclusion of charter schools in this bill only serves to
create statutory ambiguity.
2)Place requirements on online courses used to qualify for ADA
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credit as proposed by this bill and make these requirements
subject to audit; in this way the author's intent that these
online courses be "high-quality" will be realized. These
requirements should be consistent with those developed during
earlier legislation discussions related to the authorization
and proposed reauthorization of the OCP program, and clearly
would work to improve the courses, protect the student, and
make the student's online course experience as close as
possible to the classroom experience for a course with the
same content. At the same time this would still support the
author's intent to relax the funding restrictions that may
hold back districts and COEs from offering online coursework.
The restrictions would include:
a) Limit this authorization to pupils in grades 9 - 12.
b) Require the teacher of an online course to be accessible
to the student online on a daily basis, but allow such
courses to be asynchronous or synchronous, meaning that the
teacher and pupil may not be, or may be, online at the same
time.
c) Require each school site to have the same ratio of
full-time equivalent certificated teachers to pupils in
online instruction as for in-classroom instruction of the
same subject matter, and restricts online course enrollment
at each school site to no more than 15 percent of the total
enrollment of that school site.
d) Require a teacher of an online course to be currently
teaching, or in the last two years to have taught, the same
course in an in-classroom setting and to hold the
appropriate subject matter credential, and requires the
course content for online instruction to be the same as for
in-classroom instruction for each course.
e) Allow a school district to contract with another school
district to provide the online course to pupils at the
approved school site, if both districts comply with all
standards and criteria of the program.
f) Permit only pupils who have volunteered, as proven by
the written consent of a parent or guardian, to be assigned
to an online course.
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g) Require that state testing results for pupils in online
courses be assigned to the school and district in which the
student is regularly enrolled.
h) Require that pupils in any online course are tested
using proctors or other means of ensuring the integrity of
the testing process, and that a clear record of pupil work
be maintained in the same manner as for the in-classroom
version of the course.
i) Require school districts to maintain records to verify
the time that a pupil and an instructor spend online and in
related activities, and to verify compliance with other
requirements. As a condition of funding, the district must
make these records available to the districts independent
auditor.
j) Require the school district governing board of the
school site offering the course to approve the online
course, and to certify, through board resolution,
compliance with these requirements.
aa) Prohibit the waiver of any aspect of these requirements
unless specifically provided for.
3)Clarify that this proposal applies to students enrolled for
'at least' the minimum day, rather than (exactly) for the
minimum day of 240 minutes.
4)Make this change operational commencing with the 2010-11
fiscal year. Since this bill would be enacted January 1,
2010, the first half of the 2009-10 school year would operate
under one set of attendance accounting rules and the second
half would operate under another; this amendment alleviates
this problem.
Previous legislation: AB 2457 (Walters), held in the Assembly
Appropriations Committee in 2008, would have re-established the
Online Classroom Pilot Program to monitor and evaluate pupil
participation in course-based, asynchronous, interactive
instruction conducted over the Internet. SB 155 (Maldonado),
introduced in 2007, was substantially similar to AB 2457, except
that SB 155 also required the California Department of Education
to give priority to applicants ranked in the Academic
Performance Index (API) deciles 1 through 5, when approving the
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competitive applications to operate an online course; SB 155 was
later amended into a different subject matter and signed into
law as Chapter 702, Statutes of 2008. AB 885 (Daucher), Chapter
801, Statutes of 2002, authorized participation by high school
students in an online classroom program using an asynchronous,
interactive curriculum as immediate supervision in order to
count this participation as instructional time for the purpose
of generating average daily attendance (ADA) and associated
funding. AB 885 authorized up to 40 participating school sites.
Early versions of AB 885 would have authorized ADA credit for
an online class operated by Canyon High School in the Orange
Unified School District; the district had previously been found
to be out of in compliance with the requirement that attendance
credit for funding may only be earned by pupils under the
"immediate supervision" of a properly credentialed instructor,
and was at risk of losing credit for ADA and thus funding. The
bill was amended in Senate appropriations to reflect the more
general program. AB 294 (Daucher), Chapter 429, Statutes of
2003, recast this program as a pilot, added specified fiscal,
record-keeping, and reporting requirements and implemented other
clean-up provisions as requested in the Governor's AB 885
signing message. AB 1985 (Daucher), held in the Senate in 2006,
would have established the Online Classroom Program, replacing
the pilot program with an ongoing, non-pilot program allowing
school districts to receive funds for average daily attendance
(ADA) of pupils who are receiving instruction via the internet
and are located at remote locations.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
Support
California League of Middle Schools
California League of High Schools
Los Angeles Unified School District
Orange Unified School District (Sponsor)
Santa Clara County Office of Education
Small School Districts Association
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087
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