BILL ANALYSIS
AB 2027
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Date of Hearing: April 7, 2010
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Julia Brownley, Chair
AB 2027 (Blumenfield) - As Introduced: February 17, 2010
SUBJECT : Online education: school attendance
SUMMARY : Relaxes the requirements placed on school districts
and county offices of education (COE) for calculating and
funding average daily attendance (ADA) for pupils enrolled for
at least the minimum day in classes that include both
in-classroom and online classes. Specifically, this bill :
1)Authorizes a school district or county office of education,
commencing in the 2011-12 fiscal year, to claim one day of
attendance toward average daily attendance on the basis of a
pupil's attendance at a class or classes in the
classroom-based setting on that day, if the pupil is enrolled
in grade 9, 10, 11, or 12, and is enrolled for at least the
minimum school day in classes that include both one or more
courses in a classroom-based setting and one or more courses
that are offered through an online program by a high school,
where each online course in which the pupil is enrolled is a
"high-quality" online course.
2)Defines "high-quality" online course to mean an online course
that meets all of the following requirements:
a) The online course is approved by the governing board of
the school district, such that the online course is
certified, through board resolution, by the governing board
of the school district to meet these requirements.
b) The teacher of an online course is online and accessible
to the pupil on a daily basis to respond to pupil queries,
assign tasks, and dispense information, though the
teacher's interaction with the pupil may be asynchronous or
synchronous in nature.
c) The ratio of full-time equivalent certificated teachers
teaching through online instruction to pupils engaging in
that instruction is substantially equivalent to the ratio
of teachers to pupils in traditional in-classroom study of
the same subject matter.
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d) The teacher of the online course holds the appropriate
subject matter credential, and concurrently teaches the
same course to pupils in a traditional in-classroom setting
in the providing school district or did so at any time
within the immediately preceding two-year period.
e) The subject matter content for the online course is the
same as for the traditional classroom-based course.
f) The online course may be offered by a school district
contracting with another school district to provide the
online course to pupils of the offering school district.
Also requires contract terms to be determined by mutual
agreement of the school districts, and that school
districts that provide online courses pursuant to a
contract, only enter into an agreement directly with the
school district of the school site offering the online
course, and not with the pupils of the offering school
district.
g) All statewide testing results for pupils enrolled in the
online course are reported to the school district in which
the pupil is enrolled for regular in-classroom courses.
h) No pupil is assigned to the online course pursuant to
this section unless the pupil voluntarily elects to
participate in the online course and the parent or guardian
of the pupil provides written consent before the pupil
participates in an online course.
i) The school district of a school site that offers the
online course verifies that online pupils take examinations
by proctor or that other reliable methods are used to
ensure test integrity and that there is a clear record of
pupil work, using the same method of documentation and
assessment as in a classroom-based course of the same
subject matter.
j) The school district of a school site that offers the
online course maintains records to verify the time that a
pupil spends online and in related activities in which a
pupil is involved, and maintains records verifying the time
that the instructor is online.
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3)Requires that pupil attendance accounted for under this
authorization be subject to audit as part of the local
educational agency's annual financial audit conducted pursuant
to Education Code Section 41020.
4)Prohibits the waiver of any provision of this authorization,
unless the waiver is specifically authorized in statute.
5)Requires the State Board of Education to submit, to the
Legislature and the Governor on or before July 1, 2012, a
report relating to online education, that includes, but is not
limited to, recommendations relating to:
a) Standards for online education.
b) The inclusion of online education in curriculum
frameworks to ensure that pupils have the opportunity to
experience online education.
c) Changes in the Education Code necessary to facilitate
online education opportunities.
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.
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FISCAL EFFECT : According to an Assembly Appropriations
Committee analysis of a substantially similar bill in 2009,
potential on-going GF/98 revenue limit costs of $580,000, for
increased claims of ADA for providing online instruction to
pupils.
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
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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
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, were initially selected for the pilot
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
certificated 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; the district was also a
participant in the OCP program.
In a report on the pilot program 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 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 the OCP program, where the
teacher and the pupil are not required to be online at the same
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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
implemented program should be based.
The author succinctly states the problem that the Legislature
has historically faced when considering legislation to expand
online education and the problem that this bill proposes to
address by stating that, "The current rules for attendance
accounting are complex and cumbersome for schools offering
students online instruction. The current methodologies for
attendance accounting create a disincentive for schools to offer
online courses."
Background on attendance accounting:
The immediate supervision of a certificated employee of the
school district (i.e., a teacher) not only lies at the heart of
the state's mechanism for delivering educational services, but
is also the foundation of the state's current attendance
accounting and revenue limit funding system. The bulk of
funding for K-12 education in California is provided on the
basis of attendance, specifically average daily attendance
(ADA). The more that a student attends class (within specified
daily minimums and maximums), the more credit toward ADA the
district receives, and the greater the level of funding provided
to that district. Attendance in class is implicitly equated to
'time on task', so that districts are funded on the basis of
students being in class and, thus, on task. The elimination of
immediate teacher supervision, as may occur in an online
educational setting, means that the state may have no mechanism
1) to ensure that the student is engaged in the coursework
(i.e., that the student is "attending" the class and that it is
the student that is "attending") and 2) to place a time value on
the student's 'time on task'. From the perspective of
protecting the state's interest and ensuring that the state's
investment in education is spent directly on providing
educational services to students who are on task in terms of
learning, online delivery of instruction may not be able to
provide sufficient guarantees; certainly in the context of the
historical dependence on the immediate supervision of a teacher
to guarantee the state's interest, many online delivery
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approaches create problems.
The Legislature's unease with instructional circumstances
without immediate supervision was made clear by its decision to
not extend the OCP pilot program and 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 has consistently expressed a concern
over schools receiving funds in excess of what is required to
fund non-classroom based instruction, and over the extent and
intensity to which instruction is being delivered to pupils in
non-classroom based settings. Currently, only in limited
circumstances (e.g., IS) are school districts funded for
instruction that occurs without a pupil being under the
immediate supervision of certificated staff, though in such
circumstances the pupil is always under the periodic supervision
of a teacher and there is a mechanism for calculating the
time-value of work completed by the student (in an IS setting,
that mechanism is detailed in the IS contract). Such
circumstances are subject to rigorous requirements and
restrictions (e.g., requirements on student-teacher ratios,
teacher qualifications, curriculum and content, and student
assessment) beyond what is required in a classroom setting, and
have mechanisms to ensure the student's "attendance" and "time
on task".
It should also be noted that the elimination of personal,
face-to-face contact between a teacher and student may also
present numerous risks to student learning, particularly for
students with special needs and students in need of remediation.
As was noted by Members of the Assembly Education Committee
during debate about online education at an earlier hearing this
year, the teacher-student relationship often provides more than
a simple mechanism for instructional delivery; an online
relationship may not allow the personal mentoring that may mean
more and have more impact on a student's life than the subject
matter that was taught and learned during that course.
Rather than allowing flexibility in the provision of online
instruction in the context of IS or a pilot such as the OCP
program, this bill allows attendance credit for pupils enrolled
in a hybrid course schedule that includes one or more "high
quality" online course offerings and one or more courses taught
in a classroom setting; the bill also defines a "high quality"
online course as one that meets many of the same requirements on
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student-teacher ratios, teacher quality, evaluation of work
product, teacher-student interactions and course content that
are evident in IS or were required under the OCP program. This
bill allows those online course offerings to be of a synchronous
nature, where the teacher and the student are online
simultaneously, or asynchronous nature, where the teacher checks
the student's work but is online at a different time. In terms
of protecting the state's interests and investment in education,
asynchronous online courses clearly fail to meet any standard
that is close to what is satisfied by the "immediate
supervision" of a teacher. In an asynchronous online course,
absent additional requirements that go well beyond the present
scope of this bill, there is no mechanism to 1) guarantee that
the enrolled student is "attending" any class period of the
course, or 2) place a time value on the work or attendance of
the student. This means that asynchronous online courses would
fail to meet the strict rules of attendance accounting that are
designed to protect against the misuse or misallocation of
public funds and that districts must adhere to in a manner that
passes scrutiny under rigorous audit.
In a synchronous online course, an argument can be made that
there could be or are mechanisms to guarantee attendance of the
student and to place a time value on that attendance. In a
classroom setting, immediate supervision (and the line-of-sight
connection between the teacher and student during that class
period) provides the mechanism to guarantee that the student is
attending and to validate the identity of that student. In
addition, the implicit assumption in a classroom setting, that
is supervised by the teacher, is that the student is on-task
during the class period, provides a mechanism for valuing the
time that can be credited toward ADA - in a 50 minute class
period, a pupil generates 50 minutes of attendance credit toward
ADA. If a line-of-sight connection was established between
teacher and student in a synchronous environment, then it could
be argued that the immediate supervision standard is met in that
the teacher could verify the attendance of the student, could
validate the identity of the student, and could ensure (as well
as in a classroom setting) that the student was on-task during
the class period. Effectively a synchronous online course, with
line-of-sight capability that allows the teacher to see the
student, would provide that teacher with the same abilities with
respect to the requirements of attendance accounting that are
provided to a teacher in a classroom setting.
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The usefulness of online curriculum and instruction is becoming
more apparent as delivery systems mature and more electronic
instructional materials are developed; the potential use of
online education in addressing issues regarding students with
low motivation, dropout and credit recovery, specialized
instruction including both advanced and remedial instruction,
and instruction in small school settings is also heartening. It
appears that technology has brought us to a point where, in the
case of synchronous applications, the problems that arise
because of the interaction between online education and the
state's attendance accounting and funding systems can be
reconciled. However, it is not yet clear how the state should
move forward to further authorize and fund other online K-12
educational applications, particularly those that are
asynchronous, 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 order to move the state forward in its
ability to provide online courses and online instruction,
Committee staff recommends that this bill be amended to do the
following:
1)Broaden the scope of the bill to include charter schools.
2)Broaden the scope of the bill to provide ADA credit for
student attendance in synchronous online courses, whether or
not the pupil is enrolled in one of more courses provided in a
classroom setting, as long as those courses:
a) Meet the conditions specified in the bill's definition
of a "high quality" online course.
b) Allow for a "line-of-sight" connection between the
teacher and the student that would allow the teacher to
take attendance in a manner substantially equivalent to
taking attendance in a classroom setting, and that would
allow for the teacher to immediately supervise the
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student's work and verify that the student was on-task at
any point in time.
3)Clarify that attendance in "high quality" synchronous courses
counts toward a student's minimum day and minimum minutes
requirements.
4)Delete any authorization for ADA credit for attendance in
asynchronous online courses.
5)Clarify that this authorization for the purposes of
calculating ADA is not to be interpreted as constituting
"classroom-based instruction" for the purposes of the charter
school funding determination made pursuant to the provisions
enacted by SB 740 (O'Connell), Chapter 892, Statutes of 2001.
6)Require the SPI, in consultation with the Director of DOF, to
make revisions in the state's attendance accounting manual to
include attendance accounting procedures for high quality
asynchronous online courses and to make recommendations to the
Legislature regarding any statutory change that would be
necessary to authorize ADA credit for pupil attendance in
asynchronous courses.
7)Make changes to the definition of a "high quality" online
course to account for small school issues, and to clarify
specific elements of the definition.
8)Make technical changes to clarify and restructure parts of the
bill.
9)Delete the requirement for the State Board of Education to
submit a report to the Legislature and Governor.
Previous legislation: AB 837 (Torlakson), held under submission
in the Assembly Appropriations Committee in 2009, would have
relaxed 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. 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
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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 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 Teachers Association
Los Angeles Unified School District
Riverside County Schools Advocacy Association
San Diego County Office of Education (Sponsor)
Santa Clara County Office of Education
TechAmerica (Sponsor)
TechNet (Sponsor)
Opposition
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None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087