BILL ANALYSIS
AB 2027
Page 1
ASSEMBLY THIRD READING
AB 2027 (Blumenfield and Cook)
As Amended May 28, 2010
Majority vote
EDUCATION 9-0 APPROPRIATIONS 17-0
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|Ayes:|Brownley, Nestande, |Ayes:|Fuentes, Conway, Ammiano, |
| |Ammiano, Arambula, | |Bradford, Charles |
| |Carter, Eng, Miller, | |Calderon, Coto, Davis, |
| |Norby, Torlakson | |Monning, Ruskin, Harkey, |
| | | |Miller, Nielsen, Norby, |
| | | |Skinner, Solorio, |
| | | |Torlakson, Torrico |
|-----+--------------------------+-----+--------------------------|
| | | | |
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SUMMARY : Relaxes the requirements placed on school districts,
county offices of education and charter schools for calculating
and funding average daily attendance (ADA) for pupils enrolled
in online classes. Specifically, this bill :
1)Authorizes a school district, county office of education or
charter school, commencing in fiscal year (FY) 2011-12, to
claim one day of attendance toward average daily attendance on
the basis of a pupil's attendance in an online class or
classes on that day if the pupil is enrolled in grade 9, 10,
11, or 12; is enrolled in classes in a classroom-based
setting, offered through an online program, or both; meets
minimum instructional time requirements; and, where each
online course in which the pupil is enrolled is a
"high-quality" online course.
2)Defines a "high-quality" online course as meeting all of the
following requirements:
a) The online course is approved by the governing board of
the school district or county office of education, or by
the governing body of the charter school, such that the
online course is certified, through formal resolution, to
meet these requirements;
b) The teacher of the online course is online at the same
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time as each pupil in a synchronous online setting, or is
online at different times as each pupil in an asynchronous
online setting, where attendance in the asynchronous course
is verified using periodic proctored examinations,
biometric verification, or a line-of-sight visual
connection;
c) The ratio of full-time equivalent certificated teachers
teaching through online instruction to pupils engaging in
that instruction is greater than or equal to the ratio of
teachers to pupils in traditional in-classroom study of the
same subject matter in the school, school district, or the
unified school district with the largest ADA in that
county;
d) The teacher of the online course holds the appropriate
subject matter credential, and has taught the same course
to pupils in a traditional in-classroom setting or in an
online setting 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 in the
school, school district, or the unified school district
with the largest ADA in that county;
f) All statewide testing results for pupils enrolled in the
online course are reported to the school, school district,
and county in which the pupil is enrolled;
g) The course is offered by a high school, continuation
school or county office of education;
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) No pupil electing to participate in the online course is
denied access because the pupil lacks the computer hardware
or software necessary to participate in the online course,
or is charged for participation in the online course;
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j) Pupils enrolled in the online course take examinations
by proctor or that other reliable methods are used to
ensure test integrity, and there is a clear record of pupil
work, using the same documentation methods used in
classroom-based courses in the same subject; and,
aa) The school, school district or county office of
education maintains contemporaneous 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.
3)Authorizes a school district, county office of education or
charter school offering an online course to contract with a
school district to provide the online course to pupils of the
offering school district. Also requires those courses provided
under contract to be "high quality", the contract terms to be
determined by mutual agreement of the school districts, and
that such contracts only be an agreement directly with the
school, school district or county office offering the online
course, and not with the pupils of the offering school
district.
4)Clarifies that nothing in these provisions be interpreted to
mean that a charter school provides classroom-based or
nonclassroom-based instruction for the purposes of a State
Board of Education determination of that distinction.
5)Requires that pupil attendance accounted for under this
authorization be subject to audit as part of the local
educational agency's annual financial audit.
6)Prohibits the waiver of any provision of this authorization,
unless specifically authorized.
7)Requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI), in
consultation with the Director of Finance, on or before
December 31, 2011, to make revisions, necessary to conform to
these provisions, to any attendance manual or guidance; make
revisions necessary to clarify attendance accounting
procedures for asynchronous online courses; and make
recommendations regarding statutory changes that would be
necessary to allow attendance in asynchronous online courses
to be included in the calculation of ADA.
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8)Deems a pupil engaged in an online course meeting these
requirements to be under the immediate supervision and control
of a certificated employee of the district, county office or
charter school for the purposes of calculating ADA.
9)Specifies that attendance an online course meeting these
requirements is not required to meet the requirements for the
Independent Study Program for the purposes of calculating ADA.
10)Defines "asynchronous" and "synchronous" online course, and
"biometric."
11)Requires the SPI, in consultation with the Department of
Finance, to adopt rules and regulations for the purpose of
clarifying or expanding the procedures required for verifying
the identification of pupils participating in asynchronous
online courses, and for including pupil attendance in
asynchronous online courses in the calculation of ADA.
12)Prohibits pupil attendance in asynchronous online courses
from being included in the calculation of ADA until the SPI
has adopted the regulations specified in 11) above.
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)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.
3)Requires that pupils in grades 9 through 12 attend school for
at least 64,800 minutes per year in no less than 180 days (or
175 days under budget flexibility language through 2012-13).
FISCAL EFFECT : According to the Assembly Appropriations
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Committee:
1)Beginning FY 2012-13, potential on-going General Fund
(GF)/Proposition 98 revenue limit cost pressure, likely
between $590,000 and $1.8 million, for increased claims of ADA
resulting from online instruction.
2)One-time GF administrative costs to the SPI, likely less than
$125,000, to develop regulations pursuant to this measure.
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 pupil attendance: 1) pupils receiving
online instruction in a classroom setting with a certificated
employee of the district supervising the classroom; 2) pupils
enrolled in IS; 3) pupils who have met the minimum day
requirement of 240 minutes of classroom instruction and thus
have already generated a full day of ADA credit; and, 4) pupils
enrolled in a charter school, where there are less strict
requirements for funding and attendance accounting.
The state has also experimented with opening other avenues for
districts to provide online coursework. AB 885 (Daucher),
Chapter 801, Statutes of 2002, authorizes participation, through
2006, by high school students in the Online Classroom Pilot
(OCP) program, which allowed an asynchronous, interactive
curriculum to count as instructional time for the purpose of
generating ADA. AB 885 grew out of the legislature's concerns
over a school district that had illegally 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, the CDE reported that the
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, but
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
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accounting and teacher supervision for students in online
courses in terms of: 1) ensuring 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) placing
a time value on the student's 'time on task'. The immediate
supervision of a certificated employee of the school district
(i.e., a teacher) eliminates these concerns, and 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 funding system. 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
approaches pose problems.
The Legislature's unease with instruction 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 also 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 be noted that the elimination of personal,
face-to-face contact between a teacher and student may also
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present numerous risks to student learning, particularly for
students with special needs and students in need of remediation.
As was noted by the Assembly Education Committee during debate
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 "high quality" online course offerings; the bill also defines
a "high quality" online course as one that meets many of the
same requirements on 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, and that meets additional requirements. 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. The bill,
however, allows attendance credit towards ADA to begin in
2011-12 for synchronous online courses, but prohibits attendance
credit from asynchronous online courses until the SPI adopts
regulations for the purpose of doing so.
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. Where a
line-of-sight connection is established between teacher and
student in a synchronous environment, as is required by this
bill, then it can 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.
In terms of protecting the state's interests and investment in
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education, it is more difficult for asynchronous online courses
to meet a 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 either to
guarantee that the enrolled student is "attending", or to place
a time value on the work or attendance of the student. This
means that, without additional restrictions or regulations,
asynchronous online courses may fail to meet the spirit of the
attendance accounting system that is 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.
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 the quality of the educational services provided to a
student online and the state's financial investment in a pupil's
education. This bill moves the State forward significantly in
the provision of synchronous online education, while also
allowing for more clarification, in the form of regulations,
regarding the provision of asynchronous online education in the
context of the State's attendance accounting system.
Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087
FN: 0004728