BILL ANALYSIS �
AB 802
Page 1
Date of Hearing: March 30, 2011
ASSEMBLY COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
Julia Brownley, Chair
AB 802 (Blumenfield) - As Introduced: February 17, 2011
SUBJECT : Online education: school attendance
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) 2013-14, to
claim one day of attendance toward average daily attendance on
the basis of a pupil's attendance in an online course or
courses 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, to be as rigorous as a
classroom-based course, and to meeting or exceeding all
relevant state content standards.
b) The teacher of the online course is online at the same
time as each pupil in a synchronous online setting, or may
be online at different times as each pupil in an
asynchronous online setting, where attendance in the
asynchronous course is verified using periodic proctored
examinations, direct teacher-pupil meetings no less than
twice per month, or a visual connection.
c) The ratio of full-time equivalent certificated teachers
teaching through online instruction to pupils engaging in
AB 802
Page 2
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 prior-year ADA in
that county, or if the course is new or unique, then that
ratio cannot exceed 30 to 1.
d) The teacher of the online course holds the appropriate
subject matter credential, and is "highly qualified" as
defined under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of
2001(NCLB); additionally requires, if the course is new or
unique, that the teacher hold the appropriate subject
matter credential and be "highly qualified" under NCLB.
e) The subject matter content for the online course is the
same as for the traditional classroom-based course of the
same course title in the local educational agency (LEA).
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 regularly enrolled.
g) The course is offered by a high school, continuation
school, county office of education, or charter school.
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.
j) Pupils enrolled in the online course take examinations
by proctor or using other reliable methods are used to
ensure test integrity, and there is a clear contemporaneous
record of pupil work, using the same documentation methods
used in classroom-based courses in the same subject.
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
AB 802
Page 3
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
LEA, as defined, to provide an online course. 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 district, county office or charter
school 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 LEA's annual
financial audit.
6)Prohibits a pupil from being credited with more than five days
of attendance in a calendar week, or for more days in a fiscal
year than the number of days on which regular classes are
maintained.
7)Prohibits the waiver of any provision of this authorization,
unless specifically authorized.
8)Requires the Superintendent of Public Instruction (SPI), in
consultation with the Director of the Department of Finance
(DOF), 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.
9)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 for
non-charter school pupils, or to be attending at the school
AB 802
Page 4
site of the charter school for charter school pupils.
10)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.
11)Defines "asynchronous" and "synchronous" online course, and
"local educational agency."
12)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.
13)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.
14)Provides that these provisions become inoperative July 1,
2017 and are repealed on January 1, 2018 unless this sunset is
otherwise deleted or changed.
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 : A Senate Appropriations Committee analysis in
2010 of a substantially similar bill by this author found costs
AB 802
Page 5
in the million, including costs incurred by the Department of
Education to develop new guidelines and regulations, new
apportionment costs for additional pupils engaged in
asynchronous high school "dropout recovery" programs, lost
savings to the state as districts claim higher attendance for
existing pupils under an asynchronous online attendance system
than under the current system, and some cost pressure for LEAs
to purchase and maintain the hardware and software necessary to
implement the program.
COMMENTS : School districts are 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, 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
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
AB 802
Page 6
allowed to participate in the program.
AB 885 grew out of its 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
CDE 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 and the DOF have 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 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. OCP was not reauthorized.
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
AB 802
Page 7
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). As a student attends class (within specified daily
minimums and maximums) more frequently, the district receives
greater credit toward ADA, and the district is provided a higher
level of funding. 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
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
AB 802
Page 8
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 in a 2010 hearing, 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 some of the
same requirements on student-teacher ratios, teacher quality,
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. The bill, however, allows
attendance credit towards ADA to begin in 2013-14 for
synchronous online courses, but prohibits attendance credit from
asynchronous online courses until the SPI adopts regulations for
the purpose of doing so. The bill also broadens the scope of
these provisions, as compared to the author's substantially
similar bill heard last year, by allowing non-high schools to
claim attendance credit for online courses, allowing broader
contracting out for the provision of online courses, and by
deleting the prohibition against the waiver of any provision or
requirement of this bill.
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
AB 802
Page 9
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.
In an asynchronous online course, mechanisms that could
guarantee that a pupil is attending, that the pupil has spent
time on task, or that there is some time value to the pupil's
work product are not so easily defined. For example, in a
substantially similar bill in 2010, the author proposed the use
of biometric technologies to ensure that a pupil was "attending"
an asynchronous online course; however, that mechanism was
deleted from the bill in response to issues raised by the Senate
Education Committee over potential privacy concerns that had not
been fully examined. This bill proposes mechanisms to provide
these guarantees that include: 1) periodic proctored
examinations, 2) direct teacher-pupil meetings no less than
twice per calendar month, and 3) a visual connection including,
but not limited to, Internet Webcam. The bill also provides for
a sunsetting of these provisions after four years of operation;
this provision will allow the state to revisit these authorities
to determine whether historical problems associated with
attendance accounting in online courses persist (particularly in
asynchronous applications), or whether the mechanisms proposed
by this bill are sufficient to guarantee the state's interest by
ensuring that the public investment in education is spent
directly on providing educational services to students who are
attending and on task.
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
AB 802
Page 10
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 other online K-12
educational applications, particularly those that are
asynchronous, can provide the guarantees 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: Committee staff recommends that this bill
be amended to do the following:
1)Correct an error in the expression that requires the
teacher-to-pupil ratio to "not exceed 30 to 1." Instead this
requirement should be that the teacher to pupil ratio "shall
not be less than 1 to 30."
2)Delete a redundant requirement regarding the credential and
qualifications of a teacher in a "high quality" online course.
3)Consistent with the author's substantially similar bill last
year and with amendments taken on that bill by this Committee:
a) Require a "high quality" online course to be taught at
the high school level.
b) Allow a school district, county office of education or
charter school to contract with a school district to
provide the online course to pupils of the offering local
educational agency.
c) Prohibit waiver of these provisions unless specifically
authorized.
4)Delete the definition of LEA proposed in this bill and
specifically clarify those educational entities to which
specified provisions of the bill apply.
AB 802
Page 11
Previous legislation: AB 2027 (Blumenfield), held in the Senate
Appropriations committee in 2010, provided narrower authority
but was otherwise substantially similar to this bill. 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
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
AB 802
Page 12
and are located at remote locations.
REGISTERED SUPPORT / OPPOSITION :
Support
EdVoice
Riverside County School Superintendents' Association
San Diego County Office of Education
San Diego Unified School District
Santa Clara County Office of Education
Opposition
None on file
Analysis Prepared by : Gerald Shelton / ED. / (916) 319-2087