One of the big recommendations from “Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education,” the new Brookings Institution report, is to help establish national virtual schools:

To support the development of that sector of schooling, we recommend that Congress authorize the establishment of accrediting bodies for online K-12 education, incentivize states to participate in these accrediting efforts, and extend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act provisions for school choice for students in low performing Title I schools to virtual schools. Thus students in persistently low performing schools would be able to avail themselves of accredited virtual education at the district’s expense.

Not Gonna Happen.

Think supplemental education was controversial? There is no way that Congress is going to pass what amounts to a national voucher program, where money from Johnny’s local district goes directly to Kaplan Online. More importantly, Title I deals mainly with elementary and middle schools, where there almost certainly needs to be ongoing adult supervision. Thus, most full-time virtual schools at this age level require significant parental involvement–something unavailable for many of our most disadvantaged students during the working hours. Without strong student supports and local, on-the-ground partnerships and adults, it’s hard to see how this really works for but a few kids. And let’s not even get started on the many potential problems with a program modeled on higher education accreditation.

Giving students more options–especially those without access to challenging courses or effective teaching–is spot on. And, finding ways to provide the scale necessary to enable large investments in virtual schooling is critical.

Take a look at the breakdown of enrollments in state virtual schools. Wonder why Florida is such an outlier with the large number of students taking virtual courses? It’s all about the way funding flows.

One of the largest constraints on the growth of virtual schooling is the artificial cap placed on funding at the various state-run virtual schools. The best way to attack this issue–right now–is to get all of the other states to adopt the performance-based funding model for the Florida Virtual School, where funds follow students based on successful course completions or learning outcomes (more on this model from SREB). Immediately, you’d allow these various state virtual schools to meet much higher levels of demand. It’s a similar concept to the one that Brookings proposes–just a much simpler, more immediate and likely execution.

And, two very simple ways to create a better national market: Adopt the common core standards and mandate open, sharable copyrights on all federally funded projects (states’ and districts’ unwillingness to share intellectual property is a real barrier).

There are of course, many, many more things to do. But fighting for a national virtual school accreditation model in Title I is not one of them.

[To be fair, the Brookings recommendations around national provision of AP and other specialized, high-school level courses are more feasible.]