K12 Business Model

First, K12’s business model is to wholesale the product of education—through their ownership of intellectual property used in distance learning modules and curriculum—to school districts, states, and individual schools (Steck 76). K12, founded in 1999 by William J. Bennett, the former Secretary of Education under the Reagan Administration, recognized the enormous potential to profit in the virtual schooling market (Glass 10-11). K12 originally served as a provider of curriculum to homeschooled students (Glass and Welner 10). However, in 2005, the company gained a larger market and reportedly sold their curriculum and distance-learning products to schools in 13 states, serving over 50,000 students. By 2008, the number of states that students

Former New York City Chancellor, Joel Klein, laments the commodification of education by stating that “when it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching” (Glass and Welner 11). Klein’s illuminates the undermining of traditional values of education by legitimizing K-12’s commercial value; echoing the common neoliberal

Arizona paid $7,000 per student to the Arizona Virtual Academy, of which two-thirds of that money passed through to K12 (Glass and Welner 9-12). Comparable to many corporations that are outsourcing their production to cheap overseas labor, in 2008 Arizona Virtual Charter School reportedly outsourced student record keeping services to workers in India (Glass and Welner 8). Outsourcing work overseas is, and should be, unheard of in the traditional K-12 sphere, yet due to the market’s impact, overseas workers complete the tedious, administrative work done for lower wages than at home. The corporate ideology is that by rerouting “non-essential” functions, teachers are able to get back to their only functional role—teaching. In the capitalist, corporate world, this is seen in specialization of tasks through the division of