K12's Insight Schools

Re. K12 targeting at-risk students, despite how inappropriate online schools are for nearly all such students, I added this slide to my presentation:

 

I Suspect K12 Is Setting Up Insight Schools Primarily to Escape Scrutiny

 

•      K12 acquired and is now expanding its Insight schools that "tend to focus on academically at- risk students" (most of whom are low-income minorities)

•      There is almost nothing about Insight on K12’s web site or in its 10K, but CEO Ron Packard said the following on the most recent investor call:

   The Insight strategy is moving along nicely, and we're excited to be opening the Insight in Ohio. And we're putting a lot of human brain capital into developing the right model for academically at-risk kids.

   And the beautiful thing about the Insight model and the strategy is we want to have schools whose entire culture, from the teachers to administration to the curriculum, is built around taking children who are behind grade level and bring them up to grade level, taking students who are coming to high school credit deficient, who would likely be high school dropouts, and graduating them from high school. So it's a very different culture that you would have than what we traditionally had originally in our virtual academy.

   So the idea is absolutely to have one school of each type in every single state we operate in and make sure that students find the right option for them.

•      I suspect that what's really going on here is that K12 is engaging in "virtual bussing" of students out of its existing schools primarily to escape the rapidly multiplying government inquiries and punitive measures resulting from its abysmal academic results

•      Though Packard claims that Insight schools have “a very different culture,” my preliminary inquiries indicate that the schools use a very similar curriculum and often the same teachers and infrastructure

•      In other words, it appears to be just a shell game