It started with the district hiring a little-known virtual charter school company, which led to balky connections and an even more troublesome curriculum.

The teachers received demo logins to try out the platform, but they didnt work, and even the trainers struggled to access it, West says. From 8 am until 3:30 pm each day, teachers took notes without once trying the software themselves. The training was make-believe, it was so, so complex, says one teacher. Even our techie teachers were lost. On Facebook, teachers shared GIFs of dumpster fires and steaming poop emojis in response to the experience.
Thats a very complex, aggressive undertaking. And to do it with 345,000 students and in less than a month? Theres a lot of hubris involved.
Phil Hill, education technology analyst
Once the school year began in earnest, technical challenges persisted. Some students struggled to log in. Uploads could be excruciatingly slow. A particular sore point was the platforms unreliable built-in video conferencing tool, called NewRow. It had issues with sound and screen-sharing. After about 15 minutes, the video quality started to degrade. It didnt work on iPads or iPhones.
And then there was the built-in curriculum. K12 provided content, though teachers could change or supplement it. The lessons had been devised for K12s virtual charter schools: for-profit schools that are entirely online and receive taxpayer money for every student enrolled. When some Miami-Dade teachers examined K12s materials, they were horrified by what they found. One teacher came across a quiz for second graders with one question: Did you enjoy this course? Clicking yes allowed the student to ace the test. Several classes relied on K12s paper workbooks, which the students didnt receive. One thing our educators complained about was, the rigor was not there. It was a very watered-down curriculum, Hernandez-Mats says.
Virtual charter schools have long faced scrutiny for their low graduation rates and test scores. They have a really poor track record in the virtual education space, says Luis Huerta, an education professor at Columbia University. Thats a public accountability issue.
Teachers and families complained en masse. After an epic, 13-hour school board meeting that ended at 2 am last Thursday, the board voted to abandon K12. It was just too much frustration, too much anguish from all parties, says Perez, the board member.
K12 CEO Nate Davis attributes the debacle to the sheer amount of student data pouring in from Miami-Dade. It was a significant departure from K12s normal mode where students dont enroll, all at once, by the hundreds of thousands. Davis says K12 supports about 190,000 full-time students around the country. Properly setting up Miami-Dade should have taken four to six months, he says. Another difference was that K12 normally ships Microsoft laptops to its students, so it didnt typically have to deal with students using Apple products.
But the selection of K12 was controversial from the start. The district awarded a $15 million no-bid contract to the company. Davis says the district chose K12 based on positive results at a small online charter school K12 had been running in Miami. Still, the company is not the first that comes to mind when school districts think about transitioning to a comprehensive new platform. Thats a very complex, aggressive undertaking, says Hill, the education tech analyst. And to do it with 345,000 students and in less than a month? Theres a lot of hubris involved.
Perez, the school board member, says the board has changed its rules so that it will have a say in major decisions about software. As for the inclusion of K12s curriculum, she notes that the district was caught by surprise when coronavirus numbers spiked in the county, and that at the time their minds were mostly on addressing the issues raised by parents in the spring. We were confident about the curriculum, that it had been scrutinized and that it met Florida standards, she says. Only later did she start to worry about its content. (K12s Davis notes that the curriculum aligns with the states standards and that that was part of its appeal.)
Miami-Dades teachers have now pivoted back to using two apps theyd used in the spring: Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Its mostly been sighs of relief, Perez says. The episode would have been an expensive boondoggle, except for one thing: The district never signed its contract with K12.