The company has been the target of picketing , anger-filled school board meetings and local freedom-of-information requests from parents and students who say its software is inadequate for taking classes at home.
Parents have turned to Edgenuity's Facebook page to lodge complaints, and petitions have popped up on Change. In Rhode Island, a teachers' union alleged that administrators were using Edgenuity to replace them.
Interviews with eight parents in five states showed how Edgenuity software was pressed into duty by some school districts as a kind of all-in-one approach to remote learning after Covid shuttered most schools nationwide 11 months ago. It's one piece of a nationwide struggle to move learning online in response to the pandemic, a herculean task that has meant turning living rooms into classrooms , finding laptops for families who didn't have them and learning how to remember login credentials for countless websites.
Edgenuity pronounced like "ingenuity" says its software is used by more than 20, schools nationwide, including in 20 of the 25 largest school districts. It says 4 million students and teachers had accounts on its products last year. The company, founded in , said that its products weren't designed for a pandemic and that it's up to schools to provide live teachers.
Deborah Rayow, Edgenuity's vice president for instructional design and learning science, said in an interview that some school districts were having more success with the company's tools than others. The most successful ones, she said, have blended its software with live teacher interactions of some kind.
She said Edgenuity welcomes the suggestions from students such as Gardella and from parents who have also given feedback. In an emailed statement sent after this article was initially published, Edgenuity CEO Sari Factor said that when school districts asked the company for its help in an unprecedented time, "we stepped up to fill a needed gap to support learning, helping school leaders manage in a no-win environment.
That has provided little solace for students and parents who said their families have slogged through hours of solitary online material, sometimes with little to show for it. Gardella said things have turned out all right for her. The zero on the short assignment accounted for only a small part of her grade, and she has been accepted to the college of her choice.
But even in her case, her transcript from the early fall had much lower grades than she was used to, and she said she has missed having human teachers. The backlash has been especially strong in communities where school officials rely on Edgenuity software to teach students without any live video with local teachers or classmates to supplement it — that is, no video conferencing with a class via Zoom, Google or Microsoft, but only recorded lessons from Edgenuity, accessed alone.
She asked that her last name not be used because of possible consequences of criticizing the education system. But there's nothing like having a live teacher along the way. In her school district and some others, families were given a choice last summer: one track that had in-classroom teaching, along with a potentially higher Covid risk, or an entirely at-home option based on Edgenuity.
Her family chose the latter, without really knowing what they were getting into, she said. In Jen A. Now, about a third of the student population is full-time on the service, said Stacey Cooper, the extended studies coordinator for the district. Cooper said that, in hindsight, the district rolled out Edgenuity the wrong way, putting too big a workload on students in the fall and not having the time to train teachers in a "blended" style that includes more interaction.
The district allowed students to redo some work over the winter break, and it made other changes after the fall semester in response to feedback from parents and students, including encouraging teachers to provide more virtual live support via Microsoft Teams software, she said.
We didn't know what we didn't know as a school district. Edgenuity markets its courses as engaging , and Rayow said it has provided school districts with training kits and online information sessions to help teachers who are new to remote schooling. The results, however, have been uneven, she said. School districts in general have been harried figuring out new software over the past year. For many parents and students, the pandemic has been a chance to get their first up-close look at the burgeoning corner of the tech industry known as ed tech, and many of them have said they don't like what they see: from the automated grading of some assignments to the profitsof companies selling their services.
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