[Software] Edgenuity's software wasn't meant for a pandemic. That didn't stop some school districts.

[#Hassan.]

 

When Nevada high schooler Simone Gardella scored a zero on a short writing assignment early last fall, she thought the grade was inaccurate. But she couldn't find out what she might have done wrong. No human teacher had read what she wrote, and the computer program that had given her such a low mark didn't provide any feedback.

"A robot is my teacher," said Gardella, a senior who had taken Advanced Placement classes before the coronavirus pandemic arrived. "I put thought into it. I felt like I answered the question. But I didn't get to find out what I did wrong."

She saw more problems with the online lessons, and eventually, she spoke up, writing a letter to her local newspaper to criticize school administrators and Edgenuity, the vendor that her district had hired for remote learning.

It turned out that there were a lot of critics of Edgenuity, an education tech company based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and owned by private investors. Edgenuity sells an online curriculum for grades K-12, and before the pandemic, it was known in large part for "credit recovery": online classes for students who had previously failed courses or otherwise needed to catch up.

Then the pandemic hit, leaving school districts to figure out how to suddenly educate entire schools over the internet. And Edgenuity has bore the brunt of a lot of the frustration in recent months.

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.org to ban Edgenuity's software. 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-19 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 20,000 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 1998, 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.

"The schools that are using Edgenuity with more teacher involvement, that have provided more training for their teachers, are likely finding more success," Rayow said.