The school is designed to target a growing market of home-educated children. It has already drawn criticism from the leftist American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation's largest teacher unions.
Bennett's school is being financed with $10 million from a group of investors that includes one-time junk bond king Michael Milken. The school will offer the "back to basics" education that Bennett has long espoused, such as phonics, mathematics and civics lessons.
The school aims to enroll 100,000 students by 2005. It will begin offering programs next fall for kindergarten through the second grade. The higher grades will come later.
"This is a highly ambitious project. We're doing the whole thing. Every lesson, every day for 13 years," Bennett said in a statement.
The school is called "K12." Bennett said the tuition would be less than a third of the $6,500 average per-pupil expenditure at government schools, and scholarships will be available. K12, according to Bennett, can save money by doing without teachers in the early grades except where required by state law, and instead stressing parental involvement.
AFT President Sandra Feldman sees several problems with the K12 approach.
"Online learning in the early grades can be a great adjunct, but it is not a substitute for a quality education delivered in person. An excellent elementary and secondary education cannot be based solely on technology. We have serious questions about whether K-12 will offer the proper in-person content and technical support. Some courses don't work well in an online environment. Take high school chemistry as one example," Feldman said in a statement.
"This is not the first online school developed for the elementary and secondary market; others have met with great difficulty, especially in the area of content development. We will have to wait and see if the quality of this particular product is as grandiose as Mr. Bennett's quotes."
Copyright
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.