A little while ago, I posted a statement by a mother of a high-functioning autistic child who said she did not want him to be in a cyber charter; she wanted him to be in a school to have contact with other children and to learn social skills.
Bear in mind that cybercharters have a record for getting terrible academic results, in terms of test scores, retention, and graduation rates. The fact that most of them are for-profit makes it even worse because their sponsors are profiting as children don’t learn. This is one of the reforms of our day that is an unalloyed scam.
I mentioned that I have gotten emails from boosters of e-learning who claim that cyber charters are especially valuable for children who are sick or have disabilities. When K12, the behemoth of the for-profit online learning world, was founded, Bill Bennett said it would be especially valuable for children who had been bullied.
Here is another good comment on this topic:
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
I worry that cyber charters also remove an invaluable layer of the safety net for students. Teachers in brick and mortar schools see their students every day (or if we don’t, we find out why), and many times we are the first line of defense a student has against abuse, neglect, or illness. If many vulnerable children are using cyber charters, not only will they not have an every-day peer group, but they may fall through the cracks of a system that sometimes finds them inconvenient.
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Diane,
The above comment is beautiful. People can go round and round and yet, the statement, “…neither sick children nor special education students deserve to be isolated and without a peer group,” gets right to the point, as do the above examples. As an elementary school teacher, I completely agree. Thank you for your blog, and for sharing such insightful comments like this from your readers. You keep me informed- and I share many of your posts with members of my staff (yes, during the summer, too). Thank you!
Terryl Miller
NBCT
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Thank you! There are so many readers who have great wisdom, experience, and insight, and I like to share that with other readers. It is my pleasure to provide a place where teachers, principals, administrators, parents and anyone else who cares can speak and be heard.
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That’s a beautiful sentiment.
I would caution, though, before we get too celebratory, that American schools are often not so good at matching kids with a satisfying peer group. Some children may not be so lucky as to have compatible peers living within a 5 mile radius.
I suspect this is an underappreciated aspect of education, that your peers really do matter.
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In general, I don’t support charters for all of the reasons that have been noted on this blog. As such I find myself in a very strange place having my two teen age boys in on-line charter schools. We founded we needed to do this because one of our kids is a special needs student who needed help with following through on tasks and had no tolerance for work he saw as pointless.
Our other son is a bright kid who was bored to tears by what he was doing in school. The on-line charter they attended allowed them to do project based work on topics that interested them. The projects were vetted by the on-line staff before the kids began work on them to insure that state standards were met.
The school also provided monthly opportunities for kids to get together and we also co-enrolled our kids at the local school for band, gym and sports. So in our case, the cyber school met a specific need and we augmented it by staying connected to the local school.
My point here is that there can be appropriate uses for such on-line charters. Of course, they are not the answer for every one, and their use to isolate autistic or special needs kids from the larger community is a travesty . As a way to provide a customized program for a child, with the involvement of a parent and the local school system doing such work on-line could be a reasonable option for some kids and families.
But on-line education and cyber charter certainly aren’t the answer to the real problems that face our public education system.
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The Pennsylvania DOE has just announced that it would grant permission for the four more charter schools, Yet, in a case which should raise red flags, it is closing a charter school which shows everything that is wrong with this type of school
Frontier Virtual High School In Pennsylvania Shuts Down After Failed Years
from HuffPost Education
tinyurl.com/7x6rgub
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