The school district in Manchester, New Hampshire, is considering online classes–not blended learning–as Acosta-saving device. The idea is to put kids online and lay off teachers. Anyone who deals with children and adolescents knows that face-to-face contact, human-to-human relationships are very important. Something’s, like reading a book our practicing an instrument, may best be done alone. But it’s best to discuss what you have read with others and exhilarating to play your instrument as part of a group.
Here is Massachusetts high school history teacher’s letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, expressing his concern about the misuse of technology.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What if too many bad-teacher-human – to – innocent kids human
relationship?
Huh?
Ultimately, teaching is modeling. All you have to do is watch a three-year-old walk with her mother’s gait and you know that. Online learning can supplement the teacher-student relationship but it can’t replace it. (Although, why not have the lectures be on-line and have the kids to come in to do the problems with teachers? One-on-one problem solving is great for modeling thinking.)
Just as Amazon.com is putting bricks and mortar stores out of business, remote learning will be promoted to put schools out of business.
Heck, why don’t we just start plugging them in in preschool. I hate to think what kind of asocial monsters we could create.
Manchester city schools are faced with the issue of overcrowded classrooms. Online learning I believe was presented as one way some of the overcrowding could be alleviated. If I were a student in a class of 30+ I might like that option too.
Your pal in Montgomery County, Joshua Starr charges $620 for students to take 1 online course during the school year. Public school is FREE in Maryland. But, no one is stopping him from ripping off students. Abuse.
The Virtual Learning Academy Charter School is a NH endeavor that works with schools and districts to augment and provide courses to students. My impression is this is very much a home-grown school option. Some students struggle with the courses but many are able to succeed. Online teachers are responsive to their students needs.
Beyond belief! There’s only one thing I’m certain about (sort of): that the key to adolescents (not to mention the rest of us) s Relationships and Community.
Unfathomable.
Deb
How are students monitored? Perhaps that is where the armed guards will be stationed. Technology is a tool, not a teacher. It is a wonderful resource but a pathetic substitute for a knowledgable, supportive, collaborator otherwise known as a teacher.
I use the crude idea that education is made up of info-bits and human-bits. We have known for generations that info-bits could be acquired without direct human involvement—practice, drills, and now the internet, but human-bits can only be passed on from human to human. As an example, just one of the the many reasons for this is that, only humans have knowledge of their death which certainly affects their thinking. In fact as the info-bits become more available the human teacher becomes more important to help guide students to meaningful human endeavors. One of these endeavors which starts early in life is the attempt to answer the simple question, “Why?”
A couple of things on the topic of online teaching. As a college instructor who teaches f2f, hybrid, and fully online, and have done so for a while now, I heavily endorse hybrid over fully online, and f2f over everything, but with some concessions to the reality of the situation. I realize that the community college environment has some important differences from K-12 issues, but is suffering from some similar ones as well, specifically overcrowded classrooms (frequently over fifty students), and overcrowded virtual classrooms (again, in my school, typically over fifty students). Add to that the fact that a typical FTE teacher has from four to five classes, and an adjunct (in California at least) has a maximum of three per district, although often teach at more than one location be it brick-and-mortar or online. This means that the number of students ranging from from 150 to 200 is not unusual, although each college class is typically three teaching hours a week, while K-8 uses pretty much ALL the hours per day per week, albeit for thirty-something students, but who are in constant need of supervision. So I think that the number of students per teacher, while of differing configurations here, still, quite clearly, pose an incredible barrier to quality teaching. This is easily supported when comparing our educational system to much of Western Europe’s. (If you are not hip to Finland, it is time.)
Back to the online/offline thing. Here is the deal: typically in a community college classroom with thirty or more students (twenty or so having skipped class) classroom discussion is incredibly difficult. These are undergraduate students from, in my case, less than privileged backgrounds, with from little to none so-called “cultural capital.” They just clam up. I do drag then out on a one-to-one basis and get a comment or two, but a full on classroom conversation just doesn’t happen.
Online it is completely different! Using threaded discussions, and grading for participation, all kinds of interesting things happen. Some even germane to the topic. At the end of this semester in the “farewell” discussion thread many were saying goodbye to each other and to me, and expressed appreciation for the experience. Whoa! What is going on? As you no doubt have figured out, a huge element is the relative safety of commenting online, with the safety of relative anonymity, rather than taking the chance in a classroom that you might be, somehow, “wrong” in spite of the instructor’s encouragement and assurances to the contrary.
My hybrid class last semester was perhaps a little more, make that a tiny bit more, open than other f2f classes. But using an online discussion thread in addition to f2f time there was, just as in the fully online class, full on discussions. And end-of-term comments as well.
The Khan “flipping” bit holds possibilities as well, by using online videos that can be viewed as often as desired. This should be particularly useful in math classes where being able to go over the material several times is really effective, thus giving the instructor more freedom to guide, answer well thought-out questions, and assist in actual problem solving. In classes such as mine, sociology, it is less fruitful as an instructional tool, although using power points and making videos available saves a lot of time in the classroom, and what is especially appealing is being able to put multiple choice style tests online, thus freeing up an entire class session. Homework is submitted online into drop boxes. Save a tree. I can sit in a cafe with my laptop and grade them. They can read my comments. They can comment back. I send out surveys for extra credit based upon current events. I guess they learn something from that too.
Now about that business of needing fewer teachers. Clearly in my case that is what is going on, although administrators will never admit this. In K-12, teaching online to a larger group is going to be counter-productive for all the reasons a quick visit to EBSCOhost or Jstore or other online peer-to-peer publication on the topic will indicate. The literature is rampant with educational solutions that are completely contrary to current trends in America. For example, socialization, cooperative learning. communication skills, reduction of racial conflicts, role modeling, recreation, (in some cases even nutrition), and so it goes. Much of this applies to the community college environment as well.
On a broader scale, and this is never discussed in the popular media, is that having fewer teachers for a somehow more efficient (business modeled) schooling system misses the whole point of education in the first place. Learning math online does not teach you how to apply that knowledge in a socially responsible way. Learning the sciences has essentially the same problem. (This is where I usually give my lecture on the participants in the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attack, all of them having been highly educated scientists.) And this appears to be all that is being asked of the education system at present. It is the manufacture of semi-skilled drones. Dewey and democracy? A critical analysis of history? Rhetorical questions, but meant to push the point that yes, our system is evolving into, or has already evolved into, a post enlightenment nightmare in which corporations choose who controls the “system” and those who work for it. This is the real issue. All of the other stuff mentioned simply method.