A reader sent this comment:
“I work at a cyber charter. It is ironic that the administrators at these charters make us work twelve hours a day doing inane busy work, and yet the quality of education is much worse than in public schools.
I just got home from doing state testing. At one point during the day one of the third graders raised his hand to get my attention, he had just finished the multiple choice section and was stuck on the first open-ended question. He asked me what he was supposed to do. I just told him to answer the question, we are not allowed to do much more.
After he stared at the page for fifteen minutes one of the other teachers went over to give him some encouragement and get him working. He still just stared at the page. After about an hour of this we realized that he couldn’t read or write. The other teacher told him to skip the open-ended questions and move on to the next section. In the next thirty minutes, before we noticed, he completed the next three sections.
That should have taken him 3 to 4 hours. He was just acting like he was reading the questions then filling in random bubbles. This is the only face time we will get with them all year. Not enough time to do much of anything. I wonder what will happen to this kid.
I would love a job teaching in the city. I have tried for the past three years to get a job in an inner city public school, but they are too busy firing teachers and closing buildings. They are not hiring anyone because they are losing too much money to the charters.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OK, this is really scary but this is where we are headed! These standardized tests students are suffering through will all be on computers – they won’t even need teachers to score them!
http://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/news/nation/2012/10/12/a-new-kind-of-elementary-school-rocketship-si-se-puede-academy/1630549/
Wow…how depressing. Looks like The Office for kids.
And this they call personalized or blended learning?
I have no doubt that online education needs to be better regulation, but I think it can be a very useful way to deliver courses to students with limited opportunities in their local schools.
TE,
Wouldn’t a better solution be to properly fund the public schools so that those schools with “limited opportunities” might be able to provide “expanded opportunities”. (and I understand that for some highly motivated students, perhaps like your kids, computer learning might be one way to “impart” knowledge but not for the majority, especially students like the one mentioned in the article.)
Duane
The problem is scale for rural schools. The median high school in my state has fewer than 250 students, many of those high schools serve the whole county. Even in relatively large high schools there can be scheduling issues.
How does online learning offer more opportunity? A computer doesn’t offer answers, or help when you get stuck. You don’t get art, music or PE on a computer. In fact I can see the waist lines of quite a few kids only going up with online education…sitting on a computer all day, probably in the kitchen. I know I gain weight over the summer when I sit online all day (BTW I’m a technology teacher).
It does so by offering classes that are unavailable to students in the local high school.
Look at the pictures TE; that’s not what is being offered here. This is about profits. As many kids in cubicles, very few “teachers” and teach yourself. Good enough for other people’s children. Focus!
I should add that in the rural high schools many of the students do hard physical labor on the farms and ranches.
But it could be what is offered. It makes sense to offer more specialized courses on line when the students interested in these courses are very thin on the ground.
It’s canned test prep…why don’t you ask to observe and spend a day.
I know someone who was a student in a K12 administered high school class, so I have a bit of the student’s point of view.
TE, I get where you’re coming from when you say that it could be a class that isn’t available in the school. And with CC on its way, that will be more prevalent as schools and districts double down aggressively n the three R’s to get the best test results possible. I’ve already seen a reduction of class offerings in my school and suffered the indirect rejection of an idea of mine.
We see few students take core electives (English, science and social studies electives) compared to 5 or 10 years ago. My AP European History class has been in a slow enrollment decline. We offer few sections of World War II and Old West. Minority Voices in Literature (popular in a highly ethnically diverse school) has seen a decline as students burn out on English. Shakespeare is down, too. We used to have AP US and Comparative Government classes but not any more.
My district loves my idea for a new class. It’s based entirely on board gaming. It would use Euro style board games such as Puerto Rico, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic right on up to more complex games like Agricola, Le Havre and Twilight Struggle. The class would be writing heavy (so many assignment possibilities ranging from creative to research to technical writing), include elements of interdisciplinary studies (games are usually historically themed with math elements), collaborative structures built in and engaging in problem-solving and strategic thinking. It’s also cheap (no text book required).
The problem is that it gets squeezed by state and national requirements. But kids will stay after school to play these games. On their time. So, yes, there are classes that some kids would like but schools don’t or can’t offer (for reasons often beyond their control).
It completely cheapens the educational experience. I worry for any kids who are taught on computers because they will lack any kind of social skills.
Education is not just about job preparation.
BTW, those “teachers” in online “schools” are nothing more than call center workers. I rejected ever working for those outfits because they are demeaning workplaces.
Part of education is learning how to be social and how to work with people, because you have to do that when you get out and find a job. How is sitting behind a computer teaching anyone how to do that? How much do computer users or phone users interact with their environment?
Part of the problem with cyberschooling is that it is starting too early. Young children need interaction with their peers and with quality teachers. It would be ok for high school especially for catch-up or getting ahead courses. It seems the best solution for professional children and perhaps for some with autism and related conditions who melt down so easily that they would not get anything done in a regular school. Then a goal could be to work them into school slowly. But for a regular child, it seems to me to both isolate children from their peers and the real world and invite child abuse or, like the child in the article, allow them to do something that is not school when they are supposed to be learning. I did my second time in grad school on line. It is fine at that level and maybe for some undergrads, but even then they are not getting “the college experience” which is a lot more than going to class. I have been around some homeschoolers and they are strange—high achieving but odd little birds with no social skills. I can’t imagine how a young one who was taught by a computer all day could not be damaged by the experience.
I agree that the costs of virtual education probably out way the benefits of virtual education for younger children and/or more mainstream students. In rural areas, though, it does not take very much to variation to be out of the mainstream.
If we look at the use of the word “efficiency” we can see that it essentially refers to the ability to obtain the most possible money for the stockholders and upper mgmt. Local governments have been forced to make cuts to find “efficient” ways to deliver service. Policemen, firemen, teachers have been and will be cut back and replaced with less expensive people and volunteers because there is little respect for anyone who serves the public. Until this attitude is exposed, clearly, and stopped, we are in a world of hurt.
In our testing environment, all we were allowed to do was monitor the kids, not answee any questions and not ever comfort them because that woukd be “helping” them by relieving their stress! Ww prepared the students for the rules. They knew they couldn’t ask questions, but my kids knew they loved.
However, one year, the test book had directions that were misleading. We weren’t allowed to
Styx: “Domo arigato Mr. Roboto mata au hi made. . .”
LMAO
Yep, cyber charters in general are a terrible thing. Most kids need a real community of learners, with a real teacher mentoring them. But teachingeconomist is pointing to the sort of situation that can be helped by online courses (which would be replacing old-fashioned correspondence courses). Why jump all over her/him?
Kids who are very good at math can get some amazing courses and community at artofproblemsolving.com. There are good teachers and communities of students there, even though you can’t be together physically. Many of the students there would not be able to find something similar locally.
What I take from the post is that the cyber charter this person works for is a scam, part of the whole disgusting ‘reform’ charade that’s been taking over the public schools for the past decade. That doesn’t preclude the possibility that online learning might benefit some rural students and some students with interests their local schools can’t accommodate.
(Diane, you might not have the energy for it, but it’s possible to encourage (and enforce) the kind of respectful disagreements among commenters that you and Deborah Meier were having – the few times you managed to actually disagree.)
They should be banned or highly restricted for K-12 because there is so much more kids need to learn than merely academics.
I agree that ‘cyber charters’ should be restricted. I’m assuming ‘cyber charter’ means a charter school that the student ‘attends’ for all their coursework.
If and when we finally get over this ridiculous ‘reform’ phase, and start thinking about which charters are actually helpful and how to make them accountable, it would be a good idea to frame such restrictions in a way that doesn’t interfere with the good work artofproblemsolving is doing. (I assume there are other good online programs that focus on one specific area of interest.)
Thanks for the link to artofproblemsolving. It looks like a very interesting online program. Few traditional schools would be able to offer classes in number theory and group theory to their students.
Let’s keep in mind that there are students in Brick and Mortar schools who also can’t read or write. This isn’t symptomatic of online education as much as it is symptomatic of poverty.
But if a kid in a regular school is having problems, the teacher knows and it is her duty to do something about it with a special ed. evaluation, a 504 plan and/or tutoring. There would also be a conference with the parent. In a cyberschool an older sibling or even a parent could be doing the schoolwork while the child is tied up in the basement, takes care of the new baby, or even toils at an illegal job.
Also I would think that most kids who participate in cyberschool would not be poor. Although you can get a used computer for about $100 and sometimes for free, unless your city has free wireless, your Internet has significant cost attached so much so that many people in the ghettos find a neighbor with wireless and stand outside those people’s homes to use the internet on their cell phones. And if the child lived in a rural area they often have to get satellite which can run over $100 a month.
A third grader attending cyberschool and being illiterate raises a red flag for me. One of my early steps would be calling Child Protective Services.
“Also I would think that most kids who participate in cyberschool would not be poor.”
I also work for a cyber charter school (if not the same one as the highlighted comment, one very much like it) and the majority of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch. The school provides students with computers, printer/scanner/fax, and reimburses families for internet service. Poverty is a huge issue for our students.
BTW, I’m not arguing with you. Just pointing something out 🙂
When there is an involved stay-at-home parent or caregiver guiding the child’s learning and available for field trips and extracurriculars, cyber charters can be a useful resource for home schoolers.
And still attrition is often high. For many middle class kids there are decent schools that offer a well-rounded education, and which parents are hard-pressed to replicate.
True their are some brick and mortar schools that fail their kids. But, the hope is that there is a caring teacher who can find a tutor for this child. An online cyber school does offer the student or their parents with the extra assistance needed to get tutoring, etc.
After searching for a week: I found an article in the International Journal of Academic Research on “The Relationship Between Computer-using Habits and Pro-social Behavior and Aggression in 5-6 year-olds. The study was conducted in Azerbaijan, Turkey in 2011. Prior to that is Fool’s Gold: a critical look at computers and childhood, C. Cordes & E. Miller 2002, Alliance for Childhood. All the other studies focus on the benefits of computers in children’s learning. Cognitive bias???
I have been told that cyber schools are demanding parents to send divorce decrees and divorce orders to their administration. I have worked in the public school system and have never heard a principal ask for a divorce paper. Why does a charter school demand it?
That’s a strange one. I would think it was to see if there is someone paying or receiving child support so they can charge for fees at a higher level if they have a sliding scale. Public education is supposed to be free, but there was an article in this column where parents whose kids went to a charter were expected to pay about $1300 per year in “donations”. It was a charter that located in an affluent area. I think it was here. It might have been on Chalkface.
This is scary
“Remember we have to treat this test like the state tests (no teachers
should be at their computer or grading papers or …, you are all adults
and professionals, you know what I mean) if we want students to do well on
the assessments.”
Does anyone else get these kinds of instructions for what teachers cannot do while supervising standardized tests?
Thank you Bill Gates, you idiot and greedy billionaire, for your going to one teacher for one million students. Can you really run your personal business and company that way? No way. Why for students for you and your friends to make a fortune when you already have one. By the way I hate Windows 7 as it thinks it knows what I need and want to do and it doesn’t. Typical of how you think across the board. You do not know so stop trying to tell us you do. You sure did not know for 10 years that small schools do not work and when you figured it out you immediately went to destroying the profession of teachers again without knowing what you were doing. What mental illness do you really have?
What does this say about politicians? They are elected to serve the people. When politicians allow this garbage to operate in their state they have literally sold-out the very people they are supposed to serve. What is wrong with people????
Read the editorial in yesterday’s (4/19/13) Chicago Tribune, “Virtual Reality Check,” & that’ll help explain something. They got it a bit wrong, however–it states, “Local educators in the Fox River Valley have rejected a proposal to start an online charter school that would serve students in their area.” Educators didn’t reject Virtual Learning Solutions (a.k.a., K12!)–the communities’ ELECTED school boards did. And with educationally sound reasons, of course.”They argue that there are too many concerns about cost (VLS was asking $8K/student–their rep. was asked, at one board meeting, how this could be so high when the school would not have transportation costs, lunch costs, & other such costs that their schools had. The rep.
did not have a good answer “We have a line-item budget,”he said–which he never provided to the district, as per their request. At least 2 school board members brought up the fact that the company spends something like 21.8 million on advertising (they having figured out one of the budget items!), & the rep. had no good answer for that. Naturally, the VLS “President Sharnell Jackson told us Thursday that her company will appeal to the Illinois State Charter School Commission.” A lawmaker wants to put a hold on this appeal process by introducing a bill (which passed the Illinois House on Wednesday!) imposing a one-year moratorium on “new virtual schools outside of Chicago, arguing that the commission needs time to ‘study’ such schools.” Of course, The Trib’s editorial feels that this moratorium would squelch school choice, “acting so swiftly to straitjacket the commission. A state law imposing a moratorium on online charters,” The Tribune says, “would be like hanging out an “Innovators Need Not Apply’ sign.” Of course,WE all know how wonderful and “innovative” virtual charter schools are. The Tribune Editorial Board should read this post.
In fact, they need to read “Diane Ravitch’s Blog.”
Online schools, courses and resources serve several valuable purposes, one of which is offering broader opportunities to students in remote areas, as teachingeconomist points out. But, like all educational technologies going back to the record player, it will fail to live up to the hype projected on it by its advocates. As long as we keep it in perspective and use it for what it’s best at, not as a panacea, online education can serve us well.
Dave Eckstrom,
Agreed. Unfortunately, online schools are now being marketed for profit to kids who have access to good schools and as a substitute for real schools, not as distance learning.
I cannot believe that the parents of this little boy think that he is getting a quality education. Surely they must know the child cannot read or write. How can they find this acceptable?