The question often arises: Who are cyber charters for?
I have gotten emails from people in the industry saying that children with special needs should be home in front of a computer, where a parent can help them.
Or they say that cyber charters are good for sick children.
Certainly they are attractive to home schoolers, who suddenly become eligible for state tuition money (which is paid to the corporation, not the student or family).
But this mother disagrees about who should stay at home to be educated in front of a computer:
| As the mom of a teenager with high-functioning autism, I can tell you that you are absolutely wrong that cyberschool would be good for children on the spectrum. What they need most of all is to strengthen their social skills and you certainly can’t do that sitting all by yourself in front of a computer screen. |
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I believe neither sick children nor special education students deserve to be isolated and without a peer group. We put classrooms in hospitals to continue education. We developed Special Education law to stop keeping children with special needs locked out. We worked on mainstreaming and inclusion to have populations diversified. Without a strong public education we have no common education to those who most need to have opportunity opened to them. Without a strong public education we have no way to promote real citizenship nor nationalism. The very rich have great access now and will always have a variety of both public and private schools from which to choose. You are not fooling anyone who is truly an educator. It seems to me that all of this is just a grab for the money.
No one can. The real world involves communication other than keying in letters or numbers on a computer. I think.
I agree with the mom. All the parents of IEP students that I teach want their children to interact as much as possible with others, teachers as well as their peers..
Dora
Well planned and managed cyber schools provide a great deal of interaction, just not necessarily physically in the same rooms.
And exactly how would those on-line interactions help my kid learn to become better at reading body language, or help him learn to maintain appropriate personal space, or help him improve his prosody, or allow him opportunties to observe (and learn from) how his typically-developing peers comport themselves, especially in informal situations? Those are the kinds of skills I meant when I said children on the autsim spectrum need most of all to learn social skills.
Not to mention, how do you meet and work with your speech/language pathologist, your OT and your PT on-line? School is a lot more than straight academics for a lot of special needs students.
Let me take this opportunity to thank you Diane for making sure to include Special Ed in your discussions. In other parts of blogtopia, when education “reform” comes up, we are usually left out. And to my great dismay, the disability community does not seem to know our kids’ civil right to a free and appropriate public education is in great peril.
Mom of a teenager with high-functioning autism
As for me, I believe that people need people. Students need teachers. They need face-to-face interaction. Teachers need students. They need eye contact. Social skills, non-cognitive skills are very important in the development of a full person.
Thank you, Barbara.
I think that the majority of courses a student takes should be in a face to face setting, for all of the reasons cited. However, I think that there are a few cases where an online course (or two) can be very beneficial. Students who are at schools which do not offer a particular course (like Physics, let’s say) or who are isolated in a social setting anyway (because of a severe physical impairment, for example) may actually benefit from an online course.
Who are cyber charters for?
The folks who profit from them. Period.
I am skeptical of many of the cyber charters in practice. They get paid full freight to teach students, they send supplies to families, many of whom would otherwise home school, and by many accounts are providing mediocre offerings.
However, that’s not to say that the concept is always bad for all students.
A self-motivated student, especially a gifted student interested in unusual topics, may well benefit from a more independent study program. Kids who live in remote outposts may have more, not less, access to people and to interaction and to the world via the right online offerings. I love to see gifted kids in gifted magnet schools, but they don’t always live near one. I can see a strong cyberacademy as being incredibly valuable to those kids, and they could be augmented with say a month of “camp” where all the kids are together. There are many ways it can be done for good, to benefit some kids who are not well served by their local school.
I think too that local schools – again especially rural schools – will benefit from being able to offer classes online that do not fit their main population. Our local high school is small and Spanish is the only foreign language offered. But I can see a dedicated student wanting to take Mandarin being able to do so from the school computer lab, supervised by a non-Mandarin speaking teacher on campus but taught by a remote teacher using Skype, chat, shared documents, and other computer exercises. This is a net win for everyone.
I think it comes down to the importance that the schools providing these services be rigorous, not for profit, and be set up to benefit students and to support existing schools.
One side of me says that kids with autism need strengthen their social skills. The other side says that getting an education is more important. One thing I know from my work with autistic people is that you cannot force them to be social. That IS a huge portion the disability of autism, lack of ability to engage in appropriate social interaction with others. They are NEVER going to have what is conventionally considered good social skills. What they need to learn is enough to keep their autism from interfering with their functioning or getting them into legal trouble.
The lack of social skills causes people with high functioning autism and Aspergers to languish, often in dead end jobs forever. I knew a man who had worked for years in food service. He was absolutely brilliant, could read the Greek New Testament, and Hebrew as well, as though it was a near-native tongue and had an Masters of Divinity from an Ivy League level, and extremely expensive college. Yet he was so geeky and set in his ways he was nearly friendless and worked in FOOD SERVICE delivering trays to nursing home patients. He had almost gotten fired a few times for going off on co-workers or supervisors. This man was in his fifties and that was all he had done. I was constantly talking to him about controlling his behavior even if he could not control his feelings and the rights of others to disagree with him because he could get really angry. With his age I am sure he was never diagnosed, but I know my children. I know another man now with similar problems although not as severe, who also works well below his level as a clerk in state government. He is miserable on his job and has a degree in education and was only recently told that what his problem is is Aspergers. He talked about getting a teaching position and I scratched my head and recommended special education, high school aged or adults, moderately retarded who would love him as he was and accept him. Moderates are usually pretty mellow at that age. With the cutbacks he stopped pursuing the change since his present job, in which he is miserable, seems to be safe from budget cuts. Then there was the technology specialist at a rural library system who became agitated when he had to serve clients but was the only tech geek the system had. He knew the entire schematic of all the libraries in the system and seemed to be their only geek. He said when he graduated from high school he went to a university known for putting out engineers, but quit after a semester because of the “social thing”. He might have known he had Aspergers as he was very young. We never got to know each other well enough to talk about his “whys”.
School is almost certainly to be frequently an unpleasant experience. Maybe charters just for them would be appropriate. There is a dichotomy here. Do you force a person with a disability to act normal or do you let them be the best they can be even if they don’t fit? Kids with sensory disabilities also face this problem and LDs and Mildly Retarded and some with TBI often go to great lengths to hide their disabilities.
Is there a happy medium where the person can be successful and get a career that is at their intellectual level without their lack of social skills penalizng them. They are never gong to fit in socially. As they get older it gets worse and if they learn appropriate behaviors they are just playacting, much like a transgendered person who never transitions. Behavior modification only changes symptoms, not the cause. It is almost like they are in the wrong body. Why not do whatever is necessary to make them as functional as possible, give them a bang up education commensurate with their intellect, and then let them be themselves, a field where they are gone to for their knowledge and skills and not their ability to kiss butt.
I think that regular school can be too painful for some people on the autism spectrum, especially at the high school level. In elementary and maybe middle they should absolutely be in school and behavioral change should be part of their IEP although not at the expense of academic learning from a top notch special education teacher who understands their needs—I would be real cautious about throwing them to the wolves in regular education, especially with so many not-teachers filling desks nowadays. In a large university they might be able to find others like them. But beyond that when the pressure to conform is so high, it should be their choice, regular with special education supports and a strong advocate for a resource teacher or self contained if resource is overwhelming, cyber school, or a special school that capitalizes on their strengths and helps them cope with their weaknesses and learn that they are not bad, just different.
For lower functioning people on the autism scale, all school, all the time, functional skills and whatever academics they can learn, also without letting behavioral programs interfere with academics. Some people who are assumed to be low functioning because they cannot talk or communicate very poorly are actually quite bright, especially if taught with technology.
What non-ASD people don’t get is that not everybody needs people.
We, people with “ASD” have our brain wired differently, please stop trying to mainstream us or thinking that what we have is a disease, because it is not, we just have a different way to see the world than the typical person out there.
I am an adult, I have ASD, my parents always tried to put me into social things when I was younger so I could learn, did it work? NO, it was always boring, and it is still the same, social things for us have one meaning: BORING and non-sense waste of time.
I know that ASD comes into different levels, but usually the people on the high-functioning level (my case) can do pretty good by themselves.
I have a family, I have kids, I have a pretty good job and I always have been promoted before my “social” peers.
My job is online by the way, we are in 2013, remote work is more than a reality today and it will be even more present on the future when our kids start working.
With the internet and productivity revolution, socializing is losing its importance in a workplace as the management is starting to see it as non-productive.
Online companies that cut off the socialization/contacts/phone calls are dominating the market and leaving the old-fashioned companies that rely on socialization to close sales way behind.
But then you can say that you need to learn to socialize, yes, I see that as a weakness of mine, but I can handle that using the rational part of my brain and learning tricks on how to overcome the lack of eye contact / body language / etc.
Does it work 100%? No! But everybody has weaknesses, and strengths. But that doesn’t mean that I can go out there saying people should try to improve their rational thinking or labeling that as a disease and trying to force down their throats. I can be “weird” for you, but for me, you are the “weird” ones.
PEOPLE ARE BUILD DIFFERENTLY! We have different DNA’s, it is ridiculous to expect everybody to have the same needs and to behave the same.
And no, putting us into a school, or in an environment with lots of people will NOT make us learn how to do it. It will just make us really bored and frustrated. Our brains don’t see socialization as something needed.
So again, stop trying to mainstream us!
Wallace, online learning is right for some, like you. But these corporations are recruiting kids who drop out like flies. Their attrition rate is 50% every year. Did you learn about scams and Ponzi schemes when you were homeschooled on a computer?