A paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Toronto reported on the extent to which online charter schools have racial diversity. Benjamin Herold wrote about the paper in Education Week.
This struck me as an odd finding, because online instruction by definition is delivered by computer tostudents at home. There is little, if any, face to face contact among students.and since students may be spread across an entire state, the opportunities to interact with others is minimal.
There may be “diversity” in the school’s purported enrollment, but this would be diversity without integration. Students could be enrolled in a “diverse” virtual school yet never encounter a student of a different race.
Herold wrote:
“While full-time online charter schools nationally enroll a relatively high percentage of white students, there are significant variations in enrollment patterns by state, according to new research presented today at the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association, being held here.
“In Colorado, for example, the enrollment of online charters is just 36 percent white, compared to 54 percent in brick-and-mortar traditional and charter schools throughout the state, according to University of Alabama assistant education professor Bryan Mann.
“Online charters in Arizona, Nevada, and South Carolina, meanwhile, enroll significantly higher percentages of white students than do brick-and-mortar traditional and charter schools in their states.
“Most states have majority-white online charter school populations with less diversity than … other schools. However, there are states where students experience more diverse environments in online charter schools,” Mann wrote in a paper presented at the conference, titled “Whiteness and Economic Advantage in Digital Schooling: Equity Considerations for K-12 Online Charter Schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
SCARY!
What’s happened is that we now have the ASSEMBLY LINE in “ELECTRONIC form.”
Virtual schools offer children and teens an escape hatch when they hate attending a brick-and-mortar school no matter what their faulty reason is.
Virtual schools also offer abusive parents a method to keep their children home so they can abuse them without fear that a public school teacher will discover what is happening and report them.
Virtual schools offer parents that belong to extremist religions and cults a way to keep their children home and indoctrinate them so they will obediently fall into line and follow in their parents’ fundamentalist FAKE Christian footsteps helping to swell the ranks of the MAGA man’s maniacs.
Virtual schools offer permissive parents an easy way out of being a parent. When they go to work, their children will be allowed to stay home alone and do anything they want like never log on to their virtual school classroom and learn anything.
Then there is the fact that starting around age 13 to 25, the way the brain works will encourage dysfunctional children from dysfunctional homes to make poor decisions and opt out of brick-and-mortar school without any critical thinking and logic behind the decision.
“Understanding the Teen Brain” and why it is important to keep these children in real brick and mortar public schools with highly trained professional teachers to teach them and guide them away from making poor decisions.
“It doesn’t matter how smart your teen is or how well he or she scored on the SAT or ACT. Good judgment isn’t something he or she can excel in, at least not yet.
“The rational part of a teen’s brain isn’t fully developed and won’t be until he or she is 25 years old or so.” …
https://www.stanfordchildrens.org/en/topic/default?id=understanding-the-teen-brain-1-3051
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I read the EdWeek report on the study and could see little point in the whole exercise. On line charter schools are not all of the same kind and i’d guess that few are providing for online face to face interactions with other students (e.g., via Skype).
Skype or Zoom is no replacement for face-to-face interaction.
This has to be the dumbest thing I’ve read this year that didn’t come out of the White House or a Republican in Congress. Not the post, but the fact that this is considered to be a “study.”
Agreed.
If online charters are more white than public schools, that’s an obvious problem. But if online charters are more diverse, that’s a less obvious problem because it means the public schools are drained of diversity and are therefore more white than they should be. It’s a lose-lose situation. And I agree that the diversity of faceless online interactions is not integration. It’s a lose-lose-lose situation. Combine that with the fact that online education is of terribly inferior quality, and it’s a lose-lose-lose-lose situation. Is there anything good about online charters? Nope.
I’m assuming the only way this study got funded is cuz it had “diversity” in the tagline. It might possibly be of interest to know what races choose online education and why. But that’s not about “diversity in online education.” Online education is a solo pursuit.
Right–students don’t experience ANY environment in an on-line charter school, diverse or otherwise. A pointless study.
well said