Posted on 05/29/2003 10:51:23 AM PDT by neefer
MADELINE NELSON of Steubenville, Ohio, has been in the third grade since last fall but has met her teacher only a few times. She has plenty of schoolwork to do, including book reports and her favorite, art projects.
She gets her assignments online through the Ohio Virtual Academy, which she attends along with her sister Therese, 7, and brother Gabriel, 5, from the dining room table at home.
If Madeline, 9, were a traditional home-schooled student, her mother, Gretchen, would be instructing her (her father, Mark, works full time outside the home). But even though Mrs. Nelson believes home schooling is best for her children, she does not feel capable of teaching them.
"I don't have any training," said Mrs. Nelson, who majored in English in college but never got her degree. "I wasn't sure what they should be learning and at what age."
So the Nelsons enrolled their children in the academy, a public charter school for kindergarten through fifth grade that exists only in cyberspace. (Charter schools are publicly financed but independently operated.) The academy is chartered by the state and run by K12, a for-profit education company based in McLean, Va. The package includes an online curriculum, an online attendance and grading program, a loaned computer and a teacher who is reachable online, by phone and occasionally in person.
While there are a few online universities, and many traditional colleges and high schools offer some courses over the Internet, online education is only just beginning to spread to the lower grades. There are fewer than two dozen virtual elementary and middle schools nationwide, in Alaska, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Minnesota, Ohio and a few other states. Some are run by for-profit companies like K12, which has 7,000 students nationwide, or Sylvan Ventures, based in Baltimore, which teaches 400 students in kindergarten through eighth grade through its Connections Academy subsidiary. Others are operated by state education officials themselves.
Unlike most online high school offerings, which are viewed as supplements to in-school classes, virtual elementary and middle schools are stand-alone programs. And because of increasing dissatisfaction with conventional schools and increasing acceptance of so-called distance learning at the high school and college levels, the number of virtual elementary and middle schools is expected to grow substantially in the next five years.
School districts consider such schools a way to offer families who choose to school their children at home another option - one with a curriculum intended to be aligned with state standards.
"Every state in the union is exploring or has begun to develop a virtual school program, whether on their own or through a third-party provider," said James McVety, senior analyst at Eduventures, a Boston-based consulting company specializing in education.
Not all educational experts think online elementary schools are a good idea. Critics say the quality of the education suffers and that, as with conventional home schooling, it is no substitute for the schoolroom experience. Even some conventional home schoolers criticize online schools, saying they offer less of what is most important: independence.
Typically, parents who school their children at home choose the curriculum from various sources, including online providers. But virtual schools let parents off that hook. They offer a complete curriculum for each grade, aligned to state standards that help children tackle standardized tests.
"All I have to do is go in and, boom, the lessons are prepared," said Janine Tomlin of Santee, Calif., who enrolled her two youngest children, Olivia, 6, and Zachary, 8, in the California Virtual Academy, also run by K12, after schooling her eldest two by pulling the courses together herself. (The older children now both attend brick-and-mortar schools.)
Those who operate virtual elementary and middle schools point out that the students are not glued to computer screens all day long. In the early grades, parents say, students spend about 30 minutes online daily, getting assignments and sometimes doing research or additional work on the Internet. (Even small children are sent to Web sites for research.)
And parents generally have to stay involved rather than do the laundry or balance the checkbook while the children are studying in the dining room. For the most part, students, especially the youngest ones, need help with the assignments.
Because these schools are publicly financed, they require about 900 hours of school time during the year, follow state curriculum guidelines and require children to take state standardized tests. Parents use special software that records attendance, lessons completed and the answers to their children's quizzes if the children are not yet reading. The software is programmed to assess each child's progress and customize lessons according to the student's strengths and weaknesses.
A loaner computer loaded with school software (and usually a program to allow safe searching of the Internet) is provided as part of the package. Since curriculum developers for the online schools do not suggest that little children can learn solely from a computer, students receive books, too, as well as equipment like safety goggles for science experiments, tambourines for music lessons and little slate chalkboards. Everything (even the Internet connection in some states) is free.
Then there is the teacher, who works out of a central office or school and mostly communicates through e-mail, the occasional phone call and sometimes home visits. Thomas Scullen, superintendent of the Appleton, Wis., school district, which chartered the Wisconsin Connections Academy, a virtual elementary school run by Sylvan, said that sometimes this "communication is truly electronic."
This concerns some educators. "If you had a school building but not live teachers interacting with students and instead have nonqualified people who can call experts when they need help, I don't think anyone would call that an appropriate configuration for education," said Barbara Stein, a senior policy analyst for the National Education Association.
Sam Foat, 6, of Waukesha, Wis., is a kindergartner at the Wisconsin Connections Academy. He has met his teacher only three times; she lives and works two hours away. Now, Sam's mother, Laura, says her son "rushes to the computer" to read his teacher's e-mail notes. "He loves mail," she said.
Mrs. Foat, a former preschool teacher, said she chose to have Sam schooled at home after observing him play with modeling dough one morning with great concentration.
"If I home schooled him I could take any subject he enjoyed and do it as long as he wanted and not have to be interrupted," Mrs. Foat said. She said she chose the Wisconsin Connections Academy because it uses the Calvert curriculum, a traditional home-schooling curriculum that she trusts. The free materials and computer were also a draw, she said.
But that circumscribed curriculum may well be preventing Mrs. Foat from veering off into new directions. "We follow the curriculum, pretty much as it's written," she said. "He's getting all different kinds of subjects."
Mrs. Tomlin said of her virtual academy: "It may not be as flexible as some other modes of home schooling. Since it's a charter school, they expect a certain number of lessons to be completed to say you've passed that grade."
With any home school model, there are worries that children are not socializing enough.
"The issue with the so-called cyberschool is the issue of untested extremism that steals away a child's proper childhood, which should involve a huge amount of interaction with human beings face to face," said Jamie McKenzie, a former elementary school principal who is the editor of From Now On, an online journal about educational technology.
Online elementary schools acknowledge that children talking to children is a part of schooling. To that end, Connnections Academy has established message boards on which students from its schools solve math problems together, take part in a virtual science fair, or just gab.
Online schools also have detractors among parents who school their children on their own and who say that a set curriculum discourages independence.
"Look at the sample lesson plan for K12; it's very Pavlovian,'' said Larry Kaseman of Stoughton, Wis., who schooled his four children at home "all the way through" in the 1970's and is still active in the home-schooling movement. "Young kids are being encouraged through technology to run a maze, ring a bell and eat the cheese."
There are also concerns that the amount of time most students spend on the computer will only increase. "A half an hour on the computer is going to expand because it's easy for everybody and it's prepackaged and convenient," said Jane Healy, an educational psychologist and the author of "Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children and What We Can Do About It" (Simon & Schuster, 1998).
It is a safe bet that children who attend virtual elementary schools spend more time online than their peers in brick-and-mortar schools. But William J. Bennett, the chairman of K12 and former secretary of education, said that was not necessarily a bad thing. "The technology is there to eliminate the noise and get the child to the substance of education as fast and as quickly as possible," Mr. Bennett said. "Kids are spending too much time on computers doing stuff that isn't worth doing."
Lisa Graham Keegan, president of the Education Leaders Council, an organization that supports initiatives that widen the ability of parents to choose schools, said, "With any school, regardless of how it's presented, content matters most."
Other educators would argue that it is the teacher who makes the difference. "The true art of teaching and education has been shown over and over again to lie in some kind of magical interaction between the child, teacher and the material," Dr. Healy said.
In all forms of home schooling, it is the parent who bears most of the teaching burden, and sometimes the pressure proves to be too much. Since it opened last September, 25 students have dropped out of the Wisconsin Connections Academy, said Barbara Dreyer, president of Connections Academy.
"When we started up, parents didn't always have as much information about how much was really going to be required of them," Ms. Dreyer said. In some cases, both were working parents. "They were convinced they could do school in the evening," she said.
Parents say that even with the help of an online curriculum, home schooling is hard, and the days can be stressful. "I pray a lot," Mrs. Tomlin said.
(Put this into the "epanding" word in previous post)
Regarding socialization, when I hear the public school officials and advocates acknowledge the negative socialization their systems produces then I might think they have room to advise me on the subject.
Lol...well put. Amazing how something which is instinctly at odds with what being a parent is about becomes accepted with little thought because it is....well...accepted.
And there was reason not to think much about it. Schools once taught kids to fit into the social norms their parents held. "In loco Parentis" was just that--for a few hours a day, teachers filled in for parents. But now teachers are not filling in, they are trying to undo the education children receive from their parents.
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