Online Education - An Introduction

I've been following the growth of online education for awhile.  As you (faithful readers of my blog) well know, I definitely support the use of technology in the classroom to support varied learning styles and varied levels of development.  But online education has been a mystery to me.  On the one hand, it seems like the ultimate in individualized education.  But on the other hand, isn't some kind of general education, in a general classroom, with peers, the whole point of public education in the United States, and the entire idea behind IDEA?? (forgive the pun!)

Let's discuss. 



First, a bit of background on what's going on in online education right now.  There have always been parents who homeschooled their children - whether for religious, moral, educational philosophy, or other reasons.  (Interestingly, and this has been something I've been really digging to find, it turns out that 8% of parents homeschool their children due to the child's cognitive, emotional, or other disability.  Loss of faith in the public school system?  Post for another time.)  Recently, there's been a surge of online schools - both public and private.  The public online schools are sometimes created entirely by the traditional, bricks-and-mortar school district - and sometimes created by for-profit companies that manage charter schools. 

What's interesting - and controversial - is that these online charter schools qualify for state funding, just as a bricks-and-mortar school would qualify  And so questions arise about whether those funds are being used efficiently, and achieving results.

This was the topic of a recent article in Bloomberg Business Week (which is a great magazine by the way, much more general interest than the title would suggest) about K12.com, the major for-profit company managing online charter schools.  The article, A Virtual Education, explains that currently, 200,000 students in the U.S. are enrolled in an online school, with 81,000 of those enrolled in a K12 school. The authors of the article seem preoccupied that (a) Michael Milken (yes, that Michael Milken) is an investor and (b) that online charter schools qualify for public education funds.

Yes, online charter schools have lower costs than bricks-and-mortar schools (no cafeteria, no gym, etc.).  But they receive less money per student as a result.  Furthermore, as public schools, these online schools qualify for special education funding for students on IEPs.  While I have not been able to get a lot of data on this issue, some online schools do provide special ed services through at-home visits by therapists.  Of course, this is expensive - about double the typical funding-per-student - but that's not out of line for bricks-and-mortar schools.

I think the distracting issue is that K12 is for-profit, and that's just not how we've run public education in the past.  But, as Michael Milken noted in his you-misrepresented-me letter to the editor, public education needs to change.  It seems reasonable to at least argue that online schools could be one path towards productive change.

Controversies about for-profit education aside, you could view K12, and others like it, as simply providing more parents options, and that's a good thing.  But, isn't this giving a pass to the public school system?  If more and more students with diverse learning styles drop out of the neighborhood public school system, where does that leave "mainstream" education? 

Furthermore, in an online school, the parent must take on the additional role of the teacher - keeping the pace of courses going, reviewing homework assignments and tests.  This may be fine for some parents (who actively plan to homeschool their kids), but it may be just overwhelming to other parents who never planned to homeschool their kids, but felt forced to because their child's needs weren't being met in the general ed classroom.

I think the jury's still out on online education.  In 5-10 years, we'll probably have access to a great deal more data, and maybe that will make it the pros (and cons) of online education more clear.