Online schooling - it's as if the kid didn't go to school for a year

[noblegiraffe]

A study into American online charter schools has shown that they are rubbish, and in the case of maths, the student might as well have not attended school at all.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/31/study-on-online-charter-schools-it-is-literally-as-if-the-kid-did-not-go-to-school-for-an-entire-year/?postshare=8681446659837080

It's worth mentioning that they are not the same as UK online schools and students get far less contact time with teachers.

But it is interesting to note that you can't stick a kid in front of a computer and expect them to teach themselves. That will be a bit of a blow to the government, who I'm sure would be glad to get rid of the need for pesky teachers in front of classes.

Ooh interesting.

A teacher friend was describing this as 50 kids in a classroom, couple of TAs as bouncers support, cheap as chips.

A bit of a blow to the 'school is obsolete' idea.

I saw this on the BBC site yesterday.

I can't see how this could really have come as a surprise given how little contact with teachers seems to have been happening.

Would be interesting to see if the results held up if a similar study was conducted in the UK. As well as differences between the UK and US online schools there are differences between the 'bricks-and mortar' schools too.

I know that some schools think that sticking kids in front of mymaths is a substitute for a proper lesson.

Well the government will use it to justify not finding a school like weyecademy. But it doesn't sound equivalent to interhigh. I also wonder if Stanford compared it at all with their own internet school?
It would also be interesting to see what kind of pupils are at these schools.

The pupils are disproportionately white apparently but otherwise all sorts according to the short BBC report.

Just to note the group proposing the wey ecademy now own Interhigh

There are less than 20 pupils per class and I have nothing but praise for them, DD was previously in a top 100 state school that drove her to consider suicide!

Noble, there has been a series of articles in the New Yorker over the past couple of years giving, effectively, the political and financial background to some of the charter movement including the on-line proposals.

I don't know if this is behind a paywall but this is one.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/testing-time

Google will find more. Somewhere there was a much longer one which was quite shocking as an example of education being driven by the wrong priorities. No surprise then that its not delivering.

A lot of the kids are from Evangelical families who are not at normal school because its secular.