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Online Education Gains Popularity
The state of Florida’s decision to offer online high school as an alternative to the traditional high school experience appears to be a popular resolution across the nation. Schools from states with notoriously failing educational systems, like South Carolina, are looking to online classes to assuage the drop-out trend. Even places with higher ranked public schools, like the Maryland suburbs near Washington, DC, are trying full time online curriculums.
South Carolina approved online schooling through a 2006 General Assembly pilot program. Since that time, three online schools have been approved to offer their services to the public. In just under three years, the number of students attending online schools has grown to 5,000, with another 3,000 students in regular high schools taking at least one class online. The South Carolina Statehouse Report predicts that in the current tight economic times, this new technology may not only benefit the students, but that the cost savings inherent to the process will help the state’s dwindling coffers.
The Washington Post reports that a group of four schools, including the 108 year old Holton Arms School in Bethesda, Maryland, is taking the online learning experience to a new experimental place-single sex online education. While the benefits of single sex education have been demonstrated in the classroom, the new question is whether a gender tailored curriculum will affect an education obtained in cyberspace.
The merit of an online education is being demonstrated nationwide and range from helping school districts retain potential drop-outs, student athletes who are able to make up classes missed for practice, or advanced students looking to get an edge with Advanced Placement credit. This trend continues to grow. A Sloan Consortium survey of school districts reports a 47% increase in the number of K-12 students engaged in online courses in 2007-2008 compared with just two years prior. The total number of students involved-1,030,000. Of the reporting school districts that offer online courses, 66% believe their online enrollment will keep growing.
Posted by: editor on July 28, 2009
The Importance of Graduating
According to recent studies, the use of online curriculum to increase high school graduation rates could save the country a lot of money and trouble. The impact of completing high school on the rates of incarceration, obesity, low birth weight and child reading proficiency, earnings, unemployment and poverty in the United States is the central point of an article by Kristen Lewis and Sarah Burd-Sharps, co-directors of the American Human Development Project.
Entitled “We can pay for education today—or prisons tomorrow,” their simple message states that education levels have a marked impact on rates. Their article is based on two major reports released in April, 2009. One from the America’s Promise Alliance found that in the fifty largest cities in the U.S., nearly half of all high school students fail to graduate on time.
Another report from McKinsey & Co. argued that the huge academic achievement gaps separating different groups of Americans take a huge economic toll on the country—the equivalent of all high school dropouts being trapped in a permanent economic recession.
Burd-Sharps and Lewis provide hypothetical numbers based on the effects of improving the education level in the cities with the country’s worst graduation rates—Indianapolis, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Los Angeles.
- If all dropouts around Indianapolis had completed high school, 12,000 fewer people there would live in poverty, and median personal earnings would increase by $ 1,400 / year.
- If all adults around Detroit had a high school degree, 17,500 fewer people there would be unemployed.
- If all adults in Los Angeles County possessed high school degrees, median personal earnings would go up by about $ 2,000.
The effects beyond basic finances are even more striking, as Burd-Sharps and Lewis continue to elaborate:
- If all adults around Cleveland moved up one educational category, the average life span there would increase by nearly two years; in Baltimore County, the average life span would grow by more than a year.
- If all adults in Los Angeles County moved up one educational category, there would be an astonishing 566 fewer murders on average per year.
Completing high school has a big impact on voting.
- If all United States adults were high school graduates, voting rates in all the cities would rise significantly—16,000 in the Baltimore area, 37,000 in the Cleveland area, 29,000 in the Milwaukee area, and some 300,000 in Los Angeles.
- If all adults in California had graduated high school, there would be more than 50,000 fewer people behind bars; in Michigan, nearly 22,000 fewer; in Indiana, nearly 11,000 fewer. This represents a tremendous diversion of scarce resources; keeping a single person behind bars costs the government around $25,000 per year.
- If all adults in Michigan were at least high school graduates, 75,000 fewer people would be obese; in Ohio, 47,000 fewer; in Georgia, 33,000 fewer.
Educators struggling to retain their students are opening new venues for schooling. The online education forum is rapidly becoming a viable option, offered in school districts as a way to make up missed credits, and now as a primary arena for learning. Florida has just passed laws requiring that all school districts offer middle and high school students the choice of taking their classes online or attending traditional classes.
Starting this August, Florida students can use these online classes to avoid falling into the trap of dropping out of school and contributing to the above statistics.
Posted by: editor on July 23, 2009
New State Laws Support Virtual Students
Newly passed state laws allow Florida middle and high school students to take some or all of their classes online rather than on campus[i]. Online curriculum providers such as Compuhigh Florida are signing contracts with school districts to provide essentially the full range of high school classes to Florida students for free.
The state will pay the providers approximately $ 4,000 for full time curriculum per year per student, which is about $ 3,000 less than the average number given to the district for average students. This extra money can be kept by the districts and could help plug stop some bleeding in the badly slashed education budget. As more students take classes online, districts can funnel surplus money to well loved programs such as sports and arts that have been recently downsized or cut out altogether because of shoestring budgets.
A flood of virtual students could help also reduce numbers in staggeringly large classes of thirty-five to forty students which individual teachers face each workday—classes which at times are more managed or cajoled than actually taught due to massive overloading.
Just as importantly, students and their families now possess a legal right to choose whether they will attend virtual high school off campus or study on campus in conventional schools. This is exciting news for many high school students on multiple counts.
Some high school students had to quit their after school jobs this past fall due to schedule change that resulted in a later end to the high school day. With the flexible schedule that accompanies online schooling, these same kids can continue studying and go back to work and earn money to help pay their own or their family’s bills.
Advanced students also have reason to cheer as they could complete four years worth of classes in three or fewer years if they work diligently, since the virtual classes run through the summer and can be completed at the student’s pace. Those concerned that virtual students would lose out on the socialization opportunities afforded by local high schools will be relieved to know that off campus students retain access to extracurricular school subjects and activities such as music, arts, drama, sports teams, academic and social clubs.
Posted by: editor on July 10, 2009