… all of a Sudden?
There are about a million children in America today who take high school classes online – right from kindergarten, all the way to 12th grade. Some educators really love what classes at the lap of a computer can do for children. One of the most popular uses for online classes today happens to be the opportunity these give students to make up in subjects in which they have failed. And then, there are all kinds of electives that a student can opt for if she should be willing to learn from a computer instead of a proper teacher in a classroom. Some of the more obscure elective subjects invite the interest of so few students that it isn’t ever viable in a public school setting to actually have a class run for those. In such a case, rather than deny the student that elective altogether, a computerized lesson could offer her a happy compromise. The same goes for advanced placement classes. To become a real estate broker, you’ll need to take real estate broker classes.
But in a time when the country is firing teachers by the hundreds of thousands and when teachers are getting a lot of hate in places like Wisconsin, critics wonder if the whole thing to do with high school classes online isn’t just one more way to cut costs and do away with having to pay teachers. There isn’t a shred of scientific proof, they say, that can give a parent any kind of reassurance that high school classes online can ever compare in quality to learning face-to-face with a real teacher. Still, some public school districts, and states like Tennessee, are pushing ahead with large-scale changes to bring in computers to replace teachers. In Memphis, for instance, students absolutely must take at least one online course if they want to graduate. Sometimes, students are made to take online classes even when there are real teachers teaching those classes right in a classroom next door. Education officials in the state say that since online classes are quite common in college, all they are trying to do is to prepare their students for what is to come. But considering how much money it is possible for a school to save by plopping a scholar in front of the computer instead of a desk in front of a teacher (high school classes online only cost $150 a year per student) it’s pretty difficult to not believe that cost-cutting has something to do with this.
In Florida, the law places a restriction on the number of students there can be under a teacher. Since the state doesn’t have enough teachers, they just push thousands of students out into computer labs for their online classes. If there were no classroom size caps, these students would not be learning online. Why, some schools actually come out and admit as much. If there is a foreign language class with only a handful of students, schools feel that they couldn’t possibly justify paying a teacher when they are so hemmed in with budget constraints everywhere else. They just send their students to take online classes at places like the Virtual High School Global Consortium.
