As Harford explains, Sony, Xerox, Kodak, and the British Army couldn’t readily adapt to new ideas because of their organizational structure. Teams of lawyers who were used to negotiating large contracts with banks and government agencies did not translate well into marketing and selling a computer to a single consumer, and a regimented military with centuries of tradition could not readily adapt to the advent of mechanized warfare.

So what does this have to do with in-person learning during the COVID-19 pandemic? The issue is one and the same—traditional school systems are simply not organized in a manner that allows them to adapt to the new challenges presented by this virus.

Think about the two big issues that school leaders must address in light of the coronavirus—social distancing and the mixing of students. For social distancing, students should be able to sit in classrooms with several feet of space between them and their nearest peers. And, to the extent possible, the number of other students that a student encounters each day is supposed to be limited. If a student is in one class with a total of 20 other people, they only have 20 possible chances of exposure to COVID-19. If, however, they switch to a new class every hour, the possible chances of exposure increase exponentially.

The solution to this seems simple enough: reduce class sizes and reduce the number of times students switch classes. As we have seen throughout the country, however, this has been difficult for school districts to accomplish in practice.

The reason schools are not able to meet in person is because they are trying to deliver education in the same way that they have always delivered education. Some states have laws that dictate when the school year must begin and when it must end. In many school districts, contracts spell out when teachers may be asked to begin work, how many classes they may be asked to teach, and a host of other issues that shape a school system’s operational plans.

The current structure, from the school board down to the kindergarten teacher, is designed to deliver an in-person education that packs 20 to 30 students in a single class. Additionally, at least at the middle- and high-school levels, a bell rings every 50 minutes to tell the students to shuffle through the halls to a new classroom filled with different students.

Most school districts have responded to the pandemic in one of three ways: They’ve gone fully virtual, they’ve gone hybrid with half of the students coming to school each day, or they have rolled the dice with students returning to “normal” as much as possible. None of these scenarios fully meets the challenges of social distancing and mixing. Virtual learning gives up on in-person learning altogether. Blended learning only addresses the social distancing by having half as many kids on campus at a time, but typically still has kids mixing in different classes throughout the day. And doing school “as usual” almost ignores the problem altogether; which may be possible (even desirable) in small schools, elementary schools where the effects of COVID have been mild, or in communities where the number of cases is extremely low. Nevertheless, school as usual does not address the issues of distancing or mixing.

Addressing both the social distancing problem and the mixing problem caused by COVID-19 would require school districts to be nimble and to rethink many of the norms governing how schools operate. Do we have to have two semesters and four quarters, or could we spread the school year over the entire calendar year? Could we use trimesters? Do students have to take seven or eight classes at once, or could they take two or three classes at a time? Do we have to meet all day from 7:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., or could we have two shifts of in-person learning?

If we reconsidered the norms around school and how schools must operate, we would have a much better chance at coming up with solutions that allow us to social distance in classrooms and to keep student mixing to a minimum. But we don’t do these things. We simply say it is all too hard and do virtual learning, we force a blended model on our old structures, or we just put our heads in the sand.

Tim Harford’s cautionary tale helps us to understand why organizations often do not adapt to new ideas and inventions—their organizational structures aren’t designed to do so. It also helps us understand why school districts are struggling to provide robust in-person learning opportunities for students during the pandemic. Our public schools simply aren’t equipped to be nimble, out-of-the-box organizations.

The post In-Person Learning during the Pandemic appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While the situation is not good for SLPS, the impact on the budget will not be felt immediately. Missouri’s funding formula allows school districts to receive funds based on their highest enrollment over a three-year period. Assuming continuing decline, this year’s enrollment figures won’t fully be realized until 2018. In the meantime, SLPS officials must begin looking for ways to shore up the bottom line or begin attracting students back to the district.

Here are some options:

1.      Sell vacant buildings: SLPS has a glut of vacant school buildings. The district must make every effort to lease, sell, or demolish the vacant school buildings. Every penny spent on maintaining empty buildings is a penny that cannot be channeled into the classroom and teacher salaries.

2.      Consolidate or co-locate within underutilized buildings: According to the Post-Dispatch, SLPS also as a slew of underutilized school buildings; six with fewer than 200 students and three high schools with fewer than 300. Officials must consider closing some of these schools and consolidating students into the remaining buildings. Of course, this is never easy to do, as citizens fear another vacant building in their neighborhood and parents worry about their children being bussed further away. To prevent blight, district officials could look for alternative uses for these buildings. For example, they could share the buildings with charter schools or private schools in need of space. By allowing these entities to co-locate but remain distinct organizations, underutilized buildings can once again be filled with children and even generate revenue for the district.

3.      Restructure staffing models: Salaries are one of the biggest costs in public education. Now is a perfect time for the district to restructure staffing models. As Mike McShane pointed out, the district can curb administrative bloat and redesign the district’s compensation system. The district can also begin exploring alternative ways to deliver education and expand the reach of great teachers, such as blended learning models. The traditional model of a teacher in front of 18 students hasn’t been working and is incredibly expensive.  

Curbing decades-long enrollment declines is a daunting task, and it will only be more difficult if the district fails to make appropriate changes. Indeed, significant changes to improve efficiency may be the only way to change the district’s trajectory.

The post Three Tips for Managing St. Louis Public Schools’ Enrollment Decline appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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I taught at an urban, historically African-American Catholic school, St. Jude Educational Institute on the west side of Montgomery, Alabama. After 76 years of operation it closed its doors 2014, following the path of many other inner-city Catholic schools. 

You should be worried about urban Catholic schools closing, as they have for decades succeeded where other schools have failed.  Surveying the research, economist Derek Neal wrote, “Although many questions remain unanswered, one result seems clear. Black and Hispanic students in large cities often have the most to gain from private schooling, in particular, Catholic schooling.”

But the story of Catholic schools in America today is not all doom and gloom. Echoing what my good friend Andy Smarick wrote in National Review earlier this week, there are in fact, several promising trends in contemporary Catholic education. I’d like to highlight three:

1. Innovative management strategies. Many dioceses have not kept up with the changing times. Some still rely on parish-based schools tied to neighborhoods whose demographics of both children and parishioners are changing. Others have decided to keep open a large number of under-enrolled schools rather than consolidate resources into a smaller number of more viable schools. Our Lady Queen of Angels is a great example of a school under creative leadership. It is part of the Partnership for Inner City Education, a management consortium of 6 urban Catholic schools in New York. The partnership has a laser-like focus on providing a great education for low-income students, and supplements the Archdiocese, which already has its hands full managing its diverse portfolio of schools. Organizations like this (which already exist in Washington DC, Philadelphia, and elsewhere) can help bring a much more coherent strategy to urban Catholic education and stretch limited dollars the furthest.
2. Blended Learning. Multiple Catholic-school organizations have been working on blended learning models, which can help schools control personnel costs, a huge driver in the increase in the cost of Catholic schooling as the teacher workforce has shifted from priests and religious sisters to lay men and women. Seton Education Partners has implemented a blended learning model at six Catholic schools in San Francisco, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. The University of Notre Dame’s Alliance for Catholic Education has piloted a blended learning school in Seattle. Even the much-vaunted Cristo Rey network has started a blended learning school in San Jose, California. These could change the delivery model of Catholic education, lower its cost, and make it available for more and more students.
3. School Choice. Probably the single most promising development in Catholic education over the past two decades has been the emergence and growth of private school choice programs. Catholic schools in Indiana, Florida, and Wisconsin have swelled with students attending with state support in the form of a school voucher, tuition tax credit scholarship, or education savings account. Nationwide, enrollment in school choice programs has grown from less than 30,000 students in 2000 to over 300,000 today. That said, if more low- and middle-income students are going to be able to take advantage of a Catholic school education, more states will need to create or expand these programs.

It was the prophet Jeremiah who said “in this place of which you say it is a waste, there will be heard again the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness. The voices of those who sing.” For years now, many observers have written off Catholic schools as dying institutions that had failed to keep up with the changing times. But across America, voices are singing.

The post Pope Francis Is Visiting a Catholic School. Maybe You Should, Too appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

More than a year ago, I sat down with Suzanne Johnson and Matt Hoehner to discuss the charter school they were planning to open – EAGLE College Prep. Yesterday, I finally had a chance to visit the school and I was very excited about what I saw. Students were actively engaged with teachers, in both learning centers and on computers. I am a big fan of the school’s blended learning model, which incorporates technology and individualized instruction.

The best thing, however, had little to do with what students were doing in the classroom and much to do with what parents were doing there – shopping.

While I was waiting in the office for Hoehner, the executive director, I met a couple waiting for Johnson, the school leader. The couple has a son who will be entering kindergarten next year. They were waiting to take a tour. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is a fundamental shift in how we operate our public school system.

In the past, most parents simply accepted the school to which they were assigned. Sure, some expressed choice by purchasing a home in a good school district and some chose to send their children to private schools. The vast majority of parents, however, had very little ability to shop for their child’s school. That is changing thanks to charter schools.

Approximately 25 percent of public school students in Saint Louis attend charter schools and 40 percent in Kansas City attend charter schools. These schools offer parents the opportunity to choose the school that will best meet the needs of their children.

I have no idea if the couple will end up choosing to send their children to EAGLE College Prep, but I am excited to see parents empowered to choose through school choice.

The post Shopping For Schools At EAGLE College Prep appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Several representatives saying they’d like to see intervention even earlier when a school’s scores are dropping #moleg #MOTransfers

— Alex Stuckey (@alexdstuckey) April 9, 2014

There is a lot of talk these days in Jefferson City about being proactive in public schools. Currently, when a school drops below a set performance mark, the district becomes unaccredited. Students are then able to transfer out of the district to a nearby accredited one. Many view this as a reactive, nuclear option. What we need, they say, is early intervention. We need to be proactive when a school starts to struggle. I hate to get tied up in semantics, but by definition, targeting schools that are struggling is reactive, not proactive. It is a reaction to their declining performance.

Lawmakers have their hearts in the right place, but they place too much confidence in their ability to dictate solutions from Jefferson City. After I testified before the Missouri House Elementary and Secondary Education Committee about the student transfer issue, one representative asked me what lawmakers should do to help those struggling school districts.

“What advice would you give us?” she asked.

“I would tell you that you cannot mandate excellence and you cannot dictate innovation,” I said.

“You would have us do nothing?” she asked.

“No, I would have you get out of the way,” I said. “Remove unnecessary restrictions and burdensome regulations. Free the local schools to innovate.”

Missouri could:

Reform teacher tenure policies; remove Last In, First Out provisions; and reform teacher pensions so schools have more flexibility in staffing decisions.

Change seat time and class restrictions that inhibit some blended learning and online learning models.

Try something like Kentucky’s “Districts of Innovation,” where school districts can become “exempt from certain administrative regulations and statutory provisions.”

Responding to government failure with more government action is not being proactive. Policies like the ones cited above are proactive. They put the power into the hands of the school leaders on the ground. A proactive system is one that gives school leaders the freedom to be innovative and gives parents the ability to choose.

The post Proactive Is The New Reactive appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

So what was my brilliant idea? To find out, check out one of the charter schools slated to open next year, Eagle College Prep.

I recently sat down with two of the school’s leaders and talked with them at length about the new school, which will be opening in the South Tower Grove neighborhood. You can read the full interview on the Show-Me Institute website.

Below are just a few of the highlights.

Teachers at the Eagle College Prep will utilize research-based instructional practices in the classroom and will “differentiate [instruction] using a blended learning model.” The Show-Me Institute has been a big proponent of harnessing the power of technology to improve instruction.

The school also will have an affordable (maybe free) after-school program, which the school’s management company, Educational Enterprises, will run. Matt Hoehner, Saint Louis regional executive director of Educational Enterprises, noted the after-school program will be faith-based: “We . . . recognize that many families want a faith-based option. Through our free public charter school and a separate, optional faith-based after-school program, we believe we can meet the need for a high-quality school and faith-based instruction.”

A school that utilizes technology to meet the unique needs of each child and partners with the faith-based community to offer optional after-school care . . . what a marvelous idea.

(Now, if I could just get someone to follow through with some of my other great ideas.)

The post They Stole My Idea! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

James V. Shuls (JVS): Thanks for taking the time to sit down with me. Tell me a little about EAGLE College Prep. What makes the school unique or different? Why should people be interested in this school?

Suzanne Johnson (SJ): Well, we know that students in South City and students in Saint Louis in general need a great education if they are to break out of the cycle of poverty that we see in too many places. And we know a great school system is critical for the revitalization of Saint Louis. The mayor talked about this recently during a press conference where he said people are choosing to not move into the city or choosing to move out of the city because they don’t have a good public school choice. We saw that need and want to bring a better choice to a neighborhood that is currently underserved. I can speak to this from experience. I lived in the city for five years, we rehabbed a house in Soulard and loved it, but we moved to Illinois because I was having my first child and I couldn’t afford private school and I was not sending my child to a Saint Louis Public School.

So, we’re looking at bringing a neighborhood school, a free public charter school that is going to provide a world-class education. We expect that our students will be able to compete with students in the county, because they will receive a high-quality education, the kind we would all want for our own kids. Not to put anyone else down, because there are many great schools, but we believe the South Tower Grove neighborhood is currently underserved. There just aren’t that many quality options for the kids in that neighborhood and we want to serve them.

The other option that we are bringing in is a blended learning model. We will be using direct instruction, or traditional education, but we also know kids need differentiation. This neighborhood is very diverse; socially diverse, economically diverse, culturally diverse. So the one-size-fits-all model is not going to work. We want all of our students to achieve, so in addition to the direct instruction where we use the best researched-based methods, we’re also going to differentiate using a blended learning model with the Compass Education program. Our kids will be meeting in small groups for reading and math so we can really target in on those skills that our kids need remediation with or have an opportunity to excel. We know we will have some gifted kids, and we will be thinking “how can we get them higher?” We know we will have kids who will come in to kindergarten not recognizing their alphabet, so we have to start where they are and bring them up, and we have to be able to do that.

JVS: Talk a little more about the blended learning model. There is a lot of talk that blended learning can not only improve education by tailoring education to a student’s specific level, but could possibly bring some financial benefits as well. Was that part of the consideration when thinking about a blended learning model?

SJ: Right now we are seeing great success with our schools in Milwaukee and in Phoenix and they’re using models very similar to ours, with the differentiation piece. As a former classroom teacher, and a former principal, I know this is critical. When I was a high school English teacher, I had a class of 30 kids; some were reading at a third-grade level and some were post-high school. How do I go into that class and teach a lesson? You need help. You can break into small groups, but classroom management becomes an issue. So we believe a blended learning model will help us engage students and keep them on task, so we can have that one-on-one time. And yes, there are economic advantages because this is economically feasible. This is a great tool, plus we know technology has transformed so many jobs in the work place, so kids need to be able to use a computer to learn and perform in the work force.

JVS: I’m a former first grade teacher myself. I taught reading and I had that struggle of working with my small group, while other students are supposed to be working at literacy centers. So I had to find tasks for the students to do, which often resulted in a lot more work for me. Plus, the students were often off task, which distracted my small group. For many teachers like me, literacy centers are a headache. The idea is great, but it is hard to manage. So is blended learning kind of a different take on learning centers?

SJ: Absolutely, and we will utilize paraprofessionals to help in that time, because while the teacher is engaging that small group, you may not be able to pay attention elsewhere. And that is where kids are off task. We will have paraprofessionals to guide students, to keep them on task, and to help the teacher.

JVS: Some people are critical of computer-based instruction. They think this is the dehumanization of the classroom. How would you respond to that?

SJ: If we were going to 100 percent computer-based instruction, I would be on that bandwagon. There are things that are appropriate for every age level. For us, along with the computer-aided instruction, students will be engaging with their teachers. Another way we will humanize the classroom, to use your term, is by teaching character education. That will be a huge component of our schools.

Parents aren’t just concerned about the quality of education they are receiving; one of the major concerns is safety. Somewhere we lost that character component. I found it to be my job as a teacher and a principal to teach kids how to be good people, to form a classroom community. So that humanization is going to come by blending character education in with our daily instruction. [We are] teaching kids, not just expecting them to enter the school knowing how to be good students, knowing how to be good people. We will teach them values, like how to be respectful, how to be helpful, how to be responsible, how to be safe, how to be a servant leader to their community. Because we know we have to give back in order to revitalize our neighborhoods.

JVS: You talk about character education and the name of the school has college prep in it, but it is one thing to say these things and another to actually do them. If you go to any low-performing school and change the name, it’s still a low-performing school. So how will you actually teach character and how do you actually put the emphasis on college prep?

SJ: It is part of the culture of the school. You teach character education, just like you would teach a lesson about adverbs. And you don’t just say these things, you have teachers who model the traits that they are teaching. You use direct instruction, saying this is what being responsible looks like, and you reinforce it. Then you go back and you re-teach, because kids don’t learn these things when they are told them once. I have a 6-year-old, and I know you have to reinforce those traits that you want to see in children.

I took over a school that had more than 5,000 office referrals the year before. Within three years, we had less than 1,000. So, I know it can be done. We didn’t weaken the rules, there were still consequences for bad behavior, but by the time our students left the school and went to the high school, there was a difference. High school teachers commented that they could tell which students came from our school because they treated their teachers with respect.

You focus on college prep with the same mindset. You reinforce to kids that it’s not “if I go to college,” it’s “when I go to college, which college am I going to?” You create this mindset by having teachers talk about their college experiences. A little thing that makes a huge difference is college Fridays. Every Friday our staff will wear clothes from their alma mater. They will talk about what it was like to be a college student. We will talk with kids, especially as they go into high school, about how to apply for college. We will work with families and help them with the paperwork. As a first-generation college student, thankfully I had people to do that for me and we will do that for our kids and give them those opportunities. My goal is not only 100 percent of our students will graduate and go to college, but we want 100 percent of our students to graduate from college. It is not good enough for students to enroll in college and then drop out; we will continue to support our students because that is how we do business.

Matt Hoehner (MH): The community is really a focal point of our school. A lot of community leaders that I know are coming together for this school. I live in the neighborhood and it is not only about teaching the kids, but teaching the parents as well. When we use love and logic to teach the kids, we will also have parent meetings where we share that information. We will share what we are doing in the classroom, so families can reinforce those skills throughout the day. We will really build a community and once you build those relationships, it carries on through college because it is more than just a school. It is a community, it’s a family, you have these relationships and you care about these people beyond the class walls.

JVS: You keep talking about college, but isn’t this school initially only going to have youngsters? What grades are you opening with and how do you plan to expand to that point where you are serving high school students?

SJ: We will start with a K-3 school and will add a grade every year. Our initial charter is through eighth grade, but we have an expansion plan in place, so when our sponsor says we are ready, we will be able to open a high school. My vision is that those third graders will go from eighth grade into our high school.

JVS: Suzanne, you brought up your experience and I’m sure you could have stayed where you were. So what is it about this school that made you want to take this step and say, let’s do this?

SJ: The idea of being able to teach kids to be a servant leader. I want to be able to give back to the community. Nobody goes into education to become rich. And if you don’t go into education because you love kids, you’re going to burn out quickly. Saint Louis is such an amazing place, but we have a need for high-quality schools. This opportunity is the perfect meld, because I want to be able to move back to the city, I want my kids to have a great place to go to school, and I want to be a great school leader. This is the opportunity to do that and really make a difference for our area, to really help Saint Louis grow to what it once was and what it can be.

JVS: Matt, you live in South Tower Grove, but the management company, Educational Enterprises, operates schools in Milwaukee and Phoenix. How did you and Educational Enterprises become interested in Saint Louis?

MH: I have been in the Saint Louis area for 14 years. I have a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old and obviously education is important to me, for my kids and the kids in my community. Before this role with Educational Enterprises, I served as a pastor. So I have been serving and caring for many other kids who also need a great school.

The South Tower Grove area has many refugees, Nepalese, East and West Africans, and they don’t have enough money to send their kids to a private school. So, they come from a refugee camp into Saint Louis and their children are often placed in failing schools. We know that system is simply not working out for many of them. So we started wondering, how do we meet that need?

In my former congregation, we leased out our building to a charter school and then ran an after-school program to support the kids afterwards. It was through that interaction, as I was directing the after-school program, that I came into contact with Educational Enterprises. Having been on school boards with private schools, I was able to see their track record, meet with the CEO, and understand their vision and mission. I could see how well their schools were performing in Milwaukee and Phoenix. I visited their schools to see what it was they were doing and when I saw it I said, “We need this in Saint Louis.”

So we worked to bring Educational Enterprises here and EAGLE College Prep is our first school here in the city. This organization is all about the kids. Every decision we make is kids first. Our blended learning model is not just about being financially feasible; we believe it is what’s best for kids. It makes the school sustainable, it’s long lasting, and it helps us reach all of our students individually.

Our model has been proven to be very successful in both Milwaukee and Phoenix and we are really excited to bring this school to the kids in our neighborhood.

JVS: You mention an after-school program. Will EAGLE College Prep have an after-school program?

MH: Educational Enterprises will create a separate after-school program to wrap around the public charter school because we believe that additional support is important. We also recognize that many families want a faith-based option. Through our free public charter school and a separate, optional faith-based after-school program, we believe we can meet the need for a high-quality school and faith-based instruction. The after-school program will run from the end of school at 3:45 p.m. to 6 p.m. The kids will be able to be at a place where they will be safe, they can play sports, get a healthy snack, and also have some Christian faith-based instruction. We will also be offering a pre-school to families with young children. And, it is our goal to make all of these additional options as affordable as possible, so they are accessible to everyone.

JVS: The school is to open next year, for the 2013-2014 school year. If someone is interested in EAGLE College Prep, what should they do now?

SJ: We will be accepting any student who is a resident of the city and will be going into grades K-3 next year. The enrollment packet should be online at the beginning of November. Like other schools, you will have to be able to prove residency and you will need shot records, all the state required pieces. Enrollment will officially begin in January and will run through sometime in March. If we have more names than seats, we will do a lottery.

JVS: What else should people know about this school?

MH: The three words that best sum up EAGLE College Prep are college, character, and community.

The post College, Character, and Community appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As innovation continues to change the way we work and communicate, forms of virtual education are beginning to take hold in Missouri and elsewhere. Virtual education has been shown to reduce the costs of educating public school children, increase course diversity, and help students graduate.

The post Virtual Blended With Traditional Learning Can Cut Costs And Help Students appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Read Audrey Spalding’s case study on blended learning here.

The post Blended Learning: A Solution for Public Schools? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Now watch Salman Khan discuss his online Khan Academy at this year’s Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference:

Khan Academy gives students engaging instruction in an expanding number of subjects, right now primarily those in mathematics and economics, befitting Khan’s background as a hedge fund manager. Of course, this makes it easier for self-motivated students to teach themselves linear algebra, but I think the real innovation of Khan Academy is the way in which it can supplement more traditional courses.

Instead of receiving a lecture at school and working on problems by themselves at home, students using the Khan Academy can watch the lecture at home online and then work through the problems at school, where the teacher can work one on one with any students who are struggling with the material. Khan Academy’s mastery assessment software also makes it easier to identify who those students are and what particular topic they are struggling with, so the teacher can use his time most efficiently.

And it’s all free! Khan started developing these courses for his cousin and discovered that he had a knack for it. Now the Khan Academy is a nonprofit, where he works full time. Even with virtual schooling programs that are developed by for-profit companies, the fact that they can be used by millions of students simultaneously means that the per-pupil costs are extremely low. We need greater experimentation in our school systems to allow more innovations like Khan Academy to spring up and spread across the world.

The post The Education of Tommorow … Today! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn’t taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions — which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members — are aligned against it.

So children continue to learn from blackboards and books — the kind made of dead trees! no hyperlinks! — rather than getting lessons the way they consume virtually all other information: online. Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it’s like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of “Avatar” in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site. […]

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students…

Moving lesson planning and delivery online can provide students with more supervision, not less, says Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of “Disrupting Class.” It would free teachers, Horn says, “to do hand-holding and mentoring, something which is pretty much impossible in the current model.” After all, where is it written that the babysitter, disciplinarian, lecturer and evaluator must all be the same person? Or even that they all have to be in the same building?

Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls. The Virtual Virginia program focuses on offering Advanced Placement classes to every student in the state, bringing college-level courses to rural districts and inner-city Richmond, where high-level instruction is difficult to get. Rocketship Education, in San Jose, Calif., brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, cheap, modular space along with a small staff and hands their studies over to online curriculum for part of each day.

Online education has already become a boon for kids with special needs, the students least served by the traditional system. Education entrepreneur Tom Vander Ark launched Internet Academy, the first online K-12 establishment, in 1995 in part to serve kids with unorthodox education requirements, from serious athletes to children with health problems or learning disabilities.

One of the most successful areas of online education so far is helping kids who have fallen off the educational grid. Companies such as AdvancePath Academics scoop up students classified as unrecoverable by traditional schools and help them complete their education. Some dropout-recovery programs can be found in shopping malls and gyms.

Online education is no silver bullet for Missouri’s educational problems because there is no such thing. Each student is different, and although the traditional models may work well for most (a point I think is debatable), others may experience far more success in a more structured online program that still allows students to move at their own pace. Others could benefit from more independent learning styles like Montessori schools. All these options have their places, and we will be most successful when we allow parents and students find the pedagogical methods that work best for them instead of trying to force hundreds of thousands of individuals into the same boxes.

Sarah Brodsky has written about online schooling several times, and Caitlin Hartsell has also blogged about the issue.

The post Celebrate Educational Diversity appeared first on Show-Me Institute.