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POLL RESULTS
No
48%
Should Public Schools Be Required to Offer Online K– 12 Education?
Although most agree there are merits to both face-to-face and online
education, respondents are split over whether a mandate is warranted.
Blend the New with the Old
It’s a disservice to us all to suppose
that having no form of online education available to every student is acceptable. You can hide under a rock,
but don’t take your students with
you. Blend change with traditional
techniques and you will continue to
give your students a beautiful, engaging, and worthwhile education that
prepares them for the world. Can you
do it with chalk? Of course, but add a
dash of Google now and then!
Matt Pearson
Marin Country Day School
Corte Madera, California
Classrooms for Social Skills
Online education works for professional development or graduate degrees, but I think in K– 12, students
need to learn from a teacher in a classroom. The classroom provides not
only an educational environment but
a social one as well, which is important in the formative years.
Jacqueline Jo Masloff
Millennium Training Institute
Woburn, Massachusetts
Don’t Fight the Future
With the invention of the printing
press and the availability of textbooks,
many teachers were wary. They felt if
students had textbooks, they would no
longer need teachers. Educators must
be willing to embrace these new technology resources if America’s students
are going to be competitive in a global
community.
Peggy Collum
Cleburn County Board of Education
Heflin, Alabama
Go Global
Students need the physical presence
of a caring teacher. But taking one or
some online courses would provide
increased subject choices for students,
provide them with 21st-century skills,
and enhance cultural and global
understanding.
Linda Rogde
Seoul Foreign School
Seoul, South Korea
Mandates Dilute Quality
Any policy mandate ends up watering down the quality, regardless of
the intention. Serious professional
development has to be given to the
teachers, the technology support must
be in place, and administration must
support the implementation fully.
Mandating that all public schools offer
online courses would be a poor policy
decision that would end up hurting
students more than helping.
Katie Logan
Fort Washakie Charter High School/
Wyoming e-Academy of Virtual Education
Comment on ISTE.org poll
Survival of the Fittest
Making it mandatory for public
schools to have online classes is akin
to requiring everyone to practice good
health habits: We know it should be
done, but it’s just not practical with
humans. The healthy districts will
adopt change that includes online
education, virtual classrooms without
walls, etc.; the rest will fail to meet society’s needs.
Robert Richardson
Kissimee Charter Middle School
Kissimee, Florida
Yes
59%
Nationalize Online Schooling
In Turkey we reach 15 million K– 12
students, poor or rich, in small villages or on Fifth Avenue, for free thanks
to Turk Telekom sponsoring this. The
USA has less than 1 million online
students. You should have a national
online curriculum. The algebra in San
Francisco is the same as the algebra in
New York.
Muvaffak Gozaydin
Online Education Corp.
Turkey
LETTERS
Don’t Disrupt Class
I read Anita McAnear’s piece about
online learning in the Feb. 2009 L&L.
As lead author of a book about online
learning (The Virtual High School,
published in 2003 by Teachers College Press), I have documented the
strengths and weaknesses of online
learning. I believe that Disrupting
Class is a misleading, poorly researched book, and I wrote a review
of the book. One of the coauthors of
Disrupting Class notes that the review
is thoughtful, and others have also
made favorable comments, including the heads of two large online
high schools. The review is at www.
concord.org/publications/detail/2008
_DisruptingClass_WhitePaper.pdf.
Andy Zucker
Senior Research Scientist
The Concord Consortium