Abstract
Colorado taxpayers are spending $100 million a year on online schools, including millions for students who no longer attend them, according to an investigative report by the I-News Network, a Colorado-based in-depth news consortium and Education News Colorado.
Online schools are thriving in Colorado and nationally as technology has made it possible to educate students who need flexible scheduling or who struggle in a conventional school environment. In Colorado, online schools grew seven times faster than conventional schools last year, according to the report. About 18,000 Colorado students are enrolled in online schools, each funded at a flat rate of $6,228 annually, slightly less than average per-pupil funding statewide.
Reporters spent 10 months investigating the education of thousands of Colorado K-12 students who try an online school each year. The investigation used previously unreleased Colorado Department of Education data to document the path of 10,500 students enrolled in the state's 10 largest online schools beginning in 2008. Those students accounted for more than 90% of all online students for the 2008-09 school year. The analysis found:
Half the online students wind up leaving within a year. When they do, they're often further behind academically than when they started.
Online schools produce three times as many dropouts as they do graduates. One of every eight online students drops out of school permanently — a rate four times the state average.
Millions of dollars are going to virtual schools for students who no longer attend online classes.
The churn of students in and out of online schools is putting pressure on brick-and-mortar schools, which then must find money in their budgets to educate students who come from online schools mid-year.
Reasons for the turnover include working with an at-risk student population that sees online learning as a last resort, students who use online as a brief experimentation with a new learning process, and parents who are unable to stay home to oversee their children's studies, said Heather O'Mara, executive director of Hope Online, one of the state's largest online programs.
The Mitchell 20
Far better than “Waiting for Superman” or any of the other overly hyped movies about education, “The Mitchell 20” tells the real story of teachers working together to improve their teaching. They are a group of teachers from Mitchell Elementary School in Phoenix, Ariz., who set their sights on achieving the loftiest standard in the profession — certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The movie offers an unblemished tale of
Time to learn another language
Learning a new language earlier in life may be easier, but it's not impossible to learn a language later in life, says Bruno della Chiesa of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. True, children who learn a language before puberty will be able to speak without an accent, but “except for spies, who needs to sound like a native speaker anyway?” asks della Chiesa.
“Since a successful learning process crucially depends on motivation,” he says, “one of the first duties of our schools should be to make sure that learning is pleasurable for the learners.” Teachers can make the boring parts of learning a language more interesting by using music, games, YouTube clips, and student-chosen activities. Teachers should also try to surface any negative perceptions students may have about the language they are learning.
Della Chiesa points to three common myths about second-language acquisition:
Not true, he says. Good teaching and hard work are more important.
“Only dead brains don't learn,” he says.
It depends on your goal, says della Chiesa. It's possible to acquire basic conversational skills in supposedly difficult languages like Arabic or Japanese in a few days.
Sexual harassment in school: By the numbers
Sexual harassment is part of everyday life in American middle and high schools. Consider the results from a recent report from the American Association of University Women, which surveyed 1,965 students in grades 7–12 in May and June 2011.
Nearly half of those surveyed reported that they had been harassed in the 2010-11 school year. Verbal harassment — unwelcome sexual comments, jokes, or gestures — made up the bulk of the incidents, but physical harassment was also common.
New standards for teacher leaders
If we want to encourage teacher leadership in schools, we need a guidebook for how to do that. New Teacher Leader Model Standards help spell out the knowledge, skills, and competencies that teachers need in order to assume leadership roles in their schools, districts, and the profession.
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Digging Deeper: 2011 PDK/Gallup Poll Results
In this year's PDK/Gallup poll, we asked Americans to grade teachers in the same way that teachers grade students using letter grades A to Failing.
Overall, 69% of Americans gave teachers a grade of A or B. But the grades depended in part on who was scoring the test. Some 76% of Americans under the age of 40 gave teachers an A or B while only 64% of Americans over the age of 40 gave similar grades. Do good memories of teachers fade with age?
Download the complete 2011 PDK/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools at www.pdkpoll.org. Download an iPad app of the poll results at the App Store. Search on