Should Public Schooling Go Online?

justabubba said:

what do children receive in brick and mortar schools that they could not achieve online?
i suspect the future will be a melding of the two approaches

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That's how it's done in my state. The full K-12 program is online. For some families it is great. Mostly parents who would have home schooled their kids anyways. Surprisingly, some students who have been long termed expelled from the traditional schools have enrolled online. I'll also add that it a great option for really, really smart kids, who can then progress at a much faster pace than any regular classroom, where they are often bored.

StillServing said:

Certainly no teacher can prevent daydreaming, but a quality teacher in the classroom can identify when they have lost the engagement of their students and redirect them. I do it every period in my classes. Moreover, it is a responsibility of the teacher to connect the student with the material being taught. Teachers are not simply information delivery services. Our very job is to target those students who are less interested and finding a way to make them interested and keep them interested.

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That may work better for some subjects vs others, ultimately no teacher can compel someone to be interested in a subject they have little to no interest in. One of the biggest lines of bull**** I received was that any subject content can be made interesting if you are a good teacher. As someone who taught science I definitively figured out that was complete BS. Most of the job was centered around classroom management and preventing cheating.

Cynical said:

That may work better for some subjects vs others, ultimately no teacher can compel someone to be interested in a subject they have little to no interest in. One of the biggest lines of bull**** I received was that any subject content can be made interesting if you are a good teacher. As someone who taught science I definitively figured out that was complete BS. Most of the job was centered around classroom management and preventing cheating.

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You can give science lectures in many formats, the most compelling of which tends to be one which readily makes obvious what the principles considered can be used to do. You can likewise give a lecture that will bore even the most interested students by reading from a book, never interacting with the class, using a single tone for delivery, etc. An outsider might claim some teachers are lazy not to tend to give more of the first type of lecture, but teachers usually have guidelines to follow, limits on the options they have and aren't necessarily paid enough to make revamping a whole course structure worth it -- and that's when they have the freedom to do just that in the first place.

With that being said, some people will never be interested in physics. Not everyone is interested in things and how they work as demonstrated by the fact that not everyone graduates college in a STEM field. No amount of prowess on the part of teachers is going to make this change. And the problem is not unique to kids in elementary, middle or high school. I am a Ph.D. student and I almost fell asleep during one of my course this year. A course centered around incentive problems with insurance contracts is of absolutely no interest to someone who enjoys finance, macroeconomics and discussing policy problems. The same happened with some of the students who were more into empirical work in microeconomics this fall: they were forced to take a macroeconomics course, as well as a mathematics and programming course which deals almost exclusively with macroeconomic theory. I recall my office mate falling asleep half the time... And that's from a select set of people who really enjoy economics and knowingly enrolled in that program after having previously studied economics. With kids who probably do not enjoy most of what they see, it's only worse.

As the OP and others have pointed out, there are trade-offs involved with online schooling.

Kids would see other kids in different circumstances, it might be more difficult to draw minority groups out of their cultural enclaves and have them interact with the broader society, it might be more difficult to monitor at-risk kids who have behavioral or cognitive problems, etc. However, it's cheaper to run a technical assistance service alongside pre-registered courses that kids can watch at their convenience. It's also easier to tailor education to individual students that way because the lectures and problem sets are available on demand and registered just once and can afterward be used for a few years. Many textbooks at all levels of education make it clear in their preamble that you can vary the course structure by swapping the order of chapters covered, skipping some and focusing more time on others, or selecting more or less advanced problems. The same can very easily be done with videos.

Those are just things on the top of my head. It's also clear that a school could in principle offer to parents the choice of how much online versus onsite learning they would want. Maybe in some cases, nearly 100% is optimal; in other cases, maybe 50% online is better. Nothing forces one to pick either extreme.

The only problem to me is that the current decision structure in the US is entirely inadequate to strike informed compromises. Public schools nominally are regulated by state legislatures, but the very many federal programs that make funds contingent on compliance with federal guidelines often decided upon by unelected bureaucrats in federal agencies tell a very different story. The people who actually have first-hand knowledge of how kids are doing are parents, teachers, and school administrators, but none of them has much of a say in how things are operated. Likewise, townhalls and states might have some problems specific to them that do not generalize well across the entire country, but they are all handcuffed in practice. If there was a contest held to pick out the absolute most stupid way to organize resources for publicly funded schools, the US model would be high on the list. Every time we read about a problem concerning how largely bureaucratic chains of command lead to nonsense, people think that if only a slightly different plan (of their preference, of course) was voted in action in Washington, it would magically be better.

The real problem is that people who have relevant information and face the relevant incentives do not have anything resembling a say in how things are organized whereas people who have extremely high costs of acquiring this information and only incentive to rachet up their influence in one direction are in charge. As long as the decision process is not further diffused and therefore localized closer to the reality where people actually feel the consequences of those policies, you will get absurd nonsense of that system. The problem is always who decides, not what should be done when all decision units are necessarily bound by imperfect knowledge and an imperfect ability to implement any plan. If the intuition of the OP is correct, this form of schooling would emerge also for kids as a cheap way to learn without requiring anyone to mandate that procedure.

My son was home schooled until he was 14, then entered public high school. He is special needs but even so, we have a network of home schooled children here. This idea that home school children are less socialized is a popular myth. If anything they are better socialized because they have more time to pursue the things they love and the extracurricular activities we chose for school projects all brought him into contact with other kids. Most of his school work was done by the time the public school kids got home so he could spend evenings with his friends.

The media has done a bang up job of convincing people that home schooling is backward but it's so widespread now that the systems are really effectual. You even have the unschooling movement now which designs curricula around the child's unique talents and interests. A family in our community did unschooling with their daughter who, from a very early age, showed interest in film. At 16 she directed her first film and it ended up in the Sundance Film Festival. She also learned to pilot an airplane by the time she was 18. This is all due to curricula being designed around what she naturally wanted to do.

The only reason why my son went to public high school was because he wanted to.

There are pros and cons to the public system, the cons being a high level of conformity and a guaranteed level of social dysfunction because classes are so huge and underfunded now. Your child will also have guaranteed contact with kids who were not given proper attention by their parents and are expecting the public system to raise them properly. I am so glad my son's primary years were spent home schooling. He is much further ahead of his special needs peers because he got specialized attention from his immediate community rather than generic help from strangers.

Northern Light said:

My son was home schooled until he was 14, then entered public high school. He is special needs but even so, we have a network of home schooled children here. This idea that home school children are less socialized is a popular myth. If anything they are better socialized because they have more time to pursue the things they love and the extracurricular activities we chose for school projects all brought him into contact with other kids. Most of his school work was done by the time the public school kids got home so he could spend evenings with his friends.

The media has done a bang up job of convincing people that home schooling is backward but it's so widespread now that the systems are really effectual. You even have the unschooling movement now which designs curricula around the child's unique talents and interests. A family in our community did unschooling with their daughter who, from a very early age, showed interest in film. At 16 she directed her first film and it ended up in the Sundance Film Festival. She also learned to pilot an airplane by the time she was 18. This is all due to curricula being designed around what she naturally wanted to do.

The only reason why my son went to public high school was because he wanted to.

There are pros and cons to the public system, the cons being a high level of conformity and a guaranteed level of social dysfunction because classes are so huge and underfunded now. Your child will also have guaranteed contact with kids who were not given proper attention by their parents and are expecting the public system to raise them properly. I am so glad my son's primary years were spent home schooling. He is much further ahead of his special needs peers because he got specialized attention from his immediate community rather than generic help from strangers.

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That is great for some but many do and will continue to use homeschooling as an excuse to teach their kids nothing but religious dogma, things they don't understand themselves, completely leaving out important subjects, or not teaching them effectively. The solution for 98% of the population will be a well-funded public school system while home-schooling should be used as an exception and needs to be heavily regulated. There were students in my school who could fly by 18 too, if you have the money or already have a plane it is really not that hard.

Carjosse said:

That is great for some but many do and will continue to use homeschooling as an excuse to teach their kids nothing but religious dogma, things they don't understand themselves, or completely leaving out important subjects or not teaching them effectively. The solution for 98% of the population will be a well-funded public school system while home-schooling should be used as an exception and needs to be heavily regulated. There were students in my school who could fly by 18 too, if you have the money or already have a plane it really not that hard.

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That's not true and is a stereotype. Most home schooling programs have to answer to State run education requirements. I have only met one devout religious family in my region who home schooled for religious reasons. The rest had special needs children or just thought the public school system was too dysfunctional.

The time of more funding for public schools is over. It's an obsolete industrial model based on producing workers rather than independent thinkers and learners. It makes no sense to group children according to age and to segregate based on arbitrary social levels. People say that public school is needed for normal socialization, but I don't see how that's possible when the only people children socialize with in schools are people their own age. Age does not determine development level in every area. Some children are behind and some are ahead.

Not to mention the very real dysfunction of bullying, harassment, violence, and now in the U.S. the very real chance that you could be shot to death at school. The whole public system needs reform badly is the real reason why parents opt to home school. The public school system is traumatic for a lot of kids and this American idea that it's just part of growing up is non-sense. Kids in primary school don't know what tough means, they don't know that a teacher shouldn't be abusive toward them, and they don't know that it's not normal to be bullied. Often smart kids are told they're stupid when really they're gifted.

Northern Light said:

That's not true and is a stereotype. Most home schooling programs have to answer to State run education requirements. I have only met one devout religious family in my region who home schooled for religious reasons. The rest had special needs children or just thought the public school system was too dysfunctional.

The time of more funding for public schools is over. It's an obsolete industrial model based on producing workers rather than independent thinkers and learners. It makes no sense to group children according to age and to segregate based on on arbitrary social levels. People say that public school is needed for normal socialization, but I don't see how that's possible when the only people children socialize with are people their own age. Age does not determine development level in every area. Some children are behind and some are ahead.

Not to mention the very real dysfunction of bullying, harassment, violence, and now in the U.S. the very real chance that you could be shot to death at school. The whole public system needs reform badly is the real reason why parents opt to home school.

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Homeschooling is not a solution. Most families have both parents who work, the vast majority of families cannot afford to have one a parent stay home to teach the children. It is almost as if being a teacher is a full-time job and the efficiency could be increased by having multiple students in one place. Parents also do not make the best teachers either, parents cannot and will not teach certain subjects either because they can't or don't want to. I can guarantee that most parents cannot teach advanced physics and will not teach proper sex education for example.

Without public school a society loses the ability to impart societal values or common knowledge. Public school is actually a pretty good reflection for what the real world is like and you shouldn't take that away. All the points you bring up can be answered with public education reform and actually providing adequate funding is the first step in that. Removing your child from a school for bullying is the worst you can do, you need to teach them to deal with it, that is the lack of socialization people talk about with homeschooling. In homeschooling you can pick and choose what conflicts your child has to deal with or shelter them from, that is not healthy.

No, kids already live too much in their computers developing little to no social skills. Over half of young adults now are not in any relationship. They live entirely in virtual reality. Schools are the only socialization they get.

TheEconomist said:

You can give science lectures in many formats, the most compelling of which tends to be one which readily makes obvious what the principles considered can be used to do. You can likewise give a lecture that will bore even the most interested students by reading from a book, never interacting with the class, using a single tone for delivery, etc. An outsider might claim some teachers are lazy not to tend to give more of the first type of lecture, but teachers usually have guidelines to follow, limits on the options they have and aren't necessarily paid enough to make revamping a whole course structure worth it -- and that's when they have the freedom to do just that in the first place.

With that being said, some people will never be interested in physics. Not everyone is interested in things and how they work as demonstrated by the fact that not everyone graduates college in a STEM field. No amount of prowess on the part of teachers is going to make this change. And the problem is not unique to kids in elementary, middle or high school. I am a Ph.D. student and I almost fell asleep during one of my course this year. A course centered around incentive problems with insurance contracts is of absolutely no interest to someone who enjoys finance, macroeconomics and discussing policy problems. The same happened with some of the students who were more into empirical work in microeconomics this fall: they were forced to take a macroeconomics course, as well as a mathematics and programming course which deals almost exclusively with macroeconomic theory. I recall my office mate falling asleep half the time... And that's from a select set of people who really enjoy economics and knowingly enrolled in that program after having previously studied economics. With kids who probably do not enjoy most of what they see, it's only worse.

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Believe me I tried presenting the topics I taught in various ways. The bottom line is that much of science textbook content is going to be boring for the majority of high school kids and for the majority of the population for that matter. Heck after a while it became exceptionally boring to myself as well.

I ponied up $200 each to have each of my sons try an online high school course during the Summer. They simply couldn't get it off the ground. Some need the classroom.

SDET said:

I ponied up $200 each to have each of my sons try an online high school course during the Summer. They simply couldn't get it off the ground. Some need the classroom.

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possibly, that instead speaks to the motivation - or lack of same - of the student(s)

we learn different ways. i eventually realized that i am a visual learner. cannot retain information provided orally. thus, i took copious notes. never read them, but the act of writing them allowed me to retain the essential information needed

my wife's young protege' has mild learning disabilities and has difficulty maintaining focus, but is able to acquire information verbally presented because she can move around and look around at other things while digesting what is taught. despite her difficulty with reading, she has an amazing ability to detect whatever she sees which appears to be aberrant

my soon to be young grandson has dyslexia but has great facility with content once he masters the words

the assembly line method of our existing ed system works for many, but certainly not all. alternative education methods, including on-line instruction, are needed to elevate the academic skills of all of our students

here is an interesting read profiling a high achieving student who attends on-line school:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/bran...hiever-hit-his-stride/?utm_term=.b91e381f2341

justabubba said:

possibly, that instead speaks to the motivation - or lack of same - of the student(s)

we learn different ways. i eventually realized that i am a visual learner. cannot retain information provided orally. thus, i took copious notes. never read them, but the act of writing them allowed me to retain the essential information needed

my wife's young protege' has mild learning disabilities and has difficulty maintaining focus, but is able to acquire information verbally presented because she can move around and look around at other things while digesting what is taught. despite her difficulty with reading, she has an amazing ability to detect whatever she sees which appears to be aberrant

my soon to be young grandson has dyslexia but has great facility with content once he masters the words

the assembly line method of our existing ed system works for many, but certainly not all. alternative education methods, including on-line instruction, are needed to elevate the academic skills of all of our students

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Knowing SDET he is probably mad that his sons could not sexually harass female classmates online.

The fact is online schooling for virtually all people of all age groups will eventually be the reality. Most schools will close and online schooling with become the norm.

GodlessBrandy said:

The fact is online schooling for virtually all people of all age groups will eventually be the reality. Most schools will close and online schooling with become the norm.

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I don't see that happening very soon and especially not for all age groups. Also the powers to be have a vested interest to keep as many fannies in the classrooms as possible. Don't you realize that the more someone sits in a classroom the more productive they will become?

Cynical said:

I don't see that happening very soon and especially not for all age groups. Also the powers to be have a vested interest to keep as many fannies in the classrooms as possible. Don't you realize that the more someone sits in a classroom the more productive they will become?

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I agree there are benefits to schools that people cannot learn online. However, I think you are being naive if you think that's not going to be the wave of the future.

GodlessBrandy said:

I agree there are benefits to schools that people cannot learn online. However, I think you are being naive if you think that's not going to be the wave of the future.

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It's already happening, so I'm not disagreement with you. The thing is as far as I can tell there has not been a big push for this in particularly at the K to 12th grade levels.

The problem with online education is that a big part school is about acquiring social skills and learning to cope with differences of opinion, of culture, of interests, etc.

To be fair, I am not sure children really learn those things nowadays because you cannot learn this if there is always an authority figure resolving the dispute on behalf of children or even teenagers. Back when I was a kid (the 90s are not so far gone), the rules of imaginary games were negotiated among ourselves. Any disputes needed to be handled among ourselves. Everyone just knew you don't rate out your mate to an adult. Getting adults involved was a sure way to be deprived of friends for days. Adults also had a profound distaste for getting involved, except for extreme cases like someone getting hurt really bad or bullying getting so out of hand things were getting closer to assault than insults. A big part of Haidt's argument about the causes of new phenomena on college campuses concerns the fact the things I just mentioned got increasingly scarce in the late 90s in the US.

The only way you get it is when you let people solve the mess they created on their own. So, if the world eventually turns to much cheaper online education (a teacher can record lectures a few times and use them repeatedly, so it is a very efficient way to convey information), we would also need to find a way to get people to learn how to cope with conflicts, small and large. You have to learn to weigh your own goals against those of others in a way that allows you to reach an agreement whenever possible. You have to learn to discuss various options calmly with people who don't see things as you do and to learn how to stop arguing and move on when none of the people involved can converge on a single opinion. These things are more important than most of what people officially learn in class, save perhaps for reading, writing, and counting.

TheEconomist said:

The problem with online education is that a big part school is about acquiring social skills and learning to cope with differences of opinion, of culture, of interests, etc.

To be fair, I am not sure children really learn those things nowadays because you cannot learn this if there is always an authority figure resolving the dispute on behalf of children or even teenagers. Back when I was a kid (the 90s are not so far gone), the rules of imaginary games were negotiated among ourselves. Any disputes needed to be handled among ourselves. Everyone just knew you don't rate out your mate to an adult. Getting adults involved was a sure way to be deprived of friends for days. Adults also had a profound distaste for getting involved, except for extreme cases like someone getting hurt really bad or bullying getting so out of hand things were getting closer to assault than insults. A big part of Haidt's argument about the causes of new phenomena on college campuses concerns the fact the things I just mentioned got increasingly scarce in the late 90s in the US.

The only way you get it is when you let people solve the mess they created on their own. So, if the world eventually turns to much cheaper online education (a teacher can record lectures a few times and use them repeatedly, so it is a very efficient way to convey information), we would also need to find a way to get people to learn how to cope with conflicts, small and large. You have to learn to weigh your own goals against those of others in a way that allows you to reach an agreement whenever possible. You have to learn to discuss various options calmly with people who don't see things as you do and to learn how to stop arguing and move on when none of the people involved can converge on a single opinion. These things are more important than most of what people officially learn in class, save perhaps for reading, writing, and counting.

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it is as if you do not realize that the resolution of personal conflicts can occur outside a classroom

why must such social behavior be learned inside a classroom?

TheEconomist said:

The problem with online education is that a big part school is about acquiring social skills and learning to cope with differences of opinion, of culture, of interests, etc.

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This was always the concern about homeschooling, and that criticism has been met by homeschoolers' associations. The one in my community is well over 25 years old now, and there are plenty of opportunities to acquire social skills and so on. There were always homeschooled kids on my kids' Little League teams, for example.

justabubba said:

It is as if you do not realize that the resolution of personal conflicts can occur outside a classroom. Why must such social behavior be learned inside a classroom?

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I am not at all implying that they do not have other opportunities to acquire social skills. My point is rather that if you trade in-class learning for online learning, you reduce the time children spend interacting with each other, at least for part of the week, because you are looking at spending more time learning on your own versus more time learning in a group. The impact is admittedly unclear because (a) as you pointed out, they can learn these skills elsewhere and (b) it might change how they spend their spare time or even how much time they can enjoy as leisure hours.

Another point someone could raise with respect to my comment is that it is a lot less of a concern if you consider you need people with a certain degree of autonomy to do things on their own. The online learning might be of primary interests for high school students.

nota bene said:

This was always the concern about homeschooling, and that criticism has been met by homeschoolers' associations. The one in my community is well over 25 years old now, and there are plenty of opportunities to acquire social skills and so on. There were always homeschooled kids on my kids' Little League teams, for example.

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Homeschooled children do offer some kind of test. I have no idea how they fare on average, but the idea could be carried out at least in principle and probably has been carried out in past research.

GodlessBrandy said:

The fact is online schooling for virtually all people of all age groups will eventually be the reality. Most schools will close and online schooling with become the norm.

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I'm interested in your use of the word "fact" here. Can you explain why this is fact rather than opinion?

Kansas has a very successful K-12 online program leading to a diploma. Adults at any age who did not finish high school or have a GED can also finish high school and receive a diploma, from Centre School district. Yes, it's a real diploma from a real school district.

many students who still attend brick and mortar schools take online classes in subjects they previously failed, or take additional online classes to graduate early, or to take classes that aren't sometimes offered at their school, like advanced math. Additionally, students can take college classes online for credit.

It is much cheaper than a brick and mortar school to operate (per student), and does not require high speed bandwidth.

One of the benefits is the many groups available for students to socialize. And parents have more control outside of school to monitor who their kids are socializing with.

Kansas Online Learning Program | A tuition-free, online, K-12 school