You HAVE to have interaction with others to be fully rounded as a functional adult. Virtual schools are being used by cynics as a way to gut teachers, librarians, and others for cost-saving reasons.
The "teachers" can be outsourced to India or China and make pennies a day.
It’s an appealing proposition, and one that has attracted support in state legislatures, including Virginia’s. But in one of the most hard-fought quarters of public policy, arising chorus of critics argues that full-time virtual learning doesn’t effectively educate children.“Kindergarten kids learning in front of a monitor — that’s just wrong,” said Maryelen Calderwood, an elected school committee member in Greenfield, Mass., who unsuccessfully tried to stop K12 from contracting with her community to create New England’s first virtual public school last year. “It’s absolutely astounding how people can accept this so easily.”
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Virtual schools may be problematic, but not for any of the reason that you state here.
You say they should be outlawed "except in extremely limited circumstances like credit recovery and teaching rural students". Who would get to decide the circumstances? And why should anyone who isn't intimately familiar with a child's situation decide how that child should be taught?
It is just as important for students to be able to socialize with peers and learn to work together as it is to learn academics.
You HAVE to have interaction with others to be fully rounded as a functional adult.
This is the same argument that people use against homeschooling, but there are organizations that allow kids to interact with other homeschooled students.
The "teachers" can be outsourced to India or China and make pennies a day.
You say that they *can* be but are they? Nothing in the article you linked to points to that.
Geniune concerns about virtual schooling that the article did mention are the ridiculously low on-time graduation rates and the money received by the schools through taxpayer funding.
However, virtual schools are still a new system. I do believe that, once everything get settled, they will be a blessing for many students.
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