Distance Learning Ain't All What It's Cracked Up to Be

It certainly has a place in supplementing brick-and-mortar education, but it should NEVER be seen as one's entire education.

This is most critical in K-12 education, where students need to not just learn academics but also social skills which no homeschool or pseudo-homeschool environment is ever going to teach them well. Not to mention much academic learning occurs when one is interacting with others because there are more ways of teaching students rather than just direct instruction (teacher lectures while student passively sits). There are games, group projects, and other means of imparting academic knowledge. Additionally, there are certain subjects such as science that simply don't lend themselves well to distance/online learning.


A man who knows what he is talking about talks about the pitfalls:

MB: The political decisions are not based on the research. Cyber charters are often citing the data of supplementary students—students in brick and mortar schools but simply taking a course or two online. We are talking about students that can’t get AP Chemistry, for example, and take it through Michigan Virtual School. The home school will pay the fee and make space available in the computer lab or maybe have a distance-learning room. This child may have Period 2 scheduled for his online class, and they will have a student-teacher ratio roughly the same as for a regular class.
When you look at the research that says that online students do as well or better than face-to-face students, this is based on these supplemental students! In fact, up until about 2006-07, most of the supplemental courses were designed for higher ability students. These are the children we’d expect to be doing as well as or better than average students.

Supplementary online or correspondence courses have always been acceptable, but they aren't offered INSTEAD OF traditional courses.

But there is an agenda at work which has nothng whatsoever to do with student learning:

WSWS: Are these measures subverting the notion of democracy?
MB: Totally, if the notion of a democratic society is to provide the opportunity that everyone has an equal chance to participate in the democracy. They are creating a system where there is one level of education for one class of people and a separate, less equal system.
Americans should be quite familiar with this. It’s the separate but equal doctrine—and we all know that it was never equal. The same thing is happening now, not on overt racial lines—although in some jurisdictions you could argue race does play a big role in what’s happening. You are creating two systems and depriving a group of citizens the right to participate fully in the society. Yet that is the basic purpose of education, to create a lettered population able to be active participants in society.