On the Purposes of Schooling
Horace Mann: "Man is improvable. Some people think he is only a machine, and that the only difference between a man and a mill is that one is carried by blood and the other by water."
The New York Times' Stephanie Saul has a blockbuster investigative feature out on K12, the for-profit manager of virtual public charter schools. Saul finds that enrolling a child in a virtual school is, in fact, cheaper for the state than enrolling him in a brick-and-mortar school. But in the case of Pennsylvania's Agora Cyber Charter School, the modest cost savings are more than offset by a loss of quality: a learning "environment" of low standards (the lowest grade is not 0, but 50, and it is almost impossible to enforce attendance) and little or no real-time interaction with peers and teachers.
Many educators believe there is a place for full-time virtual learning for children whose pace is extremely accelerated or those with behavioral or other issues, like teenage mothers who need to stay home with their
