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News: Anchorage, Alaska Hosts National School Choice Week Event
January 24, 2012 By admin Leave a Comment
National School Choice Week (Jan. 22-28, 2012) shines a spotlight on the need for effective options for all children, including great public schools, public charter schools, private schools, virtual schools and homeschooling. Planned by a diverse and bipartisan coalition of citizens and organizations from across the country, National School Choice Week will reach hundreds of communities and tens of millions of Americans in 2012. The week was launched last year to highlight the need to enhance educational options for families across the country. Currently, children in 35 other countries outpace U.S. students, and an American student drops out of school once every 26 seconds.
“With this event, Anchorage residents are continuing an important discussion about the benefits of educational freedom for children and families,” said Andrew Campanella, vice president of public affairs for National School Choice Week. “To ensure that every child receives an effective, quality education, discussions like these are important for every community across our country, and we are very happy that Anchorage residents are using National School Choice Week to discuss the importance of educational options in Alaska.”
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Time for Virtual Schooling to Grow-Up
October 26, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment
Virtual schooling is a good idea. Over the past decade or so, online education has proven itself a valuable component of the learning system, from elementary to post-secondary. I personally use a lot of online learning in my own teaching, so I am a tried and true advocate for online learning.
But, it needs to grow up. And fast. As online learning approaches the knee of the exponential curve, we can’t ignore it as just a small tangential sandbox. With 200,000 full-time virtual students nationwide and growing, it is core to the system now and we need to treat it that way.
In a new brief my partners Gene Glass and Kevin Welner, of the National Education Policy Center, articulate many of the current problems in the P-12 online learning space. There are serious, documented quality concerns and in some cases a near total lack of traditional accountability and oversight. The Washington Post this morning provided a good summary. The abuses are appalling and could cause a national backlash against the use of online learning in the P-12 learning system.
For the rest of the article, go to Time for Virtual Schooling to Grow-Up
Ketchikan seeks to broaden ways of learning
September 25, 2011 By admin Leave a Comment
The Ketchikan School District is becoming more flexible and effective in reaching every student’s needs with its burgeoning distance learning, homeschool and summer school programs, officials say.
“It’s really about individualizing the whole instruction,” Fast Track Virtual School Director Bill Whicker said.
Revilla Alternative School has offered traditional homeschooling programs for K-12 students since its founding in 1973, Revilla Principal Doug Gregg said. It continues to offer those, and support for homeschool families through the Fast Track program.
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