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Education

The Nation's Largest School District Is Making Virtual School a Permanent Option (time.com) 68

Posted by BeauHD from the product-of-the-pandemic dept.
New York City, home to more than a million students in its school system, is the biggest school district in the U.S. -- and now allows any student to enroll virtually in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Time reports: Dubbed Virtual Innovators Academy, there are 17 teachers for about 200 students enrolled in the 2023-2024 school year for sophomore and freshman years. Each year, another grade level will be added, and the school's funding comes from the city and state, just like other public schools. Students meet in-person for required state exams and for monthly social gatherings like arcade games at Dave & Busters or seeing a Broadway show. But many of the most popular extracurriculars are done from home, says Virtual Innovators Academy principal Terri Grey, like esports and flying drones. [...]

And it isn't just in New York: school districts in Utah, Georgia, California, and elsewhere have also launched permanent virtual schools. Concerns remain about the effectiveness of virtual school. Critics worry about the lack of in-person social interaction during crucial developmental years, and about whether teachers can educate as effectively through a screen. But administrators behind the nation's burgeoning virtual schools say they have studied what works and what doesn't from remote-schooling during the pandemic when setting up these communities. Every morning, students at Virtual Innovators Academy meet in small groups with a teacher advisor to talk about how they're doing and give them time to wake up in the morning and connect with other classmates. There's less emphasis on multiple choice tests, which proved harder to administer online, and more emphasis on research projects.

"Too many people judge virtual instruction as if it were the emergency roadside online instruction that happened as a result of the pandemic," says Anthony Godfrey, who helps oversee the K-12 Jordan Virtual Learning Academy in Utah. "This is something very different. This is a carefully thought out, very intentional way of providing a unique and effective means of instruction." [...] But for all the proponents of virtual schooling, there are critics who worry about what's being lost behind the computer screen. [...] Unstructured, spontaneous conversations are often the most memorable parts of school, he argues; students might work side-by-side, help each other with homework, and also socialize in between classes. In virtual school, "How do you create space for bumping into somebody in the hall?" [wonders Nathan Holbert, a researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who studies virtual learning]. "I don't know that you can."
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The Nation's Largest School District Is Making Virtual School a Permanent Option More

The Nation's Largest School District Is Making Virtual School a Permanent Option

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  • bumping into somebody in the hall (Score:5, Funny)

    by cascadingstylesheet ( 140919 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @07:00AM (#63790046) Journal

    In virtual school, "How do you create space for bumping into somebody in the hall?" [wonders Nathan Holbert, a researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who studies virtual learning]. "I don't know that you can."

    Well, I'm sure the school could assemble mobile teams of bullies to come to your house and beat you up for bumping into them, but that seems like an odd thing to be concerned about missing ...

  • Why? (Score:3)

    by sabbede ( 2678435 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @07:20AM (#63790070)
    The pandemic is over. One of the things we learned from it was that the only good coming from "virtual" classes is that parents got to find out just how bad their kids' teachers were.

    So, what's this a solution for and why is it better than the alternative?

    • Mark my words... Politicians like Eric Adams will want to push this for austerity reasons and sell it as a technology improvement. Cheaper to have students and teachers be homebound than to maintain school buildings.

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @07:41AM (#63790110)

      What is the alternative? You may notice they aren't offering it for the entire school system, there's more than 200 kids in New York. They are adding it as an option, so the alternative here is not sending a normal kid to a normal school. It's sending someone to a virtual school who isn't capable of being in a normal school (e.g. someone who need special care), or it's sending someone to a virtual school who would otherwise be home-schooled (because despite what the people doing the home-schooling will tell you, nearly always it does not lead to a better outcome).

      One of the things we learned from it was that the only good coming from "virtual" classes is that parents got to find out just how bad their kids' teachers were.

      In what way? Because parents had to find out what it's like to actually deal with their pretentious little shits? It sounds like you're another one of those clueless "teacher = bad" parrots without a fucking clue how the school system works or what teachers do. Universally grades dropped when kids weren't able to go school. That shows how *good* teachers were. But I'm sure that is lost on you.

      • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

        by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @11:04AM (#63790588)

        >(because despite what the people doing the home-schooling will tell you, nearly always it does not lead to a better outcome).

        I just read over a few dozen links. The results of homeschooling research are directly predictable based on who is doing the research.

        Outcomes are reported to vary from "worst thing ever" to "kids do much better" with plenty of "no real difference" in between.

        My favorite was a "study" that said parents who send their kids to public school believe homeschoolers are not getting a good education. Like, lol, wtf? Someone paid for that study.

        If you have a link to a trust worthy independent study I'd love to see it.

        • If you have a link to a trust worthy independent study I'd love to see it.

          My impression is much educational (and social sciences in general) research are the drunk with the lamppost, looking for evidence to confirm pre-existing beliefs.

          I firmly believe the biggest benefit of the whole COVID situation is it's the Social Scientist Full Employment Act of 2020. There are so many things we should now be able to study using the biggest natural experiment of our lifetimes. Let's hope we don't fritter that away plogging personal agendas.

          • I'm sure it'll be frittered.

            I went to public school until HS when I went to private school, my kid is in public school and will stay there. Her school isn't the best but she's learning things and no one has attacked her so sufficient for now.

            I honestly don't know if homeschool is better or worse. I suspect it greatly varies based on the effort and capabilities of individual parents/families vs the local school options so we see results all over the place. I do believe that if parents feel they have the t

        • FYI, homeschooling groups, while numerous and generally successful, do not have funding even remotely comparable to the NEA.

          But here is why I believe it works better in almost all cases:

          Best case, your public school teacher is teaching at least 12 students per class and likely many more.

          Homeschool parent is teaching what? Maybe 5?

          They can provide personalized attention, specialized curricula and materials, etc., with MUCH greater ease than a teacher or a school district can, no matter how good they might b

      • ....sending someone to a virtual school who would otherwise be home-schooled (because despite what the people doing the home-schooling will tell you, nearly always it does not lead to a better outcome).

        Care to share how you came to that conclusion? I and my siblings were homeschooled until high school, and I can tell you we weren't impressed with most of our classmates (at a "Blue Ribbon" school that you had to apply and be accepted to). My kids are all being homeschooled and when we are with their public school peers in a social setting there is a stark difference in their reading abilities, comprehension, and vocabulary, with the homescoolers being more advanced.

        Sure there's always the edge case of the "homeschooled" kids that are just ignored and not really taught anything, but those are by far the exception to the rule. How many public schooled kids are just getting passed and not really learning?
        https://www.usnews.com/educati... [usnews.com].
        In Baltimore, MD 15% of public high schoolers are reading at grade level and 8% are at grade level for math. Literally anyone who cares about their kids could homeschool them and do a better job.

        My kids do a combination of online classes and instruction from my wife, depending on the subject and the kid. Each curriculum is specifically targeted to the student, their strengths and weaknesses.

        On top of the actual learning of basic subjects, they can choose projects or subjects that are of particular interest for them and since they are invested, they get more from the class than if it were some randomly assigned project for an entire class. They also aren't trapped in a building for 40 hours a week. When I went from being homeschooled to public school in 10th grade, I couldn't get over how much time was wasted during the day. Most homeschoolers I know are done with their work in half a day (I would say before lunch, but it could be from after lunch until dinner.), while getting more done and learning more. That frees up time for field trips to museums, places of interest, or just playing with friends. Homeschoolers generally are more adept at talking and socializing with adults because that's what they are used to. Who cares if they are "socialized" with other kids??

        It does take at least one parent that cares and is willing to put in the work, because it takes a lot of time (and money) from the parents perspective.

        Anyway I would like to know where you got your data on homeschoolers.

    • I used to know some teachers there, and I'm going to assume that my information is still good: Under Bloomberg, New York implemented a school choice system (at least for high school, I'm not sure about elementary), where instead of just attending your neighborhood school you could choose your preferred school (meaning your parents' preferred school) anywhere in the city.

      I'm not entirely sure what the logic was there, something something freedom competition something, but the effect was that children of a
      • Are you perhaps thinking of the charter schools? Based on that data, those generally perform better, but just like the public school system the pandemic led to decreases in outcome [nyccharterschools.org]. Remote education is not effective for a larger number of students that in person education.

    • Re: Why? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ljw1004 ( 764174 )

      You got it backwards. Covid was when parents realized how crappy they the parents were at being teachers and dealing with kids all day, and how awesome their teachers really were.

    • Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)

      by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @07:56AM (#63790156) Homepage

      The pandemic is very much not over. About 500 people are dying in the US weekly due to covid. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/us/covid-cases.html [nytimes.com]. That's not as high as it was, but not nearly over. More concerningly, hospitalization numbers are up, and wastewater numbers are very high right now https://biobot.io/data/) [biobot.io]. Unfortunately, getting more granular detail now is tough because the CDC decided to stop doing regular updates to their public facing date set, in part it seems to give the public the exact feel you are repeating, that this is over, and they can go and relax about everything.

      All of that said, permanent virtual schooling is not a good idea. I'm a school teacher, and it really did not go well. The most motivated students handled virtual schooling well, and the others mostly did not. Keeping students engaged and working with each other virtually is tough, and getting them to interact in contexts where they have to actually work with each other is really hard. And having hybrid setups, with some students in person and others virtual was incredibly draining on teachers, and made a lot of lesson plans and other things much harder to implement. That said, having this an option which a small fraction of students use (which is what New York seems to be trying to do), may if implemented well still end up working ok. Since this appears to be opt-in, rather than a default, one is going to be seeing it for students who have other issues and who are themselves often coming with more driven family members who are engaged with their kids education. This might not be awful.

      • I know a lot of those are older folks, but the hospitalizations are gonna be a major issue in 3-5 years. COVID does permeant damage, especially to the lungs. Am I readying that right that we have 3000 daily hospital admissions? As in 3000 new people with serious enough COVID that they're getting admitted to the hospital? I know we're in a spike right now, but still. We'd be looking had hundreds of thousands of people with long term damage to their lungs and maybe even heart (not to mention 1/3 of them getti
      • How many of those people are still entirely unvaccinated or in such poor health that any virus could do them in?

      • All of that said, permanent virtual schooling is not a good idea. I'm a school teacher, and it really did not go well.

        Virtual learning happens easily and independently.
        It's virtual didactic delivery and "classroom management" that isn't viable.

        Give a 13yo who "isn't good at science" a Nintendo Switch with Zelda BOTW or TOTK. Then leave them alone.
        Come back 4-5 weeks later. You'll find that with no scheduled lectures, nor flipped classrooms, nor LMS/publisher integrations, nor Zoom/Teams meetings, nor SLOs, nor IEPs, nor legion $250k/year Ed.D. tax-funded bureaucrat administrators, nor any of the other artificial trappings

    • Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hort_wort ( 1401963 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @08:27AM (#63790206)

      Some children go through great distress attending classes. It can be due to bullying, hardships at home, innate mental woes, or a mix of all three.

      As someone who had all three, I would have *loved* the chance to go to school remotely and have it be culturally acceptable to do so. I ended up coming out of it with so much PTSD that I couldn't function as a person for years. Later I managed to take college classes online and get a comp sci degree. Top of the class. Got offered a job straight out of it, also online. Definitely worked better for me.

      • You list 3 issues for kids attending classes but only 1 is related to being in school.

        If the bullying was stomped out would you have preferred or had a happier life outcome if you had attended school?

      • Great for you. I totally support choice and I’m glad it worked for you.

        But, there is LOTS of hard data now showing that remote learning is a second-rate format. Most people do NOT do better under remote learning. They do measurable worse.

        This isn’t some “waaa I like in-person better” whining. I’ve seen the actual data at my institution. On average, a class does worse by almost a full letter grade worth of performance when switched to remote learning.

        What’s wo
        • Wow. Apparently I touched a nerve somewhere. Too bad I’ve seen the actual data. Remote learning is NOT equivalent to in-school, and most people who switch to remote will be worse-educated. Not all, but definitely most.

          This is reality.

    • The pandemic is over. One of the things we learned from it was that the only good coming from "virtual" classes is that parents got to find out just how bad their kids' teachers were.

      Well, TFA summary assures us they've studied what works and what does not. I hope whoever is behind this has at least put some thought and research into this. OTOH, this is coming from the same bright sparks who thought masking 5 year olds was effective and harmless so color me skeptical.

      Here's the thing: as long as this is a voluntary program, why not give it a try? Who knows, maybe it's just crazy enough to work and maybe we'll learn something in the experiment.

      (I'll tell you why not: even if this is an a

  • There's already a thriving industry in "online credit recovery"; which has proven to be an attractive pitch because it allows you to say that students with...partial mastery...or...individualized...learning requirements are being catered to through advanced self-paced courseware; while either shunting them off home or, if on-campus is required, shoving them into a computer lab and having the bare minimum in supervision(since the course is online and they aren't the teacher no specific qualifications are req

  • Is it ignorance or plain arrogance to assume the USA as the default country when posting?

    • Is it ignorance or plain arrogance to assume the USA as the default country when posting?

      Slashdot is a US centric site, always has been...so, it is very normal to assume anything said/discussed on a "National" basis to be the US, unless otherwise noted.

    • What country did you have in mind instead of a website that has always been primarily about, hosted in, run by, and used by citizens of the world's only super power?

      Maybe we should default to Madagascar?

  • In 10-15 years (Score:4, Interesting)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Wednesday August 23, 2023 @08:27AM (#63790204)
    Well, we'll see the outcomes in 10-15 years' time. Anything else is speculation or conjecture. AFAIK, the history of online & distance education projects for primary & secondary education have consistently under-performed compared to presential teaching. It's always been a niche offering, usually offered because of circumstances, e.g. children who live in remote areas or in poverty. The most successful online programmes are post-grad courses, I suspect because post-grad students are more likely to already have the pre-requisite knowledge, skills, & attitudes (self-efficacy, self-discipline, etc.) to essentially teach themselves with minimal guidance from faculty. Primary school children have little to none of this.

    Who knows, maybe they've come up with a radical, revolutionary way of teaching young children effectively online that defies the lessons learned from previous research projects?

    • Well, we'll see the outcomes in 10-15 years' time. Anything else is speculation or conjecture.

      Well, these are ninth and tenth graders we're talking about. Six years from now they'll all mostly be done with college or well into their first jobs. We might be able to see how well they did in that timeframe. Problem is, a few hundred kids is far, far too small a sample size to draw reliable conclusions.

      • AFAIK, there are 2 main measurements that really matter: #1 - The learning outcomes/graduation rates at the end of secondary education, & #2 - How long those graduates stay in education (The longer they stay in education, the more qualified they become, the higher they earn, the better their quality of life, etc.. Also, the higher the ROI, in taxable income, from educating them in the first place)

  • There will be circumstances where in-person may not be possible or desirable for some students so having virtual school as an option makes sense

  • The people whining that this is going to ruin the kid forever without constant socializing in person must think home schooled kids are retarded. Turns out they grow up just fine though

  • First, this is not going to cheap, even compared to bricks and mortar schools, if it is to be a decent product. Second, Covid showed in spades that virtual school sucks and in fact was pretty much a complete failure. So, of course, why not spend a few more zillions and be baffled at its inevitable failure.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      COVID showed that virtual school run with absolutely no prep or funding for making it virtual sucks. Which, uh, was a surprise to no one. Maybe it can't be done, but it's absurd to take what happened in an emergency with no attempt to do it well as evidence to that effect.
  • There were several new social networks at the start of the pandemic that were working on ways to have spontaneous interactions, like letting people drive avatars around a virtual room. What happened to all those, some of them seemed to have some good ideas on how to make virtual meetings more like real life meetings.

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