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Neighborhood Internet Schools: The Wave of the Future?
posted by: Cindy Omlin | August 15, 2012, 10:45 PM   

Dr. David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, recently penned an opinion editorial about expanding online education options for students across the country. He contends that big problems in education call for big solutions. By leveraging the power of the internet, all students could potentially attend emerging "Neighborhood Internet Schools." These one-classroom schools would serve students of all grades and account for all subjects through online content and parental support.

He writes in The Wall Street Journal, "Local Internet schools are a promising way to mobilize existing talent. Much infrastructure is required that doesn't exist. But the parts are all spread out on the table. All we need is to fit them together properly."

Dr. Gelernter argues that simple technology and parental involvement can transform education:

We have big problems with our schools—and need new ideas about how to fix them. Deep changes are needed in our attitude toward teaching, leading education scholar Diane Ravitch wrote recently in the New York Review of Books. We need smarter, better-educated recruits to the profession. We need to value a teacher's experience properly and discard the thought that idealistic college graduates with no experience make brilliant teachers automatically.

Fair enough. But we need other solutions too. We need plans that make direct use of our biggest assets: parental anger, and people's selfish but reasonable willingness to give some time to improve their own children's education now, versus someone else's in 20 years.

Local Internet schools are a promising way to mobilize existing talent. Much infrastructure is required that doesn't exist. But the parts are all spread out on the table. All we need is to fit them together properly.

Is there a problem? "We have to see this as a wake-up call," Secretary of Education Arne Duncan responded to the latest international survey of 15-year-olds in 2010. "We can quibble, or we can face the brutal truth that we're being out-educated." Of course this was only the latest wake-up call. We slept through the first 30 years' worth of ringers and buzzers and alarms, starting with the devastating report "A Nation At Risk," commissioned by the Reagan administration in 1983. And as matters stands, our plans are to go on sleeping.



Click here to read more.

What do you think about Dr. Gelernter's idea? Do you support online learning?
Comment below.

Originally posted by Alix at AAE.

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