Gov. Pat Quinn signed bill HB 494 into law May 24, placing a moratorium on charter schools that include virtual schooling components in school districts other than the Chicago School District. The signing of the bill places the governor in the middle of a nationwide debate about the role of technology in education.
“HB 494 aims to keep Illinois in the dark,” said Ted Dabrowski, vice president of policy for the Illinois Policy Institute and a volunteer board member for Virtual Learning solutions, in a blog post on the IPI’s website. “It’s a message to the rest of the nation that Illinois is not ready to embrace the technology that is changing how the world operates.”
There are currently two schools in Chicago that heavily rely on virtual learning: the Youth Connection Charter School, which serves at-risk students, and the Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS), which offers an online curriculum for students from kindergarten through grade 12.
“K-12 virtual schools have the greatest potential of pushing students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds to being invisible in society,” said Dr. An Chih Cheng, an assistant professor of Education Policy studies at DePaul University. The real consequence of online education, Cheng says, is that children will not receive a good education.
“Like the privatization in higher education, recently, in seeking of new market ‘niche’ and revenue, virtual schools have started to target low-income districts which receive more subsidies,” said Cheng.
CVCS had 590 students enrolled as of 2012. Sixty-two percent of those students come from low-income households, according to the Illinois state board of education.
“Everybody realizes that digital technology and online resources can enhance higher education,” said Jason Martin, a journalism professor at DePaul. “But nobody has a single right answer for how to implement online learning into traditional models or how to best use it to serve students.”
“Almost every school uses virtual learning to supplement its curriculum,” said Dabrowski. “Whether it’s a Khan Academy video for algebra or a K12 Inc. module for Chinese, schools across the nation are using virtual learning to deliver student-centered education.”
Blended curriculums that used both online learning and traditional teaching methods showed a modest performance increase, according to a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. The report continues to say however that the positive effects should not be attributed to the virtual media as the students where often given additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in the control conditions for the study.
“Essentially it’s not the technology that matters,” said Cheng. “Educators should be critical of the free market as the mechanism for education and the discourse education in capitalist terms.”
Cheng said that the problem with the current trend of online education is that is attempting to replace teachers in an attempt to make schools cheaper and more profitable.
CVCS is owned by K12 Inc., a for-profit company that has schools in 32 states and the District of Columbia. The Chronicle of Higher Education predicts that 3.97 million students will enroll in at least one fully online course in 2014.
