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Originally Posted by C.
I'm also wondering if there will be a greater push towards online education that came into play during the pandemic. Will there be a need for less physical space as families become smaller (seriously, who has money to raise a kid these days and still have a life), and that online education can be provided at a much better price. Will it be for everyone? No, but may be a better option than some of the shithole schools out there in some poor communities.
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I was actually thinking the other day, I think the pandemic killed all interest in remote K-12 education and also flipped the political right's opinion of it from favorable to unfavorable. Before covid I remember periodically seeing Republicans talk about online charter schools, especially in Florida. Now that's pretty much toast.
There have been countless studies showing that remote learning was really bad for kids. Also there was a trend where parents were taking their kids out of public school districts that maintained strict covid protocols and remote learning and putting them in private and charter schools that reopened to in person learning sooner. Also I this forced at-home learning and the requirement that parents be involved was a huge reality check for families who notionally supported home schooling for political reasons but had never actually done it.
Vulnerable kids from low income or unstable households who make up most of the study body at "shithole schools" are even more in need of in-person classroom instruction to learn based on research into just how badly behind kids got during 2020 and 2021. I read somewhere that some schools in the Houston area, like half the kids pretty much vanished during online classes and became unreachable. Never mind school is a place for them to be in a relatively more healthy and positive environment for socialization, access to free school lunches, etc.
I think remote school for children and teens is going to remain seen as a niche option that only works for students with certain qualities and families that treat it as a form of hybrid home-schooling and have the resources and motivation to actually do it.
Now, what might be interesting would be an 'inverted' class which is both in person and remote. Students would attend a physical classroom in person every day of the week and participate in learning activities led by aides or assistant teachers, so not just sit at a desk in front of a screen with a room monitor doing nothing. But the main lecture component and some of the questions and answers and engagement would be remote. This would lower costs and might work for community colleges but not fond of the idea for normal schools.
Another thought is that student-teacher ratios would stay the same, the student would directly be taught by the teacher while sitting at a desk in an actual school, but the teacher is located somewhere else and the class is a video conference. This would allow one teacher to teach classes across multiple campuses without having to drive back and forth. This would be especially useful for rural education. Small rural schools, especially economically disadvantaged ones, typically struggle to offer more advanced classes. There might be only 2 or 3 students who are ready to take calculus for example and there is no way for the school to pay for a teacher just for them. But you could put those 2 or 3 students into a room with an aide and then they could join up online with the other 2 or 3 students at 10 other small schools just like theirs and have a class led by a teacher who is at home or in an AV room at a different school they teach in-person at during other times of the day but 100 miles away.
Alternatively, it would allow students to be micro-sorted into courses that match their exact level of need and ability. Currently that's not possible for the same reason a rural school cant' teach AP calc, there wouldn't be enough kids to economically justify a course be created. Because that can't be done, we just fail struggling kids who don't master the last 3/4 of a class they've been in all year and make them retake the same class over and over again, which is a waste of time and effort and sets the kids back. Or we advance/graduate them and they don't meet standards. Either way not a good result.
What changes things is scale. If you had enough students in a school, even the smallest category in the groups sorted by ability would be large enough to reach the economical 25 to 1 or so student:teacher ratio. If classroom instruction was conducted through video conferencing remotely, then several physical school campuses could be functionally combined into one massive virtual school with like 10,000 pupils without needing to bus every kid tens of miles to a college-sized campus.
Again, a school like this would still have physical classrooms containing aides and assistants and participate in hands on learning, student teacher ratios would be the same, and there would still some traditional classes with the teacher standing there. Teachers could travel around occasionally to meet all their pupils at least once and there could be open house events for parents to get to know them at central locations. Ideally these virtual school systems would be regional rather than nationwide. And there would be activities and measures designed to create a community inside this school like football and pep rallies. None of that would be lost. It would just be that instead of the teacher standing there they may be at a different school miles away, and most of the time that would not be a big deal.