Home School Online

I can’t back up these stats but I’d be interested if anyone has real hard data, or thoughts on it.

In the late 90s and early part of this century, there were three red hot trends in educational choice:

• homeschooling (charted by the US Gov’t as 2.2% in 2003 – homeschooling statistics)
• magnet schools
• charter schools

They’ve each grown to about 3% of the K12 population and are now growing at a more slower rate than before, maybe 20% annually.

The current red hot trend is public virtual schooling which is growing at nearly 100% annually, primarily at the high school level. It hasn’t yet hit 1% of K12 population but it might this next year.  It’s fueled by four factors:

- kids and families like it
- teachers like teaching online (ie wearing PJs)
- test results are very positive. It seems to be more effective than traditional classrooms and less dangerous
- it’s cheap, cheaper than having kids in schools

I just read about this which I think is cool.  To celebrate composition in all its forms, we [The National Council of Teachers of Writing] are inviting diverse participants –students, teachers, parents, grandparents, service and industrial workers, managers, business owners, legislators, retirees, and many more — to submit a piece of writing to the National Gallery of Writing.   

Basically, they’re trying to get everyone to contribute a piece of writing, organized in local Galleries, to a National Gallery. Backed by the Verizon foundation and many of  the national educational groups (see below), they’re thinking that such a project is one heck of a writing prompt for students and everyone else. Basically, what have you got to say and how well can you say it?  I notice that there has been no effort to include homeschoolers and that no homeschoolers have made any effort to get involved.  

 I see also that there is  a movement to create a National Writing Day on October 20th (ie a bill before Congress). 

Does anyone have thoughts on this? I’ll discuss it with the Time4Writing.com people (they’re one of the top writing schools online for homeschoolers) to see if they want to get involved in any way. They might use it as a writing prompt, they might think of building a whole course around, or they might think that it’s way too much distraction to devote any time to it. 

I notice that the National Gallery of Writing website has no graphics available for those of us that want to post about it.  They do have a twitter account which appears to be the only way to communicate with them.  Very novel. Original. OK, it’s weird. But they’re trying. (Actually, it’s a broadcast only twitter account).