Teaching without classroom teachers

01-25-2011

Blog by Valerie Strauss/Washington Post

Florida is the state that keeps on giving, at least to education writers. What it gives to its students is another question. One thing it isn’t giving to all of them these days is classroom teachers. According to The New York Times, more than 7,000 students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools are now in a program in which they are taking core subjects via computer. There’s no teacher in the class, but, rather, a “facilitator” to help the kids. One especially interesting thing about the arrangement is this: Many and perhaps most of the students had no idea what they were walking into when they started school last fall. And another: These “e-learning labs,” were opened at the start of this academic year to help school officials get around the state law -- approved in a referendum by voters in 2002 -- that limits class size. By this past fall, core subject classes were allowed to have no more than 18 in K-3, 22 students in grades 4-8 and 25 students in grades 9-12. But the law doesn’t apply to virtual classrooms. So they can and do have more than the limit; in some cases, 35 or 40 or more students. (more…)

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