Brief Highlights Online Learning To Combat Teacher Shortages, State Budget Shortfalls, And Low Student Achievement

The Alliance for Excellent Education has released a brief that details how the integral use of online technology in today’s secondary school classrooms can strengthen the teacher workforce, improve student outcomes, and allow states to do more despite flat education budgets.

According to the brief, The Online Learning Imperative: A Solution to Three Looming Crises in Education, state and local public officials are faced with stark realities that will force major changes in traditional education processes, especially for middle and high schools. This educational “perfect storm” includes:

• Global skill demands vs. educational achievement. At present, the nation cannot meet President Obama’s goals for college completion without dramatically improving the quality of learning in secondary schools. Even improving high school graduation rates will not result in achieving much greater postsecondary achievement unless students are better prepared in high school.

• The funding cliff. The current recession will not permit continued education spending increases for most states. As a result, state policymakers and education leaders will be challenged with raising student performance while dealing with tightening budgets.

• Looming teacher shortages. Placing high performing teachers in thousands of low performing classrooms becomes even more difficult due to large-scale retirements of experienced teachers in the coming years as well as low retention rates for new educators.

According to The Online Imperative, whether the setting is a virtual school or blending online instruction with a teacher in a classroom, student learning shows improvement. The brief cites a 2009 U.S. Department of Education study that found students who took all or part of their classes online did better than students in face-to-face classrooms, and that the advantage was stronger in blended classrooms than in online-only classrooms. The Alliance brief also argues that policymakers can reasonably hold online educators to higher learning standards than they can traditional educators.

With almost every state facing budget shortfalls, the Alliance brief also points to how online instruction can positively affect the states’ financial bottom lines and student performance. For example, rather than paying three Chinese language instructors to teach a limited number of students in three different schools, one instructor could reach all the students through online instruction and students would no longer be bound by rigid time schedules.

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