Five Questions for the President of National School Choice Week

This week marks the seventh-annual National School Choice Week, and the organization behind it expects this year's event to be the largest yet, with approximately 20,000 independently-organized events taking place around the country. Started in 2011, National School Choice Week considers itself “the world’s largest annual celebration of opportunity in education.” It's even crossed over into pop culture. In 2013, the Jonas Brothers, who were homeschooled, launchedNational School Choice Week with a concert in Phoenix.

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Embracing school choice doesn't mean abandoning public education

Betsy DeVos, President-elect Trump's nominee to serve as secretary of education, will begin her Senate confirmation hearings Tuesday evening. The nomination of DeVos, who supports school choice, has renewed the national discussion over the importance of opportunity in K-12 education.

If you were to listen only to the national-level discussion over the issue, you might think school choice is wildly controversial. But in many states across the country, that's not the case. Much of the "controversy" over school choice has largely ebbed.

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Six Key Components of Effective Online Instruction

I was recently reminded that almost ALL instruction today has an online component. I was speaking with a colleague who decided to tackle what I would consider to be a complex plumbing project at home simply by reviewing online “how to” videos. She had no plumbing experience, and yet she was able to discover the tools and techniques she needed online, learn from experts and solve her problem while gaining real-world experience (all without flooding her kitchen).

In the last 20 years–17 of which I’ve worked at the non-profit The Virtual High School–I’ve seen education, and the ways in which our students gather information, dramatically change. Informal learning has certainly grown by leaps and bounds through the use of online education and online resources in many forms. Our challenge as educators is to leverage our students’ desires and preferences to use online education while advancing their learning. With the flood of information available, what does practical and effective online instruction even look like?

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The biggest school choice celebration ever is happening right now

More than 6.4 million people are participating in more than 21,000 events this week as part of National School Choice Week. Organizers say it's the "largest series of education-related events" in the country's history.

National School Choice Week started in 2011 with just 150 events across the country. By 2013, it had ballooned to more than 3,600 events. The celebration of educational choice has included more events every year it's been held.

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Iowa teen launches Facebook effort to target bullying trend

Beginning in middle school, an area high school teen found herself the target of bullying from classmates. When confronted with a very limited amount of physical bullying in eighth grade, she retaliated in kind and was punished for it. When dealing with a far more substantial amount of verbal abuse, ridicule, rumor mongering and social media attacks — she became a shell of herself. She shrank from society, limiting her social interaction, self medicating, turning to self harm methods, planning to end her life and subsequently landing in medical care which helped her begin to turn her life around.

The circumstances haven’t necessarily changed. The bullying continues, however she believes she has walked through the darkness and come out the other side and into the light as she stands just months from graduation.

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Why Do Students Choose Blended and Online Schools?

More students than ever before are attending blended and online schools. While the reasons students select the schools vary, it is clear that these schools are providing a useful option for families across the country. Blended and online schools provide the flexibility as to where, when, and how students learn. The Foundation for Blended and Online Learning (FBOL) set out to discover why students and families are choosing these innovative school models and how they are finding out about the options available.

In the paper Why Do Students Choose Blended and Online Schools?, developed with the Evergreen Education Group, FBOL explores the common motivations behind the choice to enroll in a school or program other than a traditional brick-and-mortar setting. Through a series of stakeholder interviews, school snapshots, and data drawn from a variety of sources, the paper offers a look at the academic, social and sometimes difficult personal reasons students throughout the country turn to alternatives to their local public school.

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Online charter school students look to make eImpact in the physical world

MIDDLETON — Students who spend a large portion of their school year individually taking courses online are working together to create hands-on projects that will benefit the community.

A group of 11 students in grades four through seven at the 21st Century eSchool, a virtual charter school in the Middleton-Cross Plains School District, are building three Little Free Libraries, a bird blind for Confluence Pond in Middleton and an app to help identify birds. The group calls itself eImpact.

“You know you helped do something,” said sixth-grader Joie Meuer.

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DeVos: Shift education policy to what 'moms and dads want'

President-elect Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Education will tell senators Tuesday that the federal government's education policy needs to be based on what's best for parents and students, instead of the educational system itself.

"I share President-elect Trump's view that it's time to shift the debate from what the system thinks is best for kids to what moms and dads want, expect and deserve," Betsy DeVos will say in prepared remarks to the Senate health committee.

DeVos is a school choice supporter, and her testimony argues that the federal government needs to encourage a wide range of choices to help students get through high school.

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The Future Of EdTech Under The New Secretary Of Education

As with many of President-elect Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments to date, there has been significant controversy over his pick for Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. DeVos is a staunch advocate of school choice programs and believes that the privatization of education through voucher programs and the expansion of charter schools will help children from low-income families who are trapped in failing schools.

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How Dare Betsy DeVos Give American Families an Educational Choice

DeVos doesn’t deserve to be criticized for supporting worthwhile, effective school reforms. There are millions of American families who desperately wish that their children could attend a different school. Donald Trump’s secretary of education nominee, Betsy DeVos, wants to give them that option, while all too many on the left would like to preserve the educational status quo. School reform is a complex and multi-faceted issue, but there is at least one relatively clear divide between left and right: With few exceptions, the Left wants to improve and reform American education by doubling down on financial, moral, and intellectual support for public schools with a unionized work force; DeVos and other conservative reformers, by contrast, want to improve and reform education by introducing market competition and giving families as many viable educational options as possible.

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