Opinion: Why online classes are needed
By DARREL DEIDE
Special to The Press
According to the leaders of Idaho's education labor union, the Idaho Education Association (IEA), online education is wrong for Idaho students. If you have followed the testimony offered at the public hearings, recently held around the state, you might have come away with the same belief. In reality, the union's objection to digital learning has nothing to do with the quality of education. It has everything to do with the union's desire to maintain its monopoly. The movement to require a couple of online courses in order to graduate is not, in and of itself, revolutionary. But the IEA knows it has to block online learning. Why? Because this is one more move toward free market competition in education. The union hates competition -- competition for students, and competition for memberships. All monopolies hate competition and certainly k-12 education, on which the union has maintained a firm grip, is just that, a monopoly.
Those union bosses who oppose this reform measure are insisting that we continue to conduct education as usual. We all know what the result has been. We have a high dropout rate, our schools which were once the leaders in the world now rank 15th in reading literacy, 25th in math and 17th in science among all of the industrialized countries. We are not just a little behind, we are a long way behind. You might expect that we could be behind Japan, Korea and China but we are also behind Estonia, Poland and the Netherlands. Even allowing for inflation, we have doubled our expenditures per child in the last 30 years and spend half again as much as South Korea, yet we continue to lag behind.
The problem is not a lack of money or resources. It is how we use what we have. Business as usual has not worked and will not work. We simply must change. That is what the reform measurers are all about, including requiring students to take a couple of online classes.
Two online credits comprise just a small portion of the credits required to graduate from high school. In the future with the advancing technology and a more savvy student population, that two-credit requirement will be minuscule. Students already use technology for research, reading and basic course work. And why shouldn't they? Just about every career they can envision after school will require competent use of technology. Why should the education union block our kids' access to technology that they will need to use to be competent, successful and well rounded for postsecondary education or a career? It simply makes no sense.
Online courses are being required now, but soon, it will just be a normal part of school life. Schools will become a mix of traditional instruction coupled with online instructors -- a hybrid school. That future is not far away as we continue to find that with technology, instruction (schooling) can be delivered to students anywhere, any place, anytime -- and more efficiently and effectively than what we have today. We simply will not be able to continue to do business as usual, nor should we.
Darrel Deide is Chairman of Idahoans for Choice in Education.