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Vol. 75/No. 6      February 14, 2011

 
Miami schools skirt class-size
law with ‘virtual’ classrooms
 

BY BERNIE SENTER 
MIAMI—For 7,000 students at Miami-Dade County public schools, their English, math, or history teacher is a computer.

Public schools in Florida have turned to virtual classrooms to get around a law limiting the number of students allowed in classrooms. The law does not cover “e-learning labs,” as these virtual classrooms are euphemistically called. “There’s no way to beat the class-size mandate without it,” said Miami Beach High School assistant principal Jodi Robins.

What about hiring more teachers? Not a chance.

Students take their online courses either at home or in school. A “facilitator” may be available in the school to deal with technical problems.

Florida governor Richard Scott recently appointed Michelle Rhee as “informal education adviser.” Until recently Rhee was the school chancellor of Washington, D.C.

During Rhee’s tenure, “she closed schools by the dozens, fired teachers by the hundreds and spent more than two years negotiating a labor contract” while “establishing a new performance-pay system that ties compensation to growth on student test scores,” reported the Washington Post.

Of the 445 Miami Beach High School students taking online courses in her school, “none of them want to be there,” said sophomore Alix Braun. “For virtual education you have to be really self-motivated. This was not something they chose to do, and it’s a really bad situation to be put in because it is not your choice.”

“The way our state is dealing with class size is nearly criminal,” Chris Kirchner, an English teacher at Coral Reef Senior High School in Miami, told the New York Times. “They’re standardizing in the worst possible way, which is evident in virtual classes.” Susan Kranitz is a virtual teacher in Lakeland, located in central Florida, with 150 students in her online class. “I can kind of set my own hours,” she said. “I determine when I am going to answer my emails and do the grading, which I do every day, but then as far as the students, they have my office number and my cell phone number. They can call me or text me at anytime.”

Julie Durrance, a manager of the e-learning lab program in Miami-Dade, predicts that virtual classrooms will grow to include more grade levels.

“I truly believe this will be an option for many districts across the state,” she said. “I think we just hit the tip of the iceberg.”  
 
 
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