POLITICO COLUMN: My nephew’s senior year in high school is already different from mine in any number of ways—the iPhones, the Facebook account, an online encyclopedia of college essay ideas. But perhaps most astonishing is what I realized only after I talked to him about his daily routine: just how little time he’s physically in a school…
Everyone in his school does this at least once: thanks to a 2011 law, students in Florida, where he lives, are actually required to take a cyber course as a prerequisite to graduate. He knocked that off pretty quickly during his junior year, found that he liked the do-it-yourself approach to learning, and started to stack his schedule with them: U.S. history, AP environmental science, pre-calculus and two levels of Spanish. For his final semester next year, he’s planning to take at least two more online: perhaps U.S. government and math.
My nephew loves the freedom, which lets him work a part-time job at a local restaurant. His cyber classes are run by a public institution called the Florida Virtual School, the country’s oldest and largest statewide web-based high school; they let him do his coursework anytime he feels like it, with teachers on call from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. And there’s one other appeal, a timeless lure for a 17-year-old: “They’re easy credits,” he said… (more)
