Michigan Uses On-Line Learning to Reach At-Risk Students

Cyber high schools are a wonderful way to reach students that can’t make high school work in the traditional setting. Removing at-risk students from the distractions that are making it impossible for them to learn can only have positive results. I do hope that eventually the program will be offered to students BEFORE they have reached the point of dropping-out. I visited the website, http://www.westwood.k12.mi.us/buildingwebs/cyberhighschool/com_research.html and found some very interesting statistics. The statistic I found most intriguing was that 61% of the students that attend the Westwood cyber high school continue on to college. This is quite impressive when you compare it to the national average for high school graduates attending college. In Oct 2009 it was 70.1% (Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm).
I feel that any initiative that involves keeping kids in school is worthwhile. However, I do have a couple of comments about information in the article. First, changing the age that a student is able to drop-out of high school to 18 is long overdue. I never quite understood why a troubled child at the age of 16 was allowed to make such a devastating decision! Secondly, I was a little shocked at the amount of money that is being allocated just to generate and distribute the dropout prevention reports - $11.5 million. Can this money be put to use generating programs in our schools that will help to prevent students from dropping out? It just seems like a lot of money but I guess I don’t understand all that is involved….
The cyber high school takes the constructivist approach to learning and seems to be having great success. Could MDE possibly get grants to fund the training of teachers in the bottom 5% of struggling schools to teach using this approach? I graduated from college five years ago and learned that this approach to learning is most effective because you reach many different learning modalities. This was not the focus of education many years ago and it is possible that training teachers in this manner could help with the drop-out rate as well.