In a follow-up to his earlier post, Freddie continues to argue that online education is little help for disadvantaged students:
I keep pointing out: the record for educational technologies making an actual impact on educational outcomes is dismal. And that’s before we talk about the fact that these technologies are specifically endorsed as a method to spread education to marginal students from demographic categories with poor educational outcomes. As Alan Jacobs– the opposite of a technophobe– pointed out, the research we have suggests that it’s exactly the students who least need the affordability offered by online education who do best in online classes. Getting anything out of online classes takes great self-discipline and motivation; these are qualities that students who struggle typically lack.
When people talk about using online education to “scale up” education, that is necessarily saying that they are going to be giving students far less individual attention than they receive– despite the fact that individual attention, class time, and teacher investment are precisely what students need most to succeed.
This is an area where the media is particularly vulnerable to its demographic biases. So, so many people in our elite media have never been exposed to actual educational failure in any way, shape, or form. They come up through affluent suburban public school districts where all of the students come from stable and financially secure households. They go on to attend elite private high schools where the worst students are systematically excluded by test scores and an inability to pay. They attend Ivy League universities where all students were in the top five in their class and everybody was in the top 5% on the SAT. They then go to work at newspapers and magazines where everybody else is exactly like them. Of course, they think education can be fixed with apps or buzzwords or good ol’ American gumption. They literally don’t know what educational failure looks like.
The Dish 