I'm not sure I trust the Fordham Institute - the conservative 'think tank' has been the subject of criticism for bias - but it has released a report arguing that online learning costs less than traditional or blended learning (see chart, right). Education Week's Katie Ash notes that the report finds cost savings not so much through technology but through other means: "While more than half of traditional schools' financial resources typically go toward labor costs, virtual schools can often reduce those costs by increasing the student-teacher ratio or by reducing teacher salaries by hiring only part-time teachers or paraprofessionals." It's not so much that I disagree with these findings - I don't, really - as it seems to me that they are based on off-the-cuff calculations rather than hard data. "Authors of the paper... gathered data from public documents as well as in interviews with entrepreneurs, policy experts, and school leaders." The only documentation of costs came from the U.S. Census Bureau 2009 Public Education Finances and the National Center for Education Statistics Digest of Education Statistics - far too light research to justify the conclusions drawn (even at the ginormous margin of +/- 20%) in this paper.
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