If the home-schooling anarchist parents in the Sunday Magazine played to a fantasy of what home schooling could be — the traveling, the rebellion against the authority of the classroom, the rugged individualist children — then The Wall Street Journal’s counterpoint, “My Teacher Is an App,” is the disillusioning reality for many.
The article reports that an estimated 250,000 students in 2010-11 attend school online, sometimes in the form of full-time public cyberschools, sometimes in a cyber “hybrid” school. These children aren’t “home schooled” from a statistical point of view; they’re enrolled in schools with names that sound like online degree factories (Georgia Cyber Academy, Florida Virtual School), but are legitimately run by states and districts or outsourced to for-profit corporations. They’re going to school. At home.