(Guest post by Greg Forster)
My latest for OCPA considers whether digital learning or homeschooling will see big boosts from the current public health emergency, when millions of parents suddenly found themselves thrust into both these alternative modes of education. Admittedly, it’s a unique moment:
Oklahoma’s largest virtual charter-school organization, EPIC Charter Schools, even offered free training to teachers and schools in traditional school districts. Despite their rhetoric about how “everyone in public education must come together,” it’s a little like watching Nixon sell grain to the Soviets.
But having to do this under emergency conditions is not necessarily giving people a representative experience of what digital learning and homeschooling are normally like.
With a callback to a classic Matt Ladner meme, I argue that while digital learning has long-term promise, techno-futurist hopes for a quick digital-learning revolution remain as overblown as they were ten years ago:
Today, we can see that the edu-futurists—Matt Ladner dubbed them The Cool Kids—were right about the direction, but wrong about the scope. Or, if you prefer, you can say they were wrong about the timing; perhaps technology really will revolutionize the whole education landscape, but if so, it didn’t do it on the timetable The Cool Kids predicted…Models that explain how people behave when they buy copper wire—“the market is a huge bubble right now, it’s about to burst”—turn out not to explain how people behave when it comes to the rearing of their children.
Homeschooling has more to gain from the current crisis, because it will no longer feel weird and abnormal in the same way – people will have looked in the closet and found out there was no Boogeyman in there. But don’t get your hopes up for radical change here, either:
Institutional schooling was not imposed upon American society by some kind of totalitarian regime. Homeschooling is the right choice for some, and perhaps the right choice for more than choose it now. But radicals who view institutional schooling as a false consciousness that everyone will suddenly wake up and realize they never really believed in are a little like the “heteronormativity” theorists who think people are only attracted to the opposite sex because society programs them that way.
Bottom line, education policy is still political, and politics is still the same as it was.
Franchise movies in summer 2021 and street signs in St. Petersburg on Dec. 26, 1991 are also part of the story. Let me know what you think!
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
Excellent.
On home school: What’s your best guess of increase by, say, Sept 2022? I.e, if 1% of “forced homeschoolers” really like it, that’d be +500k.
George Will once said “prophesy is optional folly,” and I tend to heed that advice. Certainly homeschooling has a lot of room to grow.