Online credits a scam, Esquivel says

In the Journal this morning,
link, School Board Member
Marty Esquivel fired a salvo
of accusations against a local
charter school, Southwest
Learning Center, and against
online learning in general.

Esquivel thinks a student who
completed classwork over a
long weekend, must be
scamming the system, along
with the charter school that offered the class.

Southwest Secondary head
Scot Glasrud reported that
the student was logged on line
for nearly 57 hours over four
days.

He reported that the student
completed all of the essays
and quizzes required to pass.

It would appear that the loathing Esquivel shares with APS Supt Winston Brooks for charter schools in general, is driving his conviction that a student cannot complete a class in four days.

The math tells a different story.

According to APS' website, link, high school classes are 48 minutes long. Though second semester is actually shorter than the first, let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say students are in class 90 days. 90 times 48 minutes equals 72 hours, only 15 hours more total, than the student spent working over a long weekend.

Anyone who has been in a school, knows students aren't working bell to bell. If ten minutes of every class period is spent starting and ending the class, collecting homework, listening to announcements and everything else that has to be done everyday in every class, the total investment in learning drops to 90 times 38 minutes; or 57 hours, the same investment.

Subtract the three weeks early end of the school year for seniors, and the total in class room investment drops to 75 times 38, or 47.5 hours; or, less time than the online learner invested.

School board enforcer Esquivel offered;

“It sounds like a total scam. It’s the equivalent of me getting a three-year law degree on a 10-day Carnival cruise.”

The student proved only that, if a student makes up their mind to learn, they can learn online as well at they can sitting in five rows of six students attending to a teacher.

Have Esquivel or the Journal even looked at the online class the student completed? Do they have any real objection based on relevance or rigor of the coursework? Esquivel is a lawyer; he should know better than to make reckless accusations without examining the facts.

The only real question is; is the online class the equivalent of an "in school" class? If it is, then it doesn't make any difference if a student completes the class over the course of a semester or over what must have been the worst weekend of his life.

The Journal is remiss in presenting Esquivel's biased and bigoted accusations against one of APS most successful "competitors" for state education dollars, without any real investigation.




photos Mark Bralley