Yes, you’re right. It is impossible to determine which is the best online high school. That being said, I expound on the issue over at my blog on BestOnlineHighSchools.com

I received the following request in my email today. Please respond to the email address below.
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Dear iNACOL member:

I am writing to seek your assistance in identifying students from your online program that may be impacted by the U.S. Military’s policy of classifying students who graduate from full time online schools – even fully-accredited, public, online schools – with a “Tier 2” status. Tier 2 status is used for students with a GED or who have been home schooled.

Students with a Tier 2 classification may need to complete additional education beyond a high school diploma in order to enroll in the military or they are given a significantly lower priority than Tier 1 students. Through iNACOL’s Advocacy Committee, we have been working to have this policy changed and Rep. Joe Wilson from South Carolina has expressed interest in introducing legislation to change this policy.

The Associated Press is working on an article on this subject and we are hoping to be able to provide them with a list of students who have been impacted by this policy who are willing to talk to the press. If you know of any such students, if you could provide me with their names and contact information and let me know if we have permission to provide their names to the press, that would be very helpful. If you could also provide us with the gender of the student and if you happen to know if the student was able to enroll in the military despite this policy, that would be helpful to know as well.

As is often the case with the press, we have a short time frame to gather this information. We need all student names by Monday morning, April 4th. Thanks in advance for your assistance. Please respond to Wendy Fleming at wfleming@inacol.org at your earliest convenience.

Best regards,

Susan Patrick
iNACOL President and CEO

Yesterday, at my online high schools site, I had less traffic in one day than I have had since 2007 when I launched the site. I am not sure at all why that might be. Traffic was seriously down. When I saw it inside the cPanel, I actually went to the website to make sure that it was still up. The only time that I have seen anything like that occur was when there was a problem with the website. Today is slow as well.

Very odd.

If you have been wondering where I have been of late, I have been putting in great amounts of time on the day job. Most of you know that I coordinate online learning for a large urban school district. Well, my efforts over the last year are finally getting some traction. We begin to offer courses on Monday and today was a training day. For the most part, that went well. Many engaged teachers wanting to try something new and also support students in their efforts. We are offering courses initially in only two content areas because we want to get this right. I am pleased on so many levels. Yes, there is a hiccup or two that I must deal with this week, but there always is in such things.

Another bit of time this past week has been a super-secret project that should become less secret by the end of the week. Busy, busy, busy…

I had an interesting exchange with an online high school teacher who shall remain nameless. He works full-time in a school district that has a policy against “friending” current students on social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), but also works part-time for an online high school that has no such policy. He asked my opinion as to whether it was fair for him to friend one group of students, but not another group.

I chose to re-frame the question: Should you be friending current students at all?

My answer with most such questions is that it depends. I have a couple of hundred friends on Facebook. Some are really friends, some are long-lost high school friends, some are online school folks, a few are former students. At this point in time, I don’t have what you could call current students (beyond the graduate students I teach).

I have some friends who put it all out there on their Facebook page (pictures of them with alcohol, in semi-compromising poses, etc.). If you are in this group, my take is that you do not want to be friending students whether there is an official policy or not.

I don’t have those pictures of myself doing such things on any social networking sites. I feel reasonably comfortable having former students of mine (but still current students in my district) friending me on a case by case basis. Were I a different person, I would likely treat this differently.

And here’s the key: I am not saying that you should or should not post anything on these sites. What I am saying is that your privacy settings and your contact list should reflect whom you have selected for your audience.

Back to the online high school teacher. His thought was because he had a different relationship with the online students – he did not see them everyday – that it was reasonable. I always have problems with that word reasonable, but I can tell you that the parents of those online high school students probably do not see it any differently.

Right, wrong, whatever, teachers are held to a different standard. The Internet is full of examples of teachers who chose to push back on that different standard.