The recent New York Times article, "In Florida, Virtual Classrooms with No Teachers," takes us to Miami, where schools are using a blended learning approach. There’s a lot to discuss here, including the fact that the implementation has been rocky — most notably because several of the schools made no effort to tell either students or parents that they wouldn’t be in traditional classrooms. But as we’ve seen in the past with the Times, the article is framed by an assumption that the traditional classroom is best.

The headline in the Washington Post was “Austan Goolsbee: triathlete, improv comedian, economist.” Given the state of the economy, Obama’s new Chairman of the Council on Economic Advisers might need the improv comedian talents more than anything. But what might not show up in the quick list of resume references is an interesting story Goolsbee and Jonathan Guryan (both professors of economics at the U. of Chicago) penned for Education Next in 2006: World Wide Wonder? Measuring the (non-)impact of Internet subsidies to public schools

In his commentary on my book, Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, Jay Mathews doubts that he will find any time soon “something of the new electronic era that significantly increases achievement in reading and writing for all kids.”

There is an interesting development at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, north of Boston. Parents have been informed that every student must use an Apple MacBook in his and her work.

In Utah, around 7 percent of the students are now going to charter schools, creating financial conflicts of interest between district and charter schools, as both sides are trying to persuade the state legislature that they need more of the dwindling pot of state dollars. Into this mix has walked the Open High School of Utah, a charter school that is offering a virtual education that is based almost entirely on curricular materials available free-of-cost from open sources.

States applying for Race to the Top grants receive points for building statewide longitudinal...

For some, virtual schooling is a way to supplement regular schooling. For others, virtual...

Political scientists Terry Moe and John Chubb have shifted their bets from that spoke of the school-reform roulette wheel named “school voucher” to one marked “technological innovation.”

Not so long ago people were trumpeting multi-tasking as a new way of learning and behaving, one that was rewiring our brains.