“I owe Penn Foster a tremendous amount of gratitude and highly recommend their school to anyone looking to accomplish the same goal that I accomplished. Everyone who works at Penn Foster is great. They encouraged me the entire time.”

M. Kelly

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“”Penn Foster is a very easy way to learn material and it’s nice to work at your own pace. I am very thankful that I chose Penn Foster for my educational needs. I was accepted into College!”

D. Young

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“Penn Foster High School is a great program. The flexibility they offer is great if you have a busy schedule, children, and work full time. I just finished my high school program and I’m now looking forward to going on to college. Penn Foster also has very nice student services.”

A. Martin

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“Penn Foster High School is a wonderful school. The material was challenging, but very clear and easy to understand. I love that it is available online and was shipped to my home.”

T. Lockwood

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“After earning my High School Diploma from Penn Foster High School, I was promoted to shift supervisor. My experience with Penn Foster was spotless. I enjoyed my time greatly with them, and I never had a complaint.”

S. Smith

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“Penn Foster High School is a great program. They help you accomplish your goals and they build your confidence. They have helped me become a better person.”

K. James

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“Because I have a High School Diploma from Penn Foster, I am able to apply for many jobs that I was not able to apply for before obtaining my diploma. I also have enrolled in college and will graduate with A.A.S. in Electronics in November. Penn Foster was a great learning experience for me. The instructors are fair, and are there to help you succeed. Everyone whom I spoke with at Penn Foster was very helpful and courteous.”

J. Lemke

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“I was a stay at home mom with no High School Diploma. I chose to get my diploma for my children and me. I am 30 years old and never thought I could better my future. Now, I have been accepted to college. It is never to late for a new beginning. Penn Foster literally gave my family and me a better future.”

C. Martinez

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“Penn Foster is the best school I have attended. Anytime I needed help, they were there to help me. It was easy for me to do with two kids and working at night.”

T. Sweat

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“Now that I earned my High School Diploma from Penn Foster, I got a good job making more money than ever before.”

C. Mahaffey

Penn Foster High School Graduate

“Penn Foster High School is amazing. If you are considering this program, good for you! I went to public school for 10 years. I realized how much time was wasted in the classroom and how much time I wasted myself. That’s when I made the decision to go to Penn Foster High School. At school I saw so many students who would fool around just to waste time and make it hard for the students who wanted to learn but couldn’t. With Penn Foster High School, I learned more in just a few hours everyday than I learned at school in a few days.”

R. Oliver

Penn Foster High School Graduate

About 10,000 students from low-performing schools are participating in the first year of the program, which is free to their school districts, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

“We wanted to reach students who are most struggling in Algebra I as they prepare to take end-of-instruction tests—one of the requirements for Achieving Classroom Excellence,” said state Superintendent Janet Barresi.

Teacher training is conducted by webinar and will continue through Feb. 8. Training is also free to participating districts.

“This is one of the state department’s efforts to assist low-achieving schools by providing additional resources to teachers and students,” Barresi said.

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Statistics indicate that more than 1.5 million students attended fully online or blended learning programs during the 2009-10 school year, and more school districts are turning to online instruction for its expanded curriculum offerings, flexibility, and cost-saving potential. Some experts predict that roughly half of high school courses will be offered online by 2019.

In “How to Launch District Virtual Learning,” a new report from the Blackboard Institute, 17 virtual learning experts agreed that getting buy-in from teachers, administrators, parents, and the community is absolutely essential to success.

The report’s authors interviewed a panel of 17 virtual learning experts, all of whom have led online instruction initiatives. Those experts agreed on seven important questions that schools and districts must answer before initiating or expanding a virtual learning program. The experts split into three categories, although most shared expertise beyond those categories: blended learning, course expansion, and professional development.

Those seven questions are:

• What challenge are we trying to address?
• Who are our champions?
• What is our messaging?
• How are we going to pay for it?
• How do we get teachers on board?
• How are we going to create and deliver the courses?
• How will we measure success?

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It’s important work, school officials say, at a time when enrollment in online schools is soaring, but so are dropout rates. Online students made up a disproportionate share of truancy cases last year, and virtual schools worry about a backlash against their industry if they are perceived as havens for slackers.

“It is very easy to become truant in online,” said Stacy Bender, dean of students at Minneapolis-based Minnesota Virtual High School, which has 1,300 students spread throughout the state. Unmotivated students can just stop logging in and then lie about it to their parents and within two weeks, they are truant, she said.

To catch online truants, Bender and her colleagues in online schools in Minnesota use mathematical formulas that compare the hours spent on online lessons and academic progress. The formula allows for high achievers who work quickly, while catching students who are just going through the motions.

Bender has been key to spreading the interpretation, both in her current job and previously at the smaller Wolf Creek Online High School in Lindstrom. She runs a website, mnonlinetruancy.weebly.com, and has written on the subject for a trade journal and presented it Nov. 10 at the annual conference of the International Association for K-12 Online Learning. She said she has also put 3,500 miles on her Honda Civic since January working on truancy issues in counties throughout the state.

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In June, about 30 seniors will graduate from a little-known online high school currently called the Education Program for Gifted Youth. But their diplomas will bear a different name: Stanford Online High School.

States set out to write clear definitions of bullying and to regulate school policies and responsibilities in reaction to the U.S. Department of Education’s stepped-up focus on the behavior, renewed public concerns following a series of high-profile student suicides, and an increase in cyberbullying.

The most far-reaching of the new crop of laws is arguably New Jersey’s, which requires each school to have an anti-bullying specialist and to report incidents to the state.

Laws passed this year by other states vary in their scope and prescriptiveness, reflecting debate about the respective roles of state, local, and federal governments in dealing with school issues like bullying.

But anti-bullying legislation is a relatively new priority, and legislatures are still refining their strategies.

“In 2005, there were fewer policies, and they were all over the place. In 2011, we’re seeing greater consistency. … Some requirements for schools are increasing, and there’s greater specificity about what constitutes bullying,” said Jennifer Dounay Zinth, a senior policy analyst for the Denver-based Education Commission of the States.

States began passing anti-bullying laws in earnest in the early 2000s, according to Josh Cunningham, a research analyst for the National Conference of State Legislatures, also in Denver. By late 2005, 17 states had passed anti-bullying legislation. By last week, only Michigan, Montana, and South Dakota had no such laws, according to the ECS.

In addition to states like North Dakota that adopted anti-bullying bills for the first time this year, many states that already had such laws in place strengthened or revised their requirements for schools this year, including California, where three bills involving bullying were signed into law last week.

New Laws Take Aim at Bullying

It might sound odd coming from a company that pioneered online sales of physical books in 1995. But since it first entered the digital market in 2006 with its video download store, Amazon has bet consumers will pay for high-quality digital content.

Besides the millions of physical items it sells, Amazon’s trove of digital content now includes more than 1 million eBooks, 100,000 movies and TV shows, and 17 million songs. This is about 1 million fewer songs than iPad maker Apple Inc. sells, but more than twice as many eBooks and many thousands more TV shows and movies.

Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos is confident that its content is what will help the Kindle Fire do better than others who have trotted out tablets.

“The reason they haven’t been successful is because they made tablets. They didn’t make services,” Bezos said in an interview after his company unveiled the tablet at a New York media event Sept. 28.

The price will probably help, too: When it goes on sale Nov. 15, it will cost $199, which is less than half of the $499 you’ll pay for Apple’s cheapest iPad and $50 less than book seller Barnes & Noble Inc.’s Nook Color eReader. This leaves buyers with plenty of money left over to spend on content.

“It’s important to remember at the end of the day that Amazon’s core business is retailing, and this is a way to sell more digital media on a sort of 7-inch vending machine,” NPD Group analyst Ross Rubin said.

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He even includes a live feed of his tweets, usually typed from his cellphone, on the school’s website.

“It’s just such a useful and immediate way to disseminate information to my school community in a very quick way,” Loera said.

“In a few minutes one of my messages can reach thousands of people and if something I post gets retweeted … well then Poly can be read about all over the country.”

But not all uses of social media by teachers and administrators are seen in such a positive light. School districts throughout the country are studying how to best use the technology while steering clear of its drawbacks.

Nationwide, teachers have been fired for online behavior, from serious breaches like making passes at students on MySpace to the seemingly innocent, like posting a picture of themselves on Facebook having a drink at an after-hours party.

To help teachers avoid problems, last month Los Angeles Unified began debating a new social media policy.

Until last year, LAUSD had a strict ban on using social media sites during work hours or on district computers, which were kept out of the district’s Internet server by the same filtering software and rules used to keep pornography and violent Web content away from students.

“This is the wave of the future and we need to be prepared,” Gov. Dave Heineman said at a news conference in Lincoln announcing the program for the 2011-12 school year.

He and leaders from the University of Nebraska, the state Education Department, the Educational Service Unit Coordinating Council and NET signed an agreement establishing the Nebraska Virtual Partnership. Through that effort, the university will launch the pilot program, the Nebraska Virtual Scholars.

The program will be available for the upcoming school year for 50 high school students. School districts must apply to have their students participate. Applications will be taken starting Monday.

Students will be able to take courses not available at their high schools, such as language or advanced-placement classes.

Education Commissioner Roger Breed said it will be especially beneficial for students in rural schools that have just one math teacher or can’t find someone to teach Spanish, making for limited course offerings. It will also help students in urban areas who face barriers to education because online courses mean they can learn at their own pace and at a time convenient for them.

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Rogers is acting head of the Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS), an innovative school that is a cross between a traditional school and a virtual one: Students work online from home four days a week and come to school for the fifth.

In a typical school environment, all students in a classroom have to learn the same thing at same time. But at CVCS, students can work on material at their own pace, and educators can tailor their instruction to each student individually to fill the gaps in that child’s knowledge.

“In a traditional setting, students are at the mercy of the teacher, who decides how fast they’re learning [and] how much time they have to spend on the subject,” Rogers said. “We give those who ‘get it’ faster the ability to move on.”

Although students are working from home most of the time, they appreciate the chance to come to school one day a week to see classmates and their teachers face to face. The occasional face time is like an anchor that keeps them from drifting too far off their course of studies, supporters say.

CVCS is one of a growing number of schools that have adopted a blend of face-to-face and online instruction, an approach that appears to be paying off: Despite serving many poor and minority students, the school made Adequate Yearly Progress in 2008 and 2009 and has posted considerable gains in both reading and math, becoming one of 147 public schools in Illinois to win an Academic Improvement Award.

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