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Phenomenon: School Away From School
December 7, 2003
By EMILY WHITE
Andy Markishtum's hair reaches past his shoulders, thick
and shining. He speaks in a low monotone, a rocker growl,
and his favorite band is Cradle of Filth. As a student at
McKay High School in Salem, Ore., Andy was part of the
stoner crowd -- a self-described slacker with a backpack
full of half-finished assignments. ''I'd get too
distracted,'' he says. ''There would be kids sitting right
next to me talking or something, and instead of paying
attention to the teacher, I would drift off. Someone would
drop a book, and I'd have to look.'' Attention-deficit
disorder was diagnosed; for a while, Andy took Ritalin, but
it gave him migraines. His mom decided he needed to get out
of McKay and leave behind his old scene, his old messed-up
self. Andy enrolled in Salem-Keizer Online high school, and
he says, ''Now I can really concentrate.''
Salem-Keizer Online, or S.K.O., is one in a growing number
of public, private and charter schools available to kids
who are looking for an alternative to a traditional
education. Commonly called ''virtual school,'' it's a way
of attending school at home without the hovering
claustrophobia of home-schooling. S.K.O. has 131 students
enrolled in the Salem area. Nationwide, there were about
50,000 students in virtual courses last year. As a
business, virtual school is booming. Jim Cramer, co-host of
CNBC's ''Kudlow & Cramer,'' calls online-school-software
companies a hot commodity.
Andy Markishtum says that without virtual school, he
''probably would have dropped out.'' Now he will graduate
almost on time. The biggest problem was that ''too many
people were too dumb.'' The teachers bored him, the
homework flummoxed him, he hated the mandatory pep
assemblies ''that were really prep assemblies.''
Walking through his old school, Andy points out the
cafeteria table he and his friends used to sit at. ''People
would shun us, even though we had never done anything to
them,'' he says. A sign reads ''Drug and Gang Free: McKay
Togetherness.'' The bell rings, and the hall floods with
bodies. A few clean-cut kids grimace at Andy's flowing
hair. It's not so hard to understand why Andy would want to
get out of here, why he would rather enroll in a school he
can log into anywhere -- the public library or his mother's
house. Now instead of walking through the dreaded double
doors past a suspicious security officer, Andy enters a Web
site where a plain white screen welcomes him: ''Sign in!''
He checks his e-mail and clicks on the day's assignments,
blasting music from his stereo, free of the tyranny of
class periods.
Virtual school seems like an ideal choice for kids who
don't fit in or can't cope. ''I'm a nervous, strung-out
sort of person,'' says Erin Bryan, who attends the online
Oregon-based CoolSchool. Erin used to attend public school
in Hood River, Ore., but ''I didn't like the environment,''
she says. ''I am afraid of public speaking, and I would get
really freaked out in the mornings.''
Kyle Drew, 16, a junior at S.K.O., says: ''I couldn't get
it together. I was skipping more and more classes, until I
was afraid to go to school.'' Leavitt Wells, 13, from Las
Vegas, was an ostracized girl with revenge on her mind.
''The other kids didn't want anything to do with me,'' she
says. ''I'd put exploded gel pens in their drawers.'' Now
she attends the Las Vegas Odyssey Charter School online
during the day, and when her adrenaline starts pumping, she
charges out into the backyard and jumps on the trampoline.
On S.K.O.'s Web site, students can enter a classroom
without being noticed by their classmates by clicking the
''make yourself invisible'' icon -- a good description of
what these kids are actually doing. Before the Internet,
they would have had little choice but to muddle through.
Now they have disappeared from the school building
altogether, a new breed of outsider, loners for the wired
age.
Douglas Koch is only 12, but he is already a high-school
sophomore. He says that he hopes to graduate by the time
he's 15. Today he sits at his computer in his Phoenix
living room -- high ceilings and white walls, a sudden hard
rain stirring up a desire to look out the shuttered
windows. Douglas's 10-year-old brother, Gregory, is
stationed across the room from him -- he is also a
grade-jumper. The Koch brothers have been students at the
private Christa McAuliffe Academy, an online school, for
more than a year now. While S.K.O. is a public school,
C.M.A. is private, charging $250 a month and reaching kids
from all over the country. From Yakima, Wash., it serves
325 students, most of whom attend classes year-round, and
employs 27 teachers and other staff members.
Douglas looks at his monitor, searching for evidence of his
Spanish teacher. ''Oh, she's already there,'' he says,
checking a box at the corner of the screen. He puts on a
headset and greets her through the attached microphone. Her
live voice comes through the computer speakers, tinny and
distant. The lesson today is about El Salvador: its
population and geography, with a brief mention of ''la
guerra.'' Before he speaks, he always presses ''Talk.''
There's a moment of confusion when the teacher tries to
chat about hurricanes; she can't remember the word in
English. As she casts around for it, the speaker is silent,
and it's hard to tell if she is still there. At one point,
Douglas clicks the corner of the screen, and the lesson
disappears. ''Whoops!'' he says, before he retrieves the
page and the vanished teacher with it.
Across the room, Gregory answers multiple-choice math
questions about inverse numbers. He aces his answers, and
the screen flashes ''Good,'' ''Excellent,'' ''Well done.''
Gregory isn't in contact with a human teacher right now; he
will turn in a test later and wait for an e-mail message
telling him how he did. Both brothers have seen pictures of
their teachers on the school Web site. When they graduate,
they will travel to Washington State and meet them in the
flesh.
At lunchtime they get up from their computers and go to the
kitchen together. They take a little time out to pacify the
dog with biscuits. For the end of the school day there are
stacks of games: ski racing, backyard baseball, chess
masters, Lego racers. Their mother, Katie Craven, says that
at first she wondered if keeping the kids home was the
right thing. ''It was only supposed to be temporary,'' she
says, ''but the kids really liked it.''
The Koch brothers have an aura of success. The sons of a
computer-programmer father, they are little versions of
Bill Gates hatching in the incubator of their living room.
Yet some of their talk sounds lonely.
''There used to be a guy in my brother's class,'' Douglas
says. ''He was from Guam. But then he graduated.''
Sometimes, before class, they chitchat with other online
kids about the weather: ''It is snowing here.'' ''It is 104
degrees here.'' Names light up on the screen to reveal who
is speaking, what remote computer the voice is coming from.
Then the class begins, and the chitchat stops. No notes
passed, no spit wads thrown, no stories concocted about
what the teacher does when she goes home, no eye contact.
Do virtual-school kids miss the volatile human combustion
of the classroom? Douglas and Gregory don't seem to. They
seem happy to be able to stay at home and never put their
shoes on. Andy admits to missing it sometimes. ''Every once
in a while I think it would be cool to go back to high
school because there are tons of people there,'' he says.
''But at the same time, there are too many problems for
me.''
Andy lost contact with most of his friends when he left
McKay. He doesn't know where they are anymore. While
virtual school doesn't require that you leave your peers
behind, it makes it harder to feel as if you're part of a
crowd. Erin Bryan, from CoolSchool, still keeps in touch
with her two closest friends, but sometimes, she says, she
feels as if she lives in a separate world. ''I'll look at
photo albums at their houses, and I'll feel left out,'' she
says. ''There are pictures of parties I didn't go to.''
Just as video games provide cartoon versions of real
landscapes, the virtual school imitates the spaces of a
real school. Kids take tests in virtual gymnasiums, they
click into virtual classrooms and hand in papers to icons
made to look like teacher mailboxes. Some virtual schools
have student stores where kids can buy pens, notebooks or
T-shirts imprinted with the school name to make them feel
as if they're part of a real institution.
S.K.O.'s administrators say they believe that they have
found a cure for many educational ills. Since the kids are
gone, they can't act up in school. ''There tends to be less
behavior problems that we see,'' says the program
coordinator, Jim Saffeels. ''We never do behavior
referrals.'' Kids are never sent to the principal's office.
Only when a kid has not been heard from over e-mail for a
week or so do the adults start to worry, sending out
messages: Are you there? Are you working?
I'm talking to Saffeels in the offices that S.K.O. shares
with the district's teen parent program. Pregnant girls
drift in and out, some carrying babies on their hips --
another school population that is encouraged to make itself
invisible. Phones ring incessantly. It's the first day of
school, and there's a glitch: many S.K.O. students never
received their passwords. They can't get through the
virtual-school doors. (The computer problems are numerous.
Later, I'll go to a boy's house and see this message on his
screen: ''Cannot resolve educator cookie.'')
The principal, Mary Jean Sandall, rushes in wearing a crisp
pantsuit; she seems exhilarated, running in high gear. When
she talks about the transition into a new Web-based program
(which one teacher calls ''a scramble''), it is clear that
Sandall isn't a tech geek. She has an amusing computer
language all her own: content is ''chunked into'' an
electronic frame; the system doesn't require students to
download files that ''suck up lots of stuff.'' Sandall
explains the origins of S.K.O.: eight years ago, word came
down from the school board to ''pursue distance options,''
and the Salem-Keizer school district began offering online
courses. Demand was so great that the virtual model
eventually received public financing.
Sandall sees online kids as vessels of the future. ''This
is a 21st-century model of learning,'' she says. ''If
you're a total face-to-face learner, you may not get that.
But as industry goes to a model of learning online, and
professional advancement means you have to do things
online, I think these kids have an advantage.''
Burt Kanner, a math teacher, appears in the doorway, and
Sandall waves at him excitedly. Kanner, a gray-haired,
soft-spoken man, nods back at her. He seems skeptical about
all this virtual-school hype. For most of his 45 years as a
teacher, Kanner has dealt with kids face to face. Now he
spends a good deal of the time trying to figure out how to
navigate the new Web site, sending e-mail messages to
faceless kids, messages that sound like the comments the
computer generated for Gregory Koch: ''Good job,'' ''Well
done,'' ''Keep going.''
''It doesn't really feel like teaching,'' he tells me as we
leave the office and his bosses. ''I miss the performance
aspect of teaching, where you own the knowledge and have
some control. Now I am mainly a troubleshooter.'' I ask him
if he resisted becoming a virtual teacher. He says that
it's just one more change in the rules of the game. ''My
whole career is about changes,'' Kanner says. ''I take it
all one step at a time.''
Lacey Calvo, 16, was assigned Kanner for online algebra
last year. She describes him as ''really helpful.'' She
enjoys having invisible teachers, because ''most of the
time teachers get on my nerves,'' she says. ''They treat us
like children, and you can't really be independent.'' Lacey
enrolled at S.K.O. a year and a half ago, after she and her
mom decided that South Salem High School was a nest of
trouble. ''All the girls came to school half-dressed,'' she
says. ''Students would be disruptive, and you can't
concentrate at all. And you actually spend more time
socializing than anything else.''
Lacey wore makeup, although she makes it clear that ''I
never had black fingernails or anything.'' She took part in
the gossipy world, she says, but it started to pull her in
and fill up her thoughts, and she would skip classes and
hang out with ''trampy'' girls. ''I didn't care about
anything or anybody. I did whatever I wanted to do. Now I
help my mom pay the bills and take my brother to school.''
Lacey doesn't worry about makeup anymore. She doesn't have
to go shopping for back-to-school clothes or worry that
some random girl is going to hate her outfit. She goes to
school at a desk in the living room, surrounded by video
games, unwashed dishes, her brother's toy car collections.
She copies down lesson goals in a neat looping script in
multicolored notebooks. Inside each of them she has written
her name and address and her list of classes. She is taking
more classes than most kids because she wants to finish
soon and be released from high-school limbo. For P.E.
credit, Lacey takes long walks around the neighborhood, a
run-down area where the streets are named after birds:
Finch, Song Sparrow. It seems remarkable that this is
actually P.E. -- an evening stroll instead of the horror of
chin-ups and rope climbs, the locker room where girls
calculate who wears the biggest bra.
Lacey has rejected the wild life she led at South Salem,
but there are traces of her restlessness in certain stories
she tells me. ''I like to get out and go downtown and look
at the cute guys,'' she says. ''A couple of weeks ago, I
went to the river and jumped off a bridge.'' Like Andy,
Lacey does not quite trust the self that emerged in the
halls of high school, and she says that if she had stayed,
she would have entangled herself in a bad fate.
When talking to virtual-school kids, this is a common
thread: the sense that they have escaped something
dangerous by getting out of high school. ''I saw the way
the social system was set up, and I wanted to get away from
that,'' says Kristen Dearing, a student at Basehor-Linwood
charter school in Kansas.
MacKenzie Winslow, 14, who attends the Laurel Springs
school in Ojai, Calif., from her home in Colorado, says:
''I didn't want a bad experience. I had a lot of friends
who'd gone to high school, and they said the kids were
pretty nasty. I didn't want to deal with that.''
Efforts are made to socialize virtual-school kids; dances
are held, game nights and bowling nights. At Odyssey
Charter School in Las Vegas, the students occasionally get
together for trips to the Nevada History Museum or to the
shark-reef exhibit at the Mandalay Bay hotel. At Electronic
Charter School in Kansas, there are nights at a ''fun
center.'' Jennifer Vandiver is the prom coordinator at
Christa McAuliffe Academy. In a dreamy voice, she describes
the prom, which takes place in a ''room full of mirrors''
with a cardboard Eiffel Tower. Kids fly in from far-flung
locations; there's a get-acquainted picnic the day before.
Faces are put to screen names. The kids are like tourists
thrown together to see the sights. They are exotic to one
another.
These efforts at cheery socialization are exactly what Andy
Markishtum is grateful to escape. Walking through his old
school, he laughs when we are confronted with banners
promoting school spirit days: Sleepy Seniorzzz (pajama day)
and Juniors of the Caribbean (pirate day). For Andy, it's
good riddance to all that fake togetherness. ''Hat day was
the only day I liked,'' he says. ''Then they took it
away.'' Now he can turn in his assignments at midnight if
he wants to.
Because the phenomenon of full-time online education is
relatively new, there is little research into its lasting
effects -- whether its practitioners become introverts and
computer zombies or whether, as MacKenzie Winslow's mother
puts it, the kids ''have gathered their energy so they can
go out into the world and be more effective.''
Before Columbine, the social Darwinism of the hallway was
seen as character-building. Now we effortlessly imagine
those ''characters'' hiding guns in trench coats, or dead.
Promoters of virtual school promise that their Web sites
are safe from online predators, and traditional school is
portrayed as a haven for bullies, a brutal, corrupted
environment in which violent confrontations are bound to
occur.
Yet it is also true that there is a beauty in high school:
those long, exhausting hours full of other kids, everyone
trying to interpret one another. It's a beauty that Gus Van
Sant evokes in his new Columbine-inspired film,
''Elephant'' -- kids break dancing and taking pictures and
making out, even as the school day is headed for darkness.
For Lacey Calvo, virtual school has meant a taming and
organizing of her restlessness. ''I have grown up, and I
have a grip on reality,'' she says. Now she can help her
overworked single mom around the house. ''My mom knows I am
here for her and always will be,'' she says. When the
buzzer rings on the washer, she can get up from her earth
science class to shift the load over to the dryer, and no
teacher says, ''Sit down, young lady.'' She can take breaks
in the garage and watch her neighbor's new lawn being
delivered. She doesn't have to sit in a classroom,
wondering if she can trust herself or the kids around her,
wondering what she forgot at home.
Emily White is the author of ''Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes
and the Myth of the Slut.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/07/magazine/07CYBER.html?ex=1071818809&ei=1&en=4fa03e09d1781459
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