I think that it depends upon the child-- and the system. In Connections, at any rate, the CHILD cannot actually
see his/her grades at will. Only the parent can.
Honestly, the amount of work-product required at the lower grades
completely made virtual school worth it for grades 3 through 7-- it was not at all bothersome, and we were still able to more or less homeschool as we liked. I will say that I regret giving up Singapore Math, but other than that, I do NOT regret what virtual schooling did for my DD's writing skills during those years.
This is partly personality, too-- my daughter is one that WILL NOT work on an area that she sees as a "weakness." She was
born a perfectionist. I say that having seen her from birth. She was. So all that homeschooling her in areas of weakness/challenge was really doing was pitting me against her in an unwinnable war.
Enter virtual school-- she would work on things when "they" wanted her to. Not when
I did.
I'll also state up front that this is an easy route to inclusion in age-appropriate activities outside of your home when your child is HG+. Because they WILL be accelerated in a virtual setting-- and then you can just (truthfully) state that your 8yo is a "fifth grader" and is a public school student when you sign him/her up for some math-related activity.
Our experience with virtual school from 3rd grade on is that the weaknesses are in STEM-- and that the literacy side of things is superb, at least it was with Connections. At the time-- and this was pre-CC, so who knows, I realize. There
are ways around the more bothersome aspects of the system, particularly in those elementary grades.
I also liked the fact that unlike homeschooling, this prepared my DD to learn to get along and learn from (well, okay-- but hypothetically) a variety of different teachers, and to adjust her work output to meet a particular teacher's preferences. That is a skill that is difficult to teach as a homeschooling parent.
Virtual school is about credentialing. That's the bottom line, but it has some other pros/cons that are worth looking at.
The largest "pro" is that it makes acceleration possible without sacrificing so much TIME that it becomes insupportable in light of the child's asynchronous development. I would not have wanted my 10yo to have had the workload of the local high school students I see, and the work was certainly no easier in the virtual setting, but she only required half the time because she wasn't stuck sitting in classrooms all day (inappropriate for a 10yo, IMO-- especially an HG+ one). MOST of the assigned work is
never turned in. So you are left to do it if it seems necessary, or skip it if it doesn't. We never did
any spelling, for example, because DD didn't need to. I pretested her dutifully each fall, (which she enjoyed, by the way), and she'd blow through the year's words in a few sessions of me giving her the words in funny voices.
The biggest down-side to a virtual school is low-quality materials and a lack of actual teaching, coupled with an assessment scheme which is, speaking charitably, FUBAR. Again, though-- don't-ask-don't-tell takes care of a WORLD of sins there, and that policy is NOT one which is available in a regular school setting. I'm not actually convinced that virtual is WORSE than what goes into regular classrooms at this point. ALL of the curriculum seems to be deeply flawed or deficient at this point.
It kind of depends on what your needs are and what your other options are. Is virtual better than homeschooling? Well, no-- but it needn't be mutually exclusive, either, IMO.
I see a lot of parents who homeschool doing what we did-- wondering how on earth to pin down whether their kids are actually "on ---- grade level" in any particular subject, wondering what on earth that even MEANS... it's
really hard to homeschool an HG+ kid in anything like a conventional manner. You wind up seeking outside evaluation all the time, it seems, because they move so fast.
As to cost-- yes, this was as consideration. My DD, then six, had cost us THOUSANDS to homeschool in just a year of eclectic homeschooling. She would be happy to work on some new curriculum item... for a few weeks, that is. Then she'd start refusing to cooperate. In frustration, I'd try to make her do it, persuade her to try it, etc. etc. Finally, I'd get her to take the "post-test" or whatever it was-- and she'd have made some crazy jump PAST all of it. Yup-- now useless to her as appropriate learning material.
Amazon knew us by name, I'm sure.
So virtual school was a good thing those first few years-- because it FORCED her to work on areas where she could
not just do that. "Oh, it looks like you've done all of the science for the month-- I guess all you have left is writing. Tell you what, we'll do an experiment when you're done with the language arts for the week, okay?" Oh, sure-- she still read all of her textbooks and novels cover to cover before the end of September each year after the big box showed up, but it did help her develop skills she'd have otherwise ignored in favor of her strengths.
We also got regular feedback about "level" and she could move through the curriculum at HER pace, and we could add enrichment from the library and other resources as needed.
