I don't have direct experience with K12, but we've been with Connections for five years.

There are some very serious concerns that I personally have with them which are all directly/indirectly related to having a PG child in their program:

  • differentiation.... isn't. I mean, yes, it exists on paper, but... the reality is that MOST of the time 'differentiation' really just means ACCELERATION. And-- you know, no other differentiation.
  • even where there IS meaningful differentiation, there is still an attitude that this needs to be "on top of" rather than "instead of" the basic assignment/course. Often it's just a MOTS approach. Not good at all.
  • Difficulty isn't very high-- but as you go up in grade levels, output/throughput expectations are. SO if your ten year old can't write out twenty pages of notes for a research paper in a week... and complete a physics lab, and write up a formal lab report in the same afternoon... The work itself is trivial-- which actually makes a lot of the busy-work productivity aspects harder to sell to a PG child, since their productivity needs to be very high, but their motivation isn't likely to be.
  • ... Oh, and while I'm on that subject of motivation? YOU will be the one responsible for "seeing to it" that they actually DO all that required work that isn't very motivating. There are real consequences if they blow things off. This is the part where I often remark, tongue-in-cheek, that this is "the worst of both worlds" since it's all the WORK of Homeschooling for parents, with all the drudgery of enforcing someone else's ideas of what your child should be doing.
  • it can REALLY drive perfectionism because so much of the student's grades are based on trivial-pursuit style multiple choice questions. Very little is the type of open-ended, non-rubric based assessment that GT kids really need, given their proclivity for divergent or multilevel thinking... and the gradebook updates INSTANTLY, and many of the assessments are little two-to-ten question things, where obviously if you miss even one or two, that causes your "grade" to be less than an "A" on the assignment.
  • Both K12 and Connections are moving AWAY from physical textbooks due to costs. Texts are increasingly 'online' which means more screen time-- my daughter HATES the i-texts, so we have to budget to purchase physical copies of her texts.


I don't want to necessarily say that there are only bad things to consider.

This does have some significant advantages, as well:

  • "real" school results in a real transcript by a really accredited institution, so there are no questions about the authenticity of placement or course rigor.
  • real interactions with real classmates-- albeit virtually (I know this seems hard to believe, but I've witnessed this for five years running-- when these kids meet in person, they TRULY behave as though the "really" know one another already, the way real friends do.)
  • great emphasis on technological skill development.
  • grade acceleration is truly not a big deal in this environment, nor is subject acceleration (though language arts is often 'bundled' with the rest of the curriculum, so subject acceleration is usually done with math).
  • teachers are 'real' teachers-- they really care about their kids, they really help them, and they are really responsive. They also, like any other group of "real" teachers, are sometimes not very understanding, sometimes have a teaching style that doesn't "click" with a student, etc.
  • expectations and timelines/deadlines ARE NOT negotiable. Mostly, I mean. The school year ends when it ends, and anything not complete by then becomes a ZERO... which impacts grades in middle school and up. You're expected to finish the course-- often the entire textbook. This is quite different from conventional schools, and it means that most math classes actually do get into the 'interesting' end-of-the-textbook applications chapters. So that's a good thing. (As an aside, of course, it would be an even BETTER thing if we could swap out the first four chapters and spend more time on the last four instead, but we can't have everything, either...)




Hope this helps.

Feel free to PM me with specific questions and I'll do my best. I've learned a lot about the internal workings of Connections over the years.

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.