Tom Vander Ark vs. the National Education Policy Center

These days the  big dust up in the virtual education community is over a report that critical of virtual education as a replacement for the kind of education so commonplace inside bricks-and-mortar schools.
“There’s zero high-quality research evidence that full-time virtual schooling at the K-12 level is an adequate replacement for traditional face-to-face teaching and learning,” according to the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) report Online K-12 Schooling in the U.S.: Uncertain Private Ventures in Need of Public Regulation.
Adds Justin Bathon, University of Kentucky education professor and attorney, who, as a companion piece to the NEPC report,  has created model legislation language for regulation of online schools: "Virtual schooling is a good idea. Over the past decade or so, online education has proven itself a valuable component of the learning system, from elementary to post-secondary. I personally use a lot of online learning in my own teaching, so I am a tried and true advocate for online learning.
"But, it needs to grow up. And fast. As online learning approaches the knee of the exponential curve, we can’t ignore it as just a small tangential sandbox. With 200,000 full-time virtual students nationwide and growing, it is core to the system now and we need to treat it that way."
Liberating Learning Blog contributor Tom Vander Ark sees this situation--and the report--in another light. In a post headlined "Union Policy Shop Wants to Stop Online Learning," Vander Ark called the report a "hit piece on online learning."
"The real purpose of this hit piece is to block K12, Connections, and other private organizations from serving students," Vander Ark added.
Click here for all of Vander Ark's post.
Click here for the National Education Policy report.
Click here for Bathon's view and here for his model legislation outline.