President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are employing a rewards program for states that will try to incentivize adoption of new strategies will hopefully reinvigorate our nation’s education system. A pot of $4.35 million dollars is dangling in front of states, with any and all of them eligible for the gold star if certain reforms are adopted and made. Although a controversial tactic, the potential upside for America’s school system should be exciting for anyone in the education industry.

The program known as Race to the Top has four goals it aims to achieve:

• Develop common, internationally-benchmarked standards and assessments
• Improve the effectiveness of teachers and principals
• Use data to inform decisions
• Turn around the lowest-performing schools.

As details of the competition emerge, many critics feel that the most effective way to use the funding is in a disruptive way, one extremely effective way being the implementation of more online learning. According to The Atlantic, this approach has been shown to consistently provide high quality learning to students of all situations, young and old, poor and wealthy, local and long distance. This technology will provide a benchmark standard of opportunity to all students. Here are the benefits that work within the four goals listed above:

Standardized benchmarks

As of right now, online learning has found it difficult to expand itself efficiently across the country because of the up and down standards between each of the 50 states. However, if the implementation of the Race to the Top program brings about uniformity, online learning technology can be homogenously fused to the teaching programs in each district in America in order to provide opportunities for all those students who want to bring their learning experiences home. With this opportunity, the learning software companies will automatically up their effectiveness because of the high competition that will immediately explode in the market. Within that framework, the cream of the computer learning crop will rise and give each student the best options available.

Teacher and Principal Effectiveness

Most experts will tell you that if you have a squadron of high quality teachers available, the students will learn more and better than otherwise. However, with the quality teacher shortage currently at its high point, schools don’t have enough quality teachers per class of students. But the easy and effective answer would be to have the very best teachers available to students via online learning where geographic and time constraints would be immediately alleviated at very little cost.

Collecting Data for Informed Decisions

The fact is that the facts are most important in making school policy decisions. What better forum and framework to collect and analyze data is there than computer compilation? This powerful new medium has already revolutionized regular data analysis when teachers current input statistics into programs. This entire process would be streamlined with the implementation of widespread computer learning software. Discovering the comprehension that students have to tests and homework via computer learning would save incredible amounts of time while also having useful matrixes through which a student’s progress can be gauged.

Fixing the Low Performing Schools

The best way of identifying schools is identifying the statistics. The best way to identify the statistics if by having the best measure for them. Also, student ability is how to gauge the performance of a school. If students are failing classes or dropping out of school, the system is going to continue to plummet. However, with online learning, students’ weaknesses can be pinpointed and retaking classes and reforming strategies can be done in a more efficient and more flexible manner. A student won’t have to wait a year to retake a course if the course is available to him immediately online. A student can have the teacher he connects with the best whenever he needs by archiving lectures. The possibilities and opportunities are endless as long as America’s education system begins now.

Online schools are the wave of the future and one that should be journeyed on. Technology should not be resisted but engaged in in order to have a maximized experience in life and learning. Why type on a typewriter when a computer is available? Why make geography a hurdle when all you need is an internet connection? There are several online programs that are available to adults here, and these same online programs are the ones that will be what turn around our nation’s schools systems.