Online High

This site has Google Adsense advertisements. While this is good for our continuing to be able to offer this service, it is not without peril for you.

Why, you may ask? Because some of those “colleges” and “high schools” are diploma mills. While I try to stop them from showing up (and there is a process to do so), these are unethical enterprises. As with most unethical enterprises, they are quite good at being unethical. In other words, I stop one URL and they create twelve more. Some less obvious and some that are more obvious.

I periodically do look to see what is actually showing up on the site and stop the more obvious. But sometimes they look fine because, oh yeah, the unethical are good at being unethical.

How do we get past that? I encourage you to ask my thoughts on a particular school in the forum. The nice thing about asking there is that others get the benefit of the conversation.

A lawsuit by the former owner of California Alternative High School, which interestingly was operated in Nebraska, has been thrown out. After the state sued the owner and forced him to pay restitution, Daniel Gossai sued that state saying that they had conspired to destroy his business.

An article in the Sioux City Journal discusses the quality of the education that was provided:

A 2004 investigation by the California attorney general discovered that students were taught that there are 53 states in the United States, that World War II began in 1938 and ended in 1942, and that there are two houses of Congress — the Senate and the House, and “one is for Democrats and the other is for the Republicans, respectively.”

The rest of the article can be found here.

If you are unsure about this school, a Google search is enlightening.

I came across another online high school today with worthless accreditation. Please, please make sure that the school you choose has accreditation from one of the regional accreditors, Commission on International and Trans-Regional Accreditation, or the Distance Education and Training Council.

Everything else is bogus. Unaccredited programs, and that’s what these schools are, waste your time and money. One way to tell if it is legitimate is the amount of time necessary to complete the program. At the very least, it should be talking about the number of months (as in 18 or more, but I would be willing to give a little leeway to that timeframe for gifted and/or hardworking students) and not days.

If you are an accreditor and believe you offer legitimate accreditation, feel free to send me an email (info @ bestonlinehighschools.com) and I am happy to take a look at what you offer.