Really, it’s about the children:
News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch wants to focus on his A-B-Cs. The media giant, parent of the Fox network, Fox News Channel, 20th Century Fox and the Wall Street Journal, wants to make a push into the education business and has tapped New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to be the point person.
In a press conference, Klein said he’d been tapped by News Corp. to “put them in the burgeoning and dynamic education marketplace.”
Sure, Klein is probably earning more money than God in his new role as executive vice president at News Corp. But the Justice Department attorney turned data-and-accountability school reformer signed up with Murdoch to get out of the harsh political limelight and help News Corp. make a mint selling educational technology products to school districts.
Last November, shortly after hiring Klein, News Corp. acquired Wireless Generation, an education technology firm that had worked closely with Klein during his tenure as chancellor on two projects: ARIS, acontroversial (and buggy) data system that warehouses students’ standardized test scores and demographic profiles; and School of One, a more radical attempt to use technology to personalize instruction, reorganize classrooms, and reduce the size of the teaching force.
School of One. Sounds lonely to me. The corporate school reform team better market-test that. Maybe they could do one of those Fox News Luntz groups.
The acquisition put Klein, who was set to supervise Wireless Generation, in an awkward position vis à vis city ethics regulations.
It seemed unlikely Klein would be able to fully follow those mandates when, in May, the city Department of Education renewed its contract with Wireless Generation, asking the company to provide testing materials and software. Last month, New York State moved to award Wireless Generation a $27 million no-bid contact to create a state student data-tracking system similar to ARIS—despite the fact that many New York City principals have decided not to use the $80 million software, which doesn’t track helpful day-to-day information on attendance, behavior or homework completion.
News Corporation today announced that Kristen Kane, former Chief Operating Officer, New York City Department of Education and Dr. Peter Gorman, former Superintendent, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools will take on leadership roles at its newly formed Education Division.
“I’m thrilled to join News Corporation, and to work with someone of Joel’s caliber, and the rest of his team, to transform the educational system through digital technology and other means,” said Dr. Gorman. “News Corporation has a reputation for leading significant change across many industries, and I look forward to what lies ahead for the education sector.”
I think it’s great that the corporate reformers have (finally) dropped the sentimental and deceptive nonsense about “the children” and now discuss their industry, the education sector. Second graders don’t really stand a chance unless we can get these people to tell the truth.
Some media companies view education as a major growth area. The Washington Post Co. relies heavily on its education unit Kaplan Inc. In the Washington Post Co.’s third-quarter results, Kaplan had revenue of $743.3 million. It accounted for over 60% of the entire company’s revenue, according to the Washington Post. Walt Disney Co. is also a player in this field with its Disney-branded schools, and the New York Times has launched the New York Times Knowledge Network.
Disney-branded schools.
If Issue Two passes in Ohio, unions will be out of the way and we can move right to “branding” my local public schools with a corporate logo. Will we get a choice of brands, do you think? I’m not going to end up with “Koch Industries” am I?
The same media companies that have launched a crusade to discredit public schools and demonize public school teachers are in the for-profit education business. With FOX now entering the burgeoning for-profit education sector I’m confident media coverage of traditional public schools will only get more fair and balanced.
Villago Delenda Est
Wasn’t this tried before back in the 80’s with “Channel One”, which was basically a way to sneak commercials into the classroom and start bombarding kids on a more steady basis than Saturday morning cartoons or afterschool programming could do?
Rafer Janders
and School of One, a more radical attempt to use technology to personalize instruction, reorganize classrooms, and reduce the size of the teaching force.
Bada-bing! And now we see what this is really all about….
Question: why is “reduce the size of the teaching force” (i.e. a nicer way to say “eliminate teacher’s jobs”) a goal in and of itself? Why is getting rid of anyone’s jobs considered to be a laudable goal?
WereBear
Just as Stalin made money on the Ukranian Starvation Massacre, by selling their food; so our Overlords render us down for our net worth before throwing us into the streets to die.
Davis X. Machina
Dulce et decōrum est prō patriā emere.
kay
@Villago Delenda Est:
No. It’s much, much more than that. You have to read the business press to find out that it’s about “reducing the size of the teaching force”.
I’m trying to figure out when I elected Rupert Murdoch to my local school board. I’m drawing a complete blank.
Hunter Gathers
Good thing to know that my one year old has this to look forward to:
—“If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you?
You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?
Pepsi?
Partial credit!”—
Davis X. Machina
@Rafer Janders: Approximately 80% of a typical school district budget is salaries, benefits, and pension contributions.
Willy Sutton got an MBA, apparently….
Certified Mutant Enemy
“If you have three Pepsis and drink one, how much more refreshed are you? You, the redhead in the Chicago school system?”
“Pepsi?”
“Partial credit!”
— Pepsi Presents Addition And Subtraction
Linda Featheringill
Pitchforks.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Hunter Gathers:
Oops! I was too late.
kay
@Davis X. Machina:
Okay, I looked it up. I like this: “spe et Labore”
Is that “with hope and labor”? If not, I’ve been very confused for the last coupla weeks.
Comrade Dread
Can’t wait to see what all of my conservative Christian friends think when their offspring after being indoctrinated in Randian corporate schools start abandoning the church and embracing selfishness as their chief virtue.
kay
@Linda Featheringill:
Get ten people to vote “NO” on Issue Two. Friends, family members, collar strangers, whatever :)
We can’t lose this one. They’re now proposing charter (privatized) colleges.
Villago Delenda Est
OK, the irony here is that in the rush to export jobs, teaching was supposed to be one of those things that could not be exported (and therefore something to shoot for as a career, because it was difficult to offshore) because you’ve got to have a teacher in the classroom.
Looks like the Galtian overlords have found a way around that.
I’m afraid it comes down to a simple matter of survival, and I choose me over Rupert Murdoch.
russ
and I look forward to “the” lies ahead for the education sector.”
Hungry Joe
This whole monstrous scheme depends on the demonizing of teachers. Why, if those lazy, teacher’s-lounge-layabouts had to put in a whole day’s work and answer to a real boss, and weren’t being protected by union thugs … And what’s all this crap about pensions? You don’t get a pension, so why should they?
What’s surprising is that it has taken corporations so long to get into education. Hundreds of billions of guaranteed dollars every year, just waiting to be skimmed.
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Dread:
They won’t have a problem with it, because they worship Mammon-Jeebus, not Jesus of Nazareth, in the first place.
Rafer Janders
Approximately 80% of a typical school district budget is salaries, benefits, and pension contributions.
Approximately 100% of teaching is done by teachers.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Comrade Dread:
Prosperity Gospel Christians probably would have no problem with selfishness as a chief virtue.
KG
As something of a reformed libertarian, I still think there are market-ish reforms that could help public education. I think the old voucher programs, where a parent can get a portion of the money that would have been allocated to the student in public school to go to private school could work (it would, at least in theory, increase per capita spending and reduce class size).
That said, I don’t believe every “industry” can be driven by profits. I think there are some services which require a non-profit business model. Insurance would be one, education would be another.
Napoleon
@kay:
What do you mean by that? Do you have a link?
They already have those in Ohio in droves. Does Ashland, Oberlin, John Carrol, Hiram, Wooster, etc., etc., ring a bell?
Davis X. Machina
@Rafer Janders: You go after anything other than teachers, you can’t slash the mill rate — you only nibble at it. You go after anything other than teachers and aid to local education — the largest, or nearly so, of any line item in a state’s budget — can be whittled away, but not blown up.
There’s a discrepancy between the size of the bathtub and the dimensions of the putative drowning victim. Gotta put him on a diet, then drown him.
Villago Delenda Est
@Hungry Joe:
They were concentrating on other, more easily tapped, profit centers for the last 20 or so years since the collapse of the USSR meant that the governors on their behavior were disabled.
Those profit centers are drying up, so they’re looking for new veins to mine.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Napoleon:
Ahem, that’s John Carroll
Maybe they’re talking about for profit colleges (which already exist)…
kay
@Hungry Joe:
They’ve been working on it a long time. Almost 30 years. First they had to deregulate, and now, as far as I can tell, the one and only organized opposition are unions. It has to be more than stupidity on the part of liberal reformers, because all they had to do was look at Indiana to find out what was going to happen in Ohio and Wisconsin. Mitch Daniels destroyed collective bargaining by decree in 2005, and each and every year since Indiana’s public school policy grows more radically Right. They aren’t going to have a public school system after his latest “reforms”.
gene108
Schools have always bought supplies by for-profit companies, whether it is text books, chalk or toilet paper, there are vendors trying to make a buck from school systems.
What will be interesting about these computerized/on-line systems, which are becoming essential to teaching, is if there will be any real oversight of how money is spent on these or if the corporate cash from New Corp and Kaplan, will push aside any attempt to account for the effectiveness of the money spent on their products.
It seems companies are pushing products, without the schools actually demanding major changes in how they operate. I don’t think that’s a good equation for avoiding politicians handing out favors to corporate donors.
numbskull
@Comrade Dread: Dude, we passed that two exits back. “Churches” have been preaching greed for a long, long time.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Villago Delenda Est:
Cosigned with fix.
Auto-vampirism is an ugly spectacle. They won’t stop until the rest of the cadaverous body politic has been sucked dry and only then will the head realise that something’s gone wrong.
NonyNony
@Napoleon:
Those are private colleges. Much like we already had private schools in Ohio LONG before the Charter School Movement came in and stomped on us.
A charter college would presumably be a private college that gets to have funding like a state college. Much like a charter school is a private school that gets to suck up public funding on a per student basis.
I have shockingly NOT heard anything about a push for charter colleges in Ohio – so kay if you have a link please give.
Steve
@Napoleon: We’ve had private secondary schools for a long time, too. So why the heck are charter schools so controversial? Oh, you say it’s because they’re private schools that are supported with tax dollars just like public ones…
kay
@Napoleon:
Those are private schools, Napoleon. Private schools are non-profits, and they’re privately funded.
The proposal is to create charter schools out of public universities and colleges.
“Free them from regulation” leading to…profits! You know the deregulatory drill by now. Deregulate, then privatize.
Gilles de Rais
Same shit, different plate.
So tired of fighting these people, but it’s obvious that they won’t stop until they ruin not only my family but America as a nation.
Suffern ACE
In a sensible world, disgraced and failed superintendent Klein would be known as the man who inflated test score results to claim achievements for his boss and hide the reality from the parents of the kids attending his schools. But investors reward such folly and I’m sure when those investors are fleeced and the results of the company he works for suddenly go Enron, they’ll cry that they couldn’t have possibly foreseen how putting a deceitful hack in charge would end.
kay
@NonyNony:
Sure. But you have to promise me ten “NO on Issue Two” voters first.
I did a little reading on charter colleges. Ohio’s plan would be (surprise!) the most radical in the country. The one and only other state that has rolled it out to this extent is Virginia.
Maryland tried a pilot, and California set up a strictly regulated charter within it’s public university system, so expect them to lie and compare it to those two states. It’s different, so don’t buy it.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@kay:
The proposal is to create charter schools out of public universities and colleges.
Why? Generally public universities and colleges do pretty well…
Villago Delenda Est
@Suffern ACE:
As long as the investors see a satisfactory monetary ROI, they really don’t give a rat’s ass about ethics, or sustainability, or anything else.
It’s strictly about the benjamins. No other values, or concepts, or concerns, are taken into account, because you can’t monetize them.
Thus you have them acting, like the Borg, like they’re attempting to improve “quality of life” in the only way they know how to measure it.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Gilles de Rais:
You know what else had personalized instruction? Room 101, that’s what.
Villago Delenda Est
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
But they’re not allowing insiders to skim massive profit off them.
So they’re soshulist, or something…
kay
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
Given what’s happened to charter schools in k-12, why do you think?
Here’s a hint: they’re calling them “Enterprise Universities” with their typical Orwellian language and inability to tell the plain truth.
Not even the dupes at newspapers are buying that, though. They’re calling them “charter colleges”, which is what they are.
Villago Delenda Est
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yeah, but Room 101 had a student to teacher ratio that just isn’t economically feasible in this day and age, at least for a proper ROI…
4jkb4ia
I wonder if any of these things that News Corp. will be selling will be bought by one actual private school or if they are relying on school boards being gullible and given to fads.
@Napoleon: I think what Kay means is that they will apportion public money for colleges that will directly compete with the state universities like Miami of Ohio rather than with the existing private colleges. Ohio State is sui generis because it is just so huge. And 26 got there first, obviously.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Villago Delenda Est:
A kind of soc1al1sm which has worked fairly well since the 19th century…
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@4jkb4ia:
School boards are also prone to being taken over by fundies, at least temporarily.
Brachiator
Education Marketplace instead of schools. This is just sad.
kay
@Suffern ACE:
Lanny Davis all over again, who, coincidentally, is also a for-profit education lobbyist.
Rommie
This seems a little too easy to decipher: If the demographics are going against your side for future voting power, you go for those future voters and “teach ’em right” before that happens. Twelve years of Our Children are Learning the genius of John Galt? That’s an oligarchic Wet Dream that would make China’s leaders twist into knots of jealousy.
Villago Delenda Est
@Certified Mutant Enemy:
Yeah, but the problem is, the growth ceiling has been reached, and as we learned in the entire mortgage mess, when the growth limit has been reached, senior management refuses to accept reality and corner cutting (by lowering lending standards to sustain the growth rate) are ordered to maintain the “proper” quarterly growth figures. Never mind this is going to blow up a tad down the road, because, after all, I’ll be gone, and you’ll be gone!
It’s the entire “we’re rich, but not rich enough!” thing that is driving all this crap.
Kathleen
@Rafer Janders: The focus is to provide products or services that eliminate jobs or reduce the level of knowledge/skills/experience required to do an effective job. I had a bone density test a couple of years ago, and the technician who administered it told me how the equipment sales people stress their their new machine does all of the analysis and does not require a high level of technician knowledge or experience. Of course, then these labs can hire people at a cheaper rate and process more patients. A win/win. For them. Everthing is candidate for commodification (not sure if that’s a word).
Froley
I’m looking forward to the future when exciting and innovative financial instruments allow me to short sell my local school district, making money on an education bubble popping.
Linnaeus
@Froley:
If the recent past is any guide, those pushing corporatized education “reform” are also looking forward to such a future.
Social outcast
The students in a Fox-run school may not learn much about evolution, but they will at least graduate knowing how to a voicemail account. That’s got to be worth something.
Nutella
Mickey Mouse Elementary?
Dumbo Junior High?
Sneezy and Dopey Memorial?
FlipYrWhig
@Kathleen:
Commodification is not just a word, it’s a state of mind.
4jkb4ia
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I don’t know how attractive it could be to fundies if Joel Klein is in charge–he doesn’t seem to have a record of being one of them. But if this thing is sold as being like homeschooling, that could make a big difference.
Walker
The business model of for profit schools is getting poor students and sucking off the financial aid teat. If they are actually trying to make money from affluent students, they are going to fail pretty hard.
jwest
Required reading:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204226204576601232986845102.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
kay
@jwest:
Thanks! A Rupert Murdoch rag attacking public schools? There’s a shocker.
Tell me, when conservatives sold school deregulation to their “base”, did they tell folks these corporate leeches would be sucking up their tax dollars? Consultants and experts and lawyers?
Klein makes 2 million a year. He went from “school reformer” right through the revolving door. Tell me some more about how teachers are over-paid.
There’s a great photo of him riding in the back of a limo with Murdoch. Two regular folks who just love children and only want what’s best for them.
What’s next for conservatism? Are you going to knock second graders down and take their lunch money?
MattR
@kay: I am shocked that a former NFL player might try to view education through the same prism without realizing that they are two completely different systems. If anything, teachers should be comapred to coaches rather than players since both teachers and coaches are considered successes or failures based on the performance of others. But then you would have to point out that professional coaches are given players that have already been culled down to the most talented top 1% while teachers have to accept everyone in the neighborhood.
gene108
@Rafer Janders:
As more of the educational experience is pushed onto the internet, there is a potential that the demand for teachers will reduce, because the need for an instructor-classroom-pupil arrangement will not longer be necessary.
I think we are approaching a time, when students will be able to learn better remotely, at their own base.
This isn’t radical. I took macro-and-micro-economics via a distance learning option at my community college 10 years ago. The internet has just expanded the options of distance learning.
With the amount of class info – lecture notes, assignments, etc. – available on line, for middle school students on up, the dynamic of how education is delivered is changing.
How this will effect class size and the demand for teachers has yet to be determined, but the days of students learning only via in-person instructor lead classroom lessons is numbered.
Virtual learning options will exist and many younger students may respond better to that setting.
kay
@MattR:
My father-in-law (he’s deceased) said everyone thinks they can teach, because everyone went to school, and I think that’s true.
You saw what he does, right, in the bio? He runs a for-profit “business education” internet scam.
“is an entrepreneur who runs two websites devoted to small business education” In other words, for-profit education.
All of this “principled” advocacy for “school reform” ends up at a dollar sign.
I don’t want these people running public schools. I think they have massive conflicts and are unelected and unaccountable. It’s a 600 billion dollar (potential) market, and every scammer and grifter and cheat is lining up for a share of the spoils. I’ll take my chances with an elected school board, thanks.
MattR
@kay: The shame is that there is a real need for some reforms but you can’t have a conversation with the ideological wackos on the other side. If the solution does not include the destruction (or vast weakening) of the teacher’s union, they won’t even consider it.
kay
@gene108:
gene, you’re not 7 years old. The lunacy continues. We compare schools to for-profit businesses, and compare children to adults.
These are two different things. Schools are not in fact, businesses, (or professional football teams), and children aren’t adults.
We do state-funded on-line learning here. It’s a tragedy. They take the kids who are behavior problems and send them home for “on line learning”, all publicly funded. It’s a joke. The kids themselves say it’s a joke. They’re home alone. None of them finish. Bad parents like it because then teachers and principals are off their back.
It would be kinder to just have them quit school. At least we’d be telling them the truth. Our local juvenile judge won’t allow it anymore, when they’re coming thru his court. HE knows it’s a joke. He orders them to GO TO SCHOOL.
rikryah
you are so on point. I’m feeling you.
don’t want these slime buckets anywhere near public education
kay
@MattR:
I don’t know how people thought they were going to regulate this. 80% of Michigan’s charter schools are now run by for-profit companies. 80%.
We’re never going to re-regulate. They’ve purchased every member of the GOP legislature. It’s the same in Ohio.
What happens when public schools are gone? We’ll be able to “choose” from one or two national education corps. We’ll be begging for a “public option” in education. We’ve seen this movie before. How many times are we going to fall for it?
Rafer Janders
I think we are approaching a time, when students will be able to learn better remotely, at their own base.
Yeah, you let me know when we reach that time when an unsupervised eight year old boy will be able to learn remotely. I’m sure that kid will just sit quietly in his room for six hours, absorbing lessons, and there’s going to be no need for any adult to monitor him, or make sure he gets fed, or has regularly scheduled recess, or is in any way treated as a real human child with value rather than as a commodity to be marketed.
Walker
@gene108:
10 years ago, every university/college and their brother was looking at getting into distance education. Nowadays, not so much. Why not, because these programs are largely considered a failure. We have lots and lots of research on this now. Sure, if you are comparing it to auditorium lectures with no discussion and minimal TA interaction (which is common for macro and micro), then it is great. But it is very hard to run quality degree programs in this model.
When you look at successful distance education programs, such as even the things U. of Pheonix does well, they are very people intensive. While you pull some of the teaching online, you have to supplement it with small group discussions and other things. Technology is opening a lot of exciting areas in education, but reducing teaching staff is not one on them.
MattR
@kay: We can’t regulate because that would mean that big government was preventing the job creators from creating jobs (that they won’t create anyway).
In the comments of the WSJ article, one person pointed out that education is not a business and students are nto widgets. Someone responded that they are widgets and that they are the most important widgets that America makes. While I dig the sentiment in the latter part, the first part perfectly represents the mistaken belief that students are some generic object that be molded through some “one size fits all” approach.
I do computer programming for a living and I can only imagine how (much more) fucked our company would be if they judged people solely by the number of successful projects completed without any regard for their size or complexity. I know right away that if we have a problem with one particular system it will probably take 4 times as long because it is a convoluted piece of crap written be people who did not know what they were doing (and which we are currently replacing).
@Walker: There are some students and some situations where having a teacher in front of you is extraneous. But I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking those are the rule, rather than the exception.
kay
@MattR:
Why does everything have to be run “like a business”?
I’m going to call Rupert Murdoch and suggest he run his business like a …church. We’ll see how my new and innovative thinking goes over.
We’re surprised when we keep asking business people how to run schools and they all respond: “like a business!” They don’t know anything else. Of course they’re going to say that. I’d run a school like a …court, maybe. That doesn’t mean anyone sane should allow me to do that.
Walker
@MattR:
Certainly. The certification business does quite well online. But degree programs just have not been successful with the all online model. In my areas, the use of tech is all about how can we get more face time with students, because they need it.
MattR
@kay:
And we’ve come full circle to my first comment about how shocking it was to see former NFL QB Fran Tarkenton try to compare education to the NFL. When the only tool you have is a hammer …
Ohio Mom
After you finish the School of One, do you go on to join the Army of One? Sorry, couldn’t resist.
It’s quaint now, but it used to be understood that the purpose of public education was to cultivate the informed citizenry needed for democracy to flourish (that is, we were educating “the public”). To that end, the curriculum included things like public speaking (in the primary grades, aka Show-and-Tell); free-wheeling class discussions; the occasional group project or committee report; debates; whole-class efforts like plays, or the carnival my sixth grade class put together to raise money for a conservation group.
But if there is no such thing as society there’s no reason to learn to work as part of a group. How much better prepared you are for the your-on-your-own world if all your schooling is also on your own.
So once again we see the genius of a right-wing effort. Yes, this privatize the schools movement is all about raking in the cash but it also succeeds handily at promoting many other right-wing values and goals.
gene108
@kay:
I wasn’t comparing schools to for-profit businesses. I just pointed out that most things bought by school districts come from for profit businesses. Houghlin-Mifflin (sp?) isn’t a non-profit, but no one goes nuts about their textbooks because those textbooks must conform to some sort of non-profit driven guideline.
I think setting up guidelines for the need of on-line educational tools is more important, than the fact for-profit businesses want to sell products to schools. Every piece of chalk or dry erase marker or light bulb usually is purchased by schools from for profit entities. There’s nothing inherently wrong in for-profit entities providing services to schools.
When government officials are in-bed with the private sector to push specific products that haven’t been tested, that is an issue and that seems to me to be the bigger issue with Klein and others joining News Corp.’s education division. It’s bad enough Congresscritters end up in bed with business, after they leave office, but I now school superintendents are jumping ship for plum private sector jobs creates a bad precedent and is the issue here.
**************************
I don’t think parking 7 y.o. in front of monitors to listen to a lectures is a good idea. I didn’t mean to imply classroom learning’s dead, but the fact is the same way television changed how information could be presented (i.e. Sesame Street, nature specials), the internet based education delivery has become an essential part of school infrastructure.
I’ve tutored middle school kids, who can get access homework assignments on-line and lecture notes on-line. Kids gather information in ways we did not. I can see some parts of secondary education having on-line components.
I didn’t envision parking troubled students at home to learn on-line, since they would require the most one-on-one in-person attention. (I’m not entirely surprised, since it saves money on one-on-one tutors and/or special ed classes and allows school districts to say they are doing something).
Rather, if some students wanted to learn Russian, but the school lacked a Russian teacher, you could deliver a course via the internet for these students.
Internet based learning and for profit companies selling those solutions isn’t a bad thing, in and of itself. The fact is internet based solutions don’t seem to have the same set of guidelines for-profit textbook manufacturers are subject to, with regards to content.
That’s the area that needs to be addressed. Learning things via the internet is not inherently good or bad, which I guess is my point.
**************************
@Walker: I was thinking more along the lines of on-line MBA programs and other on-line graduate professional degree programs that have opened colleges up to people, who don’t have time to physically go to class.
The on-line grad classes I’ve seen people take are very interactive between students and teachers.
I’ve heard some folks fantasize about the day we have one teacher give a lecture that is broadcast via the internet to ‘n’ number of students. I don’t really get where these guys are coming from. I think these guys are represented in School of One’s goal to reduce the size of the teaching workforce.
The only rational explanation I’ve heard about virtual classrooms is when you have poor and/or remote areas of the world, where it is hard to attract teachers. You set up a virtual class room to deliver the lessons, while some literate person in the village helps get the class organized. There are a lot of kids, who don’t have access to schools. This may be one way to give them access to some level of education, while dealing with teaching shortages.
IrishGirl
@KG: Amen, I think profit and politics needs to stay the hell out of education as much as possible. I know politics will never be completely out but I think people in the middle and on the left need to seriously think about developing non-profits to offer as alternative charter schools to combat these for-profit efforts. If we’re going to be forced to have more charters, then lets give ourselves the option of non-profits based on the absolute best that educational research and business can provide. I honestly think that a non-profit approach would seriously kick for-profit charter asses when it comes to outcomes.
kay
Gene, you’re still comparing apples and oranges.
Kaplan isn’t a vendor to public schools. They operate publicly-funded for-profit sc3hools.
School of One has a construction division. TheyL’ll operate publicly funded for-profit schools.
Comparing this to purchasing school supplies is inaccurate.
School reformers are going to have to wake up, and this stubborn denial that this tthing has been hijacked is not comforting to me.
I want to keep public schools public. I’m alarmed by this. I’m going to figjt it until liberal reformers explain how they plan to keep these grifters in check.
IrishGirl
@Walker: Too bad they didn’t figure it out sooner. All of the private colleges like U of Phx, Devry, etc have moved to mostly online education but the quality has gone out the window. I used to teach for one of these businesses and I quit when they went to all online. I knew, and all my colleagues did too, that quality would be the first sacrifice. Now that the data has finally come in will those schools be hiring us back? Nope, they’ll continue down the same stupid path for the sake of the almighty dollar. Meanwhile higher education in the U.S. took a major hit as a result. Too many students are going from community colleges into the private schools and they’re getting shitty educations. The same applies to the graduate level courses. I know tons of professionals who have advanced degrees from U of Phx and they didn’t learn a damn thing. It’s a piece of paper, that’s all. If you have two candidates and one has an MBA from a real state college and another has from a for profit….I’d bet on the state college graduate every single time.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Ohio Mom:
Ironically enough, one of the leading factors pushing public education as it developed in the late 19th century was that providing the general populace with a high quality primary and secondary education made for a tactically more effective Army. Germany was an early leader in this area which is why we still use the term “kindergarten” today without remembering where it came from or why other nations scrambled to emulate what the Germans were doing. I rather doubt that the US military today contemplates the complete collapse of our system of public education with equanimity.
Ohio Mom
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Yes, public education has many roots & purposes — I was citing the John Dewey philosophy of education, which was very influential in the US, for a while (mostly during the baby boomers’ childhoods). If you listen carefully, the thump, thump, thump you hear is Mr. Dewey turning in his grave.
Another military influence on our schools is the free and subsidized lunch program. Truman started it in response to the Army’s complaint that many potential draftees had to be turned away due to health conditions resulting from malnutrition.
4jkb4ia
Eric Loomis examines technological reinvention of education in a very broad way.
(Not particularly upset that Lemieux has no baseball post)