Cyber charters are profligate in wasting taxpayer dollars. A recent article on the Huffington Post reported that they spent nearly $100 million on advertising over a five year period. The biggest cyber charter, K12, spent more than $20 million in the first eight months of 2012.
In Ohio, home of rapacious and ineffective cyber charters, it costs the cyber operator $3,600 per student. But the corporation collects $6,300 per student. This leaves lots of dollars for profit and advertising.
Would it surprise you to know that the owners of the Ohio cyber charters give major campaign contributions to the governor and legislators?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The more education is commericialized the more the Serfice Providers will spend on advertising, lobbying, and just plain payola, until the smallest possible fraction is spent on labor and infrastructure itself. The utopian ideal of of the Corporate Libertarian Hedgucator is of course to have the public working for peanuts to babysit itself, while the hedge-fund operators cash in on the higher order derivatives of other people’s labors.
Jon,
I’m going to have to enlist you in helping me write a “Devil’s Dictionary” of edubabble.
Duane
Keeping up with the lexicon artists already building that Tower of EduBabel would certainly be a devil of a job, for sure.
Don’t forget to include (ahem!)–villainthropist & villainthropy.
My personal faves, if I do say so myself!
Oh–& Linda’s bloviated, bloviating–perfection!
Right on!
This doesn’t surprise me. Follow the money.
The local superintendent here in PA just came out in our town newspaper decrying the amount of money these cyber schools cost the district. Even if the schools are blatantly profiting from tuition hikes they cost schools some serious money per student. It amazes me that taxpayers aren’t aware of this.
are = aren’t
Well, that’s good, but why didn’t she or he deny approval?
Do you have a state commission that overrides local districts’ decisions vis-a-vis charter school denial/approval? (Unfortunately, Illinois does!)
Surprisingly enough, the article wasn’t really for or against the cyber schools. The superintendent was only complaining about the amount of money that is being siphoned off towards them. I’m not sure if we do have a state commission that can override anything, but I’m inclined to think so (Pennsylvania).
Cybercharters in Ohio have some high-powered backers. Jeb Bush actively promotes them.
That alone should discredit Jeb Bush on education. The fact is they’ve never been good, they’ve never saved money, and they expand every year. They were originally sold as a way to homeschool, and they may be effective there, but like all things “market-based” they were sold to a larger market and now the lobbyists are embedded in our state legislature and they have a powerful lobby, with very little regulation or oversight.
Reformers should be called to account on Ohio cybercharters. They should have to explain how this happened, and why they didn’t object to what is rank profiteering.
Unfortunately, the question of what is “good” and what “really works” is secondary to the power and prestige of the endorser. Nothing in Jeb Bush’s Florida ed reform package has worked. Not one thing. Yet people like Bush intentionally form organizations and travel the country to promote what only serves the greed of high=power individuals and so-called education companies.
And, M., I suppose he will use his “platform” to run in 2016? Who will win the Republican primary?
“Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who is the reformiest candidate of all?”
THAT’s who will win the 2016 nomination.
Chiara: If you haven’t yet. read the comments on the Huff. Post link. Excellent, telling comment from a parent/consumer, validating all the disgust with K12 in particular.
Let’s see, we’ve privatized the health care, defense, and prison industry over the past fifty years. We’ve let a privatization mentality guide the finance, real estate, and foreign capital markets. And each of these has been a complete disaster!
So what do we want to do now? Why, privatize education as well, of course! It’s terrible that the mentality that’s given us such terrible inequality and produced such horrible people at the top is still in charge.
I googled “privitization” and found this line on the Wikipedia article:
The Economist magazine introduced the term in the 1930s in covering Nazi German economic policy.[5][6]
The Privitization blog talks about this issue: http://www.privatizationblog.com/.
Paul Buchheit talks about the five poisons of privitization at truthout.org:
“Leading capitalists like Bill Gates and Jeb Bush and Michael Bloomberg and Arne Duncan and Michelle Rhee, who together have a few months teaching experience, have decided that the business model can pump out improved assembly line versions of our children.”
I was just listening to the live feed of the Google IO Conference.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/15/google-i-o-developer-conference-live
They just talked about Google Play for Education. It will launch in the fall.
Google Play is Google’s site to buy and download Google apps for Android devices.
Google Play for Education will have education apps, categorized by subject and grade level.
Their idea is that each student in a school district would have a google account. The IT department for that school district would be able to get an education app, and download it to all their students’ android devices (most likely tablets).
Google Play also includes educational books and videos and other media.
They also mentioned that over 1000 schools in America are using Google Chrome Books.
I’ve been called a Luddite because I voiced my opposition of online learning. I stated that technology does have it place in a classroom such calculators, smartboards, document readers. But those are tools that teachers use to facilitate the presentation of a lesson. But the goal of privatization in public education is to replace as many teachers with cyber-schools and automate pedagogy in the teaching profession. This is where teachers across the nation should have some form of fear of being replaced with C3P0.
Folks in my cohort have been promoting the potential of information technology for education and research for the last 50 years at least, but what we are seeing in this corporate control pyramid scheme is a regressive movement, the very opposite of what we all had in mind.
There will always be the Efficiency Fanatics. In the 60s they were pushing the idea that one Master Teacher™ + CCTV could educate the masses on a shoestring — sound familiar? — but it sucked then and it sucks now, no matter how they rebrand it.