EduShyster is excited to see that Morgan Spurlock has discovered charter schools, which are training minority students to be busy every minute every day. Spurlock has a CNN program called “The Inside Man” where he sees how things really work.
When Spurlock decided to find out why our schools are “failing,” This is what he did:
“The Inside Man was off on a mission. First stop: Finland, where Spurlock joined a long and growing list of American visitors who descend on that country intent on learning nothing. Then it was time to find a school that takes every single one of the elements of the Finnish success story and either ignores them completely or does the precise opposite of what the Finns do. Welcome to Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, where there is no magical 100% solution but rather one hundred, individual 1% solutions. Let’s take a look, shall we?”
What are the secrets of this charter?
“Williamsburg Prep’s “immersion approach” relies on key special sauce ingredients like tracking the speaker plus some nifty new flavors, including lots of hand clapping and snapping. Most importantly though, neither these students, nor their hands, are ever idle. And that’s key because it is a well known historical fact that idle hands do the Devil’s work. Also, in the jobs of the future, there will not be much downtime, if you know what I mean. In other words, Williamsburg Prep looks a lot like a school in Finland, if Finland was actually called SLANTland and instead of educating students, the Finnish teachers were training seals.”
To learn more about this miraculous school, read on.
Plain scary! I pray that parents don’t buy into this school.
I watched that show. First, he goes to Finland. He thinks he can easily teach a class to writing stories because he is a writer. As any teacher might suspect, he quickly crashes and burns. Teaching was not as easy as he thought. He then arrives a Williamsburg Prep and is greeted by his “handler” who tells him great stories and shows him great things. Then, I am not quit sure how it happened, but his “Handler” had a scripted lesson for him to follow on how to teach about a story, with activities down to the last minute. He started teaching, with his “handler” watching, and followed the script, and everything went great.
I am not sure what his point or conclusion was. But from my POV that Williamsburg Prep was a scary place! Nobody had to think, not the teachers or the students!
Okay! I think I got it!?! Anybody ever see Demolition Man the movie about the future and a cop and a bad guy being thawed out to do battle over a corporate bad guy and his perfect utopian country and obedient population. Oh! I forgot to mention the underground poor people eating rat burgers and defiant in their free spirited radical mindset. You should really revisit this movie with a good sense of humor and an eye for the handwriting on the wall.
Anyway, there is a scene where the hero is rewarded with a dinner at Taco Bell. Ah!
Yes! Taco Bell but a high class expensive Taco Bell. What is left of the Corporate and Acquision and Merger Ages of their history. So there were only Taco Bell Restaurants around the world but of varying social and financial levels. They were not actually eating food but were offered food selections that looked like pellets made in a lab with sophisticated selections. Oh! You say you saw the TV last night that told us about the new hamburger created in a lab. Hmmmm!! Interesting! Yummy! Yuk! Oh! All I could think of was Soylent Green of another in your face seed the minds of the young sci-fi.
Yep! Civilization was out of food resources and eating themselves.
So yesterday at lunch I was having a conversation with a friend who told me of a young man from Estonia who was visiting them and how McDonalds is a big deal in Estonia and expensive. Well! In a poor country everything is expensive. Oh! You say America land of the free and jobless has become a McDonalds restaurant of “choice”….Oh! Really? Forgive my sarcasim but that is exactly where we have arrived. The managers of the fast food chains are now tauting their college degrees of all levels. Desperate people will resort to desperate times with desperate measures and do desperate jobs.
A job, any job offers dignity and purpose. It is called survival. However, it does fly in the face of the American Dream, whatever that was.
Keeping in mind as I am an advocate for the learning disabled and special education students, these were some of the jobs we counted on for our students. Those were jobs that brought our low functioning, but just as much wanting the dignity of a job, for an opportunity for work and survival. Manufacturing was and is gone and what was left in this country could be found at the next step for the push through desperate population was in For Profit Prisons. Yep! Data processing, making clothes and other products, rebuilding our infrastructure, all under the watchful eye of a government and corporate partnership. A formula for success for all. Clap your hands and snap your fingers. The elitist attitude of we are providing jobs and you can like it or leave it and eat rat burgers in a sewer is alive and well. All the PR for Walmart, McDonalds, and other global corporate wunderkins are brilliant smoke and mirror rhetoric and a lot of handwriting on the outside walls of the gated communities where the 1% live. Taco Bell or McDonals, what’s the difference? Clap your hands and snap your fingers children….Corporate Charter Schools are starting to reveal themselves as the sorting boxes for the children of the future workforce. It saves steps on finding and directing those that will arrive at a McDonalds from those that will move to Silicon Valley and like technology communities.
Oh! If your going to Estonia I was told the McDonalds does not have a breakfast menu yet and if you are going on a $10 a day budget you won’t be able to afford their hamburger.
Not sure what the complaint is here.
The snapping clapping is interactive, gets them paying attention to other kids answering the questions rather than daydreaming while waiting their turn, perhaps./
Also, the test scores crush the statewide average despite high poverty rates.
It’s not as though non Williamsburg Prep schools are bastions of creative learning.
Wiliiamsburg also, I suspect borrows from Finland in emphasizing effort rather than raw scores. The weakest students get the most help. Such an approach would likely shoot our own scores much much higher too.
Problem is, kids that are badly behind get lousy grades and lots of complaints. School is raw hell for them. Finland has no letter grade system, emphasizing improvement over raw scores. That seems to be what’s key and Spurlock did mention this facet even if he didn’t seem to make the connection.