Jeb Bush claims the mantle of King of Education Reform.
He touts the Florida Miracle.
His ingredients for success: testing, testing, testing, school report cards, privatization, charters, vouchers, and big investments in online learning.
Here is one careful review of the Florida “miracle.”
Here is yet anothergood analysis of the Florida Miracle.
Bush is pushing the digitization of schooling pretty hard. His Foundation is funded by technology companies. Tony Bennett of Indiana and Tom Luna of Idaho carried the Bush banner in the November elections, and both got whipped.
There is neither research nor any evidence that kids learn more or better if they are doing it online. But this was not mentioned this at the big Bush conference in DC (Arne Duncan was the keynote speaker, boosting Bush’s credibility as an education reformer and a candidate in 2016).
Question: Will Jeb Bush’s Florida Miracle go the way of George W. Bush’s Texas Miracle?
Can we survive another such miracle?
Hmmm. A nation of digitized children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane…you might want to highlight this article.
http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019784379_charterschools29.html
If charter school promoters seriously believe that charter schools provide a better education than public schools, they should be the first calling for failing charters to be closed. No profession/industry which doesn’t adequately police itself deserves to be taken seriously (which is not to say that policing of any profession/industry should solely be an internal affair).
Accountable to Whom?
As the convention for Ed Reform led by Jeb Bush takes place I am struck with the simplicity of this whole movement:
Test (so we know how schools are doing so we can reward and punish)
Accountability (to get rid of low performing schools and teachers)
Competition (to privatize public education to increase private control)
Technology (they want the power of data to …go back to step one)
Notice that none of the reformers are educators
Notice that they are not parents
They are business leaders and politicians
The real agenda of this corporate reform is for education to become accountable to the business roundtable. Strengthening communities is not on their list. They have been engineering this takeover for 20 years.
They want accountability so they can manage the process: manage the schools, manage the leaders, manage the teachers, manage the curriculum, manage the data and manage the profit from providing educational services paid by taxpayers.
In order to do this they are working to take school boards, local control, curriculum choice, and teacher unions out of the equation.
Their hope is that public schools will take care of the left-overs and the special ed kids (the expensive losers). Charter schools will take over everything else.
Then they will have a public education system they can control and manage to their liking.
Back in the early ’90s there was a series called Seaquest DSV–a science fiction show about a submarine crew. An episode in season 2 called “Playtime” made a huge impression on me as I began my teaching career. It was about 2 kids (the last on a future Earth) who spent so much time interacting with technology that when the technology was “dying” they didn’t know how to interact with each other. When I hear about technology taking the place of interactive, public schools (and other places), I immediately think about this episode and worry about our future.
If you are a Netflix subscriber, I highly recommend this episode.
Hi Diane…
There was another “education miracle” some time back. It became known as the “Houston Miracle.” This one gave rise to NCLB.
It was another time. Featuring another Bush. And producing another phony miracle.
Maybe such “miracles” are genetic. Maybe being phony is.
David Rackow
R ACKOW & A SSOCIATES Where Creativity Gets Down To Business (O) 215-635-1336 (C) 267-304-2305 rackowassociates@comcast.net “Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by those moments that take our breath away.”
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The real “Florida Miracle” is that they have any teachers left in the state. You can read about the horrors of teaching in the sunshine state on my blog http://kafkateach.wordpress.com.
“They are trying to bring Wall Street to Sesame Street.” That sentence says it all.
The Bush family is deeply imbedded in education software and virtual education as it is easy money and all they are about is large profits. Virtual education is a joke. Do not forget that Bill Gates is quoted as saying they will have one teacher for a million children. That is so progressive and in favor of real education of our children and individualization isn’t it? Gates, Broad, Walton, HP and the rest are not there for you only themselves and that is the bottom line. We must remember what the bottom line is as that is all they care about certainly not you or your community or children.
The miracle is that there is anyone left to teach in Florida public schools.
71% graduation rate, according to DOE cohort data. ’nuff said.
Um, the vast majority of the peer-reviewed research shows that student learning outcomes in virtual classes are essentially the same as those in face-to-face classes. Not ‘more’ or ‘better’ but not worse, either. The same. Now, there might be lots of other reasons why you wouldn’t prefer online learning, but student achievement doesn’t appear to be one of them.
And, no, this comment is not in favor of the cybercharter abuses you so aptly highlight on this blog.
I know of no peer-reviewed research showing that online learning is as valuable as social integration with a live teacher and classmates. Please send it in. I reviewed the latest federal research, which identified zero peer-reviewed studies of online learning for K-12 students.
You’ve read the federal metaanalysis, which is good. You can start diving into the P-12 instructional technology and/or online learning research literature, which is replete with confirmatory studies that, on balance, it’s a wash between F2F and online learning environments when it comes to student achievement.
Your point about ‘social integration’ is important, but we must recognize that it’s not the only goal – or even the predominant one – of many online learners. Credit recovery, the opportunity to take courses otherwise unavailable, the ability to take extra or advanced courses, convenience due to external life factors (e.g., travel, being homebound, incarceration), the chance to work at one’s own pace, and many other reasons are driving the growth of online learning. How we define learning experiences as ‘valuable’ varies from person to person, family to family, and context to context. Your view of what’s ‘valuable’ may (and does) differ from others. Mine does too. So I think we need to be careful about being so dogmatic that only certain modalities of learning are ‘valuable.’
If you have studies, not sponsored by the industry, please post them.
We can start with the work of Cathy Cavanaugh:
http://bit.ly/11pYOpn
And then there’s the work of Michael Barbour:
http://bit.ly/11pZ3Rt
Also see the work of Rick Ferdig:
http://www.ferdig.com/?page_id=18
Plus the research in any of these journals:
http://www.uis.edu/colrs/research/journal.html
Google and Google Scholar are wonderful tools…
Do any of these studies take into account the high attrition rates from online schools (sometimes as much as 50% in a single year), the very low graduation rates (Colorado Virtual Academy just posted a graduation rate of 22%), or studies by CREDO and NEPC showing that students in online schools have lower test scores than those in brick-and-mortar schools?
The brief lists of online learning researchers and academic journals that I provided – and that anyone can find with a quick online search – embody a breadth and depth of research regarding online learning. The CREDO and NEPC studies are two important contributions to the wider body of literature but also are only two analyses. There are many, many others – that study both more schools and fewer schools, that focus at the student-level instead of the school-level, that address various other research issues of interest, etc. – that have confirmed the relative ‘value’ of online learning when it comes to student achievement, access, convenience, scale, opportunity, and many other factors.
I, too, deplore the abuses of many of these charter and cybercharter schools. But that doesn’t mean that charter schools or online learning don’t have a place in our educational systems and our children’s (and adults’) lives. We all know that one modality of schooling does not fit all. Instead of overgeneralizing the abuses of some providers to condemn entire ways of learning, teaching, and schooling, we should be learning from those that do it well and figuring out ways to scale them up while simultaneously implementing additional regulatory and oversight measures that better prevent harm.
In short, it’s one thing to say, ‘Some of these charter and/or online schools are doing horrendous things and should be stopped.’ It’s another to make a leap from that to ‘all charter / online schools are bad.’ I’m wary of folks who can’t see the difference…