Stephanie Simon of Reuters continues to be the most industrious investigative education journalist in the nation.
Here she reveals the outline of the free-market model of school, where students learn what they want, where they want, when they want, and pay for it with taxpayer dollars.
She calls it “a la carte” schooling.
It eliminates public schools as we have known them. It opens the door to private, for-profit vendors and anyone who hangs out a shingle.
Remember the old Hollywood movies where Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland said, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show?”
Now, it’s “Hey, kids, let’s open a school and make money.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Just when I thought all of the stupidest ideas were taken….
Kids going in unsupervised into adult homes who will discuss their business with the kid for money. Well, I’ll be VAMmed.
Don’t you mean VAMNED?
Oh, just wait–there’s more stupid yet to come.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9729383/Catcher-in-the-Rye-dropped-from-US-school-curriculum.html
Dear Diane Ravitch,
Would you listen to a short one-minute video I made last week of elementary students here in DC speaking about why their school should not be closed? Their school is the Thurgood Marshall Elementary school, and I know Thurgood Marshall would be proud of them! If you like it, can you pass it along? It has been proposed by our Chancellor that 20 traditional schools here be closed, and the students are part of an effort to stop that.
I heard you at the SOS conference in DC. I’m so glad I found your blog, because it really helps me keep up on what’s going on with the “civil rights issues of our time.”
I’m a student rights advocate, and spend a lot of time encouraging students to speak up for themselves and the issues they care about. In 1965, when I was in 8th grade, I was one of several students suspended for wearing black armbands to school to mourn the dead in Vietnam. The ACLU took our case, which went to the Supreme Court. In 1969, the Court ruled that students in schools do have First Amendment rights, with some limitations (students can’t substantially disrupt school, and they can’t intrude on the rights of others.)
As everywhere in the country, our issue is the closing of our public schools. As you probably know, our Chancellor, Kaya Henderson, is a cookie cutter of Michelle Rhee, only with a better PR staff. The schools she has proposed to close are mostly in lower-income neighborhoods with mostly students of color live. Of 3800 students who would be affected, it is estimated that 36 are white. 83% of the students are low-income, although the school system overall has 66% low income.
The good news is that, as you have shown through your blog, community members and students are speaking up. And that is happening here as well. There may be a national movement to close our public school system, but there is also a national movement to keep and improve public schools, and we join with you in that.
Thank you for your leadership and all that you do, Mary Beth Tinker
________________________________
Sure. Where is the video?
This concept was proposed nearly two decades ago in a Wired magazine article written by Lewis J. Perelman, author of “School’s Out” in 1993: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/hyperlearning.html.
This article opens with this phrase: “Could your business benefit from a few hundred billion dollars in new sales? Good. Let’s talk.” … here’s a blog post I wrote a few months ago referencing this Wired article: http://waynegersen.com/?s=perelman
Business has really perfected that argument for privatizing public education. Anything that is public is socialist and must be saved (for the capitalists greedy fingers). They can pull in anyone who has been raised on the fear of socialist takeover.
On paper, this sounds like student-directed learning. Is the issue private-sector vendors? Big Picture Schools send kids out of the building for 2 days/week. Home/Unschoolers likewise. What am I missing? I would love to see a high school adopt this model as a choice for their students
Did you read the article? And the comments? There are several objections spelled out.
Essentially it boils down to this is great for rich folks who can afford to have one parent at home supervising their kid, helping them design an appropriate curriculum, driving them wherever they need to go and monitoring their web activity. And they get all these classes for free – stuff wealthy parents routinely pay more than $1,000/class for.
But for middle class, working and poor people it sucks because resources are pulled away from local public schools where they have little choice to send their kid because very few if any kids could be trusted to simply go to it all on their own. You’re going to have “schools” full of kids glued to computer screens being monitored by babysitters.
As one commenter put it, it’s just class warfare.
But why can’t public schools create this type of learning environment? Can’t public school teachers help the student design appropriate curriculum. I get that it stinks that private vendors would charge for this. I would prefer that they contribute time and expertise to public education students. Don’t we want to create the capacity for students to take responsibility for their own learning? There are so many learning opportunities in communities that students are cut off from. I think that this is a great opportunity for public schools to figure out how to make something like this work. Big Picture is a start, Expeditionary Learning as well. I don’t agree with how LA did it.
Out spot out!!
Public school teachers are no longer allowed anywhere near a curriculum. That is the domain of people with deep pockets and no educational expertise or experience whatsoever. Actual educators are increasingly disenfranchised from creating educational policies ….until they flop and it is time to blame someone.
Summerhill! What would O’Neil say?
He would probably ask who dictates the choices.
“Choice”has always been the tune of Madison Avenue. Give ’em a choice between filtered and unfiltered, menthol and regular, and the gals can have their Slims™. Never mind the fact — and keep the suckers from thinking about the fact — that it’s the same old cancer sticks in every pack.
See my comment here.
Many public school teachers are facing class room sizes of 30 or more pupils. Many public schools are being defunded and stripped of enrichment programs. When does this insanity end?
When we as teacher tell them to f… off. Sorry but that is the only time it will happen.
Let me see if I got this …. Louisiana TV will be charging $1280 per student to show Enviro Ed dvds they have in their archives …. so with lets just say 30 students they will be pulling in $38,000 .. for 1 semester course … or is it full year … but since there is no rent to pay or water/heat to pay no real cost to them .. except to get the dvd .. and there is no limit to the # of students (no size limitations as a classroom would have) .. there is really an unlimited ## of students hence $$ from the public coffers that would go to them …. not to mention, will they have HANDS ON anything ?… Field trips? .. building connections between folks who are in the field working in EE … of course not, I am sure
omg what are these fools doing …. except stealing the PUBLIC $$ again .. .My god .. STAND UP .. say it loud and CLEAR .. .THIS MUST STOP ……
This is so dumb. On it’s face it is just stupid!
A response for Tim McClung, since it is getting hard to read responses above:
You are right, public schools can and do offer such things, including blended learning programs, alternative high school programs with a heavy emphasis on community partnerships, and so on. But that’s not what these proposals are about.
I’m mainly familiar with the Michigan proposals. You have to understand that in the Michigan context, all school operating funds are distributed on a per-pupil basis according to a formula decided by the state legislature. Yes, ALL operating funding, except for earmarked state and Federal funding for at-risk and special education students. Local districts are barred by state law from increasing their own taxes to fund operating expenses.
As a result, every student who leaves a local public school for a charter or an online “virtual” charter school takes that per-pupil allowance with them. (In Michigan, online schools receive the same per-pupil funding as brick-and-mortar schools.) This amount is usually much larger than the “savings” from having one less student, especially in the elementary grades.
Enter this “a la carte” education proposal. Their vision is that students will assemble an education from pieces provided by local school districts, charter schools, online vendors, and others. The per-pupil funding would be divided among those “education service providers” as the proposal calls them. (Teachers are called “transmitters.”)
Is this any kind of recipe for a quality education? Is education truly just the sum of the individual facts and skills you accumulate, and no more? That’s one level of objection.
The second level has to do with the fact that Michigan has the highest proportion of charter schools managed by for-profit corporations of any state in the Union. Nearly 80% of our charter schools are managed by for-profit companies; these firms often employ every person in the school and own the building as well. Charter school boards, nominated by the management companies and approved by the chartering agency (usually a small state university) have nearly no independence. Our two existing online charters are also run by two for-profit (and highly profitable) corporations: K12 Inc. and Connections Education (now a part of Pearson).
This predominance of the profit motive is deeply troubling and potentially disastrous. Private firms have a legal duty to put their shareholders’ interests first, not their “customers.” No child deserves to come in second place to some equity investor’s dividend check.
The third level has to do with equity and the burden of educating more “expensive” kids. Companion legislation to this “a la carte” proposal would allow charters with selective admissions policies, among other things. This would simply exacerbate the existing problems with “cherry picking,” where charter schools are able to “counsel out” special education students, expel troublesome students, and exclude students whose parents are not willing or able to comply with significant parent involvement commitments. These students go back to their local public districts, but carry with them only the average per-pupil funding, not the true cost of educating students facing significant challenges.
(An example about special education: in my school district, the combination of state and Federal funds and a regional property tax levy dedicated to special education still only cover about 55% of our overall special education expenses. The rest is covered out of the regular per-pupil funding. As the concentration of special needs students rises, more and more cuts must be made to general education programs. Budget cuts, for whatever reason, drive more student departures, which starts the cycle all over again.)
In the article, attorney and longtime Michigan political operative Richard McLellan is quoted as saying that when critics argue that the governor wants to “destroy public education as we know it,” he responds: “That’s accurate.” McLellan is the author of the “a la carte” funding proposal as well as companion pieces of legislation that would radically restructure public education in my state. He was also one of the prime movers of a state ballot proposal to allow school vouchers twelve years ago. I think that pretty well sums it up.
Public schools do provide some customization, but perhaps need to have the freedom to provide more. The principle of my son’s high school was very flexible when he realized the standard curriculum was interfering in his education. Some of his friends were using MOOC’s as a basis for independent study classes. The best system would be flexible enough to provide the appropriate education to each individual student. In some cases, that might mean “a la carte” (my son came pretty close to this), in others it might mean a more rigid curriculum.
“Personalization” is an Instructional Technology buzzword from the 80s and 90s that has nothing to do with privatization, but much like the original ideals of alternative, charter, experimental, laboratory, magnet, and virtual schools, private profiteers have weaponized it and regimented it to form yet another phalanx of conquest wedged into the public sector.
People who were arguing for and developing the human use of instructional technology throughout the last half of the last century were adamant about the difference between Personalization With Persons and Personalization Without Persons. The true potential of IT was always that it could augment and enhance human2human communication and dialogic interaction, not diminish and impoverish the human touch.
As usual, the insatiable greed of the unquenchable profit motive transforms every glimmer of utopia into an abject dystopia.
But enhancing the person to person contact is exactly what some aspects of these technologies do. MOOCS use peer to peer interaction to a far greater extent than traditional classes and sites like studyroom and stack exchange crowd source answers to a variety of question.
Eggs, Grandfather.
Grandfather, Eggs.
Sorry, but no introduction needed.
The critical question remains what it always is —
Whom Do You Serve?
In other words, where are the loci of control and what aim, concern. end, goal, interest, objective, purpose does the whole system serve?
We know whom they serve, themselves and the almighty dollar. As always, I enjoy your observations Jon. They have their own corrupt golden rule, he with the gold will set the rules.
Once again, we produce many goods and services that are essential to people’s lives in the private sector. There needs to be a nuanced analysis of which things are best produced by the decentralized market at which are best produced by the state.
As usual, the absolute lust for power of the anti-capitalist element of society transforms simple, common sense instruction in reading and math, which can be done by anyone, into capture of taxpayer money into a self-sustaining ideology of monopoly employment for socialists. About time that American education was freed from the Marxists.
Yikes! This frees us from the Marxists???
My son is taking an iPad class for him to be introduced to MOOCs. Massive Online Open Course.
http://nuanceintelligence.com/tag/mooc/
MOOCs are free distance-learning, web-based classes that are open to anyone who chooses to enroll. Stanford University pioneered the concept and a couple of Stanford professors teamed up to found Coursera, a for-profit company that manages MOOC offerings from a number of august institutions, including Stanford, the University of Virginia, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and others.
1) Sell stuff. Some of Coursera’s offerings come with handy links to buy a textbook related to the class. So some of the usual suspects (Amazon, authors of textbooks) will make money there.
2) Data. I don’t know how Coursera is tracking our data, but with over 50,000 of us signed up for just this one class, that’s a lot of name/email/etc captures, and I’m sure the Stanford smarties can find a way to aggregate and monetize it.
3) Advertise. There are myriad opportunities for advertising in the spaces around the course itself, as well as the communities that are springing up to manage the needs of students in a virtual environment. I’m enjoying the ad-free look that Coursera currently sports, but I’m not expecting it to last.
4) Online domains. I really like StudyRoom, a virtual space where I connect with other students and some TAs (who are volunteers) and ask questions about the assignments. Virtual worlds could help students in many different learning environments, not just MOOCs – the challenge is going to be building the right communities, even when you don’t have 50,000 people enrolled in a course.
Online courses will have to find some way to pay for the resources that go into producing the classes. The obvious way would be a paywall, but advertising is another solution.
Sockpuppetry? What, did your former screenname get banned (understandably so)?
No, Dienne, Diane did not ban me, just asked me to stop calling her names because it was HER living room. She also asked me to say who I really am, and I’m working on that. I have added my actual middle name to my archetype. Diane is fair minded as far as the blog goes. It doesn’t make me a troll to express an opinion that the entire model of ‘stuff from government’ deserves to be eliminated. The progressive theory of education from Dewey on IS essentially socialist, and as such is fundamentally contrary to the individualist tradition in American life, that and that alone which has made America great. It is sad to me to see the public education model falter, but falter it has because it set as its goal the impossible one of educating everyone. Dolts are dolts. Something constructive must be done with them for a productive and peaceful society, but the current education leadership in this country is totally bankrupt, bankrupt because of it’s utopian philosophy, and is scamming millions of dollars out of the public. Why not let the private sector scam that money instead? The key concept is CHOICE, i.e. liberty, freedom. Some will use their freedom irresponsibly, wastefully, but the public schools aren’t doing any better. Garbage in, garbage out. THAT’s why Diane’s opposition to having teachers evaluated on the basis of testing is sensible and worthwhile. Marxism is a religion, but it will never get us to heaven on earth. Private enterprise doesn’t promise heaven, just adequate prosperity. Marxism is the Dark Side. I’m with the Jedi, not the Sith.
Would you characterize city water supplies and the like as Marxist too? Are there no rights we would consider inherent and beyond the scope of exploitation for profit?(ideally if not in actuality). I would only posit an honest observation, extremes, right or left are dangerous and unsustainable. Fascism in Italy and Germany emanated from the right. I wouldn’t go to that spectrum of misery. Even Jefferson warned of unbridled money and power being linked together. After profit what do our would be masters seek? That question answers itself. They really believe they should tell us what to do.
Interestingly enough there is an interesting literature on privately managed and even owned water companies. As I buy my electricity, natural gas, and communication services from a regulated but privately owned firm, it does not seem to be a crazy idea to buy water from a regulated private firm. The Wikipedia entry on private water companies has a nice set of links.
As you note, they are regulated, they can not just act as they will for purely capitalistic reasons. Oversight of vital services is needed.
I agree, but public ownership and daily management of these vital services is not required.
You have it upside down, Old Teacher. The Nazi’s were socialists. Inherent in socialism is the the belief that they should tellus what to do. Profit is not that way. It is a question of freedom vs. equality. There IS no equality and never will be. No one can make everyone equal, not even a good public school system. Why try to save a dead horse.
The equality sought here is one of opportunity and quality of schools, outcomes can not be assured. Current reform insists teachers can guarantee outcomes, we can not. As far as the Nazi’s go, their pure nationalism and their state collaboration with private profiteers such as Krupp and others is more of a right wing finding. I don’t advocate pure socialism either, but I contend that extremes such as communism and pure caveat emptor unrestrained capitalism will both lead to the same ruin and misery. These models do not serve most of us well.
Falstaff, your idea that the free market=freedom might hold water if there really were a “free market,” but there is not. Because of the current extreme income inequality, a small number of people own most of the media and it is an echo chamber. A small number of global corporations own most businesses. Walmart has crushed Main Street. The big box stores destroyed the book stores and the record stores. Now amazon.com is driving the big box stores to the edge of bankruptcy. Free market? I don’t think so.
The market does cause inefficient firms to leave the market, but that is required if we want to produce new goods and services. At one time we required almost all of the population to produce the food we eat. Farmers needed to be driven from business so that we could have teachers.
Being a true believer in many things — democracy, education, inquiry, to name a few — I naturally believe that my faiths are based on experience and reason, and maybe everyone feels that way about his or her fundamental beliefs. But long experience tells that a fundamental disconnect always arises in talking to fundamentalists with apparently incommensurable fundamentals, and it quite possible to me that it may always be that way.
I simply cannot grasp the point of view that is preached by the Church of Friedmanology, that cannot tell the difference between a social institution — a community that embodies the ideals of democratic government, universal free public education, or inquiry aimed at untainted truth — and something like a supermarket, antebellum plantation, advertising agency, or other purveyor of “Goods And Services” (GAS).
I would propose that the system of higher education seems to work rather well despite (or perhaps even because) it is not under the control of the legislature.
The way we organize society in order to satisfy our needs and desires changes over time for good reasons. What may be initially provided in the market, like health insurance, may, of necessity, be changed to a monopoly provided service. It may even someday come to be called a social institution, though it is not one now.
It can’t also work the other way. In the old Soviet Union, collective farms were certainly a social institution, but, as it turned out, they did not serve the citizens well, so they were disbanded.
Onion article, right?