Reporter Colin Woodard’s brilliant exposé of the profitable ties between Jeb Bush, Maine’s Governor Paul LePage, and the online industry won the prestigious George Polk award for reporting in 2012.
If you have not read it, do so now. You will be an informed citizen.
More about this great journalist:
Colin Woodard, an award-winning author
and journalist who writes for Washington
Monthly, The Christian Science Monitor,
and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
He is currently State and National Affairs
Writer for the Portland Press Herald /
Maine Sunday Telegram, where he
received a 2012 George Polk Award for
his investigative reporting. A native of
Maine, he has reported from more than
fifty foreign countries and six continents,
and lived for more than four years in
Eastern Europe.
He is the author of the New England
bestseller The Lobster Coast: Rebels,
Rusticators, and the Struggle for a
Forgotten Frontier (Viking Press, 2004),
a cultural and environmental history of
coastal Maine; Ocean’s End: Travels
Through Endangered Seas (Basic Books,
2000), a narrative non-fiction account of
the deterioration of the world’s oceans;
and The Republic of Pirates: Being The
True And Surprising Story Of The
Caribbean Pirates And The Man Who
Brought Them Down , on which the
forthcoming NBC series “Crossbones” is
based.
His fourth book, American Nations: A
History of the Eleven Rival Regional
Cultures of North America (Viking, 2011)
was named one of the Best Books of 2011
by the editors of The New Republic and
The Globalist and won the 2012 Maine
Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
He lives in midcoast Maine.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Wow! Great story…wonderful reporting.
This is usually when the poster JB appears to support Jeb….let’s wait and see.
Okay, so where are the consequences for these exposed edu-brigands?
Lets hope these corporations and edreformers aren’t “Too big to fail”.
Bottom line, the two local boards which thought about starting online schools in Maine withdrew their applications, and neither K12 or Pearson’s virtual school division got a contract. The Republican Governors Association Maine PAC got $19000 from K12 and that RGAMPAC predictably supported LePage’s candidacy. Nothing unusual about providers lobbying for bills that would permit them to enter the market. The real question is whether the specific virtual online public school provider has a good system and good lessons, and whether the learning results they produce are equivalent or better than the conventional bricks and mortar school buildings with certified, union member teachers in them. In either case, some sort of test will decide. Not all that encouraging either way. You can be pretty sure, however, that the teachers the corporate providers hire to service the online students will not be union members, so that union dues will not be deducted from their paychecks to pay for union political lobbying. If you have a favorable online student to online teacher ratio, the basic foundation grant of roughly $6500 per student will go a long way toward making such an enterprise profitable. The student provides his own school building (his house), and his own legal supervision (his parent), and possibly his own computer, but even if the online school provides the computer to the student, that still leaves plenty of cash to develop the materials and hire online teachers to answer questions and provide encouragement and support. Obviously fewer teacher bodies will be needed, and that’s the attractiveness, I suppose of the business: lower labor costs. In a service industry, like education, the ability to handle more students with fewer teachers contains the potential for cost savings and thus profit. My local community college offers online versions of its courses with section sizes of 60 students to one teacher, but charges the same amount of tuition. The old model of education with one teacher in a classroom of 15 to 35 or more students is succumbing to digital, even as the old model of going to a store to buy things is succumbing to Amazon’s on-line store. That works pretty well, but I’m not sure how digital education will work.
I know it’s a waste of time to try and inform you, Harlan, but just for other readers who might be swayed by your misinformation: union political advocacy, by law, is not allowed to be financed with member dues. Their political activities are financed by separate, voluntary contributions from the membership.
That is information of which I was unaware. I was repeating what conservatives believe. I’ll see if I can find it in Michigan law. You don’t have a citation do you.
Repeating what conservatives believe…that’s all you ever do.
I will give Mr. Woodard a standing ovation. We need the press to report the truth to the public. I don’t care what party the politician comes from, we need the watchdogs to keep the public informed.