Mercedes Schneider noticed a curious fact about Betsy DeVos’s latest handout to charter schools in Delaware.
DeVos gave the state $10.4 million to expand charters and “share best practices” only months after a Delaware charter school closed due to under enrollment.
In other words, Delaware does not have a demand for charter schools, but DeVos is funding them anyway.
It is truly weird to see the federal government handing out $399 million for new charter schools when the charter sector is amply funded by the richest people in America.
Funding is not their problem. Accountability, transparency, honesty, and integrity are. Money won’t fix those problems.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Both of Delaware ‘s candidates for governor want market forces in education i.e. taxpayer money to go to hedge funds, tech tyrants and grifters.
The DeVos family backs a Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Michigan who ran an ad for two weeks that had a swastika posted on a wall while the candidate talked about failing schools. (Detroit Free Press)
Online charters are also proliferating. This is investigative journalism at its best. No surprise that Jeb Bush is a major player, but not the only one who is marketing online instruction. Of special interest is how online LEARNING has been taken up as if online delivery and management of instruction is the same as online learning.
Of course it is not, but the easy acceptance and widespread use of the phrase “online learning” is a clear example of marketing lingo designed to misrepresent what is actually online delivery and management of INSTRUCTION, with algorithms determining which “chunks” of information and tasks should be delivered to a given student and when.
Even this excellent article (see below) falls for the marketing lingo selected to forward the idea and image of learning as if that is the inevitable outcome of online instructional management systems.
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-online-learning-companies-bought-americas-schools/
We have “blended learning” in my son’s science class and people really need to start paying attention to this. I don’t know if parents are aware, but they’re watching videos and then taking short tests- over and over and over. That’s all they’re doing.
One thing that’s really alarming is they’re not doing any writing- at all. It’s a video informational segment then a test. If they pass the test they move onto the next unit. There’s no assignments of any kind.
I don’t know what this was intended to be but it’s garbage. If they don’t do any writing in science class they won’t know how to do technical or scientific writing.
They are going to be VERY good test takers- this is a joke. It’s viewing and then testing, with a “hands on” project once a month. It’s the worst high school science class I’ve ever seen and I’ve had kids in this district for 25 years.
I cannot believe ed reformers are cheerleading this garbage. Ignore the hype from ed tech people- look at what your kid is actually doing in class.
It’s such a lie because they insist it’s somehow different than a lecture.
9 times out of 10 it’s essentially a video of a lecture. How so many schools got snookered into this I will never understand. How can you look at this stuff and think it’s “innovative”? It’s a video of a lecture. It wasn’t “innovative” in 1965.
So much that this administration is doing that will have to be undone. It’s like a hurricane, blowing through our institutions and environment and leaving a mess for people in the future to clean up. But this will happen. Trump and his ilk are the death rattle of an old order. The young people coming up understand how destructive and stupid these morons in the Trump Administration are. Big changes coming.
YES, “…morons in the Trump Administration …” I will add: “ALSO EVIL and GREEDY, too.”
“Trump and his ilk are the death rattle of an old order.” Well put,Bob. This administration has a real gotterdammerung feel. I for one will be glad to see the eclipse of angry white dudes.
But you’re right: these guys aren’t repairers, they’re vandals; they’re builders, they’re destroyers. We will spend years rebuilding civil society after their departure..
I hope you’re right Bob, & I think it’s true as regards the more onerous & flatulent [as in ‘old farts’] aspects of the current admin. But unless we turn around campaign-funding, Cit-United & 501(c)3-4 laws, we are at the mercy of libertarian et al ideological rationales for oligarchical crushing of democracy. One of its prominent consequences is the digital invasion by our prima-donna ga-gillion-revenue tech industry into every intelligent human transaction: just as we feel/ complain about it here in ed, so do engineers, medical professionals & their patients, & many more. I feel the same about digital tech: it’s a rampaging hurricane, & when the romance w/efficiency is done blowing through, there will be a lot of picking up pieces/ rebuilding to do.
This is Summit Learning, the Facebook company who wants to run every school in the country.
“Self-Directed Learning
Students are guided through a learning cycle that develops self-direction by teaching them how to set goals, make plans, demonstrate their skills and knowledge, and reflect.”
It’s all like this, this lofty language and vague descriptions. Don’t buy this based on this nonsense! This is MARKETING. That’s ALL it is.
Find out what they’re actually doing in class all day. Because in our school “what they’re doing” is viewing videos, reading short passages, and taking tests. A LOT of tests. They have to test them constantly because no one is tracking their progress with anything other than a test, because they don’t have any assignments.
Silicon Valley sells everything the same way, and this is no different. It looks like every other tech marketing campaign because it’s the same product.
https://www.summitlearning.org/program/learning-environment
This worries me a lot, Chiara. And judging from the research Laura provides us regularly, it’s a tsunami coming straight at us: ‘personalized’ learning – ed reform 2.0. ‘Blended learning’ is just folding the digital-instruction into traditional human classroom interaction a portion at a time, with the ultimate intention of total conversion.
Digital tech could actually expand and enrich learning, and the access to it, if human interactions were prioritized: live-skype-conferencing, blogging, group activities modeled on live game tournaments (just a few I can think of)– all based in the classroom & supplementing its projects. But such things are expensive to implement, & their ‘results’ unmeasurable by algorithm. So we get instead this cheap conversion of antique inhale-regurgitate methods.
I really have to hand it to the US Department of Education. They seem to go out of their way to completely ignore the public schools 85% of kids attend.
If you arrived from Mars and listened to our federal government spokespeople you would think 5% of kids in this country attend public schools. Our kids and schools seem to be some kind of unfashionable “default” that no one in DC is interested in.
They’re completely irrelevant to 85% of families. They offer absolutely no added value to 85% of US students, due to their ideological opposition to public schools. They’ve managed to “choice” themselves right out of providing anything useful to the vast majority of people.
Is this really representative of “the people”? If our elected and appointed representatives are ideologically opposed to the schools the vast majority of us attended and our children attend?
It’s ludicrous. It’s like hiring thousands of stock fund managers to run Social Security. All they so all day is promote IRAs and 401ks.
“Charlie Barone, policy director at Democrats for Education Reform, predicted that beyond crafting their own higher education rewrite and the union rights bills, Democrats would work on “unity issues” like reducing college costs and universal preschool.”
DC Democrats are too scared to advocate or work on behalf of public schools, because if they do they lose their ed reform supporters.
So they’ve decided to ignore K-12 schools in the hope that voters won’t notice. Which leaves us with 1. Republicans who are openly hostile to public schools and 2. Democrats, who have decided to pretend public schools don’t exist.
What a lousy deal for the 85% of families who attend public schools. We get people who oppose our schools on one side and useless and ineffective “agnostics” on the other.
Some how day after day I keep reading Diane’s blog and day after day its much of the same really. The charter and private sector are pushing and pushing their education agendas down our throats every day. Devos is just doing anything she wants regardless of law or any other directive in the department of education.
I hope I am wrong, but it seems as though the push is relentless and the money is plenty in pushing the privatization movement through. The auto industry went through this several years ago when Detroit was being dismantled as the premier auto producing city in the nation. The UAW was under constant attack and slews of auto makers entered the market in hope of breaking the auto union and the monopoly of Detroit and the auto industry.
Fast forward to today and take a look at Detroit. People like Betsy Devos who is from the area witnessed the collapse of the UAW and I am sure they are persistant about destroying teachers union. Today, Detroit is a cesspool of poverty and the auto industry plants are dinosaurs. I hope this is not what happens to public ed in our country
More money flushed down the toilet. Everyday all you hear is more corruption AKA money being funneled from the taxpayer to fund the rich that starts these BS schools and NO money for public education.
The Betsy DeVos give-away of public money defined:
DeVos is handing out public money to start new publicly funded, private sector corporate charter schools that will open, collect money, and then close.
Many of the owners of these charter schools will walk away with millions of public dollars siphoned away form real public schools without spending much of that money on the actual charter school. In fact, the frauds and pirates that takes the public’s money to start a charter school will probably not even bother to open a school.
Instead, once their application is approved, and the money is in their account, they will transfer the money to an offshore account and never bother to open a charter school.
I live in Delaware. This makes no sense. We have to many charters. Check out Newark Charter School in Newark Delaware if you want to see an interesting situation. https://www.google.com/amp/s/exceptionaldelaware.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/newark-charter-school-continues-their-discriminatory-social-engineering-enrollment-practices/amp/
Here is a recent podcast/interview by Sec DeVos:
https://www.dailysignal.com/2018/10/16/the-daily-signal-podcast-betsy-devos-on-giving-states-more-power-in-education/