We have known for a long while that the worst scandals in the charter sector are intertwined with online learning and cyber charters. Consider the bankruptcy last year of ECOT (the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow) in Ohio, whose owner collected $1 billion from the state over nearly 20 years, but declared bankruptcy rather than pay the state $60 million for inflated enrollments.
Then there is the infamous A-1 scandal in California, where the owners and several cooperating school districts were indicted in San Diego nearly a year ago for the theft of $50 million from the state, a scheme that involved phantom students.
Yet here we are in the midst of a pandemic and most schools have been shutdown to protect students and staff from exposure to the coronavirus. Almost overnight, millions of students were required to continue learning by going online. The platforms are different, but tens of millions of students are engaged in distance learning.
Kathleen Porter-Magee of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute sees this asa fortuitous moment, an opportunity to revolutionize education. She calls it “A Revolution in Education, Born of a Necessity.”
She says, seize the moment.
She writes:
Said more simply: Those working “in the arena” to run great schools and support great teachers are charging full steam ahead to make the most of this period of remote learning. Those who have been quick to dismiss distance learning as “ineffective” are looking in the rearview mirror and imagining a world where past must be prologue, rather than embracing the innovation that this moment may well have sparked.
You will not be surprised to learn that I disagree. From what I see and read and hear, I believe that parents want to get back to their own work. They don’t want their children home all the time, learning at a screen. Those who want to home school are already doing it. More important, I think that students must miss their friends, their teachers, their social life, their teams and activities. Home Alone is a drag.
And then there is the inconvenient CREDO study of 2015, which found that students in virtual charter schools fell behind their peers in brick-and-mortar public schools. In a school year of 180 days, the online students lost 44 days in reading and 180 days in math.
If you want our whole society to go backwards, distance learning and cyber schooling will do it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Love the LAST sentence: “If you want our whole society to go backwards, distance learning and cyber schooling will do it.”
My students aren’t happy at all. They WANT to be in the physical classroom and will probably fade away from college if we don’t get back to it. They say so.
“They say so.” Imagine anyone in charge of “reform” actually hearing the kids.
Beautifully said, Diane.
It will be, if the oligarchs and the radical right wing has its way. Silicon Valley and Wall St have no intention of stopping when they see $$$. I just got through arguing the inadequacy of on-line instruction with local libertarians. On-line learning is inappropriate for the young and the poor. These groups need the support of human teachers. On-line instruction is little more than electronic worksheets, and many disciplines do not lend themselves to incremental, rote learning.
Parents and teachers need to push back against any attempt to impose cyber learning. It is not “cutting edge.” It is deadly, dull “mental solitary confinement.” People are social beings. Public schools are mini-communities where young people learn to interact with others. They provide young people with social and emotional support that are essential to many vulnerable students. Anyone that cares about the future of young people must resist a digital takeover of instruction.
cx: have their way, sentence #1
I teach at an Hispanic Serving Institution in LA. Many of our students face barriers that can be broken down once we get the students on campus, whether as residential or commuter students. What I’ve found over the past month is that for most of my students, distance learning is a barrier of another kind. At home there is often no place to study, no internet, family demands that make it difficult to prioritize studies. Then, because most professors are not used to distance teaching, there is the attempt to simply transplant their live courses into Zoom. Students are saying they want a refund for this semester! They want live classes, and a college experience. This isn’t it.
I was a career ESL teacher that taught mostly poor ELLs including many Latinx for more than three decades. These newcomers are among the poorest. They have so many needs, but they barely have access to a roof over their heads. Technology is unavailable to most of them. These students do so much better by having a stable relationship with a caring instructor.
“Distance Learning: Wave of the Future”
Distance learning
Is a wave
Wave that’s churning
Up the grave
Distance learning
Is tsunami
Really churning
Up the mummy
If they get their wish, our country will create an even bigger gulf between the haves and the have nots.
The have nots will be stuck at home with government issued tablets or laptops, or they will sit in school buildings full of computer labs and low-wage adult room monitors.
The haves will have devices with which to learn that they will likely pay for themselves. The devices won’t be any more than maybe 2 or 3 years old, so they’ll be able to do all of their work seamlessly. Unlike the poor, they’ll supplement their learning with tutors in the subjects in which they struggle or the subjects where they have a spark and want to do deeper study. They’ll also be supplementing their study with visits to museums, professional orchestra concerts, karate lessons, Pop Warner sports teams, dance/ballet classes, domestic and international travel, etc. You know, the things that the poor only get through traditional school….
The unanticipated (some welcomed) consequences of this are:
Parents have a genuine appreciation of what a professional teacher is all about (and that does not include a six-week training program and whoosh, you’re a teacher)
The end of snow days
Something will change with standardized testing, especially if the kids come back with better scores than when they left
A wake up call of the “have” and “have not” divide in and out of school and “you mean they really NEED to give out food?” (what ‘they’ do with that is another story)
Separating meaningful, beneficial software from worksheets-online and techno-flash card programs
Appreciation for “educational’ TELEVISION! (which is accessible to millions more kids than those with computers at home) – – National Geographic, PBS, NASA…
Let’s REALLY go to the museum, zoo, botanical garden, aquarium after seeing them online (often for the first time for some families) – go. AND MAKE THEM FREE all the time like in our city/county.
The person who recommended this path has marginal experience in public schools. She is an advocate for Catholic education. She should seek approval of distant learning from Catholic officials. The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has long since lost credibility as a source of any wisdom about public education.
https://fordhaminstitute.org/about/fordham-staff/kathleen-porter-magee
TBF is hostile to public schools, and often makes proposals intended to weaken them.
What a hilarious contrast between Porter-Magee’s article and the Pasi Sahlburg one just above it! Fordham “Flypaper” once again speckled with cheerleaders’ flea droppings.
I followed Porter-Magee’s links to Uncommon Schools and Success Academy, reading descriptions of their online efforts. UC’s was pedestrian, involving mailing or downloading weekly work packets, with a once wkly 15min virtual check-in/ chat (not individual I don’t think). The SA article portrayed a couple of challenging virtual-classroom meetups. Though the interaction was impressive, each teacher was handling all students at once– about 100 per meetup. They’re technically able to monitor everyone’s activity, but that must be on the fly during realtime; perhaps they go over the input later & follow up with strugglers. Meanwhile the virtual conversation is limited (of necessity) to just a handful of students. No one can pretend this is an equivalent substitute; many students will be left in the dust.
Yes, that is quite a contrast -the two posts.
The sad thing is that a lot of public districts are buying into this garbage. They’re trying to put themselves out of business. It makes me sick for my students and my colleagues and me.
When this is over, I expect a full court press, not for continued “distance” learning, but for “flipped” classes and “blended” learning. The Disrupters in my neck of the concrete woods seem to feel they are right now showing teachers websites that will continue to be used inside physically existent classrooms for years to come. For too long, they’ve been trying to get me to post videos of myself lecturing online, and have the students watch the videos for homework and then answer questions about the videos on another website in class. That’s what they call “flipping” teaching. (I’d like to teach them a flipping thing or two.) Some teachers will buy into it because of their new experience with distance learning. Most will not. Because of their new experience with distance learning. The Fordham thinky tank is clueless, greedy for investment capital and clueless.
The district in which I teach is already insisting that we do “blended learning” for this next year, using the materials we have created for this year (which, at least mine, are not great, as they were thrown together at the last minute).
NO!
Duane took the word right out of my distance-learning mouth. The present motivation I see in my daughter to do the mountain of work that is pouring out of her diligent teachers is that she would not want to disappoint them. this is based on the relationship that had been established prior to the Covid. We are not even a month into the outage, and she already tires of the entire affair.
Meanwhile, I have been in touch with about 5 of my students out of a group of 130 or so. Many of the students I would have expected to do something are strangely silent, and a few who pestered me are communicating. Even with Verizon doubling the amout of data I get at full speed, I am through my data in 20 days.
So there are a billion reasons why school cannot take place on a computer. Things that take a second I a class take minutes on the computer, and you look up to find that you are working harder and getting less done.
These computers we have
The same way, we could say “online relationships, skype sex, digital family Thanksgiving gatherings are the wave of the future”.
These people are plain nuts.
Remember when everyone said videos were going to kill the movie theaters? It didn’t happen. The collective, shared, in-person experience matters and this pandemic is making that crystal clear
“…an opportunity to revolutionize education” – indeed. Schooling will inevitably change and evolve due to this crisis.