Cathy Frye is a veteran journalist who worked for the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, then quit when she decided she could no longer stomach being part of the Walton Goubdation machine.
She writes here about the plan to outsource schooling this fall to a tech corporation that is under investigation.
She writes:
I got curious and took a little gander today at the Arkansas Public School Center’s website. And yep, there it was – APSRC’s latest attempt to help its digital “learning” providers by – once again – taking advantage of the pandemic’s effects on public schools.
Pay attention, folks: This partnership – announced today – involves the Arkansas Public School Resource Center, the Arkansas Department of Education and an outfit known as Lincoln Learning Solutions. This partnership will affect how public schools operate during the 2020-2021 school year.
APSRC and the Arkansas Department of Education are endorsing a digital learning provider that is currently under investigation by the Pennsylvania State Auditor General’s Office.
Why an investigation? Because a five-year audit revealed that Lincoln Learning Solutions had received more than $110 million in taxpayer dollars. Now, Arkansas’ parents and schools are about to get sucker-punched in a similar fashion.
You can also be sure that someway, somehow, APSRC Executive Director Scott Smith will also find a way to profit from this. Smith does not believe in MOUs that offer no benefit to his Walton-backed empire – er, I mean, “non-profit” organization.
I dealt with digital-provider “representatives” – not educators but salesmen – for three years. They expected free vendor booths at each APSRC conference. They also expected to be wined and dined on APSRC’s tab. Initially, they got what they wanted via a grant awarded to APSRC’s teaching and learning department. But when the money ran out, they still expected to be wooed and catered to. And Smith didn’t seem to mind, which tells me that APSRC also was making money by supporting these digital providers.
APSRC has been trying for years – well before my time there – to sell this digital-learning crap to Arkansas schools. Problem is, this crap, aside from being crap, has been too pricey even for the better-off districts.
Open the link and read the rest. The Waltons are happy to disrupt public schools at any time.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“I dealt with digital-provider “representatives” – not educators but salesmen – for three years. They expected free vendor booths at each APSRC conference. They also expected to be wined and dined on APSRC’s tab. Initially, they got what they wanted via a grant awarded to APSRC’s teaching and learning department. But when the money ran out, they still expected to be wooed and catered to. And Smith didn’t seem to mind, which tells me that APSRC also was making money by supporting these digital providers.”
Bravo. They’re vendors. All this ed reform nonsense about “reinventing” and “transforming” education is in service to an industry that sells product. They either all got suckered into portraying these salespeople as “transformative” or they’re all in on the sales pitch.
I can’t tell and either can any other member of the public. I look at some of the ed reform sites and I have no idea if they’re funded by the same people who sell this junk to public schools. I think they must be, given the unrestrained cheerleading and promotion of the products.
Public school leaders have a duty not to fall for this. Don’t be pressured or bullied or shamed into buying. You’re ALLOWED to send salespeople packing, whether those people are supposedly “education researchers” or not.
Don’t buy. Refuse. It’s all overhyped and overpromoted and dishonestly marketed. Be the public school leader who doesn’t get scammed.
So let’s review. Ed reformers have a decade of evidence that “cybercharters” in Pennsylvania and Ohio were terrible schools, rife with corruption, and markedly worse than the public schools they attempted to replace.
Given that information, this “data based” “scientific” group of people are working as hard at they can to push the same cheap junk into every public school in the country, using the “hook” of a pandemic.
Stop listening to them. Stop taking their advice. Stop hiring them as consultants. Say “no”. Your communities will thank you.
How many ed reform gimmicks, experiments and profitable fads are we going to subject public school students to? Can they not get a break? They just survived a pandemic. Can they just have their schools back?
These edupreneurs are taking advantage of the chaos caused by the pandemic and the fiscal problems of so many states. They are carpetbaggers that are counting on people not doing too much critical thinking during this crisis. All the lofty language surrounding these tech products may convince some easy targets that they have “value.” It appeals to market based leaders as a way to reduce costs., not only in Arkansas, but other states as well. Real educators will see through the scam.
A key understanding: today’s pretty words “educational entrepreneur” simply stand in for that age-old profiteering word “carpetbaggers”
Online learning was a disaster in the decade-long ed reform “experiment” in Ohio and Pennsylvania, online learning as a response to the Covid crisis was ALSO primarily a disaster and a poor substitute for public schools, yet in the face of what is now overwhelming evidence that it isn’t a good idea ed reformers (“data driven! all about the science!”) continue to promote, sell, cheerlead and expand it to more and more low and middle income students.
If they aren’t actually on the payroll of these vendors, they ought to be. I hope they’re at least getting paid for pushing product. There’s no rational reason to do it otherwise.
One of the lessons of our school-at-home spring has been the extremely limited value of “personalized-learning” technology. There is increasing evidence that these programs rarely, if ever, live up to their hype and are especially worthless for students who typically struggle in school. One would hope that our experience this spring with stay-at-home learning will help us understand that the use of those programs needs to be focused only on the very few things they may actually do well, such as routine practice of some skills. Instead, panicked school districts and states, as shown in this Arkansas example, may be doubling down on purchasing and/or promoting these products under the guise of providing some semblance remote learning support in the event of more school shutdowns in the fall—even if the evidence shows that these programs are not effective learning tools. Thanks need to go to educators, such as Ms. Frye, for their advocacy against their expanded use.
Their gov Hutchison issued a “State Broadband Plan” 1 yr ago. Funding appeared to be slim to none, dependent on enticing vendor competition, & some fed sources. Accompanying maps & charts show May ’19 what you’d expect in a poor rural state. Even Waltons may not have enough dough to “scale up” lincoln-log-online-crap beyond a few urban areas.
The billionaire Waltons throw crumbs tto Arkansas. They busy themselves privatizing schools across the nation. And supporting TFA.
Wow. And doesn’t that just figure. Same way they do their employees.
“The 74
@The74
For equity’s sake, let kids who like remote learning keep doing class online and let kids who need in-person teaching have the schools”
Ugh. The echo chamber are already setting this up with in person learning being a luxury we can barely afford.
They’re going to take away these kids schools and replace them with cheap garbage.
It’s a rip off. No one should accept this. Don’t trade your schools for this cheap, inferior replacement and don’t let them use a pandemic to sell it. This is the EXACT agenda they were all selling prior to the pandemic. NONE of it is specific to the crisis.
They were all selling “online learning” and charters and vouchers prior to the pandemic. They’ve simply now seized on another sales tool.
Ask them this- if the experiment fails (and it will fail- it’s failed everywhere they’ve tried it) will people get their schools back? No, of course not, because lawmakers will have figured out they can spend 75% less on public education by getting rid of the expensive part, which is the teachers. Don’t accept this – it’s a bad deal.
“let kids who like remote learning keep doing class online”. Cute. That’ll be about 1%.
But as you point out, they can like it or lump it if lawmakers see big bucks savings – or:
— if they they just heard it would but don’t track the spending – or:
— as you’ve often noted, even if it costs a bundle, as long as they get a juicy cut of the profits.
(The song “Only In America” keeps running thro my head.)
The Gates-funded State Education Technology Directors Association lists Arkansas’ representatives at its site. Just curious- when those people represent Arkansas, do they know for a fact that the citizens want public-private partnerships and digital learning.
Arkansas remains the 2nd poorest state in the nation. How many decades does it take before the headquarters of Walmart assumes some responsibility?
There are subtle but important misrepresentations in the use of the terms partnership and the use of learning as if descriptors of these products shoved into education. There is no partnership. There is a vendor and a client who buys a product. The term partnership disguises who is responsible for what, when, and why. Vendors like the term because it implies they are fully qualified to tell educators what they otherwise could not know. Salespeople acquire an unearned higher status that they do not deserve. None of these products should be viewed as tools for “personalized learning.” These are instructional delivery systems with no guarantee of learning. The marketing value of insinuating learning is inevitable or guaranteed is exploited when there is no there-there… other than versions of workbooks and texts and tests and the great big bonus to all vendors–massive data gathering, the real gold in these transactions.