Rocketship will open eight charters in Milwaukee. Local leaders have raised $3.5 million to persuade the charter chain to come to Milwaukee. The city already has a large charter sector and a large voucher sector. The three sectors–Charter, voucher, and public–get about the same results on state tests. As the private sector grows, the public sector shrinks and has a growing and disproportionate number of students with disabilities. But the city’s leaders continue to believe that private management will create great schools. Read this article and, as usual, follow the money.
Archives for category: On-Line Education
One of our most perceptive essayists Rachel Levy watched John Merrow’s program about Rocketship charters and recoiled with alarm.
She said if she put her children in front of a screen two hours a day, she would be called a bad parent, but the charter does it and it is called innovative.
She was distressed that the school treats test scores as the only goal of school, so stuff like art and music don’t get time. That’s what kids do on their own time, if they choose, after school.
And what is it that parents do, other than chant with their children?
What’s clear to Levy is that Rocketship is a school for “them,” for other people’s children, not for “ours.” It is all about test scores, for the glory of the founder, not about education.
Rocketship may be a Model T, an apt means of mass-producing test scores, but that’s a horrifying metaphor for stamping out standardized children who never ask questions, never day dream, always find the answer demanded by the program.
Rocketship is a school designed by Alphas and staffed by Betas for the children who are Delta, Gamma, and Epsilon. Read your Huxley.
Rachel also notes possible conflicts of interest. See her P.S.
Labor lawyer comments on the Rocketship post:
“Rocketship operates charters that enroll students via application. Therefore, it necessarily follows that the Rocketship will enroll a different mix of students than the low-SES-area neighborhood public schools. In low-SES areas, many parents are too unconcerned/dysfunctional to learn about the charter, to successfully complete the application process, and to provide daily transportation to the charter. The neighborhood public school will enroll all of the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents as well as some of the children of he concerned/functional parents (who decide not to enroll in Rocketship). Rocketship, by contrast, will enroll only children of the concerned/functional parents.
“For this reason, it is comparing apples to oranges to compare Rocketship test scores with neighborhood public school test scores.
“If Rocketship thinks it has discovered the secret to effectively educating low-SES-area students, let Rocketship take over a low-SES-area neighborhood school — enrolling all the neighborhood school children and only the neighborhood school children — and let’s see how Rocketship’s model works when Rocketship has the same apples as the neighborhood public school.”
John Merrow raised this question in his PBS show about Rocketship charters.
I have not visited one of these schools so do not pass judgement on them. I can say without qualification that I would not want my grandchildren to attend a school where children spent two hours a day in front of a computer screen doing point and click. I have heard that these charters offer no art or music. I hope that’s not true. I will wait to hear from others.
But the key question here is: Is it possible to “mass produce” a high quality school.
My assumption here is that the goal is to cut costs by replacing teachers with computers and having a “system” that can be managed by inexperienced, low-cost teachers.
My answer is that the question is an oxymoron. Any school that is “mass produced” [i.e., teacher-proofed] cannot be high quality. Just as one cannot mass produce a string quartet, or mass produce great families, or great anything, one cannot mass produce a great school. A high quality school has a culture made up of its principal and teachers. They cannot be mass produced. Period.
John Merrow’s show last night was called: Profiling Rocketship Education
“Rocketship Education operates seven schools in San Jose, California that are among the top performing low income schools in the state. The dream was to eventually serve one million students. Although others have tried, nobody has successfully mass produced a high quality, cost effective school model. Will Rocketship be the first?”
Drop whatever you are doing, and read this. EduShyster serves up a delightful portrait of an award-winning school in Minneapolis that embodies every new reform strategy. And here is the best part: It hasn’t opened yet! It won’t open until next September and it is already a great success!
This article is a Christmas gift from me to you.
Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic has written one of the most eloquent explanations of why we need teachers, schools, and universities.
At a time when we hear hosannas to online learning, home-schooling, inexperienced teachers, the business model of schooling, for-profit schools, and the commodification of education, this is bracing reading.
Here is the way that Wieseltier’s wonderful article ends:
“THE PRESIDENT IS RIGHT that we should “out-educate” other countries, but he is wrong that we should do so only, or mainly, to “out-compete.” Surely the primary objectives of education are the formation of the self and the formation of the citizen. A political order based on the expression of opinion imposes an intellectual obligation upon the individual, who cannot acquit himself of his democratic duty without an ability to reason, a familiarity with argument, a historical memory. An ignorant citizen is a traitor to an open society. The demagoguery of the media, which is covertly structural when it is not overtly ideological, demands a countervailing force of knowledgeable reflection. (There are certainly too many unemployed young people in America, but not because they have read too many books.) And the schooling of inwardness matters even more in the lives of parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and lovers, where meanings are often ambiguous and interpretations determine fates. The equation of virtue with wealth, of enlightenment with success, is no less repulsive in a t-shirt than in a suit. How much about human existence can be inferred from a start-up? Shakespeare or Undrip: I should have thought that the choice was easy. Entrepreneurship is not a full human education, and living is never just succeeding, and the humanities are always pertinent. In pain or in sorrow, who needs a quant? There are enormities of experience, horrors, crimes, disasters, tragedies, which revive the appetite for wisdom, and for the old sources, however imprecise, of wisdom—a massacre of schoolchildren, for example.”
The school district in Manchester, New Hampshire, is considering online classes–not blended learning–as Acosta-saving device. The idea is to put kids online and lay off teachers. Anyone who deals with children and adolescents knows that face-to-face contact, human-to-human relationships are very important. Something’s, like reading a book our practicing an instrument, may best be done alone. But it’s best to discuss what you have read with others and exhilarating to play your instrument as part of a group.
Here is Massachusetts high school history teacher’s letter to the editor of the Boston Globe, expressing his concern about the misuse of technology.
Tony Bennett, the defeated state superintendent from Indiana, has landed the job as state commissioner in Florida.
Bennett is the hero to the rightwing “reform” sector, a champion of privatization, vouchers, charters, online for-profit schools, and the Common Core. His last action in Indiana was to lower standards for new trackers and principals, so that no preparation was needed to become a teacher and anyone could become a principal with only two years of experience as a teacher, even in higher education.
Jeb Bush is mad for Bennett, who serves as head of Bush’s Chiefs for Change.
Pennsylvania has 16 online charter schools for K-12. They all get terrible results. Some are for profit, some are nonprofit. The state auditor issued a scathing report earlier this year finding that they overcharge the state by many millions of dollars.
Rhonda Brownstein of the Education Law Center urges the state education board to reject all of the applications. The state has proven that it can’t monitor those it already has.
She writes:
“The Pennsylvania Department of Education is considering eight new cyber charter school applications, including four that would target Philadelphia-area students. It should not approve a single one.
“The academic performance of the more than 32,000 students in the state’s 16 existing cyber charter schools – the most in any state – raises serious questions about these primarily online schools, and it should give the Education Department great pause.
“Moreover, state laws governing cyber charters require the department to review the schools every year, and to close them if they aren’t meeting state standards. The department is in danger of violating the law if it continues to ignore the glaring problems of the existing cyber charters. Adding eight more cyber charters would further jeopardize its ability to uphold the law.”
This may be the best blog post of the year. Read it. It is priceless!
Welcome to Opposite Day in Ohio!
Veteran educator Maureen Reedy explains what “education reform” meant on Opposite Day.
This is the day when StudentsFirst came to the Ohio Legislature to tout the virtues of charter schools, even though public schools in Ohio far outperform charters. The bottom performing 111 schools in the state of Ohio last year were all charter schools. Opposite Day!
And when StudentsFirst claimed that great teachers could teach 100 or more children online, even though Ohio already has poorly performing online charters. Opposite Day!
And when an employee of StudentsFirst boldly claimed that teaching is not a profession. Opposite Day!
Please read. This story should be on Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow and the Newshour. John Merrow, are you there?
Diane Ravitch's blog 