I read Romney’s education agenda carefully.
It’s pro-privatization.
It repeats the myth of “failing” public schools.
There is not a good word in it for public education.
Romney is avid for charter schools and vouchers.
Here is the analysis of his agenda that I wrote for the New York Review of Books.
A supporter of cyber charters wrote to say that many activities occur in a physical setting, not online. In response to our exchange, a teacher posted the following comment:
K12 Inc has the largest student population of all online cyber charter schools in the US and this is what they want from a PE/Health Teacher:
https://re21.ultipro.com/KIN1002/JobBoard/JobDetails.aspx?__ID=*A5FEACB4EE4E6E98
Other teaching positions are similar –“Virtual” means teachers do it from home. I know because I taught at an online school owned by them for four years. While their office was not far from me, I never went there even once, nor was I required to go to any other bricks and mortar location. Faculty and department meetings and PDs were conducted online and in conference calls.
Larry Ferlazzo notes that the latest requirements for Race to the Top is just more lipstick on a pig.
By which, he means that when RTTT refers to “personalized learning,” what it really means is using online learning for adaptive testing.
That’s pretty much what the hawkers of technology mean too.
But teachers had something else in mind, something that would encourage students to explore and think and make their own decisions, not just answer test questions.
David Reber is a teacher in Kansas who happens to be a terrific writer.
His articles are always insightful.
This one is about the relentless advertising campaign in Kansas of the online giant K12.
As the privatization movement gathers steam, as equity investors launch their latest scheme to extract profits from the public schools, we will be bombarded by even more appeals to go digital. Of course, we are all going digital. But there is no good reason to home school children who don’t need to be home schooled. Virtual academies get terrible results for children. This has been documented by the National Education Policy Center and in exposes in the NY Times and the Washington Post.
Home schooling by computer may be right for some, but it is not right for most students. Don’t buy their con job.
A very interesting report by Maureen Downey on her blog in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a school in Washington D.C. that will try to raise its low test scores–fast–by turning the kids over to online instruction for half the day. The discussion about the glories of online learning was marred by technical glitches and miscommunication, but no matter.
The best line in the story came from a D.C. public school teacher who knows the school in question well and writes:
Kramer has some students with severe and unaddressed behavioral problems, a significant group (four classes and 1 Emotionally Disturbed) of Intellectually Challenged students, along with a high percent of special needs students (about 35%) that have been formally identified.
I’m willing to venture 10-15% of unidentified students would also qualify. Too bad the class sizes for these kids were larger than what should have been under DCPS guidelines, Blackmon consent, and the WTU contract. With that said, these kids need individual and human instruction and interaction, not a computer.
But, hey, why ask teachers what kids need? What do they know?
A friend works in the online industry. It’s a job. She sent me a copy of a high school graduation exam. The students learn at home on a computer.
She said the kids can take the exam over if they don’t like their score. Because they take the exam online at home, they can google the answers. Or they can have the book open in front of them.
Bear in mind that the big money in this country is investing millions to put our kids online as much as possible. They are not doing this for philanthropic reasons. They are doing it because there is a game plan. The plan is to reduce the cost of education by having fewer teachers. In a virtual school, class size may be 60-200. That means fewer teachers. And the teachers are paid low salaries.
ALEC, the shadowy organization of conservative state legislators, has model legislation promoting for-profit virtual schools. Chris Christie is eager to open more in New Jersey. Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania has many of them. So does John Kasich, who coddles the two big for-profit virtual school founders, who are major contributors to the Republican party in Ohio.
Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence and Bob Wise’s Alliance for Excellent Education are pushing virtual schools as the acme of excellence.
Here is an excerpt from a current graduation exam. Is this high quality? Does this look like excellence to you?
Consider the intellectual level displayed in the exam questions here (and they are typical). This was the literature section of the high school graduation test. The subject, ironically, was George Orwell’s 1984. The questions were either true-false or multiple choice. If the whole country could be reduced to this kind of simplistic thought process, people would be easy to manipulate and control.
A. faking photographs B. destroying originals C. telling the facts
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Quiz: Final Examination E201A
D. storing corrected documents
ce Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: C Your Response: C
5.
040 Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: A Your Response: A
6.
X Points Earned: 0/1 Correct Answer: B Your Response: A
7.
http:// us/section/content/default.asp…
Winston’s job is to Part 1 Chapter 3-4
A. rewrite the news to fit the Party’s needs B. write the news
C. help rewrite a new dictionary
D. write the scripts for the telescreen news
What is unusual about the dictionary Syme is working on? (Part 1 Chapter 5-6)
A. It contains slang
B. Words are being destroyed C. Words are being added
D. It contains curse words
In this chapter, Winston twice says that
A. Mrs. Parsons
B. O’Brien
C. Syme
D. All of the above
fie Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: C Your Response: C
will be vaporized (Part 1 Chapter 5-6)
8.
Which is NOT an appealing aspect of the room upstairs at Charrington’s. (Part 1 Chapter 7-8)
A. Modern furnishings B. Old
C. Comfortable
D. Fireplace
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Quiz: Final Examination
9.
The Party teaches all kinds of half-truths about history. (Part 1 Chapter 7-8)
se Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: True Your Response: True
10.
se Points Earned: 1/1 Correct Answer: A Your Response: A
11.
All were sights at Victory Square EXCEPT (Part 2 Chapter 1-2)
A. Prisoners in leg-irons
B. Soldiers marching
C. Guards with submachine guns D. A line of trucks
Winston and the girl decide to meet (Part 2 Chapter 1-2)
A. at her house.
B. at the park.
C. at Mr Charrington’s shop. D. on Sunday afternoon.
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Which thought did Winston NOT have about the scrap of paper? (Part 2 Chapter 1-2)
A. He was being invited to join a committee. B. The Brotherhood was alive.
C. The Thought Police were on to him.
Joe Bower is an educator who wants to reform education. But he has no sympathy for the rampant privatization that is now overtaking U.S. education with the support of the Obama administration. And it will only get worse under a Romney administration. In the post linked here, he has a video showing an advertisement for one of those aggressive for-profit operations now targeting American school children.
Why isn’t Secretary Duncan on the stump warning parents about these educational predators?
Technology is a good thing when used appropriately. But when advanced as it is now to lay off teachers and close schools, it is a disgrace. As Bower writes, children need real teachers, not home schooling by computer.
Time to say no. And say it loud.
Coach Bob Sikes put together a blog about the corporate supporters of Jeb Bush’s crusade for digital learning.
If you go back and read the report of the “Ten Elements of Digital Learning,” I suggest you scan the acknowledgments and you will find a representative of almost every corporation trying to sell hardware or software to the schools.
The other thing you need to know about the report is that it is based on zero evidence. It cites a US Department of Education study of evidence-based policy for online instruction, and that is supposed to impress the casual reader and make him/her think there is evidence to put every child online as much as possible. But I read that study and it says (p. 53) we don’t know enough about online instruction to make decisions in the K-12 area. There have been only five studies, not enough, the report says.
The accumulating evidence from places like Ohio and Pennsylvania is that online virtual schools are driven more by profit than by a desire to produce better education.
I just finished a chapter on this subject, and feel incensed that so much effort is being expended to spread the gospel on virtual schooling in the absence of evidence about where, where, and to whom. Certainly online instruction is important and necessary, but there is no support in research to have millions of chlldren home schooled in front of a computer, with the virtual school collecting millions of dollars while teachers have classes of 60:1, 100:1, even 200:1, at low pay.
This is a stunning article. A real journalistic achievement.
It shows in remarkable detail how certain politicians and investors and entrepreneurs are working together to privatize public education and to generate huge profits for certain companies.
Read this.
Doing some research on for-profit virtual schools, I come across study after study about their poor performance, high attrition rates, and low graduation rates.
But then I discovered a document produced by Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellent Education and Bob Wise’s Alliance for Excellent Education. It is called “the Ten Elements of Digital Learning” and it is a rallying cry for deregulation and proliferation of every manner of virtual education, including for-profit virtual charters.
Among other recommendations, it says that teachers should not be certified, as that would hamper innovation and diminish quality. It claims that digital learning will transform education, close the achievement gaps, and narrow the income divide in American society. It promises the world, in short. Digital learning is the magic bullet, so it says.
It does not take note of the studies that say that digital schools underperform brick-and-mortar schools.
The report was funded by–no surprise–the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the Walton Foundation.
Maybe it is the Magna Carta of virtual schooling. But the gap between promise and reality is a giant canyon.
Diane Ravitch's blog 