Archives for category: On-Line Education
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Which CEO Made $5 Million Stealing Your Kid’s Lunch Money?

By dianeravitch
July 21, 2012 //
8

At last, someone who knows and cares about public education has made a Youtube video that tells the story of ALEC and the privatization movement, linking them to the outpouring of legislation against teachers and public education. Share this with your friends and neighbors. The narrator is Julie Mead, the dean of education at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Karran Harper Royal is a founding member of Parents Across America. Gary Miron of Western Michigan University wrote the National Education Policy Center’s report on K12.

The video is called “Which CEO Made $5 Million Stealing Your Kid’s Lunch Money.” Help it go viral.

Categories ALEC, Education Reform, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Parent trigger, Privatization

The Trouble with Online Education

By dianeravitch
July 20, 2012 //
31

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The New York Times has a terrific piece today with the title of this post, written by a professor at the University of Virginia.

Sure, there are times when it is useful to take a course online.

But there is a downside.

The best learning is what happens when minds rub together, exchanging ideas; when a teacher can gauge what her students understand and can respond to their reactions. The best learning happens when there is a community of learners, thinking together.

I know, I know, this is really old-fashioned. And I’ll plead guilty to having old-fashioned values.

But there is something having the eye-to-eye contact, the face-to-face contact that is really better for purposes of teaching and learning than sitting alone in front of a computer.

I am not saying this to put down technology. I understand how wonderful it is to see visualizations, dramatizations, to see famous people giving famous speeches instead of reading them, to see events rather than reading about them. All of that can be incorporated into lessons.

My gripe is with the very concept that you can learn just as much sitting alone as  you can in a group with a live teacher. It may work with adults (although the author of this article doesn’t think so). But it strikes me as developmentally inappropriate for children.

Categories On-Line Education, Teachers and Teaching

Bill Gates Says….

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
69

Are you ready? Bill Gates says that game-based learning is the future of education.

He has a dream. A dream of children sitting around and playing games on their computers or their iPads or their Whatevers.

They will be wearing galvanic skin response monitor bracelets, or they will have a little chip in their heads to measure their level of excitement, and they will be excited all the time.

Every classroom–if there are classrooms–will buzz with their excitement. Little and big squeals of sheer joy as they blast off and shoot the intruder or blow away somebody else’s avatar or compete to win the most points.

They will be so excited that they won’t want to go  home. They won’t want to read a book.

They will need half a gram of soma to calm down, to become calm enough to leave the classroom of the future where they have spent the entire day in play and gaming.

Just a question: Why does he get to do this to our children? Why doesn’t he use his own children as guinea pigs first?

Another question: Why do education leaders listen to him?

 

Categories Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, On-Line Education

Why the Demand for Virtual Charter Schools?

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
22

We know from studies and reports that online charter schools provide inferior education.

We know that they have lower graduation rates and lower test scores than brick-and-mortar schools.

We know that they have high attrition rates, as students enroll and leave within a year or two.

We know that children enrolled in virtual charter schools do not have the opportunity to interact on a regular basis with other children of their age or have face-to-face interaction with live teachers. We know that they will not develop the social skills that come from such interchange.

We know why they are a growing business: They make millions for their sponsors.

So why do parents continue to enroll their children in institutions with such a bad track record?

Here is the answer: The demand for virtual schools is a sure indicator of the dumbing down of the American public and the triumph of American capitalism at its greediest.

Categories For-Profit, On-Line Education, Parents, Privatization

Michigan Plan to Defund Public Education

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
15

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has his own plan to hack away at the foundations of universal, free public education.

He is vying to be one of the national leaders of the education reform movement.

Like Bobby Jindal, his Southern counterpart in the far-right of the Republican Party, Snyder would love to offer vouchers but the Michigan state constitution doesn’t permit it (neither does the Louisiana state constitution, but who cares when you are a reformer?). Leaving constitutional niceties aside, Snyder wants to promote, encourage, expand, and fund with taxpayer dollars anything that is not a public school.

Governor Snyder wants to reshape the state’s school finance system so that public money “follows the child,” instead of just automatically going to public schools. This is part of the rightwing agenda to defund public education, cloaked in alluring terminology. The governor has created a panel to figure out how to make this happen.

He won’t come right out and say (reformers never do) that public education is bad, instead he will parrot Michelle Rhee’s absurd claim that public education is rigged to support “adult interests,” not the needs of children. I think what that means is that people who work in public schools get paid for doing so, which shows how selfish they are.

Far better, in the eyes of this education reformer in Michigan, to allow public money to go to for-profit corporations who put children first or anywhere else where there are no unions.

This is one of the peculiar views of the reformers in Michigan. It released a memo saying “the existing School Aid Act of 1979 generates $14 billion for public education, but the group believes that the existing law “serves the interest of legislators and representatives of the educational interests who control the education system, it is generally inaccessible to the general public.”

See the reasoning: That $14 billion now spent on public schools for all is controlled by “the educational interests” who “control the system” and it is not really for “the general public.” Get that: the money spent for public education is not for the public.

So if you follow the logic here, what is needed is more school choice, with money not targeted to any particular district or any particular school. No student would be assigned anywhere, and any choice the student or family made would be accompanied by state funding. Needless to say, that includes online learning and charters. Be it noted that Michigan has a very large for-profit charter sector; somewhere between 70-80% of its many charters operate for profit.

The governor wants funding to be allocated to “proficiency-based funding instead of “seat time” requirements,” which means that testing will be the sole criterion of education value. This again is a green light for the online corporations, because students can pass the state tests on computers and won’t need to go to a brick-and-mortar school at all.

And of course, we can’t have “reform” without “innovation.” In this case, the governor wants “A system that embraces innovative learning tools and reflects changing from a static approach to education delivery to one responsive to individual learning styles.” There we go again: code words meaning that we don’t want public money to pay for the current status quo system of public education, which is “static,” but to pay for online delivery system where the computer can adjust to “individual learning styles.” Apparently that is something that individual teachers, mere human beings, can’t possibly do. Only computers can do that.

And most certainly the governor wants to allow “nonpublic and homeschooled students maximum access to public education resources within the constraints of the state constitution.”

There you have it, folks, Governor Rick Snyder’s plan to reform public education by funding everything other than public education.

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Jindal, Bobby, Michigan, On-Line Education, Privatization

Report Says K12 Online Charters Lag Behind Real Schools

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
21

The National Education Policy Center in Boulder, Colorado, released a report today about the performance of the for-profit online corporation K12. This is the biggest of the online operators, which has been criticized repeatedly for poor academic performance yet continues to expand. Just recently, Ohio and Pennsylvania added more for-profit virtual charters, as North Carolina rejected them and New Jersey deferred making a decision.

The new NEPC report found that students who enroll in these virtual schools do worse in academics than those who attend a brick-and-mortar school.

The authors of the report urged states to slow down in their headlong rush to open more such “schools.”

Here are the major findings, as reported in the press release:

New Report Shows Students Who Attend K12 Inc. Cyber Schools Falling Behind

Students at K12 Inc., Nation’s Largest Virtual School Company,
Are Lagging in Reading, Math and Graduation Rates; Researchers Say Evidence of Success Needed BEFORE Further Expansion

Few Dollars Dedicated to Instructional Salaries and Special Ed, Despite Lower Overhead Costs

WASHINGTON — A new report released today by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) at the University of Colorado shows that students at K12 Inc., the nation’s largest virtual school company, are falling further behind in reading and math scores than students in brick-and- mortar schools. These virtual schools students are also less likely to remain at their schools for the full year, and the schools have low graduation rates. “Our in-depth look into K12 Inc. raises enormous red flags,” said NEPC Director Kevin Welner.

The report’s findings will be presented in Washington today to a national meeting of the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), where the report’s lead author, Dr. Gary Miron, is scheduled to debate Dr. Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning. The report is titled, Understanding and Improving Full- Time Virtual Schools.

“Our findings are clear,” said Miron, an NEPC fellow, “Children who enroll in a K12 Inc. cyberschool, who receive full-time instruction in front of a computer instead of in a classroom with a live teacher and other students, are more likely to fall behind in reading and math. These children are also more likely to move between schools or leave school altogether – and the cyberschool is less likely to meet federal education standards.”

K12 Inc. schools generally operate on less public revenue, but they have considerable cost savings, says Miron. They devote minimal or no resources to facilities, operations, and transportation. These schools also have more students per teacher and pay less for teacher salaries and benefits than brick-and-mortar schools.

“Computer-assisted learning has tremendous potential,” said Miron. “But at present, our research shows that virtual schools such as those operated by K12 Inc. are not working effectively. States should not grow full-time virtual schools until they have evidence of success. Most immediately, we need to better understand why the performance of these schools suffers and how it can be improved.”

Earliier this week, New Jersey education officials postponed granting approval to a K12 Inc. full- time virtual schools for one year. In many states, however, policy is headed in exactly the opposite direction. In Michigan, for example, legislators decided earlier this year to lift the cap on full-time virtual schools, even though the state was in the second year of a pilot study to see whether these schools work and what could be done to ensure they work better. That pilot study had provided no findings to support such a scale-up.

Student performance results from the current study are clearly in line with the existing body of evidence, which includes state evaluations and audits of virtual schools in five states as well as a more rigorous study of student learning in Pennsylvania virtual charter schools conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. CREDO’s study found virtual-school students ended up with learning gains that were “significantly worse” than students in traditional charters and public schools.

New Report Shows K12 Inc. Cyber School Students Falling Behind/ 3

Miron and co-author Jessica L. Urschel, a doctoral student at Western Michigan University, analyzed federal and state data sets for revenue, expenditures, and student performance. In terms of student demographics and school performance data, the researchers studied all of K12’s 48 full-time virtual schools. In terms of revenues and expenditures, they used a federal data set that includes seven K12 Inc. schools from five different states (Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Ohio and Pennsylvania), although these seven schools accounted for almost 60 percent of all of K12 Inc.’s enrollment from 2008-09, which is the most recent year of available finance data.

In terms of the number of students enrolled, K12 Inc. is the largest private education management organization (EMO) and the largest private operator of virtual schools in the United States. It had contracts to operate 48 full-time virtual schools in 2011-12. In addition to these contracts, K12 Inc. provides services and support to dozens of other schools that have more limited online offerings.

Key findings include:

  •   Math scores for K12 Inc.’s students are 14 to 36 percent lower than scores for other students in the states in which the company operates schools. Across grades 3- 11, the scores were between 2 and 11 percentage points below the state average in reading.
  •   The on-time graduation rate for students the K12 Inc. schools is 49.1 percent, compared with a rate of 79.4 percent for the states in which the company operates schools.
  •   Only 27.7 percent of K12 Inc.’s schools reported meeting Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) standards in 2010-11, compared to 52% for brick-and-mortar schools in the nation as a whole.
  •   Student attrition is exceptionally high in K12 Inc. and other virtual schools. Many families appear to approach the virtual schools as a temporary service: Data in K12 Inc.’s own school performance report indicate that 31% of parents intend to keep their students enrolled for a year or less, and more than half intend to keep their students enrolled for two years or less. K12 Inc. also noted in this report that 23% of its current students were enrolled for less than a year and 67% had been enrolled for fewer than two years.

• K12 Inc.’s schools spend more on overall instructional costs than comparison schools – including the cost of computer hardware and software, but noticeably less on teachers’ salaries and benefits.

New Report Shows K12 Inc. Cyber School Students Falling Behind/ 4

  • K12 Inc. spends little or nothing on facilities and maintenance, transportation, and food service.
  • K12 Inc. enrolls students with disabilities at rates moderately below public school averages, although this enrollment has been increasing, but the company spends half as much per pupil as charter schools overall spend on special education instruction and a third of what districts spend on special education instruction.Among the take-aways from all this is that K12 Inc.’s cyberschools reduce costs by having more students per teacher and by reducing overall spending on teachers’ salaries and benefits, particularly for special education instruction. “Part of K12’s problem seems to be that it skimps on special education spending and employs few instructors, despite having lower overhead than brick-and-mortar schools,” said the NEPC’s Welner, who is a professor of education policy at the University of Colorado. 
Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Reform, For-Profit, National Education Policy Center, New Jersey, On-Line Education, Pennsylvania

Pearson Wields Undue Power in Britain Too

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2012 //
6

A recent article in the Guardian explores how the publishing giant Pearson commands the education world in Britain.

Pearson not only sells textbooks and testing, but also owns Britain’s biggest national examination system, which is operated for profit.

But that’s not all.

Pearson is now promoting itself as a policy studies outfit and think tank, studying the problems of British education and offering solutions. In whose interest, one wonders.

And of course it is developing a model school with a computer-based curriculum called the “Always Learning Gateway,” covering 11 subject areas. It is being tried out for free but will eventually be offered for profit.

Pearson is preparing a report on which the English examination system is promoting high standards and positioning Britain to be a global leader.

“Alasdair Smith, national secretary of the Anti Academies Alliance, which is critical of corporate influence in education, says: “This stuff frightens the life out of me. My concern is that business dictates the nature of education, and especially the aims of education, when it should be one voice among others.”

“Ball says private influence does not stop at Pearson. He mentions McKinsey, the management consultant that has published two widely cited international reports on successful education systems, as evidence of companies’ incursion into policymaking. Sir Michael Barber, Tony Blair’s former education standards guru, was an author of both McKinsey reports. He now works for Pearson.

“Last month, it was reported that ministers want to “outsource” some policymaking to companies, consultants and thinktanks in a bid to scale down the civil service.”

The British government, it seems, is outsourcing education policy to the nation’s largest vendor of education products and services.

Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, International, On-Line Education, Pearson, Testing

This Ohio Teacher is Running for Office

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
13

Maureen Reedy, a teacher in Ohio for 29 years, was Ohio teacher of the year in 2002. Now she is running for the Ohio House of Representatives.

She deserves the support of every taxpayer, parent, and citizen in Ohio.

She is angry at the waste of taxpayer dollars for bad, deregulated charter schools. Forget what you read in The Economist about the miracle of privately managed charters. As she points out below, half the charter schools in the state are in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 public schools.

She is especially outraged by the rapacious cyber charters. As she points out in this article, two of Ohio’s major charter sponsors have collected nearly a billion dollars of Ohio taxpayer dollars since 1999:

Charter schools are a poor investment of Ohio’s education dollars and have a worse track record than public schools in our state; there are twice as many failing charter schools as successful ones, and one in two charter schools is either in academic emergency or academic watch, compared with only one in 11 traditional public-school buildings. Five of seven of Ohio’s largest electronic-charter-school districts’ graduation rates are lower than the state’s worst public-school system’s graduation rate, and six of seven of the electronic charter schools districts are rated less than effective.

And finally, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow has failed in every identified state category for eight years, a worse track record than the Cleveland City School system, which is under threat of being shut down by the state. The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow is run by unlicensed administrators. Lager, in addition to his $3 million salary, earned an additional $12 million funneled through his software company, which sells products to his charter-school corporation. Just how much does the average teacher in the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow earn you may ask? Approximately $34,000 per year.

Why do the Governor and the Legislature look the other way? Why are they quadrupling the number of vouchers and reducing oversight of the state’s troubled charter schools?

That’s easy:

I am appalled at the direct pipeline funneling vital state dollars for our children’s education directly into the pockets of millionaires like David L. Brennan, chief executive officer of White Hat Management ($6 million yearly salary) and William Lager, CEO of the state’s ninth-largest school district, the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow ($3 million yearly salary).

Let’s follow the money trail of political contributions by these two for-profit charter-school CEOs to high-ranking GOP legislators. In the past decade, Brennan and Lager have donated a combined $5 million to high-ranking GOP legislators, including Gov. John Kasich, Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor, House Speaker William G. Batchelder and Sen. Kevin Bacon, chairman of the Senate Committee on Insurance, Commerce and Labor.

Why isn’t the U.S. Department of Education blowing the whistle on these scandals?

Is education reform about improving education or about lining the pockets of campaign contributors?

Not a hard question in Ohio.

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Ohio, On-Line Education

What Is Legal Fraud?

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
5

A reader asks a reasonable question, perhaps wondering why states like Ohio and Pennsylvania continue to authorize cyber charters despite their abysmal results.

He brings up Michael Milken, who was convicted on charges of securities fraud and tax violation and sent to jail in 1990. According to his bio on Wikipedia, Milken made $1 billion a year and was paid out about $1.1 billion in fines and settlements of claims. One way to understand what is happening in education today is to read Connie Bruck’s book about Milken, the junk bond king, in Predator’s Ball. Junk bonds and leveraged buyouts led to lots of “creative destruction” of familiar brand names.

Today, Milken is a leading figure in the education reform movement.

He is one of the founders of the nation’s biggest cyber charter chain, K12. His foundation invests in merit pay (which as I have previously observed, never works); it gives awards annually to outstanding teachers. One does wonder if it is appropriate for an ex-felon to run schools that receive public funding. I don’t think he could work in a school because schools–at least, public schools– usually fingerprint future employees and don’t hire ex-cons. Cyber charters make a lot of money for their sponsors, but they provide a low-quality education, if you judge it by academic results.

I don’t understand the concept of “legal fraud”. Is that just reserved for corporations and some politicians?Re: CorporationsMilken owns K12 Inc and they are operating in 32 states + DC:http://www.k12.com/schools-programs/online-public-schoolsMilken is a convicted felon who admitted to and was imprisoned for fraud related to fiscal managment. Today, he typically says he’s just an investor in his companies and I believe he tries to conceal his real involvement in them by playing a kind of corporate musical chairs. At the very least, state government officials should be able to track and identify his true involvement in his companies and prevent those companies from receiving public funds on the basis of his felony convictions over money matters. I think it’s possible to do, because the feds prevented him from obtaining financial aid for a university he owned, since his felony convictions were related to violating US securities laws. Perhaps it’s because they were violations of federal laws and not state laws, but one would think the issue is more about fraud involving money, rather than jurisdiction.Re: Certain PoliticiansMy city’s former mayor of 22 years got our city into some truly terrible long-term contracts that privatized some public services, in order to cover fiscal deficits, including a 75 year parking-meter contract and a 99 year parking garage contract. Parking rates immediately skyrocketed and that is going to be lasting our ENTIRE lifetimes. This former mayor now works for the very law firm that negotiated that parking-meter deal:

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/05/daley-a-year-later-no-thanks-for-the-memories.html

I just don’t get why these kinds of things look like fraud and yet might be legal. Are there that many loopholes?

It’s particularly disconcerting when the politicians who do such things are attorneys who are familiar with the law –and the loopholes, too, I guess. This mayor was previously a State’s Attorney. Our last two governors, who were also lawyers, are currently serving time in prison for crimes they commited while in office.

One has to wonder why some people manage to avoid prosecution or sanctions while others don’t. Admittedly, I’m sometimes glad when little people, with little money and little crimes that don’t have victims are not targeted, but when we’re talking about big people, with big money and big crimes that impact millions of folks, not so much.
Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Merit pay, On-Line Education

Good News from New Jersey

By dianeravitch
July 17, 2012 //
9

Jersey Jazzman reports that New Jersey will not approve the state’s first online for-profit virtual charter school. K12 has been told to come back next year, perhaps on the hope that citizen outrage will have died down by then. Jersey Jazzman, you may recall, memorably referred to New Jersey as “the cesspool of school reform.”

This is a big win. The most important message here is that citizens make a difference when they organize and speak up against politically powerful forces who are trying to grab taxpayer money and call it “reform.”

This is two wins in a row against the K12 giant, first in North Carolina, where the school boards banded together to stop the raid on their own strained budgets, and now in New Jersey, where concerned parents and educators blew the whistle.

It’s important to remind everyone that the reformers are vulnerable. They are vulnerable to public exposure because the fact is that their harmful ideas have no public support once the public understands what they are up to. There is no public support for handing taxpayer dollars over to corporate interests and calling it “reform.”

The public loves its community schools and doesn’t want to see them impoverished by corporate raiders.

So, yes, learn from New Jersey. Learn from the parents of Florida, who stopped the fake “parent trigger” legislation. Learn from the school boards of North Carolina.

You are not alone. Work in coalition with others to understand the theft of public education that is underway. You can make a difference.

Categories Education Reform, K12 Inc., New Jersey, On-Line Education
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