Archives for category: On-Line Education
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Peter Greene: A Teacher’s View Of Cybercharters

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2014 //
8

Peter Greene teaches in a small town in Pennsylvania. He hasn’t studied the research on Cybercharters but he can tell you which students they attract and how they are affecting the public schools in his town.

If he read the research, he would find out that Pennsylvania is utopia for virtual charter schools, having 16 different companies advertising for students. Students drop out almost as fast as they drop in. These “schools” are very profitable. The founder of the first virtual charter in Pennsylvania was charged with the theft of millions of dollars; actually, so was another virtual charter founder.

And the research shows that students learn less in virtual charters in Pennsylvania.

Here is Greene’s take, from a teacher’s perspective.

Categories Budget Cuts, Charter Schools, On-Line Education, Technology, Computers

Pennsylvania Cybercharters: The Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2014 //
3

A reader offers this perspicacious view of Pennsylvania’s cybercharter industry. There are 16 of them in the state. The founders of two of the major cybercharters are currently under indictment for siphoning millions of dollars of public funds:

The reader writes:

“Running a cyber-charter in PA is as good as printing money. No oversight and a system that completely ignores the actual costs of the system. If the Commonwealth of PA went shopping for used cars the same way, it would walk onto the lot and tell the salesman, “Here’s twenty grand. Pick out any car for me that you want, and keep the change.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, On-Line Education, Pennsylvania

How Cybercharters Cheat Taxpayers

By dianeravitch
February 18, 2014 //
8

Temple University law professor Susan deJarnett studied Pennsylvania’s 16 Cybercharters and found that they make huge profits while providing few services.

“Parsing the tax documents for the 12 cyber charters for which information was available, she found that cyber charters carry large surpluses and spend what she considered a disproportionate amount of Pennsylvania tax dollars on advertising, travel expenses and contracts with outside management and service providers.”

Fewer teachers. No custodians. No heating bills. No savings.

The money for the Cybercharters comes out of each district’s budget, depending on its per pupil expenditure:

“If a regular-education student from Lower Merion school district attended a cyber-charter in 2011-2012, Lower Merion (which then had a per-pupil expenditure of $22,140.70) sent the cyber charter about $17,000.

“If a regular-education student from the Philadelphia school district attended the same cyber-charter, Philadelphia (which then had a per-pupil expenditure of $12,351.74) sent the cyber charter about $8,500.

“Same cyber school. Same cyber-education. Outrageously different price tag.”

An obvious incentive to poach students from rich districts.

Two of Pennsylvania’s best known charter founders are under indictment. With so many millions in play and no supervision or regulation, bad things can happen.

Categories Charter Schools, On-Line Education, Pennsylvania

In Praise of the Pencil

By dianeravitch
February 15, 2014 //
104

When I started public elementary school in Houston, we learned to write with pens that were dipped in an inkwell. I think it was called a quill pen. This was not easy for me because almost every desk had a wooden arm for right-handed students, and I am left handed. I had to contort myself to dip my pen and write on a desk meant for right-handed students.

Then about the time I was in second grade, we got ball point pens, which was a huge technological step forward. However, they smudged something awful. As I wrote, in my cramped left-handed way, the ink smeared my fingers and my left hand. I came home ink-stained every day.

When ball points were eventually improved so that the ink did not smudge, it was wonderful for us lefties.

But always there was the trusty pencil. We could all count on our #2 pencil, so long as there was a nearby pencil sharpener, or a pocket knife to bring back the point.

This writer joins me in distrusting the exclusive reliance on online testing. I could give many reasons why it is a terrible idea, not only including cost, but emphasizing that it shifts control to outside authority. Someone decides what knowledge is of most worth. It is not teachers or scholars. Chances are it is a committee at Pearson.

A great scholar once said to me: “Let me write a nation’s tests, and I care not who writes its songs.”

Here is a reader, in praise of the pencil:

“It becomes a test to take the test. Where are the content advocates now? Are we really ready to replace the technology of the pencil. Computers will come and go, breakdown, become obsolete. This has never happened to the pencil, a very reliable technology.
Pencils will help our children be career and college ready at less cost. Don’t need to hire technicians; and they are so abundant and available, that they can be found on the floor of any classroom at the end of the day.”

Categories On-Line Education, Testing

Rocketship Charter Chain: Preparing the Telemarketers of the Future?

By dianeravitch
January 8, 2014 //
19

This article suggests that Rocketship charter schools is preparing a new generation that has mastered the art of learning online and interacting with computers.

Students spend two hours daily at the computer, supervised by aides, not teachers.

This saves money.

These instructors monitor up to 130 kids at a time in cubicles in the schools’ computer labs. Rocketeers, as students are called, sit looking at computer screens up to two hours per day, supposedly learning by solving puzzles.

Business leaders such as Bill Gates often stress the need to train kids for the jobs of the future—digital animators, nanotech engineers? But it looks more like the Rocketeers are being prepared for online “microtasks” at Crowdflower, which contracts out data categorization and de-duplication.

According to a recent wage and hour lawsuit, these microtaskers are often paid as little as $2 an hour.

Overall, the growth these days is not in skilled, middle-class jobs like public school teaching—which is shrinking, thanks to charter chains like Rocketship—but in low-wage jobs.

It’s no coincidence that Rocketship employs the same kind of de-professionalized, non-union workforce it seems to be training. Half its teachers have less than two years’ experience; 75 percent come from Teach for America.

Rocketship charters will open next fall in many cities.

Is this the wave of the future?

 

Categories Charter Schools, On-Line Education

Anthony Cody: Confessions of a Teacher in “Virtual Charter School Hell”

By dianeravitch
January 7, 2014 //
76

Darcy Bedortha is a guest writer for Anthony Cody’s blog.

She tells her story as a Lead Teacher for a K12 virtual charter school.

She confirms all the worst fears of critics of virtual charters.

They make a lot of money. They are passionate about profits, not students.

Students need one-to-one contact with a human being. They don’t get it.

In a long and heartbreaking post, she writes:

I was an English teacher, so my students would write. They wrote of pain and fear and of not fitting in. They were the kinds of young people who desperately needed to have the protective circle of a community watching over them. They needed one healthy person to smile at them and recognize them by name every day, to say “I’m glad you’re here!” Many of my former students do not have that.

The last thing these young people needed, I came to realize during my time with K12 Inc., was to be isolated in front of a computer screen. A week or two or three would often go by without my getting a word from a student. They didn’t answer their email, they didn’t answer their phones. Often their phones were disconnected. Their families were disconnected. My students also moved a lot. During my first year at the school I spent days on the phone trying to track students down. This year I struggled to not simply give up under the weight of it all.

In the fall of 2013, 42 percent of our high school students were deemed “economically disadvantaged.” I had a number of students who were not native English speakers. I cannot wrap my head around how to serve a student who is unable to read or comprehend the language that the virtual curriculum is written in, let alone learn the technology (when it is functioning) without sitting beside them in the same space. Many of my non-native speakers had parents who did not speak English at all. These students often struggled for a very short time, and then I never saw their work again. They dropped out, moved on.

The school officials make millions of dollars. The virtual charter works for them.

Why are we allowing public dollars to flow to these non-educational institutions?

Silly question. They give campaign contributions. They lobby. They are strategic in advancing their goal: Profit.

 

Categories Charter Schools, Education Industry, For-Profit, K12 Inc., On-Line Education

Ohio’s Richest Charter Operator, with Very Low-Performing School

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2014 //
16

Plunderbund writes here about the largest charter school in Ohio. Its revenues are staggering, its test scores and graduation rates are low, its political contributions to its allies top $1 million.

“The Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) is the largest charter school in the state of Ohio. The online school is easily the largest charter school in Ohio, is larger than the vast majority of Ohio’s traditional school districts, and received over $88 million in state funding last school year. This year that amount is expected to jump to over $92 million.

“On the latest report cards released by the Ohio Department of Education, ECOT continues to rank below all of the 8 large urban schools that are often-criticized by legislators and in the media for their “sub-par” performance.

“For graduation rate, a key indicator for the long-term success of a school/district, ECOT’s 4-year graduation rate is a paltry 35.3%, while their 5-year graduation rate of 37.8%, which is only slightly higher, was still over 25 points worse than the lowest urban school district, Cleveland, which checked in at 63.3%. While we now see the legislature writing laws to specifically regulate Cleveland and Columbus more tightly, the charter school laws that apply to ECOT continue to be more lax.

“And while the data on performance for this school of 13,836 students (11th largest “district” in the Ohio) is bad enough, the financial games played by the school’s owner/operator are even worse. We wrote a comprehensive piece about ECOT back in 2011, but since then the school has continued to grow and continued to siphon ever larger sums of money away from higher-performing schools.

“On December 8, our post, Ohio’s Largest Taxpayer-Funded Charter School, ECOT, Receives Bonus Check, described how the school was up for approval of an additional $2.9 million dollar bonus from Governor Kasich’s Straight A Fund.

“On December 10, we posted a follow-up, ECOT Founder Living VERY Well Off Ohio’s School Funding Dollars, where we went into greater detail about the financial games being played and won by ECOT’s Founder, William Lager.

“Today, we have another update to the political donations and financial windfall experienced by Lager.”

Keep reading.

Categories Charter Schools, Ohio, On-Line Education

Did LA Schools Get Ripped Off by Apple?

By dianeravitch
January 1, 2014 //
35

Turns out the iPads purchased by LAUSD are way more expensive than what other districts are buying. And they have already been discontinued: obsolete already.

No wonder tech vendors are thrilled with Race to the Top: Ca-Ching !

$$$$$$$$$$

Lots of dough for devices. Not so much for the arts, libraries, small classes.

Categories Los Angeles, On-Line Education, Technology, Computers

Reader: How Cyber-Charters Crush Small School Districts

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
4

This reader reports fro Pennsylvania, which has 16 cyber-charters, all drawing money from local school districts.

“We kind of know what happens. In PA, we have limited brick-and-mortar charters, but we’ve been dealing with cyber-charters for a few years now.

“It is a crushing formula for reimbursement– the state gives the charter the per-capita cost for each student. That generally translates into about 10K per student taken from the home district and redirected to the cyber school (the cost is greater for special needs students).

“In my mainly-rural district two years ago, the total cost of cyber-students to the district was about $800,000. And then the district closed two elementary schools with the stated intent of saving— about $800,000.

“How charters will affect school districts will depend a great deal on the funding formula imposed by the state. In Pennsylvania, cyber-schools are choking smaller school districts.”

Categories On-Line Education

This is What Real Tech Literacy Looks Like

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
28

Last Sunday, the Néw York Times had a lengthy editorial lamenting the sorry state of math education in the U.S. the editorial said that our kids find math boring, so they don’t major in math or become engineers. The Times barely mentioned the pernicious effects of standardized testing, which surely mars math tedious.

But the Times writers should visit Pasadena, California, which has developed a model program for the use of technology. It is certainly NOT boring. It demonstrates foresight, planning, vision, and purpose. And it seems to be very exciting!

“In sixth through eighth grade classrooms in Pasadena Unified School District, elective Robotics classes hum with activity as teams of excited kids use laptops to build robots during the school day. Students show off the robots’ abilities in a fun end-of-year “final exam” Expo open to the entire community, and those meeting a basic academic requirement will create and code video game and other apps in the just-launched App Academy at Pasadena High School.

There are no admissions tests, no magnet school attendance restrictions, and no GATE requirements to take the elective Robotics class; interested students simply choose the elective.

For the past three years, Pasadena Unified has offered real technological literacy and computer programming classes for public school children in two out of four high schools (with plans for all) in the district — and yet its big, slow-moving neighbor to the west, Los Angeles Unified, isn’t paying attention. Neither is the rest of California, to its detriment.

Under the direction of a visionary team housed in the Pasadena Education Foundation’s STEM initiative, children in Pasadena Unified’s majority-minority, 68% free-and-reduced lunch schools with many English language learners figure out how to code in hands-on, engaging ways. These students apply math, design, engineering, marketing, and even arts learning to their creations.

The goal is to offer programming and App Academy high school classes across the entire district, and with support from faculty at CalTech, rocket scientists at NASA/JPL, and Pasadena’s burgeoning tech incubator community, they appear on track to achieve this. There’s no reason Silicon Beach on Los Angeles’ westside or Silicon Valley up north can’t help with in-kind assistance — and crucial funding via revenue to the state — to scale this highly effective model to every single school district in California, not just the ones lucky to have a high-tech hub in their backyard.”

How great is that !

The link: http://k12newsnetwork.com/blog/2013/12/09/real-technological-literacy-for-public-school-kids-instead-of-ipads-for-tests-or-code-org/

Categories California, Los Angeles, On-Line Education, Technology, Computers
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