Since 2001 there has been a marked increase in the number of man-made social and political Crises threatening Americans, from terrorism to possible global pandemics to economic collapse to peak oil to the erosion of individual rights. It's tiring, spending as much time as we have been asked to spend terrified and fending off imminent doom.
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Accordingly I have tried hard to maintain a more even keel than Young Ed used to, resisting the urge to leap to attention as though the sky is falling every time a perceived threat or crisis appears on the horizon.
Forget all of that for a second. The sky is now falling. This is the end of the world as we know it: for-profit "education reform advocates" (lobbyists/privatization fetishists) are convincing legislatures to legalize "virtual charter schools". You might know these better as online courses. You know, those things that students learn absolutely nothing from. But you can't beat 'em for cheap overhead!
Read that link. We are so, so very fucked.
Kanamit says:
Agreed. We've destroyed a functional, if imperfect, system and replaced it with a for-profit nightmare.
Ben says:
Two things
– God fucking damn these charities that help fund this evil fucking nonsense. The Gates and Dell foundations should be ashamed. And publicly shamed.
– Bob Somerby (http://dailyhowler.blogspot.com) is really good about the nuts and bolts of the attacks on education. Doghouse Riley (http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com) is really good about hurling invective on how evil the trends in education policy are.
Middle Seaman says:
We see it all over the place. It is impossible even to protest peacefully anymore. The police attacks protestors and live ammunition is just around the corner. The moronic elected officials couldn't care less about the unemployed and intend to cut the deficit. This effort will result in an increase in the unemployment and the deficit. We are now going to fight in Africa due to our spineless, mindless and valueless Nobel peace laureate.
You worry about online courses? We have a line that turns the corner of problems that will make education a non issue.
TheStone says:
In working as a one-on-one aide for kids, I have had the distinct pleasure of recently becoming acquainted with a cyberschool for f-ing kindgergarteners. A little early in the AM for an extended treatment of this, but my experience has been far from positive.
Brief vignette: The kid I'm working with has had 5 or 6 scheduled "chats" with his teacher and several other kids, 1 of which has come off without falling apart for technical reasons. The chat that did occur was 15 minutes long, around 12.5 minutes of which consisted of the teacher saying things like:
"Take your hand off the right–click button on your mouse, Jimmy," or "Sally, go get your mommy and tell her to plug your headset in the right outlet," or finally "Well kids we didn't get through this worksheet [which had 5 whole addition problems on it], so maybe we'll get to it tomorrow or the next day."
Aside from the technical issues (of which the above is merely one example), I would argue that a lot of the kids that have behavioral issues supposedly preventing them from benefitting from the classroom experience are suffering from those issues because they NEVER LEAVE THEIR HOUSE. Some of them will always have difficulty getting through a school day, but the guy I'm working with has never even been in a classroom. Maybe not having a giant bucket of toys 7 feet from his workstation would work wonders from him, but we'll never know because mom is a hot mess of anxiety and projection.
I understand that it is early in the development of these online schools and that their advocates will argue that some schools are better than others and that they all need time to get the "bugs" worked out. However, I propose that we take advantage of the fact that this movement is still "small enough to drown in a bathtub" and do so immediately. (h/t Grover)
buckyblue says:
Our school district runs one, and has a huge attendance throughout the entire state. Typically it's the at-risk parents who want to send their kid there because they are tired of getting the phone calls from the VP. This is also the population that is least likely to be successful in this type of 'education'. It requires enormous amounts of self-discipline, which these kids ain't got. I know several teachers who 'teach' in it and they tell me typically what happens is that kids turn in NOTHING for the first three months of the semester, then more for the next month, the last two weeks is a deluge. Most of the kids do all of their work in the last two weeks of the course. There's no way to verify that kids have actually done any of the work so all tests are open note/book. Papers are often times written by some other than the student. It may be cheaper but is this anyway of teaching kids?
Seth says:
It's not coincidence, either, that the cabal advancing this agenda most ardently includes one Bill Gates (and other minions of the technology industry), who have histories of monopolizing (colonizing) our culture with their for-profit wares. It's what they do. So, we have anti-public-education, anti-union radical Republicans bashing public schools and teacher unions, and we have ultra-wealthy technology company owners supplanting public schools and human teachers with machinery that doesn't really answer any of the problems, but does produce high 'measurables' that anybody who doesn't know anything about education can find quite persuasive.
Neat trick, eh?
c u n d gulag says:
I think we should let that brilliant idea's man, Newt Gingrich, lead us in this.
Until we can come up with robot teachers, who don't need salaries, benefits, unions, pensions, food, water, or sleep, I think we should have the children, after they do their janitorial work, teach the younger students. Look, let 6 year-old's teach 5 year old's – they just took the same material, so it's bound to be fresh in their heads. And then 7 year-old's teach the 6 year-old's. Etc… – all the way up to and including the Doctorate level.
Voila – problem solved.
It may not be a good system, but it's a better one than privatized online courses.
Whoever thought THAT one up is a fucking idiot who doesn't care about kids, parents, or education at all.
Entomologista says:
Here's something that could use some clarification – are the kids supposed to do these courses from home or from school? Because if they are supposed to do them from home, we're going to once again be relying on the unpaid labor of women. Somebody has to watch the kids, since you can't leave elementary schoolers by themselves all day. I guess republicans think women have nothing better to do than stay home and work for free so we don't have to pay teachers.
I'm also bothered by online university degrees. The school I attended has both regular and online MS degrees (this seems to be fairly common these days). The requirements to get into the online MS program are significantly less stringent. The online courses are significantly easier and the requirements for the thesis are looser. Judging from the stories I hear from my friend who is forced to TA these online classes, the students vary in quality from "batshit fucking insane" to "mildly retarded". But when these losers graduate from the online program does their degree say "online"? No, their degree is exactly the same as mine. Employers hire these clowns thinking they are going to get a normal person from a good school, and instead they get a hot mess. This devalues my degree, which I got the old fashioned way. But since the online program makes buckets of money, it's not likely to go away any time soon.
* says:
Hot damn, I read your post assuming that this was about "Phoenix University" or some great state school in the south that offers online courses… Which I HATE (Especially after having been supervised by the result of this "couse work.")
Now I see that this is for children… Maybe someone should let Bill (as in Gates, under the assumption that this is another profit mechanism for him & NOTHING else) know that that in my somewhat affluent highly regarded DC beltway county that the kids have to share computers in the public library (yeah the libraries that they don't want to fund. As an aside, I can't wait to hear how those free babysitters are being paid too much to do their actual jobs – librarians – in addition to the free baby sitting) 1 hour at a time.
Major Kong says:
Sounds like Florida is trying to replace Texas as "The national laboratory for bad government"
Mr. Prosser says:
So true buckyblue. I spent one semester with a kid who wouldn't do any work. They assigned me to shepherd him through an online algebra I course which actually did meet the curriculum. We met every day for 90 minutes and the kid did learn something; but, the kid had a free one on one tutor for 90 minutes a day. As you say, kids that are being held accountable are being taken out of school by their parents and enrolled in on-line classes. These are the f#$k-ups and do nothings. I don't miss them, frankly, and they won't be any less prepared than if they stayed in school disrupting the classes.
anotherbozo says:
I share a related anecdote: Back in the Pleistoscene I took a correspondence course offered by some official arm of the State of California, a required course for high school graduation. I was an A student but had hated even the thought of having to take California history, a requirement for all high school students, so put it off til summer, boxing myself into a corner.
It was a farce. I did the homework and sent it in, kept getting B's back in the mail. I had no idea why, so I began copying the homework of another student who had got A's. Problem solved. There might have been interesting approaches to California history (Rebecca Solnit or Howard Zinn certainly could've taught one), but the required text was a bowdlerized snooze and the lowlife grading my papers was an uncommunicative hack.
How much better could an online course be? A whole fucking program? Not to mention the effect of demolishing a cornerstone of our democracy, a free public education available to all. It's true: the corporatocracy just wants a pliable, naive underclass, dumb as posts but willing to buy more crap. Let the good times roll.
MarkC says:
Excellent! Once we deny the 99% an education, we can complete the transition to an overlord/underclass society. I know I'm on the right side of that divide! How about you?
Matt_L says:
You know what the best thing about on-line charter high schools is Ed? Do you? Three Words: Cheap Prison Labor.
Have convicts do the grading and monitoring the on-line tests and quizzes. (What could go wrong) Once the lectures are recorded to a server somewhere, you won't even need a teacher. The only public servant we'll ever need is a network technician (outsourced to India) and prison guards. Sounds like a win win to me!
Donna says:
Educate the best, incarcerate the rest- the policy of the elite.
rob says:
so ed, basically you're telling me it's time to re-up my sandwich artistry skillz?
xynzee says:
Q: Can someone make money out of this?
A: Certainly!
So cheer up li'l buckeroos! We're in the best care of all, and all will be o-tay! 'Cause Bu'wheat say, "It'll be O-tay!"). The omnipotent market shall reveal it as the most wonderful thing or an abject failure. What could go wrong? We've already survived the "whole language" experiment (grammar and spelling? We don't need speelin' no gramerr steenking!). In the Market we Trust! Far out!
@Stone: re: the socialising. I wonder if this is just a cheap aid for home schoolers and other far fetched crap from that sector?
Believe it or not, there are very vocal conservative Christians (see Mark Driscoll) who oppose this weird BS, and believe in bringing back the "old" methods of teaching eg. kill and drill phonetics (Dr. Seuss, would you could you, in a boat with a goat eat green eggs and ham?) and believe that schools shouldn't be test beds for the latest fads in "teaching methodology".
@C U: what you pointed out is actually a valid form of teaching. It's called Vygotsky method. Lev Vygotsky noticed that younger children learn more from older children. However, it's not to replace having a qualified teacher being involved in the process, but is to be used as another tool in the arsenal to get what is necessary into the heads of children.
Elle says:
This, exactly.
evrenseven says:
Elle, speaking of paying teachers- there's no reason not to have the streaming video classes originate in Bangalore.
Elle says:
Quite, Evrenseven. I think Seth and others made the point, upthread, about this providing the opportunity to give a spanking to the uppity teachers' unions. The threat of off-shoring, however incredible distance learning for children sounds to me, does create a somewhat different industrial relations dynamic.
Entomologista's broad point is well made, though. Right across Europe programmes and services are being cut in pursuit of 'efficiency savings', as austerity budgets press down on public spending. A staggering proportion (UK estimates have hovered around the ~73pc level, with regard to a couple of budgets and interim budget statements) of cuts to welfare, to public services, and to voluntary sector services, will be achieved at the cost of women picking up the slack.
Amused says:
I see this as a continuation of a long-term trend. For a very long time, American schools failed to educate and acted as little more than babysitters to the vast majority of students. We are shocked to see "virtual charter schools" now primarily because at this point, even the babysitting function of schools is being stripped away.
As someone who grew up in a different school system, I have to be blunt here — the American school system, even without the online component, isn't "imperfect". It's ghastly. When I immigrated, at the age of 13, I went from a school where kids my age were struggling with calculus to one where they were struggling with fractions, and that's just one small example. For a very long time, through a happy confluence of various circumstances, America enjoyed a kind of loophole that other countries did not — it could import ungodly numbers of highly skilled specialists, scientists, scholars and hard workers, while making relatively little effort to cultivate its own. And now, with the advent of globalization and the rapidly improving standard of living in countries that used to supply us with a steady stream of skilled and motivated workers, that bonanza is coming to an end, and fast. So now the time is, of course, ripe to consider the fact that every country that got to be a major economic and political player on the world stage in the past 100 years (other than this one) invested heavily in public education. But instead, we continue on the same path — diverting public money away from teaching and towards administration and private contractors, while lowering standards in order to convince ourselves that our children are being educated.
wnsrfr says:
The success of virtual schools in Florida is more a response to the horrible funding situation in that state than a true political movement. The Florida economy has been running on construction for retirees and now there is no economy, or a purely sputtering one.
Only the wealthy in FL can give their kids a decent education and it is almost all private. All the retirees vote-down any funding for education and the rich people already pay for private school so they do too! The result is some really bad classrooms, poorly funded and inhabited by the in-between kids from families stupid enough to raise a family in FL but without the means to send them to private school.
That's why there is so much home-schooling in FL, and why the virtual school got a foot-hold there…is it really the evil thing, or is the horrible funding of public education the real evil?
Patrick says:
Not that what you posted isn't scary. It is. But I think that far scarier is the Dutch scientist who just created a variant of Avian Flu that, if released, would kill 50% of people. That is, 1 out of 2 people on earth.
And that isn't just if you happen to catch it. The Avian Flu already kills 50% of people that contract the disease. The scientist(Ron Fouchier) modified the H5N1 so that it is highly contagious and airborne. Thus his "contribution" is that it would be nearly impossible to stop if from spreading to everyone if it were released.
Southern Beale says:
On the bright side, scientists have found a new, Earth-like planet called Kepler-22-b. So when things get really SERIOUSLY bad … BEAM US UP!
Darby Witherspoon says:
This is all preparation for when the child labor laws are repealed. Half of the two cents a week the child makes will be billed to them as a charge for the glorified corporate training videos played on loop at their workstations.
Arslan says:
Ok people stop whining. You don't understand capitalism and how the education system works. All you people need to do is learn how to press buttons on a cash register, or if you're lucky, a computer. Leave creativity, critical thinking, and abstract knowledge to your natural betters- the ruling class. When you guys start thinking too much, you open yourselves up to all kinds of harmful ideas. You start getting a sense that you're entitled to something, when it is you're natural betters who are in fact entitled to everything!
One commenter raised this question: "Because if they are supposed to do them from home, we're going to once again be relying on the unpaid labor of women."
Are you serious? Don't you know how the system works? In capitalism, unpaid labor is the BEST labor!
Please stop all this idle-chit chat and get back to doing the bidding of our natural masters, unless you want them to get angry and take away all the jobs. They've already started getting second thoughts about creating more jobs because some of you people have been misbehaving. And don't you DARE think that there's any alternative to this system, because if you do….then STALIN!! STALIN WILL COME AND KILL ANOTHER BILLION PEOPLE! INCLUDING YOU!!!
Now get back to work and stop asking questions.
jeneria says:
Let's be perfectly honest, here. Students aren't learning in brick and mortar buildings, either. My students lack the ability to retain information from one quarter to the next nor do they have the abilities to transfer knowledge from one context to the next. Each year, the students are weaker and weaker in this regard, regardless of how smart or motivated they are. Blame technology, high school, parents, whatever, but the fact is that we are in a educational crisis and we need to re-evaulate our pedagogy at all levels. I think the minute we tied GPA to $ is the minute we started to dig our own grave.
I know very successful people with online degrees. I also know how much work it takes to teach one of those classes and if students aren't successful, it's not for a lack of effort on the part of faculty.
Bernard says:
the whole fallacy that we as Americans should not be and are not connected to each other in society,re: Ayn Randism, the individual is more important than the society that individual lives in.
dumbing down everybody has bad effects all around. a downward spiral feeding on the inertia of Greed sanctified by the Republican Businessmen who bought America. the speed at which America has degenerated since being "bought" is fascinating to watch and horrible to live in. like reading about Weimar Germany. how the Germans got sold out and willingly accepted the lies of their leaders.
the same old, same old. lol.
the wholesale destruction of the concept of "society" and all those that live in that society are "sold" on the cheap, to make a profit.
Perfect business model and result. horrible societal and individualistic consequences. the rape of the individual for the benefit of few. kleptocracy destroys not only the society the individual lives in but also undermines and devalues those self same individuals living in that society.
i've got mine so get out of my way.
divide and conquer. Winner takes all.
Anonymouse says:
My family defaulted to an accredited online high school because the local high school has 5,000 kids under one roof (not an exaggeration) and failed 20 years ago *before* the budget cuts became pervasive and the War on Education was much underway; it's a complete shambles now. The other options available to us were 1) college-prep private schools (tuition $25k/year) or 2) speaking-in-tongues-praise-da-LAWD religious schools that openly admit they're not about educating anyone in academics.
We're also splitting the school day between online high school and community college classes. Know what? The online school is more rigorous and the students more motivated and academically prepared than the ones I've observed in the CC. Example: last night (while hanging around waiting for my child who's not old enough to drive yet), I overheard a trio of students whining about having to read a 5-page short story for the final. Their definition of a short story? Something a page or less. Five pages is too much of a burden on them. Additionally, I was forced to endure sentences that contained, "I tooken the test" and "Me and her went to the professor".