As for-profit virtual schools expand, are children getting the short end of the stick? (Photo credit: Flickr user Elizabeth Albert)
One of the biggest scams Corporate America is trying to foist on the nation is the privatization of our schools, often by promoting online education. The Nation’s Lee Fang documented last year how online learning companies are flooding state legislatures with lobbyists to win funding and mandates for online, for-profit charter schools and educational software.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) used his budget last year toAi??quietly removeAi??the cap on student enrollment his state’s virtual charter schools, opening up a flood of taxpayer dollars for online education companies. The “Wisconsin Coalition of Virtual School Families,” a group promoting these companies, named Walker a “Rock Star of Education Reform” for this move.
But a new analysis shows that these online schools aren’t living up to lobbyists’ hype:
Enrollment in Wisconsinai??i??s online schools has doubled in the last five years, but students who have chosen class without a classroom often struggle to complete their degrees and repeat grades four times as often as their brick-and-mortar counterparts, according to a Gannett Wisconsin Media analysis. […]Ai??In the 2011-12 Wisconsin Student Assessment System testing,virtual students fared slightly betterAi??in reading than their brick-and-mortar counterparts, with 83.1 percent scoring proficient or advanced, compared with 81.9 percent statewide. ButAi??virtual students fell shortAi??in other subjects, with 5 percent to 12 percent fewer virtual students scoring proficient or advanced in math, social studies, language arts and science compared with the statewide average.
Promoting huge subsidies for private school education takes well-connected lobbying. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been promoting virtual schools since 2005, and unsurprisingly the group’s education task force is co-chaired by for-profit education companies like K12 Inc. and Connections Academy. This new data shows that while these schools may offer some benefits to some kids, their overall promise of improving the education system is not being kept.
Absolutely unreal and hard to believe! I do believe you but what can Walker think of next!!!! I think he expected the VP nomination. Let’s keep Tommy Thompson out of the senate, get rid of Walker when he come up for te-election in 2 years, and make sure we keep Obama.
All those with me VOTE!
Of course, ALEC and corporations are promoting virtual FOR PROFIT charter schools — this does not surprise me. Corporations are not interested in educating the majority; they are striving to create a society of “masters” who have education, wealth, power and “slaves” or employees who will dumbly obey and work for them. Nor am I surprised that VIRTUAL charter schools do not succeed as well as they are touted. Critical elements are absent from any online instruction: teachers, peers, interaction, creativity, all things that encourage analytical development.
The public school idea was and still is a good one. But the public school system is broken — for many reasons and through the interplay of many factors. That does not mean that America should discard its public schools, rather America should mend what is broken and improve them.
The first step towards improvement is to define what education really is and what goals education should achieve. In all cultures from before Sumer through our own, teaching has had two opposing goals to balance: socializing individuals into their cultures and thus continuing those cultures AND stimulating individuals into creating innovations to improve cultures which also simultaneously destroys those cultures. Socialization is the process of inducing conformity with its virtues of obedience and righteousness, with its tactics of categorization and repetition, with its rewards of belonging and safety. Education is a more difficult process of inspiring creativity by permitting ambiguity and freedom, by using analysis and imagination, by accepting risks and failures. It is easier for both teachers and students to be better at socialization, and most schools weigh their efforts heavily on that side of the scale. However, educated minds adapt better to changing situations.
Standardized tests only measure degrees of socialization when they are effective, not of education, since there are patent answers. Essays or problem-solving projects are better at measuring levels of critical analysis, but therein comes the risk of evaluator bias. As a seventh grade teacher in Knoxville, I tried to institute a new method of evaluating student progress. I called it QQII and explained the system to my students on the first day of classes. The acronym stood for Quantity/Quality/Initiative/Improvement. Final grades at any point would be an average of the four component grades. Quantity naturally referred to how much productivity any student contributed — was work done on time or late, was there participation in class activities. Quality referred to how well each assignment was completed — error-free, originality, imagination, style, et al. Because students function at different speeds in any class, I had an alcove in my room where extra-credit work could be done; these above-and-beyond assigned projects completed at students’ own initiative were counted as separate grades. Marks for improvement were given by comparing the current work with the immediately previous work. Midway through each grading period, I set up a conference with each of my students and discussed how he or she could improve and progress. (By the way, this latter practice got me fired because our principal explained that teacher-student conferences were not the norm at her school.) My point is, however, that evaluation of any person’s intellectual development is tricky business that cannot be accurately measured by standardized tests. Thus, to gauge students’ and teachers’ abilities by them and to allot or withhold funds from schools on their basis by government is utter farce.
Every school needs adequate funding because every student deserves education, not merely socialization, to achieve her/his human potential. Schools located in wealthy neighborhoods should not receive more funding from property taxes than schools in slums. Rather, funding to each school needs to be allotted on an enrollment basis with an equal share per student. At the kindergarten level, maybe a flat sum of $5,000 per each child enrolled each year; at the elementary level, maybe $10,000 per each student enrolled each year; at the middle school level, say $15,000 per each student enrolled each year; at the secondary level, $30,000 per each student enrolled each year; at college level, $60,000 per each student enrolled each year. (My amounts may be far from adequate, but the principle should be equality per student with increases as the level of education becomes higher.) Such funding should be divided among local, state, and federal sources because SOCIETY reaps the benefits of having skilled, intelligent and educated individuals. For example, with my $5,000 per kindergarten child, $1,000 could be furnished by city or county government, another $1,000 from state government, and $3,000 from federal.
Furthermore, public school needs to become free of costs to individuals from early childhood education through college and graduate schools for EVERYONE in order to produce the kind of skills and expertise to meet the demands of the future. We CURRENTLY no longer live in a culture that requires a large number of unskilled laborers. (Which is partly why we have so many unemployed people.) Most available “jobs” demand technical skills and/or professional degrees. By making individuals or parents pay the costs of post-secondary school, government is again privileging the wealthy elite over the majority of its population and LOSING talent and potential that could fill those technical/professional positions. Kindergarten should begin at age 3 and continue until age 6. The reason it should begin so early is because numerous scientific studies have shown that the human brain is hardwired to RAPIDLY learn skills, especially language skills, between 3 and 6 years. Here is a window of time when much learning is easier than it becomes later, and schools ought to exploit this for every child born. Programs like Headstart work well because of this window, but early childhood learning should not be privileged to only the disadvantaged. I began teaching my own daughter the alphabet at fifteen months of age; when she went to Kinder Kollege at age 3, she astounded the owner of that daycare by being able to read a book on her own; at age 7 she could understand Shakespeare, and today she has two Master’s Degrees. A high school diploma is no longer sufficient to get a real job in any field. One has to have technical or professional training, which is why free public education needs to continue through technical schools and colleges. But, right now, most parents and/or most students cannot afford post-secondary education. Those who still strive for an education after high school and have not given up their ambitions must take out enormous loans to supplement any grants or scholarships they are awarded, ending up after graduation with debtloads perhaps in the hundred thousands of dollars, which will require their lifetimes to pay back, provided they find employment.
At this point you are asking, who should pay for educational opportunities through graduate school? Everyone! As I mentioned earlier, society as a whole benefits from having an educated and skilled population, not just the individuals who receive that education. If our taxation system were reformed, we would not only have enough money to pay for such educational opportunities, we would have enough to pay off the deficit. It is ridiculous that millionaires and billionaires either pay no taxes owing to loopholes and exemptions or pay pittances when everyone else pays the rest to run the government. It is even more ridiculous that Exxon and other corporations which make billions in profits every quarter receive refunds on their taxes from the government. And some members of Congress want to “lower” the tax rates on the rich and corporations even further? This is outrageous! First of all, ALL corporate profits without any exemptions should pay taxes at a minimum of 50%, which is similar to what corporations paid in the Fifties, when America was most prosperous. In other words, if a corporation or a business of whatever kind makes $500,000 as profit in a year, $250,000 should be paid to the government as taxes. Individual income tax ought to be a straight 10% across the board. So, if an individual’s income in a year equals $1,000,000, then tax for that year (no exemptions) would be $100,000; if the individual’s income were $200,000, tax would be $20,000; my income for last year was around $29,000, so under this scheme my tax would have been $2,900; if the individual works at fast-food and makes only $3,000, the tax would be $300. This scheme WOULD work and would be simpler to figure. Of course, exemptions for anything would need to be eliminated and no refunds would be paid to anyone. Income tax could still be deducted from individuals’ paychecks. Non-profits should only be exempt from taxation if they are truly non-profit; by that I mean, if all their donations are directed towards activities and they are staffed by volunteers, then these non-profits should not be levied with taxes. However, if so-called non-profits, including churches, pay salaries to keep the organization running, then they should pay taxes like corporations and businesses on their fundraising.
It has often been suggested that better teachers create better schools. To a certain extent, this is true. But how does one get better teachers? Not by salaries alone. I confess I had some genuinely excellent teachers, some mediocre teachers, and a few rather poor teachers as I moved through school. I still remember my first grade teacher fondly; she was a brilliant woman from Massachusetts, who was very patient and taught me to speak English. (I grew up in an ethnic neighborhood where the community spoke a German-English pidgin.) In the Fifties and Sixties, teachers were paid barely livable salaries by the standards of today and yet most of them were dedicated, conscientious, and reasonably successful at imparting knowledge and skills. When my daughter began school in the Eighties, teachers earned much better salaries but seemed less able to teach whichever school she attended. I had to supplement her education to keep her learning and developing until finally she reached college. While earning my own baccalaureate in education during the Eighties, I discovered that training for teaching emphasized methodology over content in its curriculum. We teaching candidates were required to have twice as many credits in methodology courses than we were in subject courses we would be teaching. These methodology courses repeated the same material over and over. Behind this was the idea that having these teaching “skills” would empower the teacher to teach any subject, even one in which he or she was not particularly knowledgeable. But teaching is communication and no one can communicate that which she or he fails to understand. To form better teachers, programs in education need to require more content courses and less methodology courses so that teachers actually possess the appropriate knowledge.
One reason that some Charter schools are succeeding, such as KIP schools founded by Feinberg and Levin, is that they employ as teachers people who are very knowledgeable but may not have degrees in education. Physicists teach physics, musicians teach music, historians teach history, writers teach English. These people have the knowledge needed to teach their subjects. Of course, in VIRTUAL classrooms communication between teachers and students really doesn’t exist. Another reason for success is that administrations give teachers more autonomy and permit more innovations in teaching techniques. While learning differences among students were discussed in my education classes, innovations in methodologies were not really encouraged. I tried them anyway and was reprimanded every time by administrations, which brings up the curious rule of “last in, first out.” Whether or not a particular teacher has been effective, if he or she was the last one hired, then he or she is the first one discharged. KIP schools and other non-virtual Charter schools often do pay better salaries and that is a factor in keeping competent people.
I have more to say but I will stop here for the moment.
The disruption to the learning climate of public education schools across our country, brought about by the practices, policies and mandated threat of severe conequences imposed by NCLB as well as the chaos, disruption and relocatiion of children in experiemental Charte Privatization using unvalidated methods and uncertified instructors is nothing short of federally funded child abuse resulting in neurlogical damage to American children. Michelle Rhee’s public bashing of public education teacher’s as being inept at raising achievement test scores of poor children is harrassment and the ensuing career assissination to hundreds of thousands of skilled teucators is criminal. Her rallying of unsuspecting parents to impliment Trigger Laws because of low achievement of high poverty schools is a demonstration of her own ignorance of most recent findings in Neuroscience. Public educators need to begin class action suits to end the Reformer Charlatans’ influence on education law and practice and expose it for the for child abuse that it is. You must read this : Ongoing research in neuroscience regarding the effects of stress on learning/memory is providing a vast m amount of evidence which shows that exposure to prolonged stress, as typically occurs in lower ranks of a social order due to psycological triggers and.
/or variation of social instability environment conditions results in biochemical hormonal responses that directly increase in neurodegeneration of neurons in the hippocamus. The hippocamus is the part of the brain responsible for learning and memory. Research shows that prolonged /repeated stress does result in decreased learning achievement and lessened retention due to a loss of hippocamus neurons. Psychological triggers notorius for resulting in stress are: loss of control, loss of predictability, no oulets , no social supports (social isolation). Socio dynamics resulting in greater degrees of stress are: threats of violence, displaced anger of others, instability of society, direct personal experience with societal instability and rank instabilityas well as unique personality differentiations, are more typical within less dominant levels of social rank(bottom of the pecking order) .Our previously held notion in education that stress was benefitial to learning and memory was based on flawed early studies of Altseimer patients.’ We need lower achievement scores of impoverished children as being directly related to the greater levels of prologed stress present in impoverished communities in which they live. Policies advocating tensified pressure on schools/ teachers for higher achievement of impoverished children is likely excerbating hippocamus degeneration, The reseach on stress is also relevant to arguing that the social isolation of children in Computer Instruction Virtual Charters is more isolating, stressful and thus destructive to children’s learning and memory than social engagement provided in brick and mortar school classrooms. The expanding body of research and readings are fascinating particularly the work cited above by Neuroscientist Robert Saplosky.