Good for Business; Kids Not So Much
While most education reform advocates cloak their goals in the rhetoric of “putting children first,” the conceit was less evident at a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, earlier this year.
Standing at the lectern of Arizona State University’s SkySong conference center in April, investment banker Michael Moe exuded confidence as he kicked off his second annual confab of education startup companies and venture capitalists. A press packet cited reports that rapid changes in education could unlock “immense potential for entrepreneurs.” “This education issue,” Moe declared, “there’s not a bigger problem or bigger opportunity in my estimation.”
Moe has worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education system into a cash cow for Wall Street. A veteran of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, he now leads an investment group that specializes in raising money for businesses looking to tap into more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent annually on primary education. His consortium of wealth management and consulting firms, called Global Silicon Valley Partners, helped K12 Inc. go public and has advised a number of other education companies in finding capital.
Should Pearson, a giant multinational, be influencing our education policy?
Pearson, a business that sells education products and services, seems to be gaining an ever-growing influence on school life. But whose interests is the company promoting – students’ or its shareholders’?
In my role as the education guy at the Reader, I’ve dutifully read Mitt Romney’s position paper on public education–a feat I doubt even Romney has accomplished.
You can read it yourself, if you’re up for the challenge. It’s called “A Chance for Every Child” and it’s only 30-some pages long, even with all the footnotes intended to make it seem like a scholarly dissertation as opposed to a salvo in a presidential campaign.
Here’s the big takeaway for Chicagoans: in many respects, it reads like it could have been written by our very own union-busting, charter-school-loving Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Yes, that’s right–Republican Romney and Democrat Rahm are like two peas in a pod when it comes to public education. It’s a little ironic given that Romney blames President Obama–Emanuel’s former boss at the White House–for everything that’s wrong with education today.
So other than enriching the test makers, what are we doing all this testing for.
A study published this week in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching covering thousands of Indiana high school seniors from three graduating classes finds that students at schools showing consistent improvement on the Indiana Statewide Testing for Educational Progress exam performed no better on the ACT science and math college entrance exams than classmates from declining schools.
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.
Q: Who does well in virtual charter schools?
A: It’s not the students.
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.”
Now why would Bill Gates want schools to use more computers?
In Bill Gates’ vision of the classrooms of the future, students are grouped according to skill set. One cluster huddles around a computer terminal, playing an educational game or working on a simulator. Another works with a human teacher getting direct instruction, while another gets a digital lesson delivered from their teacher’s avatar.
This kind of “game-based” learning is one of the priorities of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a nonprofit founded by the Microsoft creator.
If Bill’s vision comes to pass the answer to the next question will be a resounding yes.
ARE SCHOOLS BREAKING CHILDREN’S SPIRITS? Life and Learning Beyond Walls
When starting out as a teacher, I heard Joseph Cornell say that keeping children inside one room five days a week is akin to breaking a horse. I’m haunted by that analogy. Our tendency is to keep children in, especially as academic demands only increase. And for discipline or missed work what do we do? Keep them in at recess. Breaking horses.
What would happen if we gave students opportunities to go outside and interact with the natural world as part of the school day? Does a natural classroom give us a way to maintain our students’ inner wildness, as Mercogliano calls it?*
When I meet new people, I like to do a small social experiment. When asked what I do for a living, I sometimes say “I work with Teach For America.” Other times, I leave that out entirely, and just say “I’m a teacher.”
The responses often are vastly different. As a kid right out of college, I thought using the Teach For America line was great. Girls would actually talk to me and even seemed impressed by my association with TFA. But when I told people I was a teacher and left out that piece, you could almost see them start to wonder just how bad my LSAT must have been for me to have ended up teaching.
Remember The Onion is satire.
Or is it?
“I learned strategies. How to focus and… I forget the other one. Oh yeah, practicing doing tests.” He’s talking about the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAARTM) that Texas began administering this year in the hopes that testing our children will make them smarter. Texas is paying Pearson Education $470 million over five years for STAAR test, but since Texas also cut $5.4 billion from the public school budget, the state decided the tests shouldn’t actually count towards anything.