The recently commissioned Digital Learning Council has recommended major changes to state education policy that include abolishing seat-time requirements, linking teacher pay to student success, and overhauling public school funding models.
The recommendations are part of the council's 10 policy suggestions in a report issued Wednesday for states to use digital learning as a catalyst for education reform.
The council, headed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and former West Virginia Gov. Bob Wise, also suggests that, not only should all students have access to digital learning opportunities in the form of online or blended courses, but they should have choices between providers and methods of access.
The report is the result of a 90-day deliberation process that began when the council was commissioned in August. The council consists of about 100 leaders across government, education, business, technology, and research.
In a meeting with editors and reporters at Education Week, Wise and consultants Tom Vander Ark and Bennet Ratcliff explained that the suggestions were meant to strike a balance between high aspirations and realistic goals for states. But they cautioned that failing to seize the opportunity to combat decreasing funding and educational ineffectiveness with technologies that can reshape educational practice will leave states—and their students—behind.
We are fast becoming a society of isolated and emotionally maladjusted people whith short attention spans and big fat asses we get from sitting in front of computers all day.
You know what would address those problems?
Destroying the public school system and replacing it with "choice", destroying classroom education and replacing it with online education with one teacher in some remote place (India? Sri Lanka?) and students working from home or "education centers" with a few paraprofessionals to maintain order, and getting rid of teacher salaries and replacing them with commission pay, like a sales force, so that we can attract the "best and brightest" to be teachers.
Yeah, that will work.
That will help students to become better adjusted, better focused, and better able to work with others.
That will bring in a great quality of teacher too.
All right - no, actually it won't.
Instead it will help develop a nation of socially and emotionally maladjusted people with few people skills, an inability to work with others and a hostile attitude toward anybody who doesn't agree with them.
Kinda like Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Chris Christie or Michael Bloomberg.
And pushing commission compensation based upon "performance" and test scores will get you lots of people who could inhabit a David Mamet play, but it won't bring in "great teachers."
The corporations and their political shills are in overdrive this month pushing this crap.
First Klein with his online education shillery at FOX News, then Duncan calling for an end to class size restrictions and salary steps, then Gates calling for the same thing, and now Bush (whose brother runs an education management organization/online test prep company) caaling for the end of seat time requirements, salary steps, and calling for more online education and "choice."
Feudalism is coming.
Check that: Feudalism is here
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