Okay, some irony here.
Self-described genius Mike Bloomberg spent $2 billion on a 911 system redo that is so faulty it freezes up sometimes as often as four times a day and just may have contributed to the death of a four year.
Another self-described genius, Barack Obama, has a signature medical program that forces anyone without medical insurance to buy it, except for one big problem - the website doesn't work at all.
These two geniuses came to the vaunted "P-Tech" school in Brooklyn yesterday to brag about all the high techery going on at the school and all I kept thinking in my non-genius brain was, if this school is turning out high tech genius, maybe you geniuses can hire a few of the P-Tech geniuses to fix your faulty 911 system and Obamacare mess.
P Tech sounds wonderful but isn't it a little too early to applaud and clone a school that has yet to graduate a single kid much less gotten any kid a single college credit???
ReplyDeleteIn the meantime, large high schools are racking up thousands of grads per year with ever increasing numbers earning college credits.
The contrarian in me always balks at hyped stuff, but my bullshit meter especially goes off when they hawk something like P-Tech when they've stolen resources, space, etc. for it. And as somebody pointed out (I forget where now), Robeson was once a corporate/BOE venture much like P-Tech is a corporate/DOE venture. They will hawk this latest miracle so long as its useful to them, then drop it for something else...
DeleteThe part of the school that is great is, if the kids graduate, they get two years of free college. That's it. It is a selective school, which will have kids going through six years of school in yes, six years. Which leads to free labor for IBM. It's not like the kids get through six years of education in four. So please, this was just a show designed to distract from the fact that people are catching on to the lie that is "ed reform".
ReplyDeleteRobeson was once a joint venture between BOE and a corporate entity, but once something isn't new and hyped, it often ends on the junk heap That will happen to P-Tech too, perhaps sooner than we think, depending on how the first couple of classes turns out.
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