Get Ready For More "Personalized" Online Learning

Not much on the education front in today's state of the state/budget address by Cuomo, unlike in previous years when he was slamming teachers for all the ills in society and calling for the "death penalty" for failing schools, but this proposal seems education-related to me:

PROPOSAL 10: Dramatically expand and improve access to high-speed Internet in communities statewide. Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul detailed this proposal shortly after the New York State Public Service Commission voted to approve the merger of Time Warner Cable and Charter Communications, which will dramatically improve broadband availability for millions of New Yorkers and lead to more than $1 billion in direct investments and consumer benefits.

Additionally, the state issued a $500 million solicitation for private sector partners to join the New NY Broadband Program, which will greatly expand Internet access in all regions of the state, with a focus on unserved and underserved areas.

In order to begin shedding humans in the education system and switching to "personalized" computer learning, they need to ensure "unserved" and "underserved" areas have widespread broadband Internet access.

So the "dramatically expanding and improving access to high-speed Internet" proposal is not specifically about education but it is education-related.

The future is not only online education and testing in schools, it will be online schooling at home.

This will be a disaster for society in the long run of course, but in the short term it will be a boon to the state and municipality coffers when they shed payroll, building costs, et al.

With public sector unions expected to lose large swaths of their membership after the Supreme Court rules on the Friedrichs case, who will be around to stop them when they decide urban and rural areas are going to have "personalized" learning at home?

Sure the suburban parents will make sure this doesn't happen in their communities, but you can bet they're aiming to make it happen elsewhere where the pushback will be minimal.

Just add "dramatically expanded and improved high-speed Internet access" and you're ready to go.

Online Pre-K - The Next Frontier In Education Reform

Given the excitement by the investor class over online, for-profit education, you knew this was inevitable:

WASHINGTON—Saying the option is revolutionizing the way the nation’s 3- and 4-year-olds prepare for the grade school years ahead, a Department of Education report released Thursday confirmed that an increasing number of U.S. toddlers are now attending online preschool.

“We found that a growing number of American toddlers are eschewing the traditional brick-and-mortar preschools in favor of sitting down in front of a computer screen for four hours a day and furthering their early psychosocial development in a virtual environment,” said the report’s author, Dr. Stephen Forrest, who said that the affordability and flexibility characteristic of online pre-primary education are what make the option most appealing, allowing young children to learn their shapes and colors on a schedule that works best for them.

“With access to their Show-And-Tell message boards, recess timers, and live webcams of class turtle tanks, most toddlers are finding that they can receive the same experience of traditional preschooling from the comfort of their parents’ living room or home office. In addition, most cited the ability to listen to their teacher’s recordings of story time at their own pace as a significant benefit of choosing an online nursery school.”

Forrest added that, despite their increasing popularity, many parents remain unconvinced that online preschools provide the same academic benefits as actually hearing an instructor name farm animals and imitate their noises in person.

Okay, the story is from The Onion and it's a parody.

But given the push for online schooling from the reform movement and Wall Street, it may not be parody for long.

Of Course Online High Stakes Tests Are Going To Be A Mess

I don't know why anyone in power in the education world would think moving to all-online high stakes standardized tests by 2014-2015 would go smoothly.

This Education Week article says education and political officials have had their confidence shaken by a recent spate of online testing failures.

That means these people were once confident all-online testing could be carried off relatively problem-free.

Clearly these boys and girls have never used NYCDOE bandwidth to check their email at High Noon when it takes ten minutes for each screen to load.

I never develop a lesson for class that relies solely on the Internet.

I learned that lesson when I couldn't get a film I needed for one class to stream for more than 15 seconds at a time before it stopped running.

It's difficult to run a lesson about the differences between a play text and a film adaptation when you have to re-enact the film version with hand puppets.

If I, a lowly classroom teacher lacking an Ivy League degree and too stupid to have already fled the classroom and gone into policy with the TFAers, have learned that an over-reliance on technology in the classroom without a non-tech back-up is a problem, how come the geniuses running the schools systems around the country haven't learned that lesson yet?

Is it because these people believe their own pro-tech propaganda rather than the reality of their own experiences with technology?

Are they blinded by their own optimism?

Or do they figure once the online testing juggernaut starts rolling, nothing - not even a rash of online failures - can stop it?

I dunno, it's hard to get into the fevered minds of the education reform/online testing pom-pom crowd and figure out what's going on in there.

But if the reformers don't figure out a way to get these tests rolled out without major difficulties, they are going to find their vaunted new reforms - the ones they worked so hard to shove down the throats of people in 45 different states - are going to go the way of the abacus.

In fact, given how bad the online testing has been, the abacus and other implements of an age long gone just may come back:

John Althardt, a spokesman for the 30,000-student Indianapolis public schools, said students in 50 buildings experienced testing disruptions, and the district was just focusing on getting through the testing cycle before thinking about how to proceed in the future.

“Some of our folks would say they’re ready to go back and use stone tablets at this point,” Mr. Althardt said. 

I wonder who has that stone tablet contract for schools these days?

The Real Reason For The Common Core

Here it is:

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropy, and the foundation associated with Pearson, the giant textbook and school technology company, announced a partnership on Wednesday to create online reading and math courses aligned with the new academic standards that some 40 states have adopted in recent months.

The 24 new courses will use video, interactive software, games, social media and other digital materials to present math lessons for kindergarten through 10th grade and English lessons for kindergarten through 12th grade, Pearson and Gates officials said.

Widespread adoption of the new standards, known as the common core, has provoked a race among textbook publishers to revise their current classroom offerings so they align with the standards, and to produce new materials. The Gates-Pearson initiative appears to be the most ambitious such effort so far.

The Pearson Foundation is heading the course-writing effort. But Pearson Education, which owns textbook houses like Prentice Hall and sells an array of multimedia classroom tools, will market 20 of the new courses to schools and districts.

The Gates Foundation, which has promoted the common core standards movement in its philanthropy, is providing $3 million so that four of the 24 courses can be offered free to schools, partly to give educators a taste of how the digital courses can be used in classrooms.

“We’re hoping that by placing those four courses in a way that’s accessible, people will take a look at them and make connections,” said Mark Nieker, president of the Pearson Foundation.

In his educational work, Bill Gates has explored ways that new technologies can transform teaching. Vicki Phillips, a director at the Gates Foundation, said the partnership with Pearson was part of a “suite of investments” totaling more than $20 million that the foundation was undertaking, all of which involve new technology-based instructional approaches.

The new digital materials, Ms. Phillips said, “have the potential to fundamentally change the way students and teachers interact in the classroom.”

The partnership with the Gates Foundation could give Pearson a considerable advantage as textbook and learning technology companies position themselves in an education marketplace upended by the creation of the common standards.

“It’s a good deal for Pearson, and it’s good for Gates too, because it brings more attention to the standards,” said Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, which has studied the evolution of state policies on the common core.

Pearson stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars and of course these online courses can only be run on Windows, Internet Explorer, and other Microsoft platforms.

And eventually these courses can be run from anywhere with any facilitator, so you can just fire the expensive teachers and hire cheap Mcfacilitators to run the whole shebang.

But Pearson and Gates are in this for the kids, right?

The Future Of Public Education

This is EXACTLY what Bill Gates and the corporate ed deformers want to bring to fruition:

MIAMI — On the first day of her senior year at North Miami Beach Senior High School, Naomi Baptiste expected to be greeted by a teacher when she walked into her precalculus class.

“All there were were computers in the class,” said Naomi, who walked into a room of confused students. “We found out that over the summer they signed us up for these courses.”

Naomi is one of over 7,000 students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools enrolled in a program in which core subjects are taken using computers in a classroom with no teacher. A “facilitator” is in the room to make sure students progress. That person also deals with any technical problems.

These virtual classrooms, called e-learning labs, were put in place last August as a result of Florida’s Class Size Reduction Amendment, passed in 2002. The amendment limits the number of students allowed in classrooms, but not in virtual labs.

While most schools held an orientation about the program, some students and parents said they were not informed of the new class structure. Others said they were not given the option to choose whether they wanted this type of instruction, and they voiced concern over the program’s effectiveness.

The online courses are provided by Florida Virtual School, which has been an option in the state’s public schools. The virtual school has provided online classes for home-schooled and traditional students who want to take extra courses. Students log on to a Web site to gain access to lessons, which consist mostly of text with some graphics, and they can call, e-mail or text online instructors for help.

No teachers.

No teacher salaries.

No teacher benefits.

No teacher pensions.

Just a minimum wage computer "facilitator" in the room.

You don't need a school - just an "education center."

And best of all, it's all done on Microsoft products!

Can you imagine the kind of children this kind of system will churn out?

Well, we may not have to wonder for long.

Because this is EXACTLY what we're going to get in urban school districts.

Indeed, this is what Joel Klein wanted to bring about as chancellor and will now help bring about running the for-profit K-12 online education division at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.

This is what excites him!

And Gates too!

And of course it does - it's cheap, it's dehumanized, it's easily controlled and they can make a lot of money off of it.

So what if it's evil?

Klein Cashes In

The road to online education hell is paved with gold - for Joel Klein:

Jan 4 (Reuters) - News Corp (NWSA.O) will pay former New York City Education Chancellor Joel Klein more than $4.5 million if he meets targets set in his new role as chief executive of the media company's new education unit.

Klein starts in his new role this month after a decade overseeing New York City's schools where he was paid around $250,000 a year.

His base salary with News Corp will be eight times that at $2 million plus a cash signing-on bonus of $1 million. He has also been set an annual bonus target of not less than $1.5 million, according to regulatory filings.

From July Klein will also be able to take part in the company's stock option awards scheme.

News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch tapped Klein to run his company's new education unit in November. The media mogul has become an increasingly vocal advocate of public school system reform.

$4.5 million from Murdoch - who bought the online educrap company that produces Klein's favorite education program, School of One.

You know, the program used by the NYCDOE and now promoted on PBS with a push from Bill Gates.

Nice work if you can get it.

Klein belongs in jail with the CityTime crooks.

So does Gates.

And don't get me started on that GMO shit he's feeding people in Africa.