It Seems Merryl Tisch Will Give Just About Anybody A Charter School In New York State

Via Diane Ravitch comes this news:

Unlike most school leaders, Ted Morris' days in a high school classroom are still very fresh in his memory. 

It was only six years ago that he graduated from School Without Walls at age 16. Now, at 22, he's armed with a freshly minted doctorate degree in education and permission from the state Board of Regents to open a charter high school in Rochester in 2015.
...
It will be called Greater Works Charter School, accepting about 100 ninth-graders in its first year and eventually expanding to about 400 students in grades 9-12.
...
After graduating from School Without Walls in 2008, Morris got a bachelor's degree at age 18 from Western Governors University, an online college based in Salt Lake City. He then received master's and doctoral degrees from Concordia University near Chicago.

Morris has an educational consulting firm and said he has worked with the Rochester Prep schools, among others. He also helped start three non-profit organizations, he said: Sparq Rochester, a youth arts outfit; Greater Works Education Network, a fledgling statewide charter advocacy group; and Victory Living Christian Faith Center.

Wow - so a guy who got his BA, MA and Ph.D from online schools is going to run his own charter school at the age of 22.

Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told us she wants to see an "aggressive" expansion of the charter sector across the state in the near term.

Giving a 22 year old with a BA, an MA and a Ph.D from online schools who has no teaching experience but a little consulting experience sure does count as "aggressive expansion" to me.

I'm sure this couldn't go wrong at all, right?

And of course most of the learning at this charter will take place online.

Sure it will

Vote NO On Cuomo's Smart Schools Bond Act

Gary Stern at LoHud does a great job of giving both sides of the Smart Schools Bond Act story.

Here's why critics are opposed to Cuomo's technology bond for schools:

Opponents of the bond act say that borrowing $2 billion to pay for computers and other items with limited life spans would be an unprecedented move that has not been supported by analysis.

Nicholas Tampio of Mamaroneck, an associate professor of political science at Fordham University who has tried to incite opposition to the bond act, said money from the bond act will ultimately tie districts to the state's agenda. The state Education Department's goal, he said, is for districts to prepare for online tests aligned to the Common Core.

"School districts face a choice: Submit investment plans that (state Education Commissioner) John King wants or relinquish any chance of having the plan approved," Tampio said. "And what John King wants is the technological infrastructure to support online Common Core testing."

If the bond act is approved, each district would be eligible to receive a set amount based on the state's aid formula. But districts would need to have spending plans approved by a high-powered review board consisting of King, SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher and state Budget Director Robert Megna.

And:

E.J. McMahon, president of the Empire Center, a conservative think tank in Albany, has been the most prominent critic of the bond act. He said Cuomo has no research that proves New York needs to borrow $2 billion for school tech.

"There was no assessment of need and no one asked for this," he said. "This is the most ill-conceived and wasteful bond act to be put in front of New York voters in 30 or 40 years."

He noted that the state Board of Regents, which sets educational policy, has not endorsed the bond act.

"The governor treats the need for this as self-evident: Tech is good," McMahon said.

Why in the world would anybody want to vote for a $2 billion dollar boondoggle bond act that gives John King and Nancy Zimpher the right to approve or reject what districts do with the money?

You can be sure King and Zimpher, staunch Common Core proponents and testing advocates, will want every district to use the money for infrastructure for the PARCC (or some other online tests) to grade students, rate teachers and evaluate schools.

We ought to call this the Infrastructure For Online Computerized Testing Bond Act, because that's exactly what it is.

Don't be fooled, thinking much (or any, for that matter) of this money will go to building schools or getting rid of trailers in the city schools.

This is tech bond, pure and simple, meant to get the state up and running for the coming online PARCC tests.

Vote NO on the Proposition 3 on Tuesday.

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.

MOOC Study Shows Having A Real-Life Teacher Available Offline Is Important

Forget the hype over online courses - the so-called MOOC's - and how they're going to remake education.

The online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting on a study of student performance in a MOOC course offered at M.I.T. The major finding was that online learners who took the first session of “Circuits & Electronics,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s hallmark MOOC, those who worked on course material offline with a classmate or “someone who teaches or has expertise” in the subject did better than those who did not.

The research team, led by Lori Breslow, director of MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory, tried to drill down to what types of demographic and behavioral factors contribute to student success in a massive online environment.

“On average, with all other predictors being equal, a student who worked offline with someone else in the class or someone who had expertise in the subject would have a predicted score almost three points higher than someone working by him or herself,” write the authors.

 The correlation, described by the authors as the “strongest” in the data set, was limited to a single instance of a particular MOOC, and is not exactly damning to the format. But it nonetheless may give ammunition to critics who say human tutelage remains essential to a good education. 

I am just shocked that students with access to an offline teacher or someone with expertise in the subject did better than students who just worked by himself/herself online.

Online Education Insanity

Wow - this is taking the "online education revolution" to it's logical and absurd conclusion:

Triumph Higher Education, which licenses the school’s name from the Escoffier Foundation, already has two brick-and-mortar professional cooking schools in Austin, Tex., and Boulder, Colo. It just launched its online curriculum, modeling it after the online degree programs such as those offered by the University of Phoenix. The course costs $5,000. While half its new enrollment comprises enthusiasts looking to learn the basics of cooking, the school’s core objective is to train the professional cooks that make up the rank and file of every restaurant kitchen.

At this point I should mention that I worked as a prep and line cook for several years in college. I had no formal training and I’m certainly no chef, but I make a decent vinaigrette, can debone a chicken, and have developed an unhealthy indifference toward open flame. I also carry the baggage accrued by anyone who has learned to cook in a restaurant.

Sure, your grandma can teach you to cook, but to learn how to cook professionally, there is no substitute for a hairy man in sweat-drenched chef whites bellowing in your ear, demanding to know how you could foul up a carrot brunoise.

I expressed my skepticism to Jeffrey Larson, Triumph’s director of admissions marketing, and Brian Sherrill, its vice president of technology, and they say they get that response a lot. Sherrill says cooking is such a hands-on profession that an entirely online curriculum seems counterintuitive.

Sherrill says no one is going to graduate from the school’s two-to-four-month program and open a restaurant. The idea is to teach the rudiments of cooking, along with a healthy dose of French culinary theory and kitchen science to students who want to embark on a restaurant career, he says.

Triumph expects its Escoffier graduates to develop the basic knowledge needed to land an entry-level position in a restaurant or caterer’s kitchen and go on to continue their education on the job.

“You’re not going to complete the class and become a sous-chef,” Sherrill says. “You’re going to learn knife skills, to learn your mother sauces, to learn the fundamentals.”

Okay, so graduating from this $5000 dollar program will teach you enough of the basics to get an entry level $7.50 an hour job at Applebee's.

And how will students be assessed and graded by the instructors so that Applebee's knows graduates from the Triumph Online Culinary School really know knife skills, how to make mother's sauces, etc.?

Why, by taking pictures and sending them in to the Triumph's teachers, of course!

The most obvious flaw in the school’s online system is that no instructor is eating the dishes these students create. No matter how good a meal looks, you’ve made an unacceptable dish if it tastes poorly. I share this criticism with Sherrill and Larson, expecting them to cringe in fear at my astute observations. I get the impression I’m not the first person to have raised this point.

You can divine a lot about how a dish will taste just by looking at it, Sherrill says. You can tell if a scallop has been seared properly by noting the level of caramelization on its exterior. You can see if a steak has been cooked properly by cutting it up and observing the redness of juices. You can tell if eggs have been scrambled properly by the size of their curds and the sheen of moisture on their surface.

This program so smacks of "How Do We Make Some More Money From An Online Component Because We Can't Raise Tuition At Our Brick And Mortar Schools Anymore."

I worked restaurants for a long, long time, albeit in the front of the house.

I am highly dubious that paying any culinary school $40,000 to get a degree that will eventually get you, at max, a $12 or $13 an hour job cooking in a restaurant makes any sense.

I am completely dubious that spending $5000 for an online culinary program makes any sense at all.

Unless you know, going in, that you're only doing it to learn the basics for yourself.

But if you think you're going to get a job out of this program, you should think again.

In my day, people started as dishwashers and moved onto the line where they learned the very same basics without paying any school $5000 for an online program.

I know times have changed and restaurants are looking more for trained chefs from programs rather than a newbie they're willing to train themselves.

But there are at least seven SUNY programs that you can attend to learn culinary skills that would serve you a lot better than this online program, and CUNY has at least two programs that will do the same.

Every school and every would-be edu entrepreneur thinks they can turn to the Internets and make a bundle with an online program.

I am skeptical of most of those, but I am really skeptical of this one.

Next week we'll take a look at the News Corporation''s online medical school program called "Operation!" and ask the question, "Would you go to a doctor trained online?"

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?

Online K-12

I have a problem with this:

In its latest foray into higher education, K12 Inc. has teamed up with George Washington University to launch a fully online private prep school for high schoolers.

The partnership between a major research university and the virtual education company aims to bring higher quality curriculum and online classes to students around the world as well as to allow George Washington University and the Herndon, Va.-based K12 Inc., to conduct research on curriculum development and instruction in online learning environments, said Bruce Davis, the executive vice president of worldwide business development for K12 Inc., which operates online public schools in 25 states.

Here s some of the advertising claptrap the program's website is hawking:

GWUOHS college preparation is all-encompassing, helping students with every aspect of the college selection, application, and matriculation process including:

* Student portfolios
* College selection
* Test prep for SAT, ACT
* Top-tier college visits
* College representative sessions
* Application completion and submission
* Teacher recommendations
* Application essays and personal statements
* Scholarship applications
* Financial aid
* Preparing for college life

Counselors engage in personalized coaching, offering the kind of tailored advice that only results from forming a close relationship with each student. Counselors work with students and their families to understand goals, the financial situation, academic performance, extracurricular interests, geographical preferences and constraints, career interests, and special talents. This provides them with a holistic overview, enabling them to provide customized support to every student.

In addition to online college fairs, virtual visits by college admissions officers and tours of college campuses, GWUOHS students will have the opportunity to meet with a representative from the George Washington University Undergraduate Admissions Office.

What the hell is a "virtual visit" by a college admissions officer?

You know, in the old days, they used to call that "Hey - somebody's emailing you!"

Now it's a virtual visit.

As for the personalized coaching and counseling, again, this stuff is being done ONLINE. Just how personalized a coaching or counseling session can you get ONLINE?

Here's more claptrap:

Every Journey Starts with a First Step

The Journeys Symposium is a unique four-year sequence that takes students through a journey of self-discovery, leading to a fulfilling high school experience and a successful college placement. It also provides students with a framework for living life well. The Journeys Symposium emphasizes four core elements:

* Immersion in Self-Awareness
Here students will explore and evaluate their personal interests, habits, and preferences through exercises and guided experiences that will give them greater self-insight and provide a starting point for their journey. Part of this “immersion in self-awareness” is an assessment of their learning styles and needs. Each student emerges with a concrete set of goals as well as an initial college search plan.
* Team and Community
Here students learn how to incorporate their newfound self-awareness into the realm of team and community. Students will experience and reflect on the dynamics that lead to healthy team action and community living. Each student receives hands-on, direct community service experience—including an analysis and inventory of what was gained and given in that experience—providing a blueprint for future team and community work.
* Stewardship and Generational Awareness
Here students take their sense of self-awareness and sense of community/social awareness and begin to build—and tell—their own unique story. We devote time to developing the understanding that each person adds a chapter to the whole human story. The primary goal is to craft a capstone personal essay that will be used as the student’s all-important college essay.

You know, that all sounds great - if it were happening in the REAL world with REAL people in a REAL classroom on a REAL campus in a REAL community.

When it is happening in a VIRTUAL world ONLINE, there is an emotional and spiritual disconnect that renders a lot of the community building and personal interaction VIRTUALLY non-existent.

Humans evolved in the REAL world through AUTHENTIC social and emotional interactions.

For anyone to think that the above kind of program can work solely ONLINE with no ACTUAL human interaction FACE-TO-FACE, they're either in need of a lot of therapy work or they're in it for the money.

In the case of some of the people promoting this stuff as the future of education - like Joel Klein and Bill Gates - it's both.