NYCDOE Introduces "Virtual" Instructors Into Summer School

As in virtually non-existent:

Students are getting ripped off at public summer schools that cut corners to save money — including one program that ended Friday after just 10 days of classes, The Post has learned.

And a second high school stuck English students in front of computers and essentially assigned a baby sitter — who didn’t have a teaching license — rather than a certified instructor to keep an eye on them.

...

At Women’s Academy of Excellence in The Bronx, students said the English class has no instructor and no one to answer their questions when they need help with an educational computer program that is teaching them.

Instead, the school assigned a $30,000-a-year “community associate” — a noneducator who is paid to be a liaison between the school and the surrounding area — to monitor the classroom.

“Honestly, I don’t learn much from [the computer]. It tells me stuff, but it doesn’t show me what I’m learning,” said 17-year-old junior Monica Morgan.

“I was so confused . . . I’d get more out of a textbook.”

Despite confirmation from a dozen students and staffers about the lack of a certified teacher, Principal Arnette Crocker denied the charge through the DOE.

She did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

A DOE spokeswoman said the certified instructor was a “virtual” teacher whom the students could ask questions of by e-mail — but the kids said that was news to them.

“I never got offered that,” said soon-to-be sophomore Emani Brown, 15.

DOE officials insisted that the “virtual” teacher was allowable under state regulations.

Those regulations require that online courses be taught or supervised by a certified teacher in the same school district.

Ah yes - students being taught by "an educational computer program."

The future of education is here.

No need for a licensed, certified teacher.

Just a low-paid "community associate," an "educational computer program," some computers and the students.

And of course the use of an "educational computer program" and a "virtual teacher" is "allowable" under state law.

Hell, not only is it "allowable," it soon will be the norm in many urban districts.

This is just one of the reasons the powers that be want to break the unions - so that they can fire the "bad" teachers and replace them with computer programs and "virtual" teachers who are virtually non-existent.

Poof goes to the money - right to Pearson, Wireless Generation and all the other education vulture companies.

Poof goes the future - for the kids stuck in this system.

Bots Run The World

70% of the trades on Wall Street are done by automated programs.

50% of the traffic clicking through websites comes from automated programs.

22 of the top 30 editors on Wikipedia are automated bots.

22% of tweets come not from humans, but from bots - this seems appropriate since Twitter asks humans to mimic bot code in 140 characters or less.

And thanks to Andrew Cuomo, Barack Obama and Bill Gates, 40% of the evaluations of New York State teachers will be calculated using a complex algorithm called a value-added measurement - in other words, a bot will hold a teacher's job and reputation in its mechanical hands.

We have now entered a Brave New World where humans have to act in increasingly standardized and mechanistic ways or risk financial ruin, unemployment, isolation and discard on the dustbin of society.

Scary stuff:

As increasing numbers of us use online resources and social media in connection with our jobs as well as our personal lives, we need to realise how many of our "co-workers" are in fact algorithms, because we will have to live up to their standards. Bots are becoming our peers.

It used to be an insult to speak of someone "behaving mechanically", but now such behaviour is becoming both economically and socially desirable. It pays for bloggers to write articles optimised for search engines and crawler bots rather than human readers. Twitter, on the other hand, asks us to reduce our social discourse to 140 characters of hashtags, links, and @ handles, in imitation of the code webpages are written in.

We're at a turning point in the development of the internet. Bots, like any other scientific innovation, can be used for benign or malign purposes.

The identity issues that Ronson raises are only the thin end of the wedge.

We've started to see numbers of humans pretending to be bots, a strange development that signals a shift in the power and identity politics of the internet. Ronson had a bot pretending to be him, which is annoying. But following the release of Ronson's videos, we have been confronted by Twitter versions of ourselves – @dan_o_hara, @lookrobertmason – accounts that are humans, pretending to be bots, pretending to be us. In such an online environment, where your true identity is reduced to an algorithmically generated collage, and where humans – already an endangered species – are simulating machines, it's hard to say if being "you" online has any real meaning.

At least Ronson's bot could be killed, in theory. The other bots out there, beyond anyone's control or even understanding, are not so killable. When Ronson looks for the people trying to control the internet, he's looking in the right place, but at the wrong species. The internet is increasingly becoming a post-user environment, regulated by something much more uncontrollable than humans.

How do we take back our financial system, our education system, our political system, and our social system from the bots?

How do we regain our humanity and stop teaching our children to act more like robot consumers than humans?

How do we humanize society again?

Somebody told me the other day that Americans on average spend 55 hours a week on electronic media, 45 minutes a week in a natural setting.

One way to start taking our country back from the mechanized humans running things and the bots they use to control us is to stop spending so much time in the "virtual world" and more time in the "real world."

Given that the electronic media so many of us are using every hour of every day is poisoning us, poisoning our air and poisoning our water, poisoning the people who make the stuff in factories in China and poisoning the people who discard the old models in junk heaps in Mexico, we may have to return to the "real world" soon anyway.

After all, the earth can only take so much "virtual" before the environmental, societal, and human consequences become too stark to ignore.

Computers Hurt Academic Skills

All the technocrats pushing more and more technology and computers onto public schools and public school students as the miracle cure for the achievement gap ought to read this study:

Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.

Ofer Malamud, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, is the co-author of a study that investigated educational outcomes after low-income families received vouchers to help them buy computers.

“We found a negative effect on academic achievement,” he said. “I was surprised, but as we presented our findings at various seminars, people in the audience said they weren’t surprised, given their own experiences with their school-age children.”

Professor Malamud and his collaborator, Cristian Pop-Eleches, an assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, did their field work in Romania in 2009, where the government invited low-income families to apply for vouchers worth 200 euros (then about $300) that could be used for buying a home computer.

The program provided a control group: the families who applied but did not receive a voucher. They showed the same desire to own a machine, and their income was often only slightly above the cut-off point for the government program.

In a draft of an article that the Quarterly Journal of Economics will publish early next year, the professors report finding “strong evidence that children in households who won a voucher received significantly lower school grades in math, English and Romanian.” The principal positive effect on the students was improved computer skills.

At that time, most Romanian households were not yet connected to the Internet. But few children whose families obtained computers said they used the machines for homework. What they were used for — daily — was playing games.

In the United States, Jacob L. Vigdor and Helen F. Ladd, professors of public policy at Duke University, reported similar findings. Their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Scaling the Digital Divide,” published last month, looks at the arrival of broadband service in North Carolina between 2000 and 2005 and its effect on middle school test scores during that period. Students posted significantly lower math test scores after the first broadband service provider showed up in their neighborhood, and significantly lower reading scores as well when the number of broadband providers passed four.

The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying.

The North Carolina study suggests the disconcerting possibility that home computers and Internet access have such a negative effect only on some groups and end up widening achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups. The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students. In the report, the authors do not speculate about what caused the disparities.

The study also goes to show just how much positive or negative influence parental involvement and supervision have on student achievement.

Of course President Hopey/Changey is expanding broadband service into poor and rural areas as part of his miracle education cure and grant-based stimulus package.

Along with his BLAME TEACHERS FIRST education policies, his Race to the Top initiative, and his No Child Left Behind Jr. re-do set to pass after the November elections, President Hopey/Changes puts all his faith in just about every miracle cure that doesn't actually work.

Here's some advice, Hopey/Changey:

Start with parents. Get them involved. Hold parents accountable when students don't come to school, don't study, don't pay attention, don't show effort.

If he had read this study (or actually read any study on education not funded by the Gates or Broad Foundations), he would know that parents are the linchpin to student achievement and success.

Given the financial, employment, environmental, agricultural, and education policies he pursues, I wonder if President Hopey/Changey isn't spending entirely too much time on the Internets and not enough time reading policy papers and material NOT written by hedge fund managers or foundations funded by hedge fund managers and/or Bill Gates and Eli Broad.