Online schools benefit who? children or taxpayers, or a company that thrives by squeezing profits from public schools by raising enrollment , increasing teacher load, and lowering standards?
"We should be teaching kids how to handle content online, how to use it appropriately at school, and giving them the tools they need to be good digital citizens, to act ethically and to protect their privacy," said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director for the American Library Association's office for intellectual freedom.
No Child Left Behind also let states use statistical gimmicks to report performance
” federal financing should be conditioned on truth in advertisin
To shed light on equity and cost-effectiveness, states should be required to report school- and district-level spending; the resources students receive should be disclosed, not only their achievement.
efforts to reduce inequities have too often led to onerous and counterproductive micromanagement.
it comes to brain science, language acquisition or the impact of computer-assisted tutoring, federal financing for reliable research is essential.
, competitive federal grants that support innovation while providing political cover for school boards, union leaders and others to throw off anachronistic routines.
, dictates from Congress turn into gobbledygook as they travel from the Education Department to state education agencies and then to local school districts
it’s not surprising that well-intentioned demands for “bold” federal action on school improvement have a history of misfiring. They stifle problem-solving, encourage bureaucratic blame avoidance and often do more harm than good.
The headline promises more than the article delivers. It mainly identifies the limited effectiveness that the federal government can have. There are no specific "how to's" here and no mention of technology whatsoever, perhaps because that would be too specific a focus for the scope of the article. These are prominent figures in a prominent publication having a conversation that could have taken place in 1980. How do we change that? The absence of real civic engagement on issues about education is the missing link in education reform. I wonder if we can organize public discourse on the internet more effectively to have formal impact on civic activism and administration.
you simply cannot fix America’s schools by “scaling” charter schools. It won’t
work. Charter schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge
difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation’s
50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters — and it
has to include the unions.
Nice article on the challenges in school reform - An excerpt from the article - " you simply cannot fix America's schools by "scaling" charter schools. ...... Charter schools offer proof of the concept that great teaching is a huge difference-maker, but charters can only absorb a tiny fraction of the nation's 50 million public schoolchildren. Real reform has to go beyond charters - and it has to include the unions."
Kind of like Professor Dede's post about McGraw-Hill's interest in e-learning, here is a blog post from Pearson about MOOCs. I think his take (Jeff Borden, one of their VPs) is pretty accurate, in that we need a version 2 where it's not as lecture-based as version 1. I would guess that they are working on their own "version 2" solution (perhaps with Knewton?).
In a couple of weeks a bunch of Pearson people are spending a couple of days at MIT Media Lab learning about the future of learning. Specifically they are interested on how to capitalise on technology and how to make education of all kinds for all ages more widely accessible, more affordable, more effective.
Should be interesting, the lab will be doing demos all day of all the projects in the Media Lab.
'Quest to Learn' is a New York City public middle and high school, supporting collaborative student-led learning:
"Quest to Learn has used research in game-based learning to create a rigorous and engaging collaborative learning space where students feel safe taking risks and using their successes and failures to create and apply new knowledge."
"Nurturing social and emotional learning (SEL) and 21st century skills like inventiveness, risk taking and collaboration."
"The advent of this so-called "lousy product" - the MOOC - may be triggering a change, however. Indeed, recent survey evidence suggests that the acceptance of online learning among certain constituencies may be plateauing. Is it possible that a backlash against MOOCs could even precipitate a decline in the broader acceptance of online learning?"
More on MOOCs: "One one side, there are those who portray traditional higher education models as enjoying too much immunity from market forces and public demands for greater academic efficiency and productivity; on the other side are faculty groups and others who are struggling against a narrative of disruption that sees higher education as a business while discounting the issues of academic quality, freedom and governance."
ITNews, an Australian business publication, is reporting that the Department of Education of the state of New South Wales is using a variety of management software and techniques 'to roll out 240,000 netbook computers into what CIO Stephen Wilson calls "the most hostile environment you can roll computers into" - the local high school.' Students are offered a netbook in 9th grade through 12th and can keep them if they graduate.
Google Wave, which combines email, instant messaging and wiki-style editing will go on public trial today.
The search giant hopes the tool, described as "how e-mail would look if it were invented today", will transform how people communicate online.
Agh! Not another way to communicate! I can't even remember my passwords to all these things! I can't even remember I have a Facebook account until someone "friends" me! What happened to isolation and Transcendentalism? Needing to read Walden in the woods alone right now...
There could be some real potential here for use of grants beyond the television screen. I'd be interested to track how this money is allocated across platforms, especially emerging ones like apps for phones/iPads.
Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America's collective intellectual wealth within everyone's reach?
the idea of "a Digital Public Library of America," envisioning it as "an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources" drawn from the country's libraries, archives, museums, and universities.
the biggest obstacle to the Digital Public Library, in his view, is not money but "finding our way through our baroque copyright laws," especially those that govern so-called orphan works, whose copyright status is unclear.
Detroit public schools made its science curriculum digital this school year through a partnership with Discovery Education. They don't mention whether students have access to their own laptop or other mobile devices.
As internet data rates cheapen, throughput for public Wi-fis, such as the California Public Library system, is optimized, bringing the internet to learners hungry for knowledge.