Lars P. Syll — The Swedish for-profit ‘free’ school disaster

Must-read.

Lars P. Syll’s Blog
The Swedish for-profit ‘free’ school disaster
Lars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Mark Thoma — 12 Good and Bad Parts of Online Education

Is online education the solution to widening inequality, rapidly rising costs, and lack of access to high quality courses? Will it lead to the demise of traditional “brick and mortar” institutions? I was initially very skeptical about the claims being made about online education, but after teaching several of these course during the past academic year my own assessment has become much more positive....

Digital is the future. It's just beginning and it is going to get amazingly better over time with experience and innovation.

I've been involved in distance education for some time and my conclusion is that the learning curve in the discipline is a lot like the transition from theater to cinema. First, in the days of silent. Stage actors were used large to reproduce what was already the standard in acting. That soon fell flat on its face as innovators realized that theater and cinema are different media that afford creative artists both different tools and different opportunities based on them.

The same thing happened predictably in the transition from silent to sound. The first films were theatrical productions and stage performances, which again soon fell flat in comparison with the innovations of cinematic artists who integrated speech, sound effects and music as tools to enhance creative opportunity and control.

Distance learning is still largely stuck in the classroom model and the initial attempts at using digital media rather than analog have not yet really broke out of this mold. The reason that cinema was able to make the leaps it did was because the people involved were creative artists who realized that the medium is not only the the message but also the massage. Interestingly this expertise was also transferred to television advertising when digital production matured.

Education has not caught up yet, but it is going to and it is not going to take that long once it takes off and a feedback loop is created that unleashes both creative imagination and pragmatic innovation.

Notice that all the "bad parts" that Thoma notes are based on the classroom model. He doesn't yet realize that digital distance learning is a fundamentally different experience from traditional classroom education. He is focusing on a process rather than an experience. This is in-the-box thinking when what is needed now is out-of-the box thinking.

The fit between process and experience is reciprocal and interactive. It's called learning. It's about exploring alternatives and options taking tradeoffs into account in achieving payoffs. Education is a complex adaptive system involving discovery, and innovation and therefore emergence. It is network and feedback dependent. It's about information, but not only about information. It's about life. (Yes, I realize that John Dewey said most of this beginning a century ago. It was called progressive education.)

Parents that have home schooled and those that have been successfully home schooled realize this. Several of my friends home schooled their exceptionally bright children and they eventually graduated from top undergrad and grad school. Students can set their own pace, for example, and make decisions about what, when, how and above all why they study. As in all creative endeavors, freedom is the foundation, and freedom to explore is essential.

Fiscal Times
12 Good and Bad Parts of Online Education
Mark Thoma, Professor of Economics, University of Oregon

Diane Ravitch — Public Education: Who Are the Corporate Reformers?

This is a hugely important issue socially, politically and economically and it is not a single issue but rather a web of interconnected issues touching almost every sphere of life beginning with early childhood rearing. Education shapes a society more than anything else.

The great value of public education that is more or less standardized is that it provides the basis for a common culture, which is extremely significant in a pluralistic and multicultural society like the US. Without a "common core," and I don't mean the common core as it is used presently in education, the society can be expected to be become increasingly divergent and divisive, as well as layered.

However, achieving a common core socially is not the same as introducing a common core into the curriculum and teaching methodology as presently proposed. Cookie cutter approaches don't work at that well other than with cookies and other items that can be standardized. Human beings cannot be standardized and it would probably not be optimal even if they could be.

We need maximum diversity compatible with foundational unity. Entering the global age, that foundational unity must be the universality of humanity as a species that is ecologically interdependent with other species and the environment.

Reading, writing and 'rithmetic will not longer cut it. Nor will emphasis on STEM, especially at the expense of a liberal education.

The primary goal of education in a pluralistic multicultural democracy must be oriented to self-governance by the population itself with a view to common purpose. This is stated quite eloquently in the preamble to the US constitution:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The educational system that America has today is a holdover from the past and it may not be suitable for the new era that the country and world is embarking upon. We need to be asking what the opportunities and challenges are and how to meet them agilely in a time of when the pace of change is accelerating exponentially. New opportunities are bringing new levels of challenge that are orders of magnitude greater than previously experienced.

Is the educational system keeping pace? Would greater privatization increase the opportunities or exacerbate the challenges? Can the present system be reformed from within, or is an overhaul required? What questions do we need to be asking? I don't think we are asking the right questions yet. People seem to be too fixed on providing answers before the problem has been explored sufficiently.

Bill Moyers & Co.
Public Education: Who Are the Corporate Reformers?
Diane Ravitch

See also, Public Schools for Sale?

Yves Smith — How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike?

It’s telling that the fact that hundreds of thousands of people in Quebec have been striking for over two months has gone virtually unreported in the US. This Real News Network interview helps explain how protests against tuition hikes have evolved into a broad based effort to reverse the neoliberal policies of the incumbent provincial government.

Read it at Naked Capitalism and watch the video
How did Quebec Students Mobilize Hundreds of Thousands for Strike?
by Yves Smith

Same thing is happening with students in Chile.

MIT to take next step in free education

Awesome.

For Wall Street Occupiers or other decriers of the “social injustice” of college tuition, here’s a curveball bound to scramble your worldview: a totally free college education regardless of your academic performance or background.  TheMassachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) will announce on Monday that they intend to launch an online learning initiative called M.I.T.x,which will offer the online teaching of M.I.T. courses free of charge to anyone in the world.

The program will not allow students to earn an M.I.T. degree. Instead, those who are able to exhibit a mastery of the subjects taught on the platform will receive an official certificate of completion. The certificate will obviously not carry the weight of a traditional M.I.T. diploma, but it will provide an incentive to finish the online material. According to the New York Times, in order to prevent confusion, the certificate will be a credential bearing the distinct name of a new not-for-profit body that will be created within M.I.T.

The new online platform will look to build upon the decade-long success of the university’s original free online platform, OpenCourseWare (OCW), which has been used by over 100 million students and contains course material for roughly 2,100 classes. The new M.I.T.x online program will not compete with OCW in the number of courses that it offers. However, the program will offer students a greater interactive experience.

Read the rest at Forbes
M.I.T. Game-Changer: Free Online Education For All

by James Marshall Crotty, Forbes Contributor

(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

This is huge step toward online degrees offered by established institutions globally through innovations in distance learning made available by technological advances.

Privatization of education — fail

Speech by Kenneth J. Saltman at Occupy Chicago, Friday, November 18, 2011, adapted from his forthcoming book "The Failure of Corporate School Reform" (Paradigm Publishers 2012)

Read it at TruthOut

The Failure of Corporate School Reform: Toward a New Common School Movement
Monday 5 December 2011
by Kenneth J. Saltman, Truthout | Op-Ed

While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs).

EMOs extract profit by cutting teacher pay and educational resources while relying on high teacher turnover and labor precarity.(i) Corporate school reform seeks solutions to public problems in private-sector ways, from contracting out schools and services, to union-busting, a wholesale embrace of numerical benchmarking and database tracking and the modeling of schooling and administration on multiple aspects of corporate culture. Policy hawks make demands, for example, for teacher entrepreneurialism, or insist that students dress like retail chain workers and call school heads "CEO"; or install corporate models of numerical "accountability," paying students for grades and teachers for test scores; or leaders play intricate Wall Street-style shell games with test performance to show rising "return on investment"; or teachers assign students the task of crafting a resume for Benjamin Franklin; BP was involved in creating California's new science curriculum: the examples are endless.

Despite the fact that corporate school reforms have expanded at an exponential speed, the dominant corporate school reforms have failed on their own terms.