Searching for "charter"
A charter chain thinks it has the answer for alternative schools
Critics complain that the schools lack rigor and often use software programs vulnerable to cheating, such as Edgenuity. https://www.edgenuity.com/login/
Bixby also pushed back on the idea, expressed by some alternative school critics, that students in traditional classrooms, with teachers who each see over 150 pupils a day, are assured a more meaningful experience. Altus students are assigned to one main teacher who becomes responsible for each of their students’ progress throughout their time in the program. The network aims to assign no more than 40 students to each teacher so that they have time to get to know them. And all instruction is delivered one-on-one or in small groups.
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more on charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=charter
Just What IS A Charter School, Anyway?
“Most Americans misunderstand charter schools,” was the finding of
the 2014 PDK/Gallup poll on public attitudes toward education.
Ted Kolderie, a former journalist and senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey School of Public Affairs. He helped create the nation’s first charter law in 1991 and helped 25 states design their own.
Greg Richmond, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. NACSA represents people and organizations that approve and oversee charter schools in 43 states.
Nina Rees, head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy group that lobbies on behalf of charter schools.
: The term “charter” really refers to the decision by states to turn public education into a two-sector system. One is a traditional school district, centrally managed. The other, charter schools, are independent, not owned by a central school board. Both are public, but they’re organized in radically different ways.
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more on charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=charter+schools
Trump’s education proposal is short but simple:
More school choice (a.k.a. “open the corporate charter floodgates”).
Merit pay for teachers (a.k.a. “we’ll pay them just what we think they’re worth and they’ll like it”).
End tenure (a.k.a. “You’re fired whenever the mood hits me”).
If Hillary is elected, we can expect more of the Obama style of reform. He deduces this from the advisors who are close to her, mostly from the Center for American Progress.
Bottom line: Trump will run over the schools like a steamroller, flattening them along with their teachers. He endorses vouchers, charters, online charters, anything goes.
Clinton is likely to be akin to Obama/Duncan in advancing charter schools and testing.
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REIGN OF ERROR By Diane Ravitch
Ravitch writes that the “the transfer of public funds to private management and the creation of thousands of deregulated, unsupervised, and unaccountable schools have opened the public coffers to profiteering, fraud, and exploitation by large and small entrepreneurs.”
The public school system, Ravitch argues, is under attack from corporate interests and Wall Street crusaders seeking to make a buck off the American taxpayer. The reformers, Ravitch writes, are an insurgency in America’s schools, “a deliberate effort to replace public education with a privately managed, free-market system of schooling.”
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Higher ed
Class Action Suit Filed Against Top Private Colleges
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/01/11/class-action-suit-filed-against-top-private-colleges
K12
Elites Profit From “Nonprofit” Charter Schools
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/charter-schools-for-profit-nonprofit-taxpayer-public-money-oversight-education-salaries-real-estate-burris-interview
Some families don’t want to go back to in-person school. Here’s how one S.C. district is dealing with this demand
https://hechingerreport.org/some-families-dont-want-to-go-back-to-in-person-school-heres-how-one-s-c-district-is-dealing-with-this-demand/
When the pandemic arrived, the school district struggled to connect its students to remote learning, as nearly half its households didn’t have high-speed internet. Even when the district handed out personal hotspots, they didn’t work for many families due to poor cell service.
Research before the pandemic often showed poorer outcomes for students in virtual schools versus brick-and-mortar ones. Only 3 percent of parents, in another Rand survey conducted this July, said they would send their youngest school-age child to full-time virtual school if the pandemic were over.
Gov. Henry McMaster pushed hard to return all schools to in-person learning this fall, saying remote learning was “not as good.” This year’s state budget allows only 5 percent of a school district’s students to enroll virtually; if a district exceeds that limit, the state will give only about half as much per-pupil funding for any additional online students.
But administrators said they didn’t have much of a choice. If Fairfield County didn’t offer a virtual option, some families would leave the district entirely and instead enroll in an online charter school. Fairfield fits a national trend: 31 percent of leaders in districts that serve primarily students of color said that parents “strongly demanded” a fully remote option this year, compared with 17 percent in majority-white schools, according to Rand.
That last part is one of the biggest barriers to remote learning in rural areas. Almost one in five rural Americans don’t have access to broadband at the speed considered minimum for basic web use, according to a report this year from the FCC.
The National Education Policy Center, for example, found that the high school graduation rate last year was only 53 percent for virtual charters, which enroll the majority of online students, and 62 percent for district-run virtual schools. The overall national average is 85 percent. A Brown University study last year on virtual charter schools in Georgia found that full-time students lost the equivalent of around one to two years of learning and reduced their chances of graduating from high school by 10 percentage points.
Skylar has “thrived” academically since she started learning at home. “I think that was because of less distraction,” she said. “I think it’s a little bit more intimate because it’s just her in her room by herself.”
The flip side is that less unstructured time also means less time spent just hanging out with friends at the playground or in the hallway between classes.
Developing trainee teacher understanding of pedagogy and practice using 360 degree video and an interactive digital overlay
The context of 360-degree video in teacher education
Towards an understanding of pedagogic knowledge and practice
The project
The research project was framed as an interpretive case study undertaken with 23 Year 3 students on the BA primary education studies course; we adopted Stake’s (Stake , 1995) instrumental case study approach using examination of a particular context to facilitate wider understanding. The work was aligned with modules developing students’ English and maths pedagogical content knowledge across Key Stages 1 and 2. It comprised four stages:
STAGE 1: TEACHING RECORDED WITH 360-DEGREE VIDEO
STAGE 2: POST-TEACHING TEACHER REFLECTION
STAGE 3: CREATION OF INTERACTIVE 360-DEGREE EXPERIENCES IN VIRTUAL REALITY
STAGE 4: INDIVIDUAL STUDENT INTERVIEWS
New Acting FCC Chief Jessica Rosenworcel Supports Restoring Net Neutrality from r/technology
https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7mxja/new-acting-fcc-chief-jessica-rosenworcel-supports-restoring-net-neutrality
Rosenworcel has long supported net neutrality, and opposed most Trump FCC policies, be it the steady dismantling of the agency’s consumer protection authority, or efforts to eliminate decades-old media consolidation rules designed to protect public discourse and smaller companies from massive media monopolies.
In 2019, Rosenworcel pressured telecom giants to come clean on their collection and sale of sensitive user location data to third parties, and consumer groups say she’s been a steady advocate of consumer rights throughout her tenure.
Roughly 42 million Americans—double official FCC estimates—lack access to any broadband connection whatsoever. Another 83 million only have the choice of one provider, usually Comcast or Charter. This lack of meaningful competition directly results in high US broadband prices, spotty coverage, and routinely terrible customer service.
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more on netneutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/remote-learning-will-keep-a-strong-foothold-even-after-the-pandemic-survey-finds/2020/12
Remote Learning Will Keep a Strong Foothold Even After the Pandemic, Survey Finds
The survey, conducted between Sept. 15 and Nov. 11, included seven questions that covered areas such as staffing challenges, professional development, and approaches to the 2020-21 school year.
The survey was sent to leaders in 317 regular public-school districts and charter management organizations, who are part of RAND’s district panel. The response rate was 84 percent.
Twenty percent of district and charter management organizations said in a new survey that they had started or were planning a virtual school or fully remote option this academic year and expected those options would remain after the pandemic. Another 10 percent said the same about hybrid or blended learning, while 7 percent said some lesser version of remote learning will continue when the pandemic is in the rearview mirror.
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more on the iGeneration Generation Z, Generation Y Generation Alpha in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=generation
It’s 2020: Why Is The Internet Still Treated Like A Luxury, Not A Utility? from r/technology
It’s 2020: Why Is The Internet Still Treated Like A Luxury, Not A Utility?
https://gothamist.com/news/its-2020-why-is-the-internet-still-treated-like-a-luxury-not-a-utility
The city Board of Estimate first decided back in 1965 to slice up the city into cable-TV franchise fiefdoms, a setup that has survived largely intact in the internet era. Today, Altice (aka Optimum) has exclusive cable rights to the Bronx and southeast Brooklyn, while Charter (aka Spectrum, formerly Time Warner) has the rest of the city; Verizon FiOS is also available in a slowly expanding patchwork of areas overlying those two. As a result, most city residents have at most one other option if they’re unhappy with their current service, and many have none at all.
Americans weren’t always beholden to their local cable and phone companies for internet access, notes Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative for the D.C.-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance. In the 1990s, thousands of internet service providers across the country offered dialup connections for relatively low prices, connecting via the copper wires of the phone system. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, he says, was initially designed to build on this by enabling multiple providers to use the new, faster networks that were then starting to be rolled out using higher-capacity coaxial and fiber-optic cable. It didn’t quite pan out.
“Both the Clinton and the Bush administrations dismantled that, under pressure from the big cable and telephone companies,” says Mitchell. “Most of those internet access providers went out of business, because they didn’t have access to the networks. If you have a policy that requires a company to pay $1,500 per home to get a subscriber, and it takes three to four years to earn that money back, you will not have much competition.”
The result has been a network of broadband services that are unaffordable or unavailable for a persistently high number of local households.
Torres noted that the city has spent nearly $300 million on renting otherwise-vacant hotels to house homeless New Yorkers during the pandemic, but hasn’t asked for the hotels to allow residents access to their broadband routers.
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more on netneutrality in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=netneutrality
http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow
1. Anti-School Shooter Software
4. “The Year of the MOOC” (2012)
6. “Everyone Should Learn to Code”
8. LAUSD’s iPad Initiative (2013)
9. Virtual Charter Schools
10. Google for Education
14. inBloom. The Shared Learning Collaborative (2011)
17. Test Prep
20. Predictive Analytics
22. Automated Essay Grading
25. Peter Thiel
26. Google Glass
32. Common Core State Standards
44. YouTube, the New “Educational TV”
48. The Hour of Code
49. Yik Yak
52. Virtual Reality
57. TurnItIn (and the Cheating Detection Racket) (my note: repeating the same for years: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=turnitin)
62. Edsurge
64. Alexa at School
65. Apple’s iTextbooks (2011)
67. UC Berkeley Deletes Its Online Lectures. ADA
72. Chatbot Instructors. IBM Watson “AI” technology (2016)
82. “The End of Library” Stories (and the Software that Seems to Support That)
86. Badges
89. Clickers
92. “The Flipped Classroom”
93. 3D Printing
100. The Horizon Report