Searching for "charter schools"
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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Ohio’s E-School Attendance Dispute: Q&A With the Columbus Dispatch
The biggest Ohio e-school story over the past year: a push by the state education department to audit attendance at the full-time online schools using student-login records. A first round of reviews found that nine e-schools had overstated their enrollment by a combined 12,000 students. A Dispatch analysis of ECOT’s audit showed that nearly 70 percent of the school’s students missed enough school to be considered truant under state law.
Across the country, the question of how to best track and report student attendance in a full-time online school remains unresolved, contributing to the significant uncertainty around e-schools’ funding and performance.
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more on charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=charter+schools
http://lwveducation.com/the-prize-who-is-in-charge-of-americas-schools/
podcast: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fresh-air/id214089682?mt=2&i=352838278
The Prize is a story about good intentions gone awry. They turn into political struggles, condescending and arrogant management policies, and money wasted. They are thwarted by community mistrust which led to rebellion. Note that none of this mentions the children. It may be an opportunity lost for them. If their parents stay involved, workable strategies to improve schools may emerge.
The Prize gives little insight into what works in schools to break the cycle of poverty. The Newark example explains what did not work. Individual teachers, given adequate support, are effective. Some lessons learned about charter and district collaboration have emerged. Small steps are being taken. I will post them next. What we do know is that, in the last analysis, parents own the schools. Without them, nothing good will happen.
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.
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
five of the biggest education stories of the year
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Stagnant Student Performance and Widening Achievement Gaps
a vociferous debate over what to blame, from subpar reading instruction to poverty to uneven implementation of the Common Core
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A Crisis in Elite College Admissions
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Declining Trust in Higher Education
a survey from the Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican believe colleges have a negative effect on the country.
Betsy DeVos, continued to draw criticism for rolling back oversight of for-profit colleges and weakening protections for bilked students.
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The Democratic Party Backed Away From Charter Schools
Charters in cities like New York and Boston have shown promising achievement gains. But the sector has come under increasing fire on the left for harsh discipline practices, contributing to school segregation and serving fewer students with special needs. Teachers unions tend to oppose the schools’ expansion, since most of them are not unionized.
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Democrats Continue to Debate School Segregation
school segregation remains a defining feature of the American education system today,
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https://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/diane-ravitch-slaying-goliath-passionate-resistance-to-privatization-and-fight-to-save
As Charters Face Growing Opposition, NewSchools Summit Makes Its Case
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-05-14-as-charters-face-growing-opposition-newschools-summit-makes-its-case
for the past 21 years its organizer, the Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit known as NewSchools Venture Fund, has also put millions of dollars into novel schools in public districts
Charter schools operate with public funding, and sometimes philanthropic support, but are managed by an outside organization that is independent from local district oversight. In California, they are run by nonprofit organizations with self-elected boards. (For-profit charters are outlawed.)
Their supporters and operators—who make up the vast majority of the 1,300-plus attendees at this year’s Summit—say the model offers the flexibility needed to introduce, test and adopt new curriculum, tools and pedagogical approaches that could better serve students, particularly in low-income and minority communities.
Rocketship Education was an early showcase for blended learning, where students rotate between working on computers and in small groups with teachers. Summit Public Schools, a network of charters that now claims a nationwide footprint, promotes project-based learning assisted by an online learning platform.
But charters have also attracted an increasingly vocal opposition, who charge them with funneling students, teachers and funds from traditional district schools. Aside from raising teacher salaries, a sticking point in the recent California teachers’ strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland has been stopping the growth of charter schools.
Detractors can point to fully-virtual charters, run by for-profit companies, that have been fined for misleading claims and graduating students at rates far below those at traditional schools. At the same time, research suggests that students attending charter schools in urban regions outperform their peers in traditional school settings.
While the first decade of this century saw double-digit percentage increase in the number of such schools, it has almost entirely plateaued (at 1 percent growth) in the 2017-2018 school year, according to data from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
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more on charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=charter