Silicon Valley breeding nationwide schools-for-profit scheme

[KamaAina]

http://www.peoplesworld.org/silicon-valley-breeding-nationwide-schools-for-profit-scheme/

Nearly every metropolitan area these days has its own wealthy promoters of education "reform." Little Rock has the Waltons, Seattle has Bill and Melinda Gates, Newark has Mark Zuckerberg, and Buffalo has John Oishei, who made his millions selling windshield wipers.

Few areas, however, have as concentrated and active a group of wealthy "reformers" as California's Silicon Valley. One of the country's fastest-growing charter school operators, Rocketship Education, started here. A big reason for its stellar ascent is the support it gets from high tech's deep pockets, and the political influence that money can buy....

"Blended learning," the hallmark of the Rocketship education model, is based on using computers more and teachers less. Its roots lie in a valley dominated by high-tech factories, where electronic assembly lines belie the hype of entrepreneurship and "creative disruption." Education policy analyst Diane Ravitch describes Rocketship charters as "schools for poor children. . . . In this bare-bones Model-T school, it appears that these children are being trained to work on an assembly line. There is no suggestion that they are challenged to think or question or wonder or create."

A report by Gordon Lafer for the Economic Policy Institute, Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower Quality Education than Rich Kids? examined the Rocketship model: "The 'blended learning' model of education exemplified by the Rocketship chain of charter schools," it found, "often promoted by charter boosters - is predicated on paying minimal attention to anything but math and literacy, and even those subjects are taught by inexperienced teachers carrying out data-driven lesson plans relentlessly focused on test preparation. But evidence from Wisconsin, the country, and the world shows that students receive a better education from experienced teachers offering a broad curriculum that emphasizes curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking, as well as getting the right answers on standardized tests."

[Ampersand Unicode]

1. Not a perfect solution, but how else are we going to teach kids programming?

The three Rs just don't cut it anymore. The "three Cs" you speak of (curiosity, creativity, critical-thinking) are too vague to put on a resume. No matter what way you look at it, American students are grossly underprepared to work the jobs of the future. We suck horribly at math and have a glut of liberal arts majors studying social theories and analyzing novels. Then they graduate after four years with enormous debt that they can't pay back because they can't get good jobs for which they don't have the skills. Last I checked, Monster.com had no jobs for "novelist" or "philosopher" (except at retail stores and restaurants), and plenty for Cisco network engineer. ("Blogger" is not a "real job" either.)

Obviously it's not the case that nobody is doing web design, managing server environments, repairing equipment, or programming in C. But clearly there aren't enough of them. A lot of them are from India and China; why are there more programmers and engineers from the East than from here?

[KamaAina]

2. 'Cause there are more people from there?

Both India and China have populations over 1 billion, compared to our 300 million.

[liberal_at_heart]

3. The answer to your question of how come there are more from over there than over here is H1-B visas.

I don't want to be anti-immigrant and isolationist but the reason they are bringing so many over here is so they can lower wages, and make tech work contract work and it is working.

[Ampersand Unicode]

4. So why do we suck at math?

Why do we have all these STEM initiatives if we're not sorely lacking in those skills? Why do we have a glut of English lit majors and not a majority of engineers or programmers?

It just seems that there are more maths people from the East (regardless of there being more people, period) than we have here. I read some article in, I believe, The Week that said the Eastern written languages were almost mathematical in and of themselves (the Romans, after all, used letters for their numbers) and that it really is a matter of the West does better with classical Greco-Roman liberal arts stuff while the East is better known for the maths and sciences. Some programmer (from India, natch) wrote a book and the magazine was reviewing it. It doesn't explain how some of us Westerners are able to learn the language of coding and maths, like Gates or Einstein. Because far as I know, Bill Gates doesn't speak Chinese, and Albert Einstein was dyslexic.

I don't know if any of this is true or not, or what, if anything, we can do to correct the problem so that we don't keep sucking at math and the next generation of Americans ends up a bunch of permanently indebted janitors with useless master's degrees in gender studies and criminal justice. Making college free doesn't solve the problem of why we suck at math. It just means that an English lit degree would be valued at a price of what it's basically worth. Zero -- another thing the maths folks discovered over in India while we Westerners were going gaga over Plato.

[QED]

6. We don't.

When you compare similar kids - socioeconomic backgrounds, etc. - we are just as good if not better. Remember, the US educates all kids and when the data is reported, that's what is given.

Just another outgrowth of the Reagan era.

[Generic Other]

5. And their kids don't even use computers in the classrooms

They have the luxury of learning from real humans. The new class system.