Good News Inside the Bad

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I know these threats [pandemics, population, climate change, etc.] sound like science fiction, but they are real and my generation will have to address them. The way to overcome these challenges and ensure the continued long-term existence of our species is through investment in rapid scientific innovation.

To make this second giant leap possible, the culture surrounding science in America must change. Too many have rejected evidence-based science. Nearly 60 percent of American public school biology teachers are not teaching evolution properly and another 13 percent admit to teaching creationism. Almost half of Americans believe that the Earth was formed in the last 10,000 years. Taxpayer funded schools in my home state of Louisiana are teaching that scientists and their scientific work are “sinful.” At least 300 taxpayer funded voucher schools nationwide are teaching creationism. Teachers in public schools in Louisiana and Tennessee are teaching unscientific “alternatives” to evolution, the origin of the Earth, and climate change, and this is allowed by state law. Other states may soon follow suit.

“President Obama, Please Call for a Second Giant Leap for Mankind,” Zack Kopplin

I should be a little embarrassed to admit it but I had not heard of Zack Kopplin before I saw an interview with him on Moyers and Company. (It aired a few days ago but I watched the tape at lunch today.) I won’t say much about Mr. Kopplin– his ideas speak for themselves– except to say that he’s a wonderful breath of fresh air. Not only is he anti-creationist, he sees the connections between the right’s anti-evolution ideology and their fight against public schools. Kopplin shows that critical thinking and resistance is alive and well.

Posted in: Miscellaneous, Online Places, Professional

Another Emperor, This One Is Naked Too

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The report, “Understanding and Improving Virtual Schools,” was released by the National Education Policy Center, a nonprofit research organization based in Boulder, Colo., and a frequent sparring partner for K12 Inc. My colleague Ian Quillen has the details on the results from the most recent report focusing on K12 Inc., which shows students in schools managed by the company perform worse and drop out more frequently than students in brick-and-mortar schools.

In a lengthy response to the report posted on its website, K12 Inc. claimed NEPC used selective data that didn’t present the whole academic picture for virtual schools, including the tendency for students to enroll already behind grade level and ignores academic growth.

“K12 Inc. Stock Down After Scathing Report,” Jason Tomassini

I love online education– I feel the need to say it– but I also think that it’s drowning in hyperbole. In recent years, too, it has tended to drive a discussion about education that I think is almost entirely irrelevant. Online education, this rhetoric suggests, is a disruptive technology sure to destroy higher-education-as-we-know-it and replace with a system that is better in every way. Online education is both the problem and the solution.

This new system will be cheaper, more efficient, more democratic; you name it, this new system will be it. (I am not really using hyperbole myself, at least not much. See “Clayton Christensen: in 15 years half of all universities will be bankrupt.“) I think most of this sort of talk has less to do with real-life economics and education and more to do with the very loose rhetoric that’s now become the norm. It’s dramatic and it ignores education’s real problems.

The real problem in U.S. higher education is that it has become a part-time employment system. The problem isn’t the public schools, it’s poverty and gun violence and the lack of a national health care system and 30 years of right-wing propaganda that has made the very idea of pubic funding suspect. It’s an irrational market ideology that attributes a kind of magic to private property and greed. Online education might help but it’s no panacea.

Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Professional, Writing

Money Rules

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  • “In the United States, students don’t get their money’s worth.” — Peter Thiel
  • “You can’t think of another industry where a list of top 10 providers is perfectly correlated to what it was in 1960.” Larry Summers, former Harvard President
  • “We’re at 2.4 million students now. The biggest lesson I’ve learned on this is I underestimated the amount of impact this would have around the world.” Daphne Koller, founder of Coursera
  • “We manage this transition very carefully. How can MIT charge $50,000 for tuition going forward? Can we justify that in the future?” Raphael Reif, president of MIT
  • “When people first put courses online people thought they could charge money and no one bought them. They put them online but from a global perspective, all these high numbers of students we’re hearing about today, the effective number of people who use them is zero.” Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft

    • “Eight Brilliant Minds on the Future of Online Education,” Eric Hellweg

    It’s the Harvard Business Review, I know, and they are not going to be discussing poetry. Still, the questions posed to the “brilliant minds” weren’t supposed to be about profitability and education, they were supposed to be about the future of education. What would you expect? Nonetheless, if you are ever going to get a good sense of how the U.S. oligarchy thinks about education, the Harvard Business Review is a good place to start.

    What’s so interesting is how few of our nominal oligarchs have any framework for discussing education beyond the capitalist marketplace. This might be called a kind of educational realpolitik. I would think that at least one of them would mention democracy or perhaps global climate change in this context. Perhaps it wouldn’t be more than paternalism, but the rhetoric of education used to lie outside of the market, at least to some extent.

    Online education, though, seems to have created (or grown up in) a new territory where wide public access to education is framed largely in terms of markets: schools are “providers” and students don’t get “their money’s worth”; MIT is concerned that it cannot sustain its business model with such a high cost; Gates believes that nothing “effective” is going on in these classrooms, but Koller crows about 2.4 million student, as if size were in itself significant.

    Posted in: Economics, Online Places, Professional

    Let us be dissatisfied

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    So, I conclude by saying again today that we have a task and let us go out with a “divine dissatisfaction.” Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort and the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice. [,et us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family is living in a decent sanitary home… Let us be dissatisfied. Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol houses a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy and who will walk humbly with his God. Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream. Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid. Let us be dissatisfied.

    “Where do we go from here?” Dr. Martin Luther King, Speech, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 16 August 1967

    Posted in: Economics, Language, Online Places, Professional, Union