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

Critical Thinking You Can Eat

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With the cost of private education and unpaid internships increasingly the purview of a privileged few, community colleges deserve a second look. Sure, you can teach yourself how to cook or compost and do a fine job at it, but for those who want to upgrade their skills, practice using professional equipment, and receive mentorship that can last a lifetime, community colleges are increasingly rising to the challenge.

“Community Colleges: Affordable Good Food Education,” Nina Kahori Fallenbaum

In many different ways, the large research universities– where I got my Ph.D.– are becoming increasingly insular if not irrelevant; gated factories run by poorly paid part-time workers who cannot afford the commodity educations they help produce. This could be turned around– and online education ought to be a part of that turn around– but so far there’s little sign of any substantive change on the horizon. The giants sleep.

The research universities used to be great engines of class mobility; more and more, now, they contribute to and reinforce the increasing divide between rich and poor. The real hope for change, perhaps not surprisingly, may lay at the margins, in the community colleges. I particularly like these progressive culinary programs, which embody critical thinking (and not merely teach it). It’s an authentic praxis, and all too rare in education.

Posted in: Writing

The Online Emperor has no Clothes

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If UCOP and the Regents end up trying to use the expansion of online courses–rather than say the increase in the number of faculty–as a way to overcome so-called “bottleneck” courses, and if they use online courses as the primary means to allow community college students to meet their lower-division requirements then, as a practical matter, students will be compelled to take online courses even if they are not officially required…

It has been the austerity policies of the last twelve years–not the invention of new technologies or the alleged conservatism of the faculty–that has driven the dialogue and the seminar to the margins of the university. If we are serious about the quality of education then returning the dialogue and the seminar to the center is the task facing education going forward–whether digital or not,

“Whose Online? What Online?” Michael Meranze

Roughly speaking, there are two sides to the sorts of Utopian thinking that have flourished around new communication technologies and online education. On the one hand, you have the run of the mill electronic naif, naively enthusiastic about the possibilities and seemingly oblivious to the practicalities of everyday life, economic and otherwise. We can call this the Napster side. Thomas Friedman and his ilk go here; Meranze calls him a ‘technopulicist‘.

The technopublicist enthusiasm may or may not be self-serving, since many of them are involved in companies of various kinds (Udacity, Coursera). The other side of this technological Utopian thinking is the side– we might call it the administrative side– that uses this naïve discourse and enthusiasm to both drive a specific anti-labor agenda and to obscure problems it has no desire to solve because the solutions don’t serve its interests.

Meranze suggests that this administrative strategy, at least in California, is faltering as students and faculty begin to articulate a response to the cynical policies that promote the growth of online education in order to protect the status quo and its top-heavy administrative costs and over-reliance on contingent labor. The real Utopian possibility in online education is not just pedagogical, it’s an end to the exploitation of teachers in the universities.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing

The Future is Full-Time

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The fundamental question that must first be addressed (and consciously built around) is: “Why are we doing e-learning?” Is it to increase tuition revenue? Decrease costs? Create greater access? Allow greater flexibility for our students? Experiment with new pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning, so as to better educate a different generation of students? All of the above?

Without a clear and unwavering “will,” it makes little sense for a college president to discuss the “way,” because ultimately the senior no-wake proponents on campus will delay and/or sabotage any meaningful e-learning strategy.

“The ‘No Wake Syndrome‘” Kenneth E. Hartman

I think that Hartman is right; the MOOC’s put on a big show, with lots of sturm und drang, they are more a symbol of change than evidence of the change itself. Most universities, as Hartman suggests, have yet to build a viable online program. Online education, like Rome, isn’t going to be built in a day. Lots of folks, he says, are going to resist this change because they resist all change. Hartman, of course, thinks like an administrator.

It’s not about new ideas; it’s about managing people. He knows who’s going to cause a stink and he tries to find a way to placate them preëmptively. In this case, he’s thinking about the elderly academics who, curmudgeons that they are, will say no to just about any new thing. Administrators say these sorts of things no matter what change they are suggesting, even if the change isn’t designed to do much more than increase revenues.

What is fascinating is that Hartman and administrators like him don’t seem to want to address what is arguably the most serious problem in the current system in the discussions over the future and online education. Is he going to talk to contingent faculty– part-time, adjunct, graduate students– and see what ideas they might have? I bet their priority would be to use the online revolution to create (or re-create) a system based in full-time employment.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Writing