News of a paper entitled "Cyber and Home School Charter Schools: How States are Defining New Forms of Public Schooling".
Cyber and homeschooling charter schools have suddenly become a prominent part of the charter school movement. Such schools differ from conventional schools by delivering much of their curriculum and instruction through the use of the internet and minimizing the use of personnel and physical facilities. This paper examines how these alternative charter school models are emerging within the larger public school and charter school communities with particular attention to recent developments in California and Pennsylvania . In these two states public scrutiny of cyber and homeschooling charter schools has led to considerable debate and demands for public accountability. Of particular concern is the need to modify the regulatory framework to accommodate cyber and homeschooling charter schools as well as consideration of the differing financial allocations that are appropriate for schools that operate with reduced personnel and facilities and the division of financial responsibility between state and local educational agencies.
My instant reaction is that "of particular concern" is for people who care about "regulatory frameworks" to bugger off to Timbuktoo and die. Instead of "defining new forms of public schooling", why don't these people just let other people go ahead and do them? Especially when these schools only require "reduced personnel and facilities".
It's on the up. It's far cheaper. Before you know it there'll be no excuse for public money being spent on education at all. And then what? Answer, we must regulate the damn thing until it is good and expensive again, and only highly qualified people are allowed to do it, and in good and expensive ways.
But that's probably just me. They probably have their hearts in approximately the right place.
You can read the whole thing, in one of those absurdly unwieldy pdf files that occupy sixty pages of uncopiable text when they could have been presented as ten copiable ones.
Anyway let's have a look at the final paragraph of this thing, to see where they're coming from.
As we mentioned earlier, existing research that examines nonclassroom-based schooling is limited. New research efforts will need to focus on school-level analysis that can assess the effectiveness of instructional programs, organizational and governance structures, resource use, and the accountability mechanisms that nonclassroom-based schools employ. Ultimately, new research will assist us in deciphering the viability of sustaining these alternative schooling models under the context of increased state and federal demands.
"Deciphering the viability ..."? Alternative schooling "models"? "Under" the context ...? I still can't tell if these people are meddling class meddlers, or fighting the good fight from within the heart of the beast, and talking the beast's language in order to outwit him.
My life is too short to be ploughing through stuff like this. Maybe your life is longer.
Category: Free market reforms • Home education • Sovietisation
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Here's an essay about the rise of the amateurisation of nearly everything with obvious educational vibes attached to it. I found it at a blog which a friend of mine recommended to me, as one of the best on general trends in technology, the internet, etc.
Quote:
But it's not only equipment that separates the professional from the amateur, it's also access to information. The dramatic increase in available information constituted the second shift towards mass amateurisation (and was the first that the internet provided). Suddenly it became effectively effortless to research information online and to connect with communities of people interested in the same things. Film-makers could meet one another, animators find out each other's tips and tricks, audio-professionals could learn from and collaborate with their peers. Before the internet, large swathes of technical information had no accessible forum in which to be exchanged had previously been disseminated top-down via training courses, Universities and within industries. That remains true to an extent today but to a much lesser extent – today much more information is available to everyone – one way or another. This has had a parallel effect quite outside media production – helping to amateurise almost every field of human activity from fixing cars to fixing people. For good or ill, self-diagnosis tools, support groups and dedicated information resources are increasingly helping people to figure out what's wrong with themselves and even (sometimes) to fix it.
And the reference to Universities shows that he knows it.
The traditional school was based on doling out scarce information. But now, the environment outside the school pulsates with information, and often the classroom is one of the most informationally impoverished environments most of us ever now experience. In a word it is boring.
The answer from your internet savvy teacher now is that without "education" you can't make any sense of all that "information" out there. Well, depending on your definition of "education" that may well be so. But the anti-classroom come-back is that you can surely get this "education" on the internet too.
Speaking for myself, I don't just get facts from the interenet. I also get the schemas and frameworks to make sense of and to arrange all these facts. I get understanding, as well as information.
Once again, a piece that I at first wrote, about this, for here, has ended up there. And this time the version there was actually posted here, before I realised. Ah, that old Samizdata hit rate!
UPDATE: Not feeling well. so no more today.
This sounds familiar, doesn't it?
The Department of Education and Umalusi, the independent body that certifies and ensures the quality of matriculation examinations, today hit back at critics who lament about the quality of this year's matric results.Both Umalusi and the Department of Education contended that the improvements in the matric pass rate signified a "first step to quality" education.
Director-General for the department of education Thami Mseleku said the criticism by some academics, media and commentators alleging that pupils' marks were inflated and question papers simplified were baseless.
Mr Mseleku said such negative comments displayed a lack of knowledge about the processes of quality assurance and the job done by Umalusi.
And it also sounds bad. "First step to quality" sounds really bad. They're not talking: education better. They're talking more like: educational collapse now happening at a decreasing rate. I mean, "first step"? That could mean anything. So I assume the worst.
For the second time today I started doing a piece for one of my little personal blogs, and ended up sticking the result up at Samizdata. First there was this cultural piece, and now there is this, about Chinese private sector education.
Better there than here even for regulars here, because there may be lots of interesting comments. On the other hand, there may also be lots of stupid comments, but that's the chance you take with Samizdata.
Incoming email:
Hi Brian
My daughter is in her GCSE year and I am confident that she will pass sucsessfully. However, after much discussion it is clear that school is no longer beneficial, and she is becoming increasingly stressed and upset in that environment. If I had been more knowledgeable in the past I would not have sent her to school. I am unsure of the regulations in the UK, maybe you could tell me: can she be homeschooled for the last six months before her GCSEs?
Thank you for your help.
Rebecca Hayes
Rebecca: the only help I can really give you is to put this email up here, and ask those who really are sure of their ground to answer your query by commenting. My thanks in advance to anyone who can do this.
My understanding is that there is no big problem about any of this, but my "understanding" is too much of a guess to be any use. You obviously need to be sure. I hope one of us here is able to help you to be sure.
If it doesn't sound too patronising, Rebecca, it's great to see a parent willing to have "much discussion" with her child. Not all parents have the sense to do this, or they only do after something truly ghastly has already happened. Whether we here can help or not, I wish your daughter and you all the best, and all future educational happiness and educational success.
