Online charter schools -- not such a good idea

A New York Times report reveals damaging evidence that online charter schools, while earning profits for Wall Street companies, are actually failing students.  Here's the link:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/13/education/online-schools-score-better-on-wall-street-than-in-classrooms.html.  My two cents?  It's pretty obvious that classroom instruction is important to most learning.  Weaving in online education with classroom education is important, but going all-online is a bad idea.  Virtual learning may be the wave of the future, but classroom education is not going away because it's difficult to reach kids in an online environment.

If UNLV were a business...

From an interview with UNLV's president, featured here:
"Let’s talk about UNLV as a business. It employs 3,000 people. It has a billion-dollar-a-year economic impact.
It brings into this state from outside the state more than $300 million a year.
The return on the state’s $175 million investment is enormous.
Where do we get those dollars? From nonresidential students, and two-thirds of them pay full freight nonresidential tuition at $18,500 per year — that’s just the tuition.
Of course those students don’t just bring their tuition dollars. They buy cars, gas, groceries. The direct impact of that is $140 million per year — that’s raw dollars, not economic impact. That’s a pretty good business.
We also run a major entertainment venue, the Thomas & Mack Center. It’s the top-grossing college arena in the country. It’s perennially in the top 10 of all arenas in the country.
We bring about $100 million a year in federal funds — grants and contracts. Those dollars have the biggest economic multiplier you can ever imagine."

Can someone save us from $200 textbooks?

The headline on this article puts it bluntly -- "$200 textbook vs. free.  You do the math."  The idea is that open-source material can someday replace textbooks as the main source of information in K-12 education and beyond.  With all the politics involved in textbook marketing -- Texas and California are the biggest K-12 textbook buyers and hence set the tone for textbooks around the country, and the Texas textbook board has taken a strong right-wing turn lately -- it may be time to think about using the Internet and tools like the iPad to their full capacity to transform education.  My only issue with using the open-source model to replace traditional textbooks is that textbooks only have space for so much material, whereas there is no limit on the Internet, so the best learning material may get lost in the sea of other information that is out there.  It is essential that we teach students how to read critically, and that we use the Internet as a tool of the trade in education, but we can't expect teenagers and younger students to be expert readers who will automatically understand the nuances of an open-source model.  We have to train them in how to read this material, just as we train them to read textbooks.

If Teachers Made What They Were Worth...

...good kindergarten teachers would earn $320,000 per year, according to this article from the New York Times.  While I find the statistic interesting, I don't think it's likely that pay for performance will ever get that far.  It's interesting that the article is based on an economic analysis of a group of students.  I wonder what impact later grades have.  Probably less.  So should kindergarten teachers earn more than 1st grade teachers, and so on to high school and beyond?  They say the lower the grade level the better teacher you have to be.  I think that's true.