A New Oxymoron

Government Teachers

We have long been sceptical of the current fad in government schools of equating higher quality education with IT gadgets.  Should new entrant students be taught to write and vocalise numbers and how to manipulate them in order to multiply, divide and subtract, or should they be provided with calculators and taught how to use them?  Why, the latter of course.  Increasingly, avant guarde educational theory in many circles equates education with competence in operating machines.

Cue the highly advanced, superior, modern classroom.  An ipad on every desk, er. . . seat.  But, then, even desks are so last century.  Teachers now interact with students via private networks or e-mail.  Neither teacher nor students we are told  ever need to meet face to face.  It is "inevitable" they will be replaced by virtual classrooms.  There is existing technology which is perfectly capable of constructing this now.  It's only the archaic structures of our ridiculously outmoded education system that are holding us back.  Welcome to the wonderful world of cutting edge government education. 

Michelle Malkin has a couple of examples of how superior this new pedagogical wave will be--and how pockets of vested interests will be lined with gold along the way.
  They used to say that "government worker" was an oxymoron.  Now, it is becoming appropriate to extend the appellation to "government schools". 

Education’s Shiny Toy Syndrome

by Michelle Malkin

It’s elementary. Public education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things. Clever kids are ready, willing and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices’ security protections. It was a piece of iCake. The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the media.

“Roosevelt students matter-of-factly explained their ingenuity Tuesday outside school,” the L.A. Times told readers. “The trick, they said, was to delete their personal profile information. With the profile deleted, a student was free to surf. Soon they were sending tweets, socializing on Facebook and streaming music through Pandora, they said.” . . .

Remember: These “reform” programs are not about stimulating brain cells. It’s all about stimulating the Benjamins. Pearson is the multibillion-dollar educational publishing and testing conglomerate at the center of the federally driven, taxpayer-funded “standards” racket. For Pearson, ed publishing and ed computing are a $6 billion global business. For nearly a decade, the company has plotted a digital learning takeover.

According to industry estimates, Pearson’s digital learning products are used by more than 25 million people in North America. Common Core has been a convenient new catalyst for getting the next generation of consumers hooked.

As I reported last week, Pearson sealed its whopping $30 million taxpayer-subsidized deal to supply the city’s schools with 45,000 iPads pre-loaded with Pearson Common Core curriculum apps earlier this summer. I repeat: That works out to $678 per glorified e-textbook, $200 more than the standard cost, with scant evidence that any of this software and hardware will do anything to improve the achievement bottom line. . . .

And then there's Detroit.

The abysmal history of federal investments in ed technology is as crystal-clear as an HD touch screen. Take President Obama’s $49 million technology initiative for the Detroit public schools, funded by federal stimulus money. The city is bankrupt. The urban school system is overrun by corruption, violence and incompetence. The federal ed tech program showered some 40,000 new (foreign-made) ASUS netbook computers on Detroit, plus thousands of printers, scanners and desktop computers to teachers and kids from early childhood through 12th grade.

The district budget is $300 million in the hole. Meanwhile, the board slashed special education buses and shut down 70 schools. Have the devices helped students “compete in a global marketplace,” as champions of the program promised? SAT scores in Detroit remain “stagnant.” High school graduation rates are rock-bottom. According to the most recent data, just 3 percent of Detroit fourth-graders are proficient in math; 6 percent are proficient in reading. In 2010, 11 people were charged in connection with a lucrative fencing scheme involving hundreds of DPS computers, which they stole and sold on eBay or peddled to friends and family.

The fetish amongst government educrats for technology can be compared to equating driving with locomotion, the part for the whole.   Modern educrats are like the benighted parent who, rather than teaching and encouraging his child to walk, placed him straight on the driving seat of a car.  Naturally the foolish parent believed he was teaching his child to operate at the cutting edge of human sophistication.  An advanced education to be sure.  Walking is so last century.