Reign of Error by Diane Ravitch

Author:Diane Ravitch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House LLC
Published: 2013-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Trouble in E-land

CLAIM Virtual schools will bring the promise of personalized, customized learning to every student and usher in an age of educational excellence for all.

REALITY Virtual schools are cash cows for their owners but poor substitutes for real teachers and real schools.

New technologies appear almost daily, and schools are rightly expected to help young people learn to use them. Computers and access to the Internet are nearly ubiquitous, and no one doubts that if used appropriately, these are valuable tools for teaching and learning. Ingenious teachers integrate technology into their lessons and engage young people in science experiments, historical research, and projects of all kinds. Students today can vicariously visit other lands, not just read about them in a textbook. They can see and hear presidents giving their major speeches. They can watch the historical events that changed the world with their own eyes, as if they were there. The possibilities for making learning interactive and lively are limitless, and a new age of teaching and learning is within reach, one where students can learn at their own pace and explore topics far beyond the assignment.

Yet with all its great potential, technology can never substitute for inspired teaching. Students will respond with greater enthusiasm to a gifted teacher than to a computer with the world’s best software. Electronic technology has its charms, but it can’t compete with the lively interchange of ideas that happens when students discuss a book they read or a math problem they wrestled with or a play they saw or an unsolved mystery in history or the most recent elections. Ultimately, it is imagination, joy, and disciplined inquiry that make education valuable, that distinguish real education from seat time, that constitute the difference between learning and a credential.

Faced with tightened budgets and the incessant demand for more high-stakes testing, our policy makers have been all too willing to sacrifice such nebulous concepts as imagination, joy, and disciplined inquiry. After all, they can’t be measured, so why should they matter?

Entrepreneurs look at declining longitudinal studiesfailing value budgets and see an opportunity, not a problem. The biggest cost in education is teachers’ salaries, so they devise online programs, new devices, and new kinds of schools to cut costs by replacing teaching with technology. They see public education as a new business opportunity, an emerging market. For years, equity firms have circled what they call the “education industry” with interest, uncertain how to break in or how to find a niche. After the passage of No Child Left Behind, many entrepreneurs started businesses to offer tutoring and consulting services to districts. Many of these businesses, however, were small-time, able to obtain only a small chunk of the federal revenues for after-school activities or for professional development in one or several districts.

After the launch of Race to the Top, however, equity investors saw new possibilities for major returns on a statewide or national scale. Now that the federal government was firmly planted on the side of privately managed charter schools, many investors poured millions into the expansion of charter chains.

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