More on the Ongoing Destruction of Public Education

Whiny shits: Don't complain you were laid off because you took a one-year-only contract.

However, it serves the paper's anti-teacher propaganda purposes regardless of the truth.

Districts in Nevada have been given the go-ahead to abuse the OYO system in order to have a revolving door of teachers never eligible for post-probationary status or pensions.
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Scary stuff: Although online K-12 schools perform a whole lot worse than traditional public schools, this is where education is headed. Look no further than Bill Gates for proof. It is a disaster in the making if it isn't stopped.

As I said, distance learning needs to be limited to rural areas or credit recovery and implemented under the control of local school districts. Online charter schools would be outlawed if it were up to me.

A recent study of virtual schools in Pennsylvania conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University revealed that students in online schools performed significantly worse than their traditional counterparts. Another study, from the University of Colorado in December 2010, found that only 30 percent of virtual schools run by for-profit organizations met the minimum progress standards outlined by No Child Left Behind, compared with 54.9 percent of brick-and-mortar schools. For White Hat Management, the politically connected Ohio for-profit operating both traditional and virtual charter schools, the success rate under NCLB was a mere 2 percent, while for schools run by K12 Inc., it was 25 percent. A major review by the Education Department found that policy reforms embracing online courses "lack scientific evidence" of their effectiveness.

"Why are our legislators rushing to jump off the cliff of cyber charter schools when the best available evidence produced by independent analysts show that such schools will be unsuccessful?" asked Ed Fuller, an education researcher at Pennsylvania State University, on his blog.

Of course. It is all about tracking students to be members of a permanent underclass, just as upping the "standards" for curriculum so that kids are doing age-inappropriate work is a way to track kids into the underclass. Rich kids will NEVER be forced to go to online charters; they will have their little private schools with real buildings, real teachers, real books, and real curriculum.