Harry B writes about McCain’s education plans.
I don’t have that much more to say about McCain, except to point out
that he doesn’t have much to say either. His answer to the education
question was quite disappointing (and I’m not talking about his
apparent confusion of Down syndrome with Autism, which is an easy
mistake to make) but also quite revealing. McCain focused entirely on
choice. This reveals that he doesn’t really have anything to say;
something his website confirms.
This is the most comprehensive statement I can find of McCain’s education platform.
It does not reveal a great deal of thought or anything very original.
It’s basically a laundry list of boilerplate Republican issues, plus a
few million dollars to invest in virtual schooling (as if the Feds need
to do anything here: the market, the districts, and the States are
moving ahead with this, and it is, if anything, regulation not money
the Feds need to be providing).
I hope the edu-bloggers will link to this post, because it’s really quite excellent.
Point 1 that really needs a lot more air time in the blogosphere. Vouchers aren’t going any where. Anybody who talks about them really has no clue about the realities of the politics of education.
Point 2. It’s all about virtual education. Have I talked about this on this blog? Can’t remember. Anyway just look at what Bill Bennett has been talking about for the past five years. Not vouchers. It’s virtual education. Homeschoolers like it. It’s cheap. Computers don’t ask for health benefits. So, anybody who doesn’t want to give much to public education likes it. Rural educators of all political stripes like it.
Pay attention to this issue, people. This is next battle ground.
Apt. 11d 
I’m working on developing an online course right now (to be run starting in the winter term), and the process is fascinating. I’m not entirely sure I’m doing the right thing, nor that this particular course is right for online, or … well, anything. But I am pretty sure that I want to be the person in my department working on it. 🙂
One interesting thing that has come up from our Online Learning people is that there apparently was federal legislation passed to require universities to ensure that online students can be securely identified (i.e., so people can’t have their moms write their papers for them in their online courses–oops, that happens in offline courses too).
If you ask individual students, which we did via our outcomes testing (captive audience, quasi focus group), a lot of students would miss the face-to-face environment of college classes. That was kind of a relief to read. 🙂
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“Homeschoolers like it. It’s cheap. Computers don’t ask for health benefits. So, anybody who doesn’t want to give much to public education likes it. Rural educators of all political stripes like it.”
I believe bj likes some computer learning programs. I personally haven’t seen any for little kids that I was crazy about, but it should theoretically be possible to get programs that do a lot of the heavy lifting for math facts, spelling, foreign language vocabulary, etc (I loved my Speak and Spell as a little kid). That’s exactly the sort of rote material that I bet a lot of teachers would love to outsource to a virtual aide, while keeping the fun stuff for themselves. It’s supposed to be really hard to recruit for certain areas (rural and urban) and academic subjects (math and science), so technology that would enable one good teacher to teach more kids while being freed from mindless correcting might be a good thing. Technology is not the enemy.
I had a Polish professor who had us work on Polish conjugations and declensions and vocabulary on some primitive computer programs in the language lab, and I think it was helpful. My husband recently took an online defensive driving course and got a break on our car insurance, and I’m supposed to do the same thing soon (rather than spend six hours on a Saturday doing it in person at the local driving school). I did my first couple of terms of college Russian through the University of Washington’s Distance Learning when I was in high school back in the early 90s. It was a pretty low tech set-up (I was mainly just mailing back piles of handwritten homework and cassettes with oral assignments), but despite the lack of classroom interaction and my teenage procrastination issues, being able to master the material before moving on really worked for me. The main minus was the delay from waiting for assignments to come back to me, but most of that could be cut out with contemporary technology.
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Thanks for the link Laura. Since it caught up with me at CT, I just want to point out that my parenthetical comment about Down Syndrome and autism was sarcastic. My usual earnest tone apparently obscured the sarcasm, so I got hit with a bit of criticism (even from dsquared who is the most sarcastic as well as the cleverest person on the internet)
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I got it, harry. This is why people use emoticons. Ugh.
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Technology is not the enemy.
Sometimes it is. It depends on what the technology is being used for, and consequently what kinds of questions and priorities a reliance upon technology will structure in the future.
I’m deeply resistant to virtual education–I hate all sorts of the online tricks and options which we teachers are havin shoved at us these days. I also recognize, though, that my resistance is mostly philosophical and personal, not practical, and therefore I will, sooner or later, lose the argument, and be put into a position where my subject matter becomes a “content” and my teaching becomes a “delivery system.” I just hope I can make tenure before my loss is total.
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Sarah Palin’s nephew has autism…he knows her son has Down syndrome and that was not a confusion.
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I’ve some rather indirect experience of virtual education in that my wife has been teaching a virtual high school English class as (a small) part of her job as a public school teacher for the past 18 months. I’d bet that I share all of Russell’s reasons for disliking it (but I’d also bet that he can articulate them better than I can). Two things are striking:
1. The benefit of a packaged curriculum which, if good (and the one she uses (which I’m pretty sure comes from Bennett’s outfit) is good enough — not as good as she would have created, but better than a lot of teachers would) gives the teacher more time and energy to give individualised attention to the students she never sees.
2. The dynamic, which must be toward the best informed students with the most pushy parents ceding from the classroom to take more challenging classes on line than they can find in the school. This is good for them, but very bad for everyone else because, in the absence of competent management, most mediocre high schools depend on pressure from pushy parents to raise their game academically (to the benefit not only of their children, but also the able and motivated children of non-pushy parents, who with the new dynamic will be left in the mediocre classroom).
Ken — thanks, I didn’t know that, and it does explain his comments. I added a comment at CT correcting myself, and a comment in my head warning myself to use sarcasm even more sparingly than I already do.
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I like computer technology in very limited instances: rote practice — drilling multiplication facts, drilling spelling (assuming you have recorded vocabulary), drilling vocabulary (we did that using a tape in the olden days. But, rote practice isn’t about “education” it’s skill learning.
I’m totally unenthusiastic about virtual education in general, because as I’ve made clear before, I think a lot of education is about interaction, not about content. At some stage that interaction might be able to occur virtually, but I don’t think it can for young kids.
That being said, I see a role for virtual education for people who cannot attend school, and do not have access (rural communities being a big part of this).
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Hey Harry,
Let’s grant, for the sake of argument that you are correct, and voice beats exit as a way of improving schools. Thus, without pushy parents, bad schools get worse; and there’s no way to give exit a tougher bite.
I believe you have advanced this argument, as well as a general egalitarian argument, as a justification for prohibiting private schools. Doesn’t this same problem exist at the level of virtual education, lessons, and non-school enrichment generally? Where we choose to intervene may differ as a matter of prudence, but it seems that one can imagine that the same arguments that, in principle, would prohibit private schools would also prohibit educational supplementation outside of schools (certainly ones that proved highly efficacious). Would you agree with this line of argument?
Cheers,
Ben A
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I’ve taken a few MIT courses and they have been really cool. I’ve emailed a prof with a question and got a response immediately. Then again I was learning for fun. I think if it were the first go around and I was not in my 30’s but in my teens I would need the interaction. Rather, I liked the interaction and was interested in engaging teachers.
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I don’t think we should look at a virtual experience as inevitably some sort of second-best to live instruction. When I took my first Russian class, I was 14 years old, and it was a live intensive summer course, and it got going so fast that I only lasted 4 days before switching to an English lit class where I could actually keep up. That fall I started my distance learning Russian coursework, and it went a lot better. I was able to work on my handwriting slowly and methodically, and to acquire a solid base. I didn’t get lost or left behind, because I was working at my pace, not somebody else’s. Eventually, I was able to transfer to a second-semester (???) college Russian class without missing a beat. They even used the same textbook, which was fantastic.
Anyway, my point is that the focus should be on what works best for students, rather than what makes teachers feel good.
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“Anyway, my point is that the focus should be on what works best for students, rather than what makes teachers feel good. ”
I think that’s true, and the fact that technology might change the job of teaching is no different than it having changed so many other jobs over the years.
Kip — are you taking the MIT courses for real (i.e. for credit) or as part of their open university project? I *love* the amount of course content that MIT has made available on the web (for example, their lectures). I don’t, however, consider it anywhere near a substitute for attending MIT. The reasons for the difference are complicated, though — being at MIT is about credentialing, meeting people — other students, exclusivity — being accepted into the program as well as learning.
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There’s a big curmudgeonly anti-tech post from Mark Bauerlein over at the Britannica blog (via joannejacobs.com):
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/10/turned-on-plugged-in-online-dumb-student-failure-despite-the-techno-revolution/
He’s the author of “The Dumbest Generation” so you know where he’s coming from.
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most mediocre high schools depend on pressure from pushy parents to raise their game academically
In my experience people far overestimate the pressure “pushy parents” bring to bear on schools, particularly during the high school years when our children’s grades “count,” as we parents are explicitly told by school personnel.
Another obstacle: high school-age students are highly focused on peers and dislike intensely having their parents “interfering” with the school in any way or even being visible within its halls. Case in point: here in my town, we parents are told by the h.s. principal, during our “high school transition meeting,” not to complain about problems at the school but to let our kids practice “self-advocacy.”
The kids are given this line, too, and they enforce it at home.
Also, parents who are inclined to push are confronted by the spectacle of non-pushy parents winning insider status, being invited into classrooms to speak and asked to serve as parent reps on committees and the like. Under such circumstances there is in many quarters the suspicion that the children of loyalist parents get first dibs on Honors selection & school awards. This doesn’t have to be true to make a parent think twice about speaking up.
Last but not least, I would be surprised to find would-be pushy parents who did not harbor doubt about just how enthusiastic his children’s h.s. teachers will be when the time comes to write letters of recommendation for college admissions.
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Virtual government schooling at home is not homeschooling by almost any homeschooler’s definition. Homeschooling allows you to make the choices in education that best serve your child and your family. A full virtual curriculum might provide some advantages (self-pacing, for example) but doesn’t allow for the using the breadth of resources that most homeschoolers reach for.
That said, homeschoolers are as different as economists (Two economists = Three opinions) and they don’t all love virtual education. Too much virtual education and you get what people seem to think homeschoolers are doing already — not leaving the house and never interacting with anyone. Homeschoolers don’t do it, but maybe virtual schoolers would.
I don’t think most parents would want to give up the all day supervision that goes with schools, and I don’t think the education sector would give up their business willingly. I welcome improvements — if you can make a video game to teach my kid his times tables, I think that’s great. If a video makes Columbus’s voyage fascinating, it’s a useful tool (but needs a mediator to explain any biases). But ultimately nothing beats personal interaction, in nearly any context. I’m not expecting to see virtual education make any big dent in traditional K-12 schooling any time soon.
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What Alison said. I’ve been reading homeschoolers online for the past ten years, and although there is a lot of diversity in educational philosophy, they tend to be curriculum connoisseurs. As I understand it, the big homeschooling conferences are overwhelming and feature literally hundreds (if not thousands) of different educational options. While some homeschoolers might embrace some aspects of a canned virtual curriculum, few would swallow it whole.
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“being at MIT is about credentialing, meeting people …”
… and the visceral thrill of getting soundly thrashed by insanely hard problem sets while surrounded by warm, cuddly, inviting architecture.
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“warm, cuddly, inviting architecture”
? sarcasm?
incidentally, at Caltech, one really is surrounded by warm, inviting architecture. And, it’s balmy. An entirely different environment in which to be thrashed by impossible problem sets.
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Wow, how about some comments from a family that’s just beginning its fourth year of virtual schooling? My son is now in sixth grade; my daughter just started high school at the local brick & mortar public school (we don’t say we drive on the government roads or go to the government library or play in the government park).
Opposition in our state has largely come from the teachers’ union (ironically, the teachers in our virtual school are union members). They don’t like the teacher:pupil ratios of ~ 1:60. Secondary opposition has come from the weird homeschoolers (we were previously homeschoolers, but not the weird ones) who . . . well, I can’t entirely understand their position. . . say that virtual public schooling will allow regulation of true homeschoolers. Whatever. I think they fear the loss of some of their constituency. It’s the only time the homeschoolers will side with the teachers’ union.
Anyway, virtual schooling works for us, and for many, many families. It may bring needed structure to some who prefer to teach their kids at home. It’s a no-peer pressure way to raise kids. My kids are not isolated. Oh, and we are pro-choice, evolution-believing Democrats.
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Thanks, Connie, for the input. I’ve talked to some school systems in rural Wisconsin who have had to use virtual education, because the students are so spread out and seen a very bad demonstration from a voucher advocate in OH, but haven’t gotten any other feedback on it. Good to hear new stories.
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We actually use a virtual class or two in our junior high program. We have students that have gone beyond jr high math (algebra) and now need to move to high school math. We’re too small to offer that. So we have kids that take geometry virtually during math time. Our kids have the advantage of 4 other kids in the room doing the same thing, plus a T.A. that works with them, it works well for us.
I know in the summer the virtual academy is bubbling over with kids taking courses so they can take more during the school year. I know kids who take health or technical writing so they have room for Latin or western civ or another math or science class.
I think it has a lot of uses and is likely here to stay.
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NYC is starting to look into this – and I am really excited. My son goes to a private school because he did not function well in a regular classroom. He is very into doing his work on computers and it could be a future godsend to kids like him. Also, NYC has a high school that caters to mostly immigrant children who would have otherwise dropped out because their families demanded them to work in the family business. The school meets at night and is obviously not geared to the social aspects of high school. It would be easier to keep them enrolled if they were doing the program at home. Right now the children participating in the computer pilot program are in school (required seat time) but it could be a boon for children that find school hard to attend due to emotional, financial or medical reasons.
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