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No Child Left Untableted
theodp writes "Made possible by a $30 million grant from the Dept. of Education's Race to the Top program, the NY Times reports that every student and teacher in 18 of Guilford County's (NC) middle schools is receiving a tablet created and sold by Amplify, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The tablets — 15,450 in all — are to be used for class work, homework, educational games — just about everything. With a total annual per unit lease cost of $214, Amplify was the low bidder of those responding to Guilford's Race-to-the-Top RFP, including Apple. Touted by Amplify as one of the largest tablet deployments in K-12 education, the deal raised some eyebrows, since Guilford's School Superintendent once reported to an Amplify EVP when the latter was the superintendent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, coincidentally a proving ground of the Gates Foundation. Amplify and the Gates Foundation are partners on a controversial national K-12 student tracking database that counts the Guilford County Schools among its guinea pigs. Getting back to the hardware, after putting their John Hancock on a Student Tablet Agreement and the Acceptable Use Guidelines for Tablet, students are provided with an ASUS-made tablet "similar to ASUS MeMO Pad ME301T" ($279 at Wal-Mart). The News & Record reports on some glitches encountered in the first week of the program, including Internet connectivity issues affecting about 5% of the tablets."
Annual per unit lease cost of $214 that would get you a new Nexus one every year. Someone is making a pretty penny (or dime)
Are the students allowed to bring their own device if they already own a tablet? I know I wouldn't want to use a computer offered up to me by the state. I'd much rather buy my own if it's a required item.
No I didn't RTFA.
Maybe linked to the Race to the Top website, a link to the definition of "annual"?
What we really need is well paid and highly motivated teachers with small class sizes. Not yet another way for students to play angry birds.
Of course the ones making decisions know this, but they're happy taking the tech sector money. And a class full of little kids with tablets make good press and website pictures.
Fix college costs
Fix no child left behind
Fix the system - stop patching it.
That headline fills me with unease. Sounds vaguely improper.
Maybe I'm just getting old but in my days, children were simply never verbed. It isn't polite.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
per year out of tax payer pockets. Please stop doing it for the children because everything you do sets them back even further. Smaller class sizes? Boon for teachers union, bane for tax payers. Students? Show me the improved test scores. New math? Fail. "Smart" classrooms? Fail.
It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline. The US has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, over the decades to "fix" education with absolutely no positive results. Perhaps it was not broken in the first place.
No more one laptop per child anymore? Should be rolling out one wristwatch per child soon?
So... Now that they can all learn by themselves, I guess we have no more need for teachers?
I don't see how politicians think a tablet/laptop/computer/ebook reader will make students better. Our students are getting worse because of the pervasive attitude that's it's not cool to be good in school. We need to change this perception and reward students who try really hard and/or do well in school...right now it looks like they're just throwing money at a problem to see if it helps and it also seems like they're helping out one of their buddies who's benefitting from this ludicrously expensive lease plan.
per year out of tax payer pockets. Please stop doing it for the children because everything you do sets them back even further. Smaller class sizes? Boon for teachers union, bane for tax payers. Students? Show me the improved test scores. New math? Fail. "Smart" classrooms? Fail.
It remains fact that students pre WWII were better educated in every discipline. The US has sunk hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, over the decades to "fix" education with absolutely no positive results. Perhaps it was not broken in the first place.
Well it's broken now. So, it needs fixing.
You seem to be saying we should not fix it?
going to mean ADHD for everychild ! ooops Thats no what the article meant.
The summary has 15 hyperlinks! *head explodes*
Will they only be allowed to visit the Fox News site for current event assignments?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I've stopped even trying to address the absurdity of these initiatives. There will always be administrators looking to get attention with big splashy purchases for no particular reason. I don't see any way to stop it.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Tablets aren't even useful as a computing device, there a gimick/toy. if you want kids to learn about computers give them a pile of parts, if you want to improve the education system start attracting teachers who are good at teaching not failed professionals to whom teaching is now the only alternative.
A tablet per child sounds like a ridiculous way to spend money, but a valid point brought up in a previous article suggests that perhaps a donation is/was made that cannot be spent on any other budgetary concerns. So....kids get tablets.
Perhaps this can be a good thing though. If we can get a gadget in to every child's hand maybe we can force the hand of major textbook publishers and get them to put out electronic copies of their books that are actually usable. I dont mean "Here is the foreword for the book get a dead tree copy to read the rest" or webpages for chapter objectives that refer back to a 5lbs hard cover book for the rest of the work.
This is a well known fact. Personal electronic gadgets can only distract, or make the learning process more efficient, reducing mnemonics that help retention.
The federal government is *leasing* tablets from a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation at a cost of $200 per year.. Not buying..... LEASING!!! For $200 per tablet. Let's see how Fox News deals with this WASTEFUL GOVERNMENT SPENDING!
Someone once told me "the further you get from the classroom, the more money you make"
If you follow the money trail, you will likely find one of the decision makers on pushing this forward has a monetary interest in this whole scheme. Sort of like how the biggest opponents of drug legalization have shares or outright own prisons and drug testing facilities
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Great, let's give a bunch of horny, hormonal middle schoolers a way to easily watch porn at school.
How are we supposed to RTFA and discuss it when there are fifteen (15!) links in the summary? These comments are a wasteland of generalized ranting.
Only two factors have consistently been shown to positively correlate with student performance: parental support and teacher enthusiasm. But, hey, throwing technology at the problem might work this time...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Maybe, but I'm assuming that this company did in fact come in with the lowest bid. To be fair, having parents who've been teachers, schools spend A-LOT of money on *CRAP* - CRAP standardized programs, CRAP books, CRAP software, CRAP consultants, CRAP tech, CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP CRAP! I was amazed to hear what one school paid to have specialized desks built, each with an embedded CRT and a PC with a RealMagic Hollywood card to play DVDs, and a huge 64-port Cisco router for the 15 or so machines, apparently none of which got much use. Money that could've gone to better things. Still, $200 to lease a tablet? Just buy the freaking tablets! Get Nook HD's - they're cheaper and keep Barnes and Nobles in business. Seriously, If I were in charge, I'd put Apple IIs, Atari 800's and TRS-80's back in classrooms. Maybe give a Raspberry Pi to every kid. There was something to using a device that essentially gave you a blank slate and you had to learn and create to make it do stuff. Now, everything comes flying at you with bright colors and stupid, condescending, badly drawn cartoon characters. By the way, remember that Neil Bush's No Child Left Behind program was a pretty nice deal for Neil Bush's IGNITE! company, formed the very same year that his brother ran for president. Gotta love family connections.
No Child Left Untableted
Right, and to hell with the homeless and other chronically underutilized who have already endured so many years of frustration and unhappiness? Too late for those fuckers so screw 'em, right?
It's ageism again.
Two Seconds of googling. That said, have been going down because we're admitting more people, and those people aren't as wealthy so they don't have access to a full time parent, a nanny, and tutors. They're often more or less on their own. Basically, we expanded education to everyone but we didn't expand all the advantages afforded to the rich and powerful to them. If you think about it it's common sense. Dump a bunch of under privileged kids into underfunded schools and what do _you_ think will happen?
/.? We're better than this.
As for the Charter & Private schools, don't make me laugh. They get to pick and choose their students. If a kid starts under performing or is disrupting class it's back to the public school for them. Not that I think we should abandon those kids.
On a side note, +5 insightful? Really
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
is beyond stupid.
"When your only tool is a hammer..."
Gerry Sussman is enthusiastic enough and the electronic media allows him to influence many more people that it would be possible in brick school settings. And I'm sure there are more such people...now if only the mediocre regional drones who only think that they can prepare good teaching materials and deliver good lectures stopped deluding themselves.
Ezekiel 23:20
For me it started in 1966. My school went Comprehensive (this is the UK I'm talking about). The Secondary modern school I was at joined up with the local Grammar school. Two years later the overall exam results were down to the level of the Sec modern school which was fully 30% lower than the Grammar on its own.
I was in the Techical Stream i.e. 2nd grade. We were not expected to do much but go out to work in local factories aged 16. No chance of staying on to get 'A' levels and go to University.
I went back 6 years later with a 1st Class Honours degree in Engineering and stuffed under the noses of the teachers who'd condemmed me to failue.
Now my grandkids are finiding it hard to fit in because they are bright and consistently get 'A' grades. However their teachers are mor concerned with them fitting in with the rest of their year group and not standing out. Their parents can't afford to send them to private school so they have to deliberately fail things in order not to be a target for those who are frankly Thick and have no ambition. Their school district (they live in MA) seems more concerned with the idiots than the bright kids.
While tablets are very useful for consuming media, they are not very useful for producing it. Technology can be distracting. Leasing the machines is also a bad idea.
That being said, the rest of your rant is patently false.
-We cover signifcantly more subject matter than pre-WWII students. That generation was taught that the atom was the smallest unit of matter and Venus may be habitable. Very few learned Trigonometry because most jobs did not require more than a high school degree. Pre-WWII students were separated by race and gender. Do you really want to go back?
-When the US educational system is compared to that of other countries, we test everyone while they only test their top students. Not a fair comparison at all.
-When you see videos of people who don't know geography, people who get the answers right are edited out. If most people did not know geography as depicted in these videos, then few would get the joke.
-The media generally spins educational stories to the negative. When students do well on a test in the U.S. the test was too easy. When they do poorly on a test, the teacher did not do their job.
Granted, there are setbacks. However, to claim that there are "absolutely no positive results" in educational reform is beyond foolish. You are disregarding reality in favor of your tarnished opinion. You are suffering from "educationalism" as defined by racism, sexism, and exceptionalism.
Obviously they've got money to burn, the fools.
For their "total annual per unit lease cost of $214" they could buy 5 Raspberry Pis at Adafruit, and OWN THEM OUTRIGHT instead of the devices still being on lease so they have to pay $214 every year till the supplier is fat and happy.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
I call this the "HR-ificiation" of our society, because of the mindset I see in business/HR type people that unfortunately run the country right now. They do not seem to have thinking skills themselves, hence cannot identify it in others. Instead they rely on checklists that were "created with input from our business partners". Sounds great on the surface to most parents and students -- they worked with industry to get relevant job skills! -- but the downside is that the educational curriculum is now reduced to a checklist of "skills" rather than a comprehensive education in how to reason about problems. I see this in tech schools too (where I currently work), where the focus on business skills is taking such priority (so that they can advertise that they prepare for jobs) that they have lost sight on the actual important material in the program.
Said pre-recorded lectures would revolutionize education. Every home should have one. Hwever his competitors discovered that entertainment was more commercially viable.
Every new media invention in the past 140 years has been promoted as an education aid with varying success.
P.S. Edison originally invented the phonograph as a means of cramming more information onto a telegraph. You'd record message on a phonograph, send them at high speed across the wire, record them at the other end, and play back at human readable speeds. Wires were a precious resource in those days.
The "Tablet privacy policy:
No Right of Privacy
tablet technology users have no right of privacy in their use of tablet technology or the content they access using tablet technology
Review and Monitoring of Usage all tablet technology use may be reviewed and monitored without notice by GCS administrative staff for any reason, even use that occurs on personal time or off school property.
Like the charter school movement these technology initiatives are a boon for the 1% crowd like Bill Gates who benefits from the privatization of education. There is a large amount of money spent on public education and these guys are working to make profits from it. The main profit will come from the de-skilling of teachers and the reduction of the teacher numbers and salaries. The leftover cash becomes profit for the corporations that sell gizmos and software (Pearson) into the schools and the corporate education executives. If you look closely enough you see that Bill Gates and the other "philanthropists" are profiting from this. Also look at the schools that these guys send their kids to; I'm sure that they have low student-teacher ratios and don't rely on Khan Academy for instruction.
To provide an example, my daughter is a high school science teacher in CA where the district is going to buy every kid an iPad and put AppleTV and big LED TVs in every classroom but claims there isn't enough money to fix the broken sinks in the classroom.
This is a giant grab for tax dollars by the 1% under the guise of helping children.
So, I'm taking a few graduate level courses in a scientific discipline. Although all of them have in-class lectures, one is "distance learning" enabled. The school sunk huge amounts of money into building these "smart" classrooms that have audio/video recording capabilities with microphones and cameras all over the place. The professor writes on a touch-sensitive screen, and students can choose to remotely view the session live, or watch the recording later.
Another class is taught in a traditional way, with an old-school professor who just comes into class and lectures. There's no technology involved, except for using a whiteboard. No recording. You miss class, you miss the lecture. He doesn't post an online syllabus, or notes, or homework. EVERYTHING is done in class.
Guess which class WORKS? Since Day One, there have been inexplicable bugs and failures in the smart classrooms. The microphones stop working, the distance learners can't see or hear the feed, and the software is clumsy and difficult to use. The professors can't write neatly on the touchscreen and so all the formulas look like chicken scratches. Almost every class has a period of 5-10 minutes where nothing gets done because the professor is trying to solve some tech problem. Few students bother to view the session remotely now because they don't want to take the chance of missing something if there's a problem.
All that technology, all that money that the university threw into these classrooms and contractors, has gotten in the way of learning. By the time all the bugs are ironed out (which may be never), these classrooms will be obsolete and the university will be sold on upgrades to an even more needlessly complex system. Meanwhile, the old school professor has covered twice the amount of material and he doesn't even lecture for the whole time.
The point is, students are paying for educational technology that they don't even need. It's not a matter of "growing pains." There isn't any functional need for the class to use this technology, and the old school professor proves it. Giving a tablet to every kid only teaches them how to depend on those tablets as a learning tool, and it merely enriches the pockets of the corporations that sell this crap to the schools. In higher education, laptops would be understandable, but a tablet is really not a better learning tool than a textbook. I can find something in a textbook faster than I can in an e-book; I can annotate more quickly and easily, and it is less strain on the eyes. Even though i have a tablet and a laptop (and I bring the latter to class), I still take notes with pencil and paper, because nothing else comes close. The laptop is for running software relevant to my classes.
You forgot about RACE.
Remember when Newt Gingrich was so roundly ridiculed for wanting to buy laptops for schoolkids?
Now school districts worry about the price and fairness of the contract, rather than whether we should or not.
What we really need is to get rid of standardized tests and realize that one-size-fits-all educations have their limit.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
Only two factors have consistently been shown to positively correlate with student performance: parental support and teacher enthusiasm.
Maybe, but in those cases, the measurements they use are the same flawed measurements (standardized tests) that make our public education system so terrible; I wouldn't trust them, as they don't measure understanding.
Nope, most of the long-term studies judge success based on degree and employment. Try again.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
INBLOOM OFF THE ROSE?: "Another state has pulled out of using the Gates Foundation's $100 million technology service project, inBloom. The withdrawal further shrinks the project after other states pulled out in part because of concern about protecting studentsâ(TM) privacy. Guilford County, N.C. told POLITICO on Wednesday that the state decided to stop using the service, which is designed to hold information about students including names, socioeconomic status, test scores, disabilities, discipline records and more in one place, and ideally, help in customizing students' education."
You know, we love our tech. I love mine. But back in the day, there was a reason they didn't allow students to use calculators in math class. Basic skills mastery are needed. How to use your hands to write is necessary. How to count and do basic math is necessary. How to spell is necessary. These basic skills most of the 40+ here take for granted is in serious trouble for those younger. When you see actual business reports contain "RU" instead are "are you" you have to face-palm at the very least.
We don't need computers, tablets and multimedia edutainment for our children. We don't. We need, in fact, to isolate them from these things until mastery of the basics are demonstrated.
And here's a thought... just a mild paranoid question to consider. By connecting our childrens' minds to 'the net' are we exposing their psychological profiles to government for evaluation and selection? Enabling them to more easily select the best or the most 'dangerous' from the sea of young minds out there? As the Snowden secrets continue to trickle out, we are seeing the wildest conspiracy theories get proven right and a few which even the theorists didn't dare to dream are coming to light. It's out of control. We need rational control back.
This is the biggest waste of money evar.
How convenient, considering tablets have almost no security and are ripe for the NSA to observe.
Of course it's important to have every child tableted, it's easier to spy on them that way.
Ever tried to do multitasking in a tablet? It's not gonna be easy for the kid to do something else and quickly close it before the teacher notices.
Ironically it is because there are votes in the general populace wanting to cut waste in schools that this happens in the first place. IT people that have a clue in higher up central positions are counted as excess pork because they are not (possibly ex)teachers/principals (need to cut down on the number of non-teachers/principals). More often than not the decision makers are old former principals and get offered a free lunch and buy whatever is on offer... if something goes wrong they can retire anyway.
Why dont you do it to get affordable food on the shelves.
I know they can do it because the done it for the greeks.
They just want to keep profits high not that they cant make it more affordable.
That is criminal if you ask me.
Do not sign the student tablet agreement. Move to another county where digital freedoms are respected and students are encouraged to open up hardware and experiment with what's under the hood.
Guilford County's student tablet agreement as mentioned above reduces the students' digital freedoms.
Once again this shows you can't trust big media or big gov or big school to defend your freedoms. EFF and GNU are good points of reference to understand what I am talking about. Be careful before buying any hardware and never buy hardware on a lease or a plan because companies use that excuse to lock down the computers, tablets, phones while you don't completely own the hardware. This is a perfect example of that. They think they can stop you from opening up the tablet hardware by signing some piece of paper. REFUSE to sign by all means. Everyone must remain vigilant to preserve their rights to fix/tweak things to their liking for anything they own.
I lived in NC for a long while. The schools I went to wasted money like there was no tomorrow. Near the end of one school year, my high school sent home notes about how a senator wanted to cut the school's budget from 5 million to 4.5 million dollars. They wanted to start a letter writing campaign demanding the budget stay the same or increase. When the next school year started, they bought 100 ipads (this was about about a year after they came out) and started putting "smart-boards" in each room. The smart-boards saw a little bit of use, but the ipads were almost never used (much like both of the computer labs). The entire interior of the school was re-painted annually, and they also had fully-stocked rooms for shop-class (a class that they never offered).
I read it as 'untabled' and was thinking someone had screwed up the wording trying to say that they're scrapping it.
Good mindless cetacean? You mean like Flipper?
That's not much different. As I thought, people don't even care about education anymore; they just want people who assimilate into the workforce easily and/or spend ridiculous amounts of money on colleges and universities. Where is the focus on understanding? It's just not there.
Our local school district just leased an iPad for every kid from some "education" company that demanded a multi-year contract for service and "content." This is a rural district, and the state ratings, coincidentally, just came out, giving our schools an "F" in one core category and a "D" in another. I have met graduates of these schools who don't know who we fought in WWII and, in one case, didn't know what cream is. From a cow. In that field over there.
An honor student around here is anybody who doesn't show up stoned or fight. Most "graduates" read at sixth grade level, but nobody cares. The teachers, by and large, graduated from these schools themselves.
Meanwhile, parents don't give a shit, as long as the football team has new uniforms and comfy bleachers. The schools employ multiple levels of coaches, including golf coaches. Golf coaches. They closed the high school library and laid off the librarian, but don't touch our golf coach.
Another idea, train teachers on how to actually use technology for learning. I remember being approached outside a local library by a middle schooler asking if I wanted to buy a laptop. It still had school stickers on it, and I declined. I'm expecting similar fates for these tablets.
With a remotely activate able microphone and camera, a wireless connection to the schools servers controlled by school admins, with ability to monitor all activity on the tablet when ever the tablet is on and reporting of all unauthorised activity reportable. Personally if I were at that age, the very last thing I would want to accept is a school supplied and controlled computing device. If stuck with one, definitely throw in faraday and sound shielded case and bring along a matching appearance unit that didn't connect to the school server and regional administration beyond that. Google plus M$ plus News Corp, why does the 'EWWW' in privacy invasion come to the fore.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Take that idea to it's limit. One extremely motivated teacher and one or two students.
You know what I call them? Parents.
I take exception with the idea that teaching could ever replace parents. Teachers are by and large, socially broken, today. I don't like their ideals, or morals, or world view.
Yes, I believe the world, is millions of years old. Yes, we should strive to not pre-judge people by their appearance. Etc etc etc. None of that really goes to what I'm speaking of.
The problem is so beyond salvage, that I am either going the homeschool, or private school, route.
You have left me little choice.
OK, so the students are the parents. Now who is the extremely motivated teacher?
What you need is to hire teachers that care about giving a good education and then respect them and pay the well enought so they feel respected. After that you need to give them the freedom to decide how they archieve good education for their pupils. After that you give them the responsibility of actually doing so, and the needed resources to do so (This does not mean money. This means immunity from stupid parents, from stupid lawsuits, and from stupid politics). You don't need tablets. SOme teachers might like to try some out, they might even have nice uses for them, but sure as hel lyou don _need_ them for proper schooling.
States are cutting school funding. Gotta have more prisons!
It really is one of those things that can either be really good or really bad, depending on implementation. I live near a school district that has had a reputation in the past for not having the best scores in town. Economics have shifted and in recent years they have been able to give tablets to all students - at least at the 7th-9th grade levels(not sure about high school). They've noticed an improvement in grades and test scores, but more importantly they've noticed that students seem to be more engaged with school work and more willing to actually do it. Not only that, but tablets have built in methods for organizing tasks and time management. The result? Students turn in homework more often, they track their own progress, they do better on tests and their grades have steadily gone up over the last 3 years. What used to be a run-down impoverished school that was a joke in the surrounding area is now competing - and winning - academic competitions with the more renowned and respected schools.
Given that there's also a recent article on /. complaining that schools don't get enough funds, I wholly welcome tablets in schools. If kids run out of construction paper in September, then teachers all over the nation end up buying their own construction paper from their own pocket. If kids get to draw/create/design on a tablet...it's a one time cost that can be used for years. Of course, they break and have to be repaired...but you're talking about $50-100 up front for a tablet(it doesn't need to be the latest $600 iPad) or hundreds each year for the pen and paper equivalents.
I'm not saying throw out art projects or other things that use physical materials...but augmenting classrooms with tablets can reduce costs elsewhere, and it's a relevant technology that can help students organize their time, turn in the homework regularly, and plan for their future, which are all *extremely* important for school districts in impoverished areas. It's easy for kids in those areas to drop school and do other things that look like they have more value. If they can see their hard work is going to pay off by letting them go to college, and they have the tools to record their progress...then they end up doing more work.
I've seen the good that tablets can do, so I'm all for putting more money into this effort.
From here, the first thing that comes to mind is poor teacher pay and layoffs. NC went from the bottom for teacher pay to middle of the pack of states, but has now reverted to a position near the bottom. Counties (NC has 100) with more populous cities and more money supplement the pay enough to push most teachers above the poverty line (Guilford is one). Many schools here still have serious security issues, and I don't mean from external threats, I mean from some of the students. How about a grant for teacher pay, teaching assistants, or Resource Officers (police trained for working in schools)? Until recently, and often still, middle schools didn't even have ROs or shared them (what good can that do?), and high schools generally have no more than one, which isn't enough for some of the schools. Or how about enough cash to fit all the buses with emissions controls (all but the newest belch carcinogenic diesel soot—just the kind of exposure kids need) or incentives to use biodiesel? A lot of farms here still grow tobacco, so switching to energy crops needn't impact food prices/supply. Or perhaps decent funding for the "technology" classes where a few students learn a little about robotics?
Time will tell how the tablets work out, but even if abuses like monitoring students and altering content to suit extremists doesn't occur in Guilford, it most likely will in some other county when their tablets appear.
Few kids here are taught any kind of programming whatsoever. The only thing they normally get is some instruction on using Word or PowerPoint. I don't expect this to change. There's no significant push here for either programming instruction or using open source software, even though Red Hat isn't far away and has contributed some resources in the past.
let's make sure everyone is ignoring each other. that is the best way to have peace in the classroom.
Sadly, my state government seems to think that the best path to increase student performance is:
1) Tests, Tests, and more Tests - Pearson has been given a multi-million dollar contract to implement said tests, parents/teachers are forbidden from seeing anything on them, and Pearson gets to decide how to score them. There was a 30% passing rate in NY after the new - much harder - tests were implemented. But don't worry because Pearson sells a line of teacher training programs, textbooks, etc that can help raise students' scores.
2) Charter Schools - The governor recently said that the "death penalty" should be implemented for public schools that don't pass. Note that I said "public schools." Charter schools can admit who they want (no special ed or special services kids in there if they don't want them) and don't need to take the tests. So they wouldn't be eligible for the "death penalty." However, charter schools pull their funds from the public school bank just like public schools. So public schools are left with less money and more students with special needs. This effectively means that the "death penalty" for public schools will mean more charter schools (and possibly some private schools). Charter schools are also run by businesses, don't require their teachers to have teaching degrees, etc. It would be very interesting to see if the companies that run charter schools in New York contributed to Governor Cuomo's campaign and, if so, how much they gave.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Yeah, having good teachers might also be a good idea...
But it's not going to do any good if you don't let them teach. Right now, they have to teach to the test or the schools lose funding if students do poorly on the useless standardized tests.
Da derp dee derp da teedly derpee derpee dum. Rated PG-13.
So... we're making sure kids don't look away from screens any more. Perfect. We have proved screens are healthy.