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Led By Zuckerberg, Billionaires Give $100M To Fund Private Elementary Schools
theodp writes: AltSchool, a 2-year-old software-fueled private elementary school initiative started by an ex-Googler, announced Monday a $100 million Series B round led by established VC firms and high-profile tech investors including Mark Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, John Doerr, and Pierre Omidyar. AltSchool uses proprietary software that provides students with a personalized playlist lesson that teachers can keep close tabs on. Currently, a few hundred students in four Bay Area classrooms use AltSchool tech. Three more California classrooms, plus one in Brooklyn, are expected to come online this fall, plus one in Brooklyn. "We believe that every child should have access to an exceptional, personalized education that enables them to be happy and successful in an ever-changing world," reads AltSchool's mission statement. For $28,750-a-year, your kid can be one of them right now. Eventually, the plan is for the billionaire-bankrolled education magic to trickle down. AltSchool's pitch to investors, according to NPR, is that one day, charter schools or even regular public schools could outsource many basic functions to its software platform.
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Fuck trickle down economics. Schools should be mandatory. Schools should be funded equally. And if rich fuckers want a better education for their kids, key them improve the whole system.
This is a great way of creating a caste system like what already happens on the east coast if you didn't go to some fancy prep school.
As much as I hate government, this is a good place to apply heavy regulation, at least in terms of funding and talent disparities.
Different meaning of the word 'trickle down.' It's like a new technology......electric cars were primarily available to rich Tesla drivers, but the 'technology' is 'trickling down' as it becomes cheaper. Same thing happened with microwaves and plenty of other technologies.
You could have figured this out, but he's saying that if their school is successful, other schools will start using it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If it costs $26k per student, why do they need $100M in funding? What are they doing with all that money?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Seems like it's already there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Given the quality of educational software I've seen, if they are depending on software to teach kids, I can't imagine this being a success.
As in, I've never seen any educational software that is good, and it only gets worse as the scope increases.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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Why delete my comment, I asked where does Facebook earned 100 mil?
I'm sure those two are foremost on this company's plan.
Not just electric cars, all cars. And aircraft.
The beginning of the headline is a tad misleading
Led By Zuckerberg, Billionaires Give $100M To Fund Private Elementary Schools
Would the same wording have been used in this instance.
Led By Zuckerberg, Billionaires Give $100M To Fund Uber
No, right? This isn't a gift. It's an investment. Also, the fund is going to a single company called AltSchool.
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but I'm not sure a school system that works in downtown San Francisco will have the same needs as one in, say, downtown Detroit.
Then at least we'll have one that works in downtown San Francisco.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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If this read "Koch Brothers" Slashddot would be recoiling in horror. Announcing the end of the world.
No one deleted your comment, it got modded down because your question wasn't very interesting (or even relevant, really).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Facebook could help schools far, far more by enforcing their minimum age requirements of 13. I'm seeing far younger kids sucked into their computers by the Facebook chat, and refusing to go outside or explore knowledge outside their own little clique of online "likes".
Ah, you mean "race to the bottom". Now I get it.
I know a better headline I'd like to see: "New fair taxes enable feasible education budget. Donations not neccesary anymore." How about that, hu? ... Just saying sometimes I'm glad I live in Germany (allthough taxation could use a redo here aswell).
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Actually trickle down economics has worked -- not just under Republican presidents like Reagan but under Democrat ones like Kennedy.
See
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-calls-it-fairy-dust-trickle-down-does-work-economist-art-laffer-says
It's better than welfare economics which we've tried for decades and it hasn't worked for our poor communities to give them a leg up.
Welfare economics makes us feel good and give us the false impression that we're doing something to fix the problem. But the truth is that these decades old policy has done nothing for our poor. Their children who have grown up are mostly still poor. So what's the answer? Throwing more good money at the problem or rethinking the problem to determine a new solution?
Since we have tried welfare economics with poor results, maybe we should try trickle down economics or something else to see if that will work. These poor communities need jobs and a hand-up; they don't need a hand-out.
How about paying taxes and not lobbying the country to shreds? Maybe then we could all have schools.
Prosperity *is* pizza you fucks.
Or, y'know, they could just pay an appropriate level of income tax and let educational professionals decide how best to invest that money. Of course that wouldn't boost their collective ego nearly so much. Still. Once you've made enough money from stock market bubbles to reduce social responsibility to charity who are we to argue?
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
I think it is pretty clear. If there is any doubt all you have to do is read Zuckerberg and you should know this isn't altruistic. After eliminating many of the teachers he'll use this to classify the rest as "Tech Workers" and replace them with H1Bs. If any doubt,remained the first sentence in the summary says "...announced Monday a $100 million Series B round led by established VC firms and high-profile tech investors..."
FTFL:
This area includes self-awareness, self-confidence, growth mindset, gratitude, curiosity, self-regulation, and grit.
They are going to teach gratitude? My cynical self thinks - "Oh thank you my billionaire masters for giving me what I do not deserve. I will grow up to vote for candidates that look out for your interests at the expense of mine, oh my benevolent masters."
for many decades the plutocrats and big corporations have been shaping the culture by getting to young and impressionable minds via the educational curriculum. Plutocrats&corporations give money to large nonprofit foundations --> foundations pay activists/writers/academics to generate propaganda that serves the needs of the plutocrats and corporations---> this propaganda winds up in the educational curriculum --> young minds are shaped for life in ways that favor the interests of the plutocrats and corporations. For example, the plutocrats and corporations want more money. So they get it by depressing wages by increasing the supply of labor. How? Multiculturalism combined with mass immigration increases the labor supply. How? By making white people feel guilty about racism. How? By creating an educational curriculum that did just that. See Dr Roelofs' book FOUNDATIONS AND PUBLIC POLICY: THE MASK OF PLURALISM. So, what zuck is doing here is just what the rich and powerful have been doing for many decades--using money to domesticate the culture and the people.
posting at http://leftistconservative.blogspot.com
And who wouldn't trust that billionaires have the same objectives as a publically elected government when it comes to educating our children?
Might I suggest a catchy name like... Corinthians?
Quite possibly the easiest way to do that would be to adopt China's approach of selectively implementing trade barriers in the name of domestic self-interest. Everything made of cloth or plastic should get a 200% tariff on it; and those barriers should only be relaxed when we've 'drained the swamp' at home.
This, and cutting all passive welfare to the able-bodied.
At the end of the day, not everyone is smart enough to go to college. Thick people need jobs, money and dignity too.
Unfortunately, this is anathema to our naive neoliberal overlords, whose world-view never went beyond Econ 101.
Their system is too dependent on technology and it will not scale to poorer school districts who cannot afford all the laptops and tablets.
This is a great way of creating a caste system like what already happens on the east coast if you didn't go to some fancy prep school.
Exactly! This kids are getting opportunities that other kids will never get and they get those extra steps towards being successful.
Of course, when they grow up, they'll be under the delusion that they got where they are all by themselves and anyone who can't accomplish what they did are just lazy and entitled parasites who should be thankful that they are not in India.
How about they give 100 million to local public schools to eliminate funding shortfalls instead?
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
the ideal is a meritocracy- if you work hard, you're rich. if you don't work, you're poor
that's the ideal
of course reality means we have rich kids who don't do shit and can't fail, or whose dad gets them a cushy do nothing job with his friends at the golf club
it also means there are poor people who are busting their asses at two full time jobs who will never get ahead, barely tread water, and are one accident or medical problem away from losing everything, due to depressed wages because of power imbalances, and an insane healthcare system. and poor people on assistance who don't work simply because the financial incentive is to stay not working: it pays more
so we do not live in a meritocracy
we should, of course. and we should try to model our society on that ideal
and one way we do that is we guarantee a baseline of medical care and education to everyone
but if being poor means your education will be pathetic, you'll stay poor. and if you're rich and are a loser flunkie who never tries in school but still gets ahead due to connections
we WANT to subsidize poor people's healthcare and education, so we can actually and honestly say "you're poor because you don't try." we can't say that with honesty today. if we don't actually have everyone STARTING on level ground. the ideal of meritocracy requires everyone to start at roughly the same spot. then, indeed, you can criticize people for being poor, and laud people for being rich. rather than our increasing classist reality in the usa of a shirnking middle class, a rich kid who cannot fail and does nothing, and a poor person who cannot succeed and works his ass off
in fact, the usa is not the world leader in social mobility, the ability of the poor to get ahead by hard work
that title goes to "gasp" nordic countries, evil "socialist" countries, where people are happier and richer than "capitalist" america, which really isn't capitalist in the meritocratic sense, but more like plutocratic rent-seeking, social darwinistic fuck-you-i-got-mine-die-in-the-street america
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This isn't a gift. It's an investment. Also, the fund is going to a single company called AltSchool.
It is what is called a 'loss leader', giving away a product for future sales. Of course, It also looks like he may not be giving away $100M at all, but rather arbitrarily placing a high value on the software he is giving away. But he may also be paying people to build and implement the systems, in which case it would appear to be more than just giving away software.
Many argue that public schools are failing our children, but few agree on the cause, so standardized tests have been rolled out to evaluate and quantify the various levels of achievement in the various school systems at both the state and federal level.
That in and of itself isn't really a problem, the problem (IMHO) with standardized testing is that it has become the only way to evaluate career teachers since the teachers and their union groups have typically rejected every other form of teacher evaluation.
For example, in one famous example a new superintendent walked into a major metropolitan school system and was confronted with the reality that some 60% of high school graduates failed to perform at an 8th grade level, yet some 90% of the teachers had peer-evaluated each other to be 'Excellent' teachers.
The issue isn't standardized testing, it is the importance the test results have to the teachers that causes great stress in the children.
Ken
They possibly see a public good in this 'Khan Academy' model of education, but I'm put off at the for-profit motive.
Ken
"We believe that every child should have access to an exceptional, personalized education that enables them to be happy and successful in an ever-changing world," reads AltSchool's mission statement.
Then why have you set yourself up as a private school? If you want to reach every child, why not set yourself up as a public charter school and allow every student equal opportunity to apply? Currently, only children whose parents have $28,750 to spare have access to this "exceptional" education. That's not every child.
Eventually, the plan is for the billionaire-bankrolled education magic to trickle down. AltSchool's pitch to investors, according to NPR, is that one day, charter schools or even regular public schools could outsource many basic functions to its software platform.
Good luck with that. At $28,750, you cost way more money than what every state in the nation pays to educate a child. And all those lucky kids still get a teacher in the room! You better have a really, -really- good return on investment for that kind of money!
The headline should read "Led By Zuckerberg, Billionaires Give $100M To Entrench Their Elite Status For Their Children".
usa and eu already impose artificial trade barriers, ie tariffs on chinese things.
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Yeah, tricke down is working so well that the income inequality between rich and poor is getting wider and wider each generation.
Are Zuckerberg and the other sexists shites excluding young people with penises again, or have they finally realised discrimination is wrong ?
This is your new government, folks. Schools run by the world's largest corporations with a curriculum designed to benefit the top tier preferred shareholders and provide a stream of cheap labor.
I hope they enforce all vaccinations for entry, other than those with legitimate medical exemptions.
Trolling is a art,
But let us say H Ardworker has a classmate in college, R Ichkid, a trust fund baby, who inherits enough to make it to top 1% by net worth. Let R Ichkid draw from the inheritance the same salary H Ardwoker earned, without contributing anything more. Just simply live off the trust fund. R Ichkid would still be in the top 1% by networth, or become even richer. Most trust fund babies do not limit themselves to just the top 1% salary and run down their inheritance and fall off. So the ranking of R Ichkid is likely to improve.
The changes to the tax code done starting from the 1980s is the root cause. The lower capital gains tax rate, higher rates for earned income, the ability to defer income by making it capital gains, etc allows people already rich to stay there without doing much. It has been made impossible for the unwashed masses and people who have to work for a living to join the Rich class by earned income alone. Extremely lucky few who make it to the upper management with stock options, or hit venture capital jackpot, or been extremely lucky to win lottery or hit a lucky home run in investment ... only they are able to join the 1% by net worth club.
Most slashdotters will not make it. It is not a matter of how hard your work, or how smart you are or both. We are back in the 19th century England. Rich families will be rich. Professionals will make the next rung but not be rich. Then unwashed masses below.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Zuckerberg invests $100M to insure racial and economic segregation until 2040.
Just like a venture capitalist does not know which of the many companies he/she is funding is going to be a super success, government does not know which of citizens are going to be a super star performer. So it should invest on ALL the citizens. Provide all the citizens with education, opportunity and a shot at making it big.
A large portion of this investment will not pay off and those citizens will take from the government, never pay anything back. Just write them off as a loss and focus on the rest like any venture capitalist would
Most of the citizens will end up as moderate success, they will make average salary and pay back some modest return on investment. They would also provide the basic frame work infrastructure for super stars to perform greatly. Google and Apple need HVAC mechanics, janitors, accountants, electricians too, right?
Some of them will hit it out of the park. They are the ones the venture capitalists drool over. They will provide outsize returns on the investment.
A venture capitalist would call the return profits. Government would call it taxes. This is the justification for taxing the superhit super millionaires at a high percentage compared to average working folks. This is the justification to writing off as losses the citizens who do not contribute enough returns. That is ok, that is how venture capitalism works.
So, to reiterate, let us discard all the old fashioned Marxist, socialistic, communistic, collectivistic ideas and throw them in the dust heap of history.
Let us run the government as a Capitalist enterprise, as a Venture Capitailistic enterprise. With very deep pockets, with very long investment horizons.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
What exactly constitutes "passive welfare"? Since welfare was reformed under that reactionary libertarian President Clinton, everyone that receives cash assistance is required to either work or attend job training 30 hours a week, or lose their benefits. Which is awesome on paper if you want to fix the "problem" of welfare queens (which have not been proven to exist in significant numbers), but in reality it creates more problems, one of which is what to do with your kids while you're working or going to job training. Not everyone has a spouse or family that can watch the kids while you're off at your dead-end McJob making minimum wage.
Everyone who is able-bodied should work, in an ideal situation. In the real world, you can't always get a job when you need one, and if you have to pay for day care, sometimes having a job means you have LESS money to work with than if you were sitting at home on the couch like everyone on the right thinks welfare recipients do. Lots of people think the poor should be punished for being so, so the situation continues. There's a school of thought that providing cash benefits perpetuates a cycle of poverty, that it encourages dependence instead of personal responsibility. The truth is that most people on cash assistance are trying desperately to get a job so they can stop collecting benefits, and forcing an arbitrary work requirement on them does nothing more than 1) make the situation worse for the recipients and their children, and 2) provide Big Biz with a captive audience of low-wage workers who can't quit when you treat them like dogshit. When you factor in the low wages, lack of access to health insurance (as even under the ACA a lot of people have to make a sizable payment each month for even the lowest level of coverage), and cultural stigma (which, ironically, makes it HARDER to get a job due to the perception of welfare recipients being goldbricking leeches), welfare DOES make people dependent by perpetuating the vicious cycle of trapping low-wage workers in their jobs, not because they're lazy. The solution is not to end welfare, but to increase wages enough to shift the burden from public assistance to private wages. This is one reason why people want the minimum wage increased; a living wage gets people off welfare. But, since that eats into the profits (which are still at record highs), Big Biz just instructs their wholly owned "elected" representatives to perpetuate the myth of the lazy welfare recipient who leeches off taxpayers' hard work. After all, it's much better for the CEO to buy his third summer home with his six-figure bonus for keeping salaries low than for the workers at his business who do actual work to have enough money to live on.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
One size does not have to fit all. That's a key problem with the sclerotic public school system we have today.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I am sure that $100 mln going to a private school for rich kids and not going to public schools has nothing to do with it. If you add the other donors, we could have had a public school system like Germany... top 5 globally.. Our current public elementary school education system will doubtfully compete with any European nation or 10+ non-european ones for that fact. US kids cannot compete any longer.
No good deed goes uncriticized, right?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Corporatization of the public schools. The final blow to public America.
No businessman does this for the sheer joy of giving. They want something, and they will take it. They want properly trained corporate citizens, with skill sets that are widespread and therefore cheap to rent. Amongst other things, depending on the billionaire. Zuck just wants kids that don't care about privacy and love to give him money. Other billionaires want Jesus, dead commies and Muslims, and lots of power.
I've been fuming for months now that the rollup of public schools into private hands, now accepted as a natural process that no one should stop, will be a setup for the next step. Koch brothers-type billionaires will start buying all the little education ompanies and mom-and-pop schools that everyone thought were so charming and a Good Idea. That certainty was reinforced when the Koch brothers themselves started saying, a few months back, that they were intending to forward a new, American-correct, proper view of history that should be installed in classrooms - corporate friendly, pro-Jesus, anti-science, Ayn Randian horse manure. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch's little empire is now stating a school chain in the US - think of it as Fox Schools.
We deserve it. They're going for the kids, now, when no one is looking. Next up, in ten years: Generation FoX.
Government is not a business, cannot be run like a business, and has different goals than a business.
Government RUNS business. Corporations are government critters - they are circumscribed and defined by nothing else but laws. Corporations are our toys.
Government is/was run by academics, who are interested in good governance, rather than getting rich. Lying is considered bad form in academica, and leads to bad results. That's why science works; fibbers get weeded out, rather than kicking out the people who annoy the powerful, or eliminating those who don't make money for the powerful.
Business is run by self-involved, well, thieves is a good word - well-regulated thieves and liars. They admit no principle but the Win. They have no morals, no conscience, and no limits. They are in it for the sheer joy of kicking the ass of people who get in their way. They are absolutely lousy at compromise and when installed in any capacity in interacting with other countries, go into full guns-and-bribery mode. Look at what the W. admin did to us and Iraq for that yummy oil. And they did it on our credit card, and let laughing.
Government for the Corporations, by the Corporations, will be hell on Earth, a permanent feudal power structure that will be damned unkillable. It is the ultimate nullification of the age of enlightenment, the death of science as we know it, and makes fascism look like a kid playing with toy soldiers.
..."We believe that every child should have access to an exceptional, personalized education that enables them to be happy and successful in an ever-changing world," reads AltSchool's mission statement. For $28,750-a-year, your kid can be one of them...
So for more money per year than a significant portion of the US families bring home in a year, a family can send one child to school.
In Soviet Facebook, website builds you!
Welfare cut to the able bodied happened a quarter century ago. Two years max is all you get. You can't cut much more. It simply is not a factor in school failure; poverty is, race is, the flight to the suburbs is. The failure is schools in California was due to Proposition 13, btw, the tax freeze. California had the finest schools in the country before prop 13. Almost free universities, too. They were tax-cut to death. It would do well to remember that. This is a long game to basically kill control over corporate power.
If you can afford tuition of $28,750/yr for elementary school, then you don't need a charity to subsidize the cost for you. This is nothing more than the 1% helping the other 1%. The promise of trickle down is merely a teaser for the other 99%.
Funding PRIVATE SCHOOLS!?!?! OMG, it's the end of the world as we know it! Surely, they know that not everyone can attend a PRIVATE school!
Education is a fundamental public good and no public resources should ever go to a private company to run schools. By doing that, you take away resources from the public schools and further damage them.
I know everyone loves to point to charter schools and what a wonderful job they're doing, but there are two things people conveniently ignore:
- Behind that charter school is a company/person getting insanely rich off of public funds and/or using their unique position to maximize profit.
- All the other schools in the area get hurt because resources get funneled away from them.
- You're basically corporatizing education -- I'm guessing Zuckerberg and Company will be influencing the curriculum to turn out a new generation of web code monkeys.
Everyone loves to bash teachers and teachers' unions, but that's not what we should be doing. Teaching needs to be a profession people want to go into, and people need to respect educators. Giving up and just selling the school system to the lowest bidder won't fix the long-standing problems a school district has. Nothing will -- there are always going to be poor kids with horrible home lives. Unless you go after that, education won't improve significantly in bad neighborhoods.
Is there an echo in here?
Many argue that public schools are failing our children, but few agree on the cause, so standardized tests have been rolled out to evaluate and quantify the various levels of achievement in the various school systems at both the state and federal level.
That in and of itself isn't really a problem, the problem (IMHO) with standardized testing is that it has become the only way to evaluate career teachers since the teachers and their union groups have typically rejected every other form of teacher evaluation.
For example, in one famous example a new superintendent walked into a major metropolitan school system and was confronted with the reality that some 60% of high school graduates failed to perform at an 8th grade level, yet some 90% of the teachers had peer-evaluated each other to be 'Excellent' teachers.
The issue isn't standardized testing, it is the importance the test results have to the teachers that causes great stress in the children.
The solution is to ban private schools and homeschooling.
The net effect will be that money driven assholes working to undermine the public school system, because they send their children to private schools and don't want to pay for public schools, will have to get involved in the school system and fix it rather than destroy it.
As long as that dirty, rotten, illegal, immoral, unethical, criminal Clinton Foundation stays away from this I am okay with it.
Who is that foundation run by again?
Usually an indication of problems to come, wonder if that's true this time.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Just to be clear, this effort is meant to eventually replace public schools with privately owned schools entirely. Once education becomes a service that a business sells, it will no longer be accessible to all segments of the population. Only those with sufficient money will be able to get educated.
It is very scary when you look at who funds these initiatives -- the same companies clamoring for more visas, claiming the American workforce doesn't have the right skills, and claiming that public education doesn't work when there is zero evidence of that. In reality they need a dumbed-down, uneducated workforce because that makes them either easy to exploit, or easy to justify the exploitation of foreign workers. It's a win-win for business.
And guess what would make the single biggest improvement to American education? Donating that 100 billion to our existing education system. Just imagine what we could do with that:
- Buy complete class sets of books for children so they can actually follow the literature they're reading.
- Have supplies such as pens, pencils, paper in classrooms so students don't have to go without these basic necessities.
- Have computers and school networks that are _maintained_. (it's easy to give a school 100 new computers, it's impossible to keep them maintained and running)
- Be able to offer the electives students desperately want but can't get (metal shop, wood shop, music, art, any kind of vocational training)
- Keep school campuses clean, functional, and graffiti-free.
- Actually pay teachers for their incredibly difficult job.
Be wary of these initiatives. They are about triggering a change that shifts education into a business, where profit is the only thing that matters and the quality of education has no consideration. And most importantly they are about limiting the accessibility of education.
For example the "Smarter Balanced" testing system is supported by these tech companies and it consists of a system that has no input from any real educators, places unreasonable demands on schools in terms of the computer systems they _must_ upgrade to in order to run the test, and has virtually no educational value. But boy, is there money to be made from it. That is what this is all about.
Ask yourself if any education system that is designed to be profit-first and deliberately unavailable to the poor is a good idea.
Please re-read my posting. I am claiming socialism is venture capitalism.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
" let educational professionals decide how best to invest that money"
That's a bad idea if there ever was one. The quality of schools in the US has been steadily declining ever since the federal government started sticking its nose in. More and more bureaucracy, regulations and administration. Less and less effective teaching.
You know, if federal control of schools were any good at all, the schools in Washington D.C. would shine. Instead, despite their huge budget (second highest in the country), D.C> schools are the worst in the country.
Send all of the "educational professionals" to flip hamburgers. Return schools to state and local control. Hire teachers who hold degrees in the subjects, instead of in education (this might be important). Some places will be disasters (but they already are). Others will finally be able to do something about fixing their schools. Without all the federal regulation, it'll probably cost a lot less, too...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Well, that depends on what you call "able bodied". Let me give you an example. I know a guy who's 36. In the prime of his life. He's got Bi-Polar disorder. It's a real thing, and he has real symptoms. If he goes unmedicated, about twice a year he'll go all "Charlie Sheen" on us and get a little crazy, sometimes even suicidal.
So he needs meds. When he's on meds he's a completely normal dude who goes years without a bi-polar episode. He found himself out of work and applied for SSDI. After all, when he's off his meds he truly is disabled and can't live a normal life. Being on meds though, makes him a completely normal guy who is able bodied and more than able to hold down a job.
So SSDI approved him as disabled, so he could get his meds for free from the government - which he needs. So now he's on meds and completely normal. But if he gets a job, he loses his disability qualification and loses his meds. So instead, he gets a SSDI check every month, gets a govenrment provided phone, got free furniture from a non-profit, gets public housing, gets SNAP, and gets state cash assistance. He basically lives the life of a college kid playing xbox and drinking beer all day in his apartment on the taxpayers dime. He's in a catch 22, if he works he may or may not find a job that covers his expensive medication. If he doesn't have meds he's a crazy threat to himself. But if he stays "disabled" he gets free meds and free everything. It's not a life of luxury, but it's a lot like living the college life in perpetuity. And he's going to get this free ride the rest of his life. He retired from the workforce at age 32! Perfectly able bodied when on his meds, but the system isn't setup for this situation, so us taxpayers get to support him. It's pretty messed up.
Again, how does this not create a caste system?
Actually he's right because it's all about the budget. This school has a limitless budget whereas every public school has a limit. You can do amazing things with a blank check. Call me when you do it on a budget.
Assuming it's the research and the software creation that costs the most, then once the software's created, it's no big deal.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
AltSchool is clearly a working title, maybe they could call it Elysium High or The Eternal Gardens School.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Socialism will not work. Government should be run like a private company.
You realize this would mean they would attempt to maximize profits right? That means raising taxes and cutting services. I'm not sure I see how that's a useful behavior set.
I use trickle down to fuel my car.
Everyone says I'm crazy, but I believe the best way to get fuel to the engine is to spray it at the top of the hood and let it find its own way to the tank.
Inhale my funky Zuckersnatch
Wow... You must not live very close to poverty. Passive welfare and generational welfare do exist and are a huge drain on the economies of states like West Virginia and Mississippi. There is no required job training and the system is abused. For example, somebe my ex girlfriend went to high school with came into her work and literally asked "why do you work? If you have a kid the government will pay for everything.". My ex naturally replied that her taxes are whay pay for that girl's lifestyle, but that attitude is quite common in that area.
A government provided job would do more for a poor person's morale and sense of pride than a hand out. Hand outs breed people with no sense of worth and no shame. Need more money? Have another kid! And then teach them to game the system too.
Education is very complex.
It is important to separate the issue of 'funding' from 'delivery'
I do agree with the idea that all children should have enough funding to get a decent education.
What the delivery model is really depends (public, private, voucher, charter...)
Sweden is going through an interesting case right now.
They have a full voucher system where you can either go to a public school or take your voucher to a private school.
I think this is really fair as if the public school does not suit you, you are free to go to a private school and you get equal funding.
The same is true in Canada in places like BC, Alberta. What's interesting is how this does not 'collapse' the public system. In most of these places, it is normally around 20% of kids enroll in these alternative schools.
How this gets twisted to mean against the poor baffles me. It empowers the poor to send their kids to alternate schools.
Technology is another big thing. I am a qualified teacher and technology can be a big changer. Lesson plans for example are normally shared by teachers ,but also held tightly. Really grade 9 math is going to be teaching the same thing in most areas under the same curriculum. Is there a reason for teachers to build their own lesson plans?
Theory: You build individual lesson plans for each class and tailor for different students.
Reality: most teachers don't do this. They just use general lesson plans and maybe if there is a special needs child, they will create an alternate lesson.
We could dramatically improve education by hiring more teaching assistants, using standard lesson plans, reducing teachers pay (IMHO).
For example, Instead of hiring one teacher at 90k, have one teacher at 60k, and one teaching assistant at 30k. This is just an example, the ratios can be whatever.
But of course this is the beauty of allowing alternate schools. They can experiment with these models. I really don't know if this will be better. In my opinion it would be.
Right now, it is just not tried as the public sector and teachers unions have a big say.
Even the common arguments in favor of public school tend to fall flat on their face. The main one being that it increases diversity as kids from all backgrounds go to the same school. This is ridiculous as parents now move entire neighborhoods to get their kids into a 'good school'. I think its an equally valid argument to suggest public schools INCREASE SEGREGATION. If you had school choice, maybe parents would stay in the same community knowing they could send their kids to a 'good school'.
Elementary psychopathy
Control fraud for beginners
Front running - the basics
You data? My data!
How to identify dogs on car roofs.
Killing for fun and profit.
so lets try to get them even earlier.
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To be fair, teachers aren't for gang members in their classes or a large amount of truancy caused by bad parenting. The more involved parents seem to favor school vouchers so they can pull their children out of that environment (I can't blame them when faced with that environment). But that also ends up hurting the original schools even more since their few well-performing students are leaving.
Bleh, give him a rifle and send him to Iraq. Let him go crazy over there.
No, a good deed would see this money used for fixing the public school system...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sweden is going through an interesting case right now. They have a full voucher system where you can either go to a public school or take your voucher to a private school.
How does that work out for them?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The education "industry" potentially is into the trillions which has a captive customer base; almost as captive as the healthcare industry has.
The potential profits from just a small slice of this developing new "marketplace" is staggering. No bigger gold rush exists outside of managing social security.
Regardless of intentions, the appeal here is extreme. Prisons were/are only a starting point and those have less growth potential (despite the heavy lobbying already present to keep numbers up.)
Sure corporate interests will be protected and some people do want their own little factories of goosestepping consumers but there is more than just that going on here.
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It justifies progressive taxation and social services from a capitalistic point of view. Without invoking socialism or appealing to better human nature. It also forces the ultra right winger who argue all taxation is theft by government to account for the investment made on them by other tax payers. This argument is useful upto that extent, not too different from Elizabeth Warren's, "we built the roads and educated your workers, you built it, you keep a good chunk of the profits, we contributed too, so give us our fair share to create more successful people like you for the next generation". But of course you could not carry it to the extreme.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
but I'm not sure a school system that works in downtown San Francisco will have the same needs as one in, say, downtown Detroit. I
Which is exactly why we need to remove the dept of fed from the education system and let the local schools decide whats best for them
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you do know that going to private school you still pay local school taxes right???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Quality McDonald's Food you can raise your child on... now as... education! .... and "super" walmart have free daycare!!
Quality Walmart products and service with a highly desirable clientele that you feel perfectly comfortable with allowing your children to visit on their own.... now as.... education
Low low prices...
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Spot on except that Fascism is Italian and it IS government by the corporations.
Government is captive already; the end game is still being setup the huge fight to reclaim it has not even begun and possibly will not until it is too late.
End game: between "1984" for intellectuals and "Brave New World" for the sheeple.
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you are being modded down for not understand that this isnt trickle down economics, but trickle down technology. Remember when flatscreens cost 10 grand??? now you can get one for a few hundred bucks.
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so doing a good deed in one place is somehow NOT doing a good deed because it doesnt mesh with YOUR ideals????
great to know you get to decide what other people do with their money....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Yes, it's much better to have a system that works equally well everywhere - and by "equally well," I mean, "equally badly."
The idea behind AltSchool is that the lesson plan for each student is tailored to their learning style - which suggests that the people building these systems are much more sensitive to the idea that "each student has different needs, abilities, and learning patterns," than you're giving them credit for.
This is not a 'good' deed. It is a typical investment in a company that sells software, which sounds more like snake oil. Any 'good' coming from it for education in general will be entirely ancillary, a matter of luck. They are perfectly welcome to use their money as they wish, but save the bullshit for the believers.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
It justifies progressive taxation and social services from a capitalistic point of view.
If you mean that they should attempt to maximize the social value created for each dollar spent then I'd agree, though the difficulty of measuring social value (or even agreeing on what that is) would make it pretty much impossible to do on any sort of quantitative basis. People can't even agree on what the goals are let alone the best way to get there.
If you want everyone to become more equal, help all disadvantaged people equally. This will work because it will automatically balance things out: those who have been disproportionately disadvantaged will be disproportionately helped.
The solution is to ban private schools and homeschooling.
The net effect will be that money driven assholes working to undermine the public school system, because they send their children to private schools and don't want to pay for public schools, will have to get involved in the school system and fix it rather than destroy it.
That won't help, as the wealthy live in a type of walled garden where their kids would all go to the same schools even if they were public schools. I live in a school district with arguably the 4th best high school in my state, private schools included (#1-3 are private). This is accomplished by making sure the average price of a home in my school district is about $600k in a county where the average home price is closer to $200k. We effectively have a private school that is paid for with public tax money.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Unions push for teacher evil based on tech scores? What planet are you from?
They possibly see a public good in this 'Khan Academy' model of education, but I'm put off at the for-profit motive.
In general, I wouldn't say "for-profit" is necessary a motive per se. In part, it's a function of the market philosophy and ideology -- if the system generates profits, it can fund itself, therefore it is sustainable. This view denies the idea that "infrastructure" shouldn't fund itself (see also rural broadband or lack thereof).
The other half of the equation needs consideration that true corruption can only affect people with good intentions. Every charity executives remuneration scandal starts with executives who really believe in the work of the charity, and therefore believe they're personally doing good work. The next logical step is for them to conclude that they deserve a reward for their good work, so they give it to themselves.
So the people putting money into this believe that it has to be a self-sustaining business, and that it therefore needs to be built on VC money, so the VCs are doing good work (even if that's not their primary goal) and therefore they deserve to be rewarded (which is the VCs primary goal). But then the logic of corruption kicks in: the VCs aren't doing it for the public good, so the guys who are doing it for the public good are clearly better and more deserving of reward than the VCs, so of course they too should be rewarded. But they're still doing it "for the kids".
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
No good deed goes uncriticized, right?
Setting up a company to cash in on private education sounds like a business plan, not a good deed.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
*dept of ed
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I see you were brought up under this hellish educational model. My condolences.
Everyone who is able-bodied should work, in an ideal situation. In the real world, you can't always get a job when you need one, and if you have to pay for day care, sometimes having a job means you have LESS money to work with than if you were sitting at home on the couch like everyone on the right thinks welfare recipients do.
There is a name for this phenomenon. It is called the cliff effect.
There's a school of thought that providing cash benefits perpetuates a cycle of poverty, that it encourages dependence instead of personal responsibility. The truth is that most people on cash assistance are trying desperately to get a job so they can stop collecting benefits, and forcing an arbitrary work requirement on them does nothing more than 1) make the situation worse for the recipients and their children, and 2) provide Big Biz with a captive audience of low-wage workers who can't quit when you treat them like dogshit.
Indeed. I know one guy who is trying to get off public assistance. He finds it humiliating. He told me he is looking forward to the day when he can proudly say he is contributing to society by paying his taxes.
The solution is not to end welfare, but to increase wages enough to shift the burden from public assistance to private wages.
While increasing the minimum wage would certainly help, the real solution is to take care of the cliff effect I cited in the link above. From my experience as a volunteer over the last year or two trying to help people get off public assistance, I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that our country's current welfare system is not so much a safety net but a vortex: it sucks people in but it is not so willing to let them go again.
In Virginia at least, if you have a child more than 10 months after you begin receiving benefits, that child is not eligible for additional benefits. Having a kid does not increase how much you get under TANF. Please stop spreading bullshit about welfare recipients. We can't solve the problems involved if people ignore the reality of the situation by demonizing recipients as goldbricking baby factories.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 sets a cap on benefits of no more than 2 consecutive years at a stretch and 5 years total over someone's lifetime. "Generational" welfare would involve longer time-frames. Please get your facts right if you're going to criticize.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
you do know that going to private school you still pay local school taxes right???
That is why they are sabotaging the public schools; they don't want to pay that tax money.
Most liberal fascist try to hide it. I complement you on your honesty.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
And sense it passed social security disability rolls have been growing by more than 1 million people per year.
Do you really think there are a million more disabled people this year vs. last? They just moved to a new scam.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Disability is a hard thing to prove. If after walking down to the mailbox I collapse in front yard how can you prove I'm not faking?
I remember in the 50's sometimes the workers picking up potatoes in my father's field would bring their children with them. There was usually a teen girl watching the babies. Modern farming methods eliminated millions of jobs.
As productivity has increased the need for workers has greatly diminished. Securing the border and bringing manufacturing back will still not supply enough jobs. There is no simple solution. Supposedly the oil is going to run out and the economy crash so no one will be worrying about welfare or disability.
I'm not sure why you're attributing that to trickle down economics instead of the welfare state.
Also, trickle down does work on a global level. People in underdeveloped countries are seeing their standard of living go up a lot due to the investments made there by large businesses. It just doesn't work very well for the poor people in the US.
What about students with disabilities and all the pending litigation over accessibility of technology? Will those people who are by law guaranteed and individualized education suitable to their needs and consistent with the education received by students without disabilities receive the same individualized education and at who's expense? Or are Zuckerberg and other's trying to keep up with the Gates'.