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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.
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."
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."
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.
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
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
And who wouldn't trust that billionaires have the same objectives as a publically elected government when it comes to educating our children?
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.
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
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