Slashdot Mirror
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.
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."
It's a curious middle-class conceit that people who work in jobs think they know everything there is to know about the socio-political situation around their industry. Teachers commenting on education policy is no more interesting per se than policemen commenting on laws. And you're not even a regular policeman, you're a rich well-paid policeman who looks after a small gated community that is law-abiding, and your solution to crime is basically that everyone should be rich like these guys then there wouldn't be a problem.
Yeah, tricke down is working so well that the income inequality between rich and poor is getting wider and wider each generation.
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.