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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."
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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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.
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."
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".
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
How about paying taxes and not lobbying the country to shreds? Maybe then we could all have schools.
Prosperity *is* pizza you fucks.
I went to a state-run school for the criminally gifted. I can't help but think if it was a private school I might've ended up somewhere like Goldman Sachs.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
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..."
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?
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
Yeah, tricke down is working so well that the income inequality between rich and poor is getting wider and wider each generation.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.