The reason to keep reinventing the wheel is because reinventing the wheel costs lots of money.
The monopolistic nature of the public education system means that customer demands - the parents - can be ignored. So, we've got a textbook industry that can ignore cost and can ignore efficacy, since their customer is the school district, but can't ignore political fads.
If you want textbooks to get relentlessly better and relentlessly cheaper then the people who are urgently concerned about the safety and effective education of the kids - parents - have to assume direct control over education.
That's in the process of happening with the spread of charter schools, vouchers, parental trigger and tax credits but we're only just now getting to the point that those changes are starting to impact education. But another two to three years should see the monopolistic complacency of the public education system shattered as the nature of public education, and the costs of that nature, are more widely understood as they stand in contrast to the alternatives.
If Europeans want to pay $9/gallon for gasoline that imposes no responsibility on America to follow suit and it certainly doesn't make $9/gallon gasoline a good idea.
It's impossible to "fully fund" public education because however much funding public education gets the result will be that it's not enough. The proof is in this question: how much money constitutes "all the money they need"?
The answer, never given explicitly, is always "more".
Unless of course some bright, young thing figures out a way to use the recoil of a projectile weapon to tactical advantage. Much of the history of warfare consists finding new lemonade recipes for the new lemons that keep showing up.
Oh, and not all projectile weapons have recoil or at least recoil that has to be absorbed. There was a fairly brief, by military standards, love affair between militaries and recoilless rifles.
Really? I thought Big Fat Oxycontin Whore Show was where the comment went flat. But you know, hatred of the proper people and ideas is really evidence of compassion, tolerance and intelligence.
When you aren't concerned with the quality of the evidence "temporarily" means "until I can't stop it".
Dismissing the burden such a ban places on the drillers isn't a measure of the unimportance of what they do but of how little exposure you have to the losses they'd suffer.
In medicine the dictum is "first, do no harm". But that requires a sense of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. You, like all admirers of the cautionary principle, have no sense of responsibility for the harm you might cause.
If I were a public official I'd take a look at the quality of the evidence, which is either execrable or nonexistent, balance that against losses that would be incurred and form a conclusion on that basis. If I were irresponsible I'd give into the temptation to appear terribly concerned with public safety when I have no reasonable basis for the concern but have something to gain by pandering to and inflaming public fears.
Not so much a hoax as an example of pandering to hysteria.
The wells haven't been opened yet so unless the earth can be frightened into producing an earthquake at the prospect of a fluid injection well the wells could hardly have had anything to do with the earthquake.
So yeah, it is a fragile and precarious victory since it's based fear-mongering. But then if you don't have the science on your side what are the alternatives to whipping up fear?
Don't worry, I'm sure the invisible hand of the free market will step in and all will be OK.
That's exactly what's happening.
The solar power industry's entirely dependent on subsidies. Solar power doesn't make any sense on an economic basis and the people who think solar power's the next step in power generation can't change that so they've thrown in with commercial interests, which are perfectly happy to take government money while it flows, in the hopes that those subsidies will "prime the pump".
But even government subsidies have an upper limit and that limit's clearly been reached. Now the "invisible hand", having been thwarted by those subsidies, is going about the business of setting things right by putting an end to companies that offer products not for their economic value but for their narcissistic value.
There's a rising tide of African voices that agree with you since most of that aid never leaves the capitals of the nations being "helped".
Other times the aid ends up trashing the local economy since aid agencies are quite often less concerned with the results of their efforts then with shaking down rich donors.
the hypothesis is that some number of climate scientists, noting which side their bread is buttered on, are quite capable of artfully, in some cases not so artfully, slanting the science. Can we at least agree that scientists are human and thus vulnerable to the same pressures that motive other human beings?
With all due respect to your smart-aleckiness, I don't think so.
At the very least the density of water, while resulting in a superficially similar motion to wing-flapping in air, is just such so much more dense a medium I'd guess the adaptations necessary for the penguin wouldn't easily translate to the adaptations necessary for flight. Then there's the problem of intermediate forms. What are the intermediate steps between a penguin adapted to "flying" in water and a penguin-descendent adapted to flying in air?
The "intermediate steps" problem is why I have doubts about birds evolving from purely gliding to powered flight.
Wings adapted to the production of thrust, to improve running performance, will also generate lift when held still in an air stream. The skeletal, musculature and nervous system adaptations can occur incrementally because incremental improvements result in incremental benefits. For a bird adapted to gliding the incremental benefit that accrues incremental, but immediate, benefits is a further perfection of gliding adaptations.
I don't know about Zerglings but it's always struck me that the use of wings to improve land speed would be a good evolutionary intermediate step to flapping-winged flight.
The bone and muscle structure and all the supporting bodily systems wouldn't be much different between a bird that's improved its running speed by wing-flapping and a bird that can take flight for short but worthwhile distances.
How about a bit less in the way of hysteria? All the folks who were having kittens over the phony reduction in the Greenland ice sheet are looking like schmucks now so perhaps a few people, like the editors of Slashdot for instance, could forgo schmuckdom by not engaging in heavy breathing ahead of the facts?
I wonder if it's premature to short the euro? If Germany really does follow through it can't help but pull down the value of the euro which brings up the question of who'll bail out Greece the next time they spend their way towards oblivion?
It's the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss subsidized dollars per job. It's also the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss how many non-subsidized jobs it cost to pay for one subsidized job.
Let's see how that notion works for decision about, oh, medicine for instance.
How many parents, when faced with a decision between modern medicine and a medicine man will opt for the latter? A few but then the responsibility, and the consequences, are where they ought to be so in the vast majority of cases the importance of the decision outweighs fads, fond hopes and feverishly-held beliefs of the parent(s). If parents ought to have the final say-so when it comes to life and death decision what kind of sense does it make to mandate deference to the "experts" over how that child's going to learn to read?
Sorry but parental choice is pivotal. It's the basis for everything that's wrong with the public education system.
Even the problem of intransigent, irresponsibly demanding or uninterested parents can be traced back to either compulsory attendance or the lack of parental choice.
Both undercut parental authority and both also negate any penalties for bad parental behavior. If you can't make choices you either make a nuisance of yourself, in the hopes of getting what you want for your child or you give up and trouble yourself to the least degree possible with a situation you can't escape, can't change and deprives you of important responsibilities of parenthood.
You know, I believe this may be the very first time that anyone, unable to make a response has decided to blow up the conversation as a means of diverting from the fact that they can make no substantive response.
But in case anyone's followed the thread this far, my delightful correspondent made the claim that charter schools select their entrants. That's a lie but a lie supporters of the current system repeat at every opportunity reacting angrily when challenged on th claim. A child gains entry to a charter school either via the luck of the draw or by being lucky enough to have parents who will camp out to get one of the limited number of seats a charter has to offer.
It's a district-based school that's allowed to select among applicants and even set standards for entry. That would be what's referred too as a "magnet" school. Charters aren't magnet schools therefore they can't select therefore the charge of "cherry-picking" is false.
There are various other falsehoods that supporters of the district system are driven to as a means of deterring people from investigating the interesting concept of parents deciding which school their child attends but I'm sure anyone who is interested in the evolution of the public education system that's currently underway will be exposed to all those very necessary falsehoods in due time.
And for you Anonymous Coward, are you really unaware of how silly your studied outrage makes you look or don't you care because posting as an Anonymous Coward? My suggestion is that you grow up a bit but I'm pretty sure that's advice you're incapable of taking to heart.
While much is broke about our educational system, charter schools, as currently operated, will do little to fix the structural problems. Rather, they will respond to market pressures in way start maximize their profit, which does not necessarily equate to improving the educational system.
Charter schools go a good deal of the way towards fixing the structural problems of public education by putting the power of organizational life and death in the hands of parents. If enough parents are dissatisfied with a particular charter school that charter school will close. You think maybe the prospect of having to close their doors will get the attention of charter operators? I think so and for those charter operators who can't be bothered with parental concerns being forced to close their doors solves the problem as well. The charter school has no power to compel attendance so exists because parents are satisfied that their kids are safe and getting an education.
As for the moral evil of "maximizing their profit" the charge takes on a somewhat less damning aspect when compared to the grotesque and cruel way in which many district schools fail the children they're supposed to be educating.
For example, charter schools do not want to operate on the basis of providing an appropriate education to everyone within their district - they want to be free to pick and chose who can attend - essentially cherry picking the most capable / least problematic students. What happens to the others? Who now pays for the kid that needs a para-pro for feeding during the school year?Who tells the school they have to accept someone and allow them to attend unit the are 21? More to the point - what happens to those the charter school doesn't accept?
Nice try but charter schools are in every way public schools which means, unlike magnet schools which are district schools, charters cannot be selective. It's a widely promulgated falsehood but it is a falsehood.
Also, being public schools federal funding which is available for the education of problematic kids is available to charters
We really don't value teachers. We expect them to deal with all sorts of social and behavioral issues with students *and* the students to *achieve* and then blame the teachers when that happens. Is it any wonder teachers leave as soon as they can? Or that, in areas where their skills are more marketable working for a private company - they bolt at the first chance they get? Try hiring a math or science teacher in a lot of districts - and see how many people you get when they can make 2x in a private company and not have to deal with a bunch of students and parents every day. Sure, there are bad teachers - but there are plenty more who care about the kids and do whatever they can to help; but at some point they have to decide if it is really worth it.
We value teachers. It's the public education system that doesn't value teachers as can be seen in the fact that good teachers receive compensation no different from bad teachers. The public education system doesn't differentiate between good and bad teachers and, in fact, resists attempts to measure differences in teaching skill. A further item of evidence to prove the indifference of the district-based public education system to teaching skill is the fact that it required state law to force districts to hire teachers who've received special training to deal with kids with serious problems. Previous to the passage of such law mandating properly-trained teachers any warm body with a teaching certificate could be stuck in a special education classroom. And were.
Accountability is great - many teachers would love real accountability - but what they get instead is parents who say "What are you going to do about my kid who is failing math? It's not *his* or *her* fault she skips school, never turns in assignments, and is drugged out when they are here." i'v
Khan Academy, along with all other ideas that undermine the school district model, the dominant form, are already under attack by those entrenched powers. However, public sentiment has clearly swung away from either support for the status quo or your apathetic acceptance of the status quo as proven by the widespread adoption of policy ideas which undermine that status quo.
No Child Left Behind under the Bush administration and Race To The Top under the Obama administration both passed with wide, bi-partisan support. Arne Duncan, Obama's original and current Secretary of Education is running around the country talking up vouchers, charters, accountability, standards and everything else that sets the teacher's unions teeth on edge. Despite that, and despite the NEA's overt and public effort to have Duncan dismissed Obama hasn't shown any indication that he's listening. So there's the federal level, executive and legislative.
At the state level the list of substantive reforms is just too long to detail but this year, as a result of the mid-terms, there's been a quite a wave of reforms. Like I wrote in my post above (hint, hint) the number of states enacting serious reforms of the sort that simply wouldn't have been debated previously is getting up toward half the states in the union. So there's your state level.
As for the local level, that's not where the sort of policy that qualifies as "education reform" is decided. Still, there is some variability among school districts and one, at least, has given Khan Academy a whirl. I don't think this is the start of a trend given the realities of the law that established public education but stranger things have happened. We'll see.
Gates has been guided for some time by the conventional wisdom about what constitutes innovation like small classes and small schools. I think there were a couple of other self-serving prescriptions adopted by Gates that are on the wish list of people who are quite happy with the public education status quo.
As you'd expect from an organization that's been unaccountable to parents since its inception those prescriptions did nothing but funnel large sums of money from the Gates Foundation, ultimately, into the pockets of the professionals and suppliers who enjoy a parasitic relationship with the public education system. Not that any other sort is possible but that's immaterial.
The basic fact is the public education system, as it's currently constituted, is beyond reform. I don't know if Gates has come to that realization yet although he seems to be headed in that direction with his enthusiasm for Khan Academy and the change of focus to the politics of public education. There seems to be a gradually building national consensus in favor of the view that the public education system is beyond redemption which is what's propelled charter school law adoption in forty states and, more recently, a burst of legislation to enact vouchers, tax credits, trim tenure and increase accountability. All those are the sorts of substantive changes that erode the foundation of the monopoly the public education system enjoys and as the catastrophes predicted by the supporters of the status quo fail to emerge they'll be the encouragement for more such law.
As for Ray Ozzie's work on the use of computers in education, sorry, the utility of the technology for any particular purpose is based on more then feasibility or even successful execution.
Costs, seemingly unimportant technical factors, the readiness of the prospective market to embrace the technology all play into when the technology makes its mark. Ozzie was too early so he gets a footnote. The same may yet happen to Sal Kahn although right now it's looking like he's going to revolutionize education. We can revisit the question in five years by which time it ought to be clear whether Khan Academy is a flash in the pan or a water-shed. I'd give small odds right now that it's the latter but education is very much an area of development now that it's finally starting to escape the deadening hand of government.
The good professor's got a peculiar view of things.
The intellectual property owners have a legal monopoly and the market is inherently averse to monopolies rewarding everyone who figures out a way to undercut the monopolists. Far from being a market failure it illustrates the proper functioning of the market and the role of government in interfering with the proper functioning of the market.
The purpose of copyright, like the purpose of the patent, is to confer a temporary monopoly to encourage the development of worthwhile ideas. That purpose is undercut by endlessly extending copyright into the indeterminable future. It's hard to even guess what that sort of appropriation of the patent system would've resulted in but it would hardly have been to serve the end of encouraging new developments.
It's not the computer that's at fault but the people who are responsible for the idea.
The "activists" contribute their moral outrage but don't much care if the kids actually get an education. It's the opportunity to display moral outrage that's the pay off for the activists. If the kids don't learn anything that's another opportunity to display moral outrage.
The politicians want to look like they're doing something and preferably with other people's money - getting something for nothing, even something useless, is politically worthwhile. Does it matter if the kids learn? Obviously not.
There's really only one group that has an unquestionable claim to be concerned primarily with education and that's the parents. They're not consulted because they might ask uncomfortable questions like "Will the computer do anything worthwhile?" Neither the activists nor the politicians are interested in having to answer questions like that.
Were the yeast scientists studying alcohol caught producing fraudulent data, suppressing the work of other yeast scientists whose results didn't agree with the lurid predictions of alcohol increase and colluding on how to cover up their fraud?
This ship has sailed. The CRU, and now the IPCC, are revealed as scientific frauds unworthy of the credence extended to them. As that credence has crumbled so have the claims made and supported by those organizations and carefully ignoring those facts isn't going to help the agenda of global warming believers.
You know what the real pisser is? There's some possibility that the warmies are right although determining whether human activity actually has an effect on the global climate will now have to wait until the debris from the collapse of the CRU and the IPCC is cleared away by real science.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason to keep reinventing the wheel is because reinventing the wheel costs lots of money.
The monopolistic nature of the public education system means that customer demands - the parents - can be ignored. So, we've got a textbook industry that can ignore cost and can ignore efficacy, since their customer is the school district, but can't ignore political fads.
If you want textbooks to get relentlessly better and relentlessly cheaper then the people who are urgently concerned about the safety and effective education of the kids - parents - have to assume direct control over education.
That's in the process of happening with the spread of charter schools, vouchers, parental trigger and tax credits but we're only just now getting to the point that those changes are starting to impact education. But another two to three years should see the monopolistic complacency of the public education system shattered as the nature of public education, and the costs of that nature, are more widely understood as they stand in contrast to the alternatives.
If Europeans want to pay $9/gallon for gasoline that imposes no responsibility on America to follow suit and it certainly doesn't make $9/gallon gasoline a good idea.
Fortunately, that day will never come.
It's impossible to "fully fund" public education because however much funding public education gets the result will be that it's not enough. The proof is in this question: how much money constitutes "all the money they need"?
The answer, never given explicitly, is always "more".
Unless of course some bright, young thing figures out a way to use the recoil of a projectile weapon to tactical advantage. Much of the history of warfare consists finding new lemonade recipes for the new lemons that keep showing up.
Oh, and not all projectile weapons have recoil or at least recoil that has to be absorbed. There was a fairly brief, by military standards, love affair between militaries and recoilless rifles.
Really? I thought Big Fat Oxycontin Whore Show was where the comment went flat. But you know, hatred of the proper people and ideas is really evidence of compassion, tolerance and intelligence.
When you aren't concerned with the quality of the evidence "temporarily" means "until I can't stop it".
Dismissing the burden such a ban places on the drillers isn't a measure of the unimportance of what they do but of how little exposure you have to the losses they'd suffer.
In medicine the dictum is "first, do no harm". But that requires a sense of responsibility for the consequences of your actions. You, like all admirers of the cautionary principle, have no sense of responsibility for the harm you might cause.
If I were a public official I'd take a look at the quality of the evidence, which is either execrable or nonexistent, balance that against losses that would be incurred and form a conclusion on that basis. If I were irresponsible I'd give into the temptation to appear terribly concerned with public safety when I have no reasonable basis for the concern but have something to gain by pandering to and inflaming public fears.
Not so much a hoax as an example of pandering to hysteria.
The wells haven't been opened yet so unless the earth can be frightened into producing an earthquake at the prospect of a fluid injection well the wells could hardly have had anything to do with the earthquake.
So yeah, it is a fragile and precarious victory since it's based fear-mongering. But then if you don't have the science on your side what are the alternatives to whipping up fear?
Don't worry, I'm sure the invisible hand of the free market will step in and all will be OK.
That's exactly what's happening.
The solar power industry's entirely dependent on subsidies. Solar power doesn't make any sense on an economic basis and the people who think solar power's the next step in power generation can't change that so they've thrown in with commercial interests, which are perfectly happy to take government money while it flows, in the hopes that those subsidies will "prime the pump".
But even government subsidies have an upper limit and that limit's clearly been reached. Now the "invisible hand", having been thwarted by those subsidies, is going about the business of setting things right by putting an end to companies that offer products not for their economic value but for their narcissistic value.
There's a rising tide of African voices that agree with you since most of that aid never leaves the capitals of the nations being "helped".
Other times the aid ends up trashing the local economy since aid agencies are quite often less concerned with the results of their efforts then with shaking down rich donors.
the hypothesis is that some number of climate scientists, noting which side their bread is buttered on, are quite capable of artfully, in some cases not so artfully, slanting the science. Can we at least agree that scientists are human and thus vulnerable to the same pressures that motive other human beings?
With all due respect to your smart-aleckiness, I don't think so.
At the very least the density of water, while resulting in a superficially similar motion to wing-flapping in air, is just such so much more dense a medium I'd guess the adaptations necessary for the penguin wouldn't easily translate to the adaptations necessary for flight. Then there's the problem of intermediate forms. What are the intermediate steps between a penguin adapted to "flying" in water and a penguin-descendent adapted to flying in air?
The "intermediate steps" problem is why I have doubts about birds evolving from purely gliding to powered flight.
Wings adapted to the production of thrust, to improve running performance, will also generate lift when held still in an air stream. The skeletal, musculature and nervous system adaptations can occur incrementally because incremental improvements result in incremental benefits. For a bird adapted to gliding the incremental benefit that accrues incremental, but immediate, benefits is a further perfection of gliding adaptations.
I don't know about Zerglings but it's always struck me that the use of wings to improve land speed would be a good evolutionary intermediate step to flapping-winged flight.
The bone and muscle structure and all the supporting bodily systems wouldn't be much different between a bird that's improved its running speed by wing-flapping and a bird that can take flight for short but worthwhile distances.
How about a bit less in the way of hysteria? All the folks who were having kittens over the phony reduction in the Greenland ice sheet are looking like schmucks now so perhaps a few people, like the editors of Slashdot for instance, could forgo schmuckdom by not engaging in heavy breathing ahead of the facts?
I wonder if it's premature to short the euro? If Germany really does follow through it can't help but pull down the value of the euro which brings up the question of who'll bail out Greece the next time they spend their way towards oblivion?
It's the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss subsidized dollars per job. It's also the kind of measure you use when you don't want to discuss how many non-subsidized jobs it cost to pay for one subsidized job.
Let's see how that notion works for decision about, oh, medicine for instance.
How many parents, when faced with a decision between modern medicine and a medicine man will opt for the latter? A few but then the responsibility, and the consequences, are where they ought to be so in the vast majority of cases the importance of the decision outweighs fads, fond hopes and feverishly-held beliefs of the parent(s). If parents ought to have the final say-so when it comes to life and death decision what kind of sense does it make to mandate deference to the "experts" over how that child's going to learn to read?
Sorry but parental choice is pivotal. It's the basis for everything that's wrong with the public education system.
Even the problem of intransigent, irresponsibly demanding or uninterested parents can be traced back to either compulsory attendance or the lack of parental choice.
Both undercut parental authority and both also negate any penalties for bad parental behavior. If you can't make choices you either make a nuisance of yourself, in the hopes of getting what you want for your child or you give up and trouble yourself to the least degree possible with a situation you can't escape, can't change and deprives you of important responsibilities of parenthood.
You know, I believe this may be the very first time that anyone, unable to make a response has decided to blow up the conversation as a means of diverting from the fact that they can make no substantive response.
But in case anyone's followed the thread this far, my delightful correspondent made the claim that charter schools select their entrants. That's a lie but a lie supporters of the current system repeat at every opportunity reacting angrily when challenged on th claim. A child gains entry to a charter school either via the luck of the draw or by being lucky enough to have parents who will camp out to get one of the limited number of seats a charter has to offer.
It's a district-based school that's allowed to select among applicants and even set standards for entry. That would be what's referred too as a "magnet" school. Charters aren't magnet schools therefore they can't select therefore the charge of "cherry-picking" is false.
There are various other falsehoods that supporters of the district system are driven to as a means of deterring people from investigating the interesting concept of parents deciding which school their child attends but I'm sure anyone who is interested in the evolution of the public education system that's currently underway will be exposed to all those very necessary falsehoods in due time.
And for you Anonymous Coward, are you really unaware of how silly your studied outrage makes you look or don't you care because posting as an Anonymous Coward? My suggestion is that you grow up a bit but I'm pretty sure that's advice you're incapable of taking to heart.
While much is broke about our educational system, charter schools, as currently operated, will do little to fix the structural problems. Rather, they will respond to market pressures in way start maximize their profit, which does not necessarily equate to improving the educational system.
Charter schools go a good deal of the way towards fixing the structural problems of public education by putting the power of organizational life and death in the hands of parents. If enough parents are dissatisfied with a particular charter school that charter school will close. You think maybe the prospect of having to close their doors will get the attention of charter operators? I think so and for those charter operators who can't be bothered with parental concerns being forced to close their doors solves the problem as well. The charter school has no power to compel attendance so exists because parents are satisfied that their kids are safe and getting an education.
As for the moral evil of "maximizing their profit" the charge takes on a somewhat less damning aspect when compared to the grotesque and cruel way in which many district schools fail the children they're supposed to be educating.
For example, charter schools do not want to operate on the basis of providing an appropriate education to everyone within their district - they want to be free to pick and chose who can attend - essentially cherry picking the most capable / least problematic students. What happens to the others? Who now pays for the kid that needs a para-pro for feeding during the school year?Who tells the school they have to accept someone and allow them to attend unit the are 21? More to the point - what happens to those the charter school doesn't accept?
Nice try but charter schools are in every way public schools which means, unlike magnet schools which are district schools, charters cannot be selective. It's a widely promulgated falsehood but it is a falsehood.
Also, being public schools federal funding which is available for the education of problematic kids is available to charters
We really don't value teachers. We expect them to deal with all sorts of social and behavioral issues with students *and* the students to *achieve* and then blame the teachers when that happens. Is it any wonder teachers leave as soon as they can? Or that, in areas where their skills are more marketable working for a private company - they bolt at the first chance they get? Try hiring a math or science teacher in a lot of districts - and see how many people you get when they can make 2x in a private company and not have to deal with a bunch of students and parents every day. Sure, there are bad teachers - but there are plenty more who care about the kids and do whatever they can to help; but at some point they have to decide if it is really worth it.
We value teachers. It's the public education system that doesn't value teachers as can be seen in the fact that good teachers receive compensation no different from bad teachers. The public education system doesn't differentiate between good and bad teachers and, in fact, resists attempts to measure differences in teaching skill. A further item of evidence to prove the indifference of the district-based public education system to teaching skill is the fact that it required state law to force districts to hire teachers who've received special training to deal with kids with serious problems. Previous to the passage of such law mandating properly-trained teachers any warm body with a teaching certificate could be stuck in a special education classroom. And were.
Accountability is great - many teachers would love real accountability - but what they get instead is parents who say "What are you going to do about my kid who is failing math? It's not *his* or *her* fault she skips school, never turns in assignments, and is drugged out when they are here." i'v
Khan Academy, along with all other ideas that undermine the school district model, the dominant form, are already under attack by those entrenched powers. However, public sentiment has clearly swung away from either support for the status quo or your apathetic acceptance of the status quo as proven by the widespread adoption of policy ideas which undermine that status quo.
No Child Left Behind under the Bush administration and Race To The Top under the Obama administration both passed with wide, bi-partisan support. Arne Duncan, Obama's original and current Secretary of Education is running around the country talking up vouchers, charters, accountability, standards and everything else that sets the teacher's unions teeth on edge. Despite that, and despite the NEA's overt and public effort to have Duncan dismissed Obama hasn't shown any indication that he's listening. So there's the federal level, executive and legislative.
At the state level the list of substantive reforms is just too long to detail but this year, as a result of the mid-terms, there's been a quite a wave of reforms. Like I wrote in my post above (hint, hint) the number of states enacting serious reforms of the sort that simply wouldn't have been debated previously is getting up toward half the states in the union. So there's your state level.
As for the local level, that's not where the sort of policy that qualifies as "education reform" is decided. Still, there is some variability among school districts and one, at least, has given Khan Academy a whirl. I don't think this is the start of a trend given the realities of the law that established public education but stranger things have happened. We'll see.
Your understanding is incorrect.
Gates has been guided for some time by the conventional wisdom about what constitutes innovation like small classes and small schools. I think there were a couple of other self-serving prescriptions adopted by Gates that are on the wish list of people who are quite happy with the public education status quo.
As you'd expect from an organization that's been unaccountable to parents since its inception those prescriptions did nothing but funnel large sums of money from the Gates Foundation, ultimately, into the pockets of the professionals and suppliers who enjoy a parasitic relationship with the public education system. Not that any other sort is possible but that's immaterial.
The basic fact is the public education system, as it's currently constituted, is beyond reform. I don't know if Gates has come to that realization yet although he seems to be headed in that direction with his enthusiasm for Khan Academy and the change of focus to the politics of public education. There seems to be a gradually building national consensus in favor of the view that the public education system is beyond redemption which is what's propelled charter school law adoption in forty states and, more recently, a burst of legislation to enact vouchers, tax credits, trim tenure and increase accountability. All those are the sorts of substantive changes that erode the foundation of the monopoly the public education system enjoys and as the catastrophes predicted by the supporters of the status quo fail to emerge they'll be the encouragement for more such law.
As for Ray Ozzie's work on the use of computers in education, sorry, the utility of the technology for any particular purpose is based on more then feasibility or even successful execution.
Costs, seemingly unimportant technical factors, the readiness of the prospective market to embrace the technology all play into when the technology makes its mark. Ozzie was too early so he gets a footnote. The same may yet happen to Sal Kahn although right now it's looking like he's going to revolutionize education. We can revisit the question in five years by which time it ought to be clear whether Khan Academy is a flash in the pan or a water-shed. I'd give small odds right now that it's the latter but education is very much an area of development now that it's finally starting to escape the deadening hand of government.
The good professor's got a peculiar view of things.
The intellectual property owners have a legal monopoly and the market is inherently averse to monopolies rewarding everyone who figures out a way to undercut the monopolists. Far from being a market failure it illustrates the proper functioning of the market and the role of government in interfering with the proper functioning of the market.
The purpose of copyright, like the purpose of the patent, is to confer a temporary monopoly to encourage the development of worthwhile ideas. That purpose is undercut by endlessly extending copyright into the indeterminable future. It's hard to even guess what that sort of appropriation of the patent system would've resulted in but it would hardly have been to serve the end of encouraging new developments.
It's not the computer that's at fault but the people who are responsible for the idea.
The "activists" contribute their moral outrage but don't much care if the kids actually get an education. It's the opportunity to display moral outrage that's the pay off for the activists. If the kids don't learn anything that's another opportunity to display moral outrage.
The politicians want to look like they're doing something and preferably with other people's money - getting something for nothing, even something useless, is politically worthwhile. Does it matter if the kids learn? Obviously not.
There's really only one group that has an unquestionable claim to be concerned primarily with education and that's the parents. They're not consulted because they might ask uncomfortable questions like "Will the computer do anything worthwhile?" Neither the activists nor the politicians are interested in having to answer questions like that.
Were the yeast scientists studying alcohol caught producing fraudulent data, suppressing the work of other yeast scientists whose results didn't agree with the lurid predictions of alcohol increase and colluding on how to cover up their fraud?
This ship has sailed. The CRU, and now the IPCC, are revealed as scientific frauds unworthy of the credence extended to them. As that credence has crumbled so have the claims made and supported by those organizations and carefully ignoring those facts isn't going to help the agenda of global warming believers.
You know what the real pisser is? There's some possibility that the warmies are right although determining whether human activity actually has an effect on the global climate will now have to wait until the debris from the collapse of the CRU and the IPCC is cleared away by real science.