Remember when Charles Koch wrote that he had done an oopsie by being so partisan and dividing the country? That was back in late 2020, and it was followed by the rise of a new Koch Brand--Stand Together aka the Charles Koch Institute's new branding exercise.
So the “microschools” you describe here are clearly just homeschool coops without the homeschoolers’ greatest asset, namely the focused attention, connection and differentiation that a parent can bring to the role of teacher. So, lame.
But if you just want to imagine what that word “could” mean, I think you can arrive at some genuinely interesting and positive innovations. I teach at a public vocational high school. We have only about 100 students. We don’t have nearly (even considering scale) the levels of bullying and misbehavior that occurs at large high schools. We have excellent student success metrics, even though we aren’t drawing from students who see themselves as “college bound”. It’s probably pretty expensive on a per student basis (class sizes are about half or a third of a typical high school), but kids are happy here in a way that I haven’t ever experienced in my years teaching at multi-thousand student high schools.
I mean, details and implementation obviously matter. If we had shitty admin we’d probably all be just as miserable as people who work/learn at the big schools, but again, my experience is that people are miserable in those schools even when you have good admin.
I think smaller class size is the goal for everyone who cares about kids and education. I'm not sure that "get rid of classes entirely and DIY education" is the way to get to those better student-teacher ratios. 😞
This same family is behind price gouging, during Covid-19 they were using false shortage to justify but pricing never went back down to pre level, see Georgia Pacific products for example. Disgusting, greedy, corrupt Republicans.
Well here's the thing, let's just go back to neighborhood public schools. A lot of people have been against school consolidation. My mother fought a political battle to keep my neighborhood school open in the 1970s - successfully for 5 years she delayed the consolidation. And my school experience went into the toilet when they closed that school finally and I had to go to the consolidated school twice as far away and with so many more students. It was so awful, it was a terrible experience, so terrible, that I finally agreed to go to private school for high school rather than risk going to the big consolidated high school which I knew would just be worse. They know people want neighborhood schools. Consolidated schools are like a huge machine meat grinder institutions where it's more likely to have huge outbreaks of disease, and easier for kids to fall through all sorts of cracks.
SO I guess this plan of the Kochs is another FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE scenario to attract people to privatization after they've made the consolidated public schools into a shitshow of covid outbreaks, poor air quality, and teachers who can't afford to live never mind provide the supplies the school expects them to pay for themselves.
The individualization of education can mean many things. The variant that interests me might be described as individualization based on rate of learning. An important observation has to be that rate of progress in group based methods is not set by individual needs. Some learners could go faster and some should go slower than the pace set by a teacher. Both outcomes are problematic. Bright kids are bored and those moved along too quickly are lost and frustrated. There are multiple ways to address this reality. Tutors work great, but not practical resulting in inequities based on income. Technology may offer a solution. It is easy to criticize the companies attempting to promote this path, but I don’t see much that offers a practical alternative from the critics. If interested, read my series of posts about mastery learning. My background is in educational research, but my interest in policy tends to take the practical position of what can be done given the funds people are willing to support.
So the “microschools” you describe here are clearly just homeschool coops without the homeschoolers’ greatest asset, namely the focused attention, connection and differentiation that a parent can bring to the role of teacher. So, lame.
But if you just want to imagine what that word “could” mean, I think you can arrive at some genuinely interesting and positive innovations. I teach at a public vocational high school. We have only about 100 students. We don’t have nearly (even considering scale) the levels of bullying and misbehavior that occurs at large high schools. We have excellent student success metrics, even though we aren’t drawing from students who see themselves as “college bound”. It’s probably pretty expensive on a per student basis (class sizes are about half or a third of a typical high school), but kids are happy here in a way that I haven’t ever experienced in my years teaching at multi-thousand student high schools.
I mean, details and implementation obviously matter. If we had shitty admin we’d probably all be just as miserable as people who work/learn at the big schools, but again, my experience is that people are miserable in those schools even when you have good admin.
I think smaller class size is the goal for everyone who cares about kids and education. I'm not sure that "get rid of classes entirely and DIY education" is the way to get to those better student-teacher ratios. 😞
The push for “school choice” is going deep into sneaky ways to defund public schools.
While some of the same proponents are insisting public schools are all inept and need help choosing books and topics for curriculum.
This same family is behind price gouging, during Covid-19 they were using false shortage to justify but pricing never went back down to pre level, see Georgia Pacific products for example. Disgusting, greedy, corrupt Republicans.
Well here's the thing, let's just go back to neighborhood public schools. A lot of people have been against school consolidation. My mother fought a political battle to keep my neighborhood school open in the 1970s - successfully for 5 years she delayed the consolidation. And my school experience went into the toilet when they closed that school finally and I had to go to the consolidated school twice as far away and with so many more students. It was so awful, it was a terrible experience, so terrible, that I finally agreed to go to private school for high school rather than risk going to the big consolidated high school which I knew would just be worse. They know people want neighborhood schools. Consolidated schools are like a huge machine meat grinder institutions where it's more likely to have huge outbreaks of disease, and easier for kids to fall through all sorts of cracks.
SO I guess this plan of the Kochs is another FOR ME BUT NOT FOR THEE scenario to attract people to privatization after they've made the consolidated public schools into a shitshow of covid outbreaks, poor air quality, and teachers who can't afford to live never mind provide the supplies the school expects them to pay for themselves.
Ugh.
The individualization of education can mean many things. The variant that interests me might be described as individualization based on rate of learning. An important observation has to be that rate of progress in group based methods is not set by individual needs. Some learners could go faster and some should go slower than the pace set by a teacher. Both outcomes are problematic. Bright kids are bored and those moved along too quickly are lost and frustrated. There are multiple ways to address this reality. Tutors work great, but not practical resulting in inequities based on income. Technology may offer a solution. It is easy to criticize the companies attempting to promote this path, but I don’t see much that offers a practical alternative from the critics. If interested, read my series of posts about mastery learning. My background is in educational research, but my interest in policy tends to take the practical position of what can be done given the funds people are willing to support.