NYC Educator: Cyber Charter Whoppers on TV

NYC Educator: Cyber Charter Whoppers on TV:

Cyber Charter Whoppers on TV

I was pretty surprised to turn on my TV this morning and see a commercial for a company called K12. This company sells education via computer. The commercial showed loving parents, and suggested that if you really loved your kids you'd sign up right away. There's no charge because K12 is a public school. That's true in the sense that you won't be paying out of pocket. But we're most certainly subsidizing the company via our tax dollars.

In less than a minute I pulled up what Diane Ravitch had to say about K12. It appears even DFER guru Whitney Tilson finds it subpar. That's saying a lot. Whitney Tilson runs a hedge fund and is bullish on anti-worker companies like McDonald's and Walmart. It's tough to imagine the depths to which a company must sink to incur his disapproval.

My kid is not a scholar, but she's very social. Had I placed her in front of a computer rather than with a peer group, she'd probably hate me. One of the most shortsighted things about corporate reform is the notion that standardized test scores tell the story of how well kids do in school. We're always reading about college readiness, and how students need so many points on a Regents exam to demonstrate it. Of course that's arbitrary and ridiculous.

I know very few people who get through life by taking standardized tests, more precisely zero. But getting along with people is key to pretty much any profession. I'm not personally persuaded sitting kids in front of computers is any substitute for interaction with peers and teachers. Ravitch's most recent book, Reign of Error, is full of tales of cyber-charters that fail to help our kids.

Sadly, few people who see this commercial will bother to look up anything about this company. It's kind of remarkable that we're publicly funding NYC Educator: Cyber Charter Whoppers on TV: