Why This Teacher Supports Sanders for President

Every political cycle is a sad reminder that public education in general and teachers in particular are political orphans. Neither party even pretends to be interested in or supportive of traditional public education and the people who work in that sector. Where once upon a time, kissing a baby could be reliably followed by thanking America's teachers. Now both traditional parties just want to punch us in the face.

None of the 147 Presidential candidates at any point showed any concern about making nice with teachers or standing up to the institution to which we have devoted our lives, the institution which is the very foundation of our country, our democracy.

No, not even Bernie. We've been able to get him to cough up a couple of usable quotes that would suggest that he's a fan of teachers and public education, which puts him ahead of Hillary who bent over backwards to avoid letting one sentence worth of charter school criticism upset any of her deep pocketed backers [but even at Sunday night's debate, given a chance to directly address education and educator issues, he punted]. Pretty sure I missed the part where she dispatched Bill to reassure public school teachers that any of her zillion pro-charter comments were no cause for alarm. And the closest that any GOP candidate came to saying something nice about teachers was that time John Kasich said that he would abolish teacher lunch rooms, which sounds mean but, hey-- at least he didn't say he would abolish letting teachers have lunch at all.

If I were a one-issue voter, a candidate who voted his job, I'd have a choice between  a symbolic for D. Jill Stein or just staying home.

Let's not kid ourselves. In the political world, nobody has our collective backs.

But I'm not a single-issue voter. Well, actually, I am. But it's a bigger issue than public education, even though it's the same issue.

My issue is democracy.

Sanders doesn't talk much about education, and I don't get the impression that it's something he's really studied up on or fully grasped.

But he talks a great deal about the ways in which our democracy has been stripped from us, eroded by the toxic spread of big money as the very rich buy up our government, our processes, and, almost without exception, our candidates for major offices.

This ongoing attempt to milk the taxpayers while stripping them of their voices, their say, their ability to help steer the national bus-- that is the problem that, right now, is virtually all problems. The dismantling of our public education, our selling off of the pieces, our transformation of universal public education into a system that serves the needs of only a few, a system that enriches the already-rich while trying to get away with training many young citizens to be nothing more than drones, fodder for their corporate overlords-- that grand perversion of public education is mirrored in the co-opting of our food industry, our military industry, our decaying cities, our twisted political system, our money-sucking health care system.

I care, obviously, about our public education system, about the teaching profession, about the care and nurture of our young people. But I am also aware that the gutting of public education is a symptom of a larger problem, like a shirt that keeps getting bloody because it's being worn by a person with a knife driven deep into his chest. And I can live with somebody who's not too concerned about the shirt if he's focused on removing the knife and healing the wound.

We have candidates who want to punch the shirt-wearer for bleeding all over the place. We have candidates who want to "solve" the problem by putting a different shirt on a different person. And we have more than a few candidates who owe their allegiance to the knife manufacturer and will never do anything with that knife except to drive it in deeper and maybe twist it a little.

I'm concerned about the shirt, and the blood. Sanders is not paying so much attention to the shirt, but he is totally on point about the knife and the wound and the need to draw the weapon out and heal the breach.

To be less metaphorical, education is not anybody's issue-- including Sanders. But the toxic rot and corruption that he rails against in the country is the same toxic rot that is eating at public education. I can get behind that. I'm not a naive kid, and I don't expect miracles. But I can get behind a man who at least talks about the knife and the wound. That's why this teacher supports Bernie Sanders.

What Is the Charter Difference?

What exactly makes a charter school a charter school? What is it that charter supporters expect to get from a charter school that they cannot get from a public one?

Variety and choice? 

Some advocates say that parents and students need choices, a variety, a plethora, a cornucopia of educational options from which to choose. We should have a sciency school for science students and a musicky school for musicians and a welding school for welders.

But we have that. In smaller districts, the possibility of magnet schools and specialty schools is lessened, but even in my mostly-rural county, districts have a co-operative vocational school that prepares welders and auto mechanics and security guards. Large urban districts can have all manner of specialty magnet schools that give students plenty of variety and choice. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Quality?

As I've argued before, people don't really want choice, anyway-- they want their children to go to one good school. Being "trapped in a zip code" never comes up when people have a school they like.

There's no arguing that some schools fail to live up to the promise of public education. But if you don't like the color of your house, do you paint the house, or do you buy a second house? If the school that I'm providing for my community's children is not doing a great job, sending some kids elsewhere will leave Sore Thumb High School still right where it is, doing poorly.

If I want it to be a better school, I can make it into a better school. This is what many communities have done over the years-- remade and reconfigured their local school to better reflect their desires at the time. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Regulations?

Charter fans say, "Well, we can create schools that don't have to work under the weight of bad government regulations."

I say, "If we know they are bad regulations, why don't we lift them for all schools?" And if it's a bad idea to lift them for all schools, exactly why are they bad regulations? If there are regulations that are not good for education, let's get rid of them for everybody, and if they are good for everybody, then let's have everybody follow them.

We can fix stupid laws on the legislative level. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Staffing?

Charter fans like the idea of schools that are non-union, non-professionally-trained teachers who can be paid by whatever mechanism and salary schedule. But in many locations, advocates have successfully imposed such ideas on the public system, with the dismantling of tenure, collective bargaining, and professional requirements to be a teacher. And local school districts are always free to negotiate whatever contracts the local market will bear. We don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Competition?

Free marketteers believe that if schools have to compete, that will drive them into paroxysms of excellence. But we already have competition between school districts-- in fact, competition between school districts is often a single factor in larger competition between communities. One of the ways that communities distinguish themselves as Better (and the houses therein more valuable and the neighborhood more desirable) is by making sure that the schools in East Egg are way better than the ones in West Egg. It is competition that has produced the very tyranny of the zip code that reformsters so hate. Because a feature of free market competition is that it has winners and losers, both in terms of producers and consumers.


We already have a school system handcuffed to a free market system of real estate. Schools already compete-- as best they can, given whatever local limitations they wrestle with. We don't need charter schools to establish a system of competition.

Doing more with less?

Do we need charters to show us how to do more with less? This is a non-starter. Plenty of public schools already have to do more with less every year, while charters frequently decide that the secret of success is more money. Next?

Laboratories of Innovation?

There is nothing to keep public schools from innovating and no signs that charters have discovered heretofore undiscovered revolutionary ideas in education. There is also nothing to indicate that public schools are not already filled with educators intent on finding new and better ways to do educate students. If you want to see more innovation, then by all means, rewrite the rules and regulations of public schools to reward or spur more such innovation.

But we don't need charter schools to accomplish this.

Selective enrollment?

All right, this isn't even an advantage that charters claim they want, but it's one they're often accused of-- creating a school with carefully selected student body, with undesirable low-performing high cost students pushed out and desirable high-performing low cost students gathered in.

But this, too, is something we already do in public schools. Districts with magnet or specialty schools require students to move through an admissions process. And systems have an alternate education placement with students whose more severe issues, from autism to social maladjustment to developmental disability, make them a poor fit for the mainstream classroom.

We don't like to admit that we don't always take all comers in public schools, but we know how to be selective about who gets in the door and stays in the building. Some charters go much further, but the basic principle is the same-- public schools just don't fess up. Not that we should be proud of it, but we don't need charter schools to accomplish this goal.

So, really-- what do we need charters for?

Improvements in quality, choice, innovation, instruction, programs-- all of it can be accomplished in a public school system. All of these ideas for improving education could be applied to public schools, which would have the additional advantage of bringing the improvements to ALL students instead of a small group.

Of course, part of the challenge would be that changes and reforms would have to be discussed, debated and deployed publicly. A person who wanted, say, to subject non-wealthy non-white students to boot camp style No Excuses education would have to convince the taxpayers that it was a good idea. It's possible that only charters can provide an opportunity for one driven visionary to impose his or her ideas on a school without being answerable to anyone. But that would be less like a democratic institution and more like a small-scale dictatorship. It's not a very admirable goal-- and anyway, the invention of mayoral control has once again made it possible to establish small scholastic dictatorships without resorting to charters. This, too, we can accomplish without charter schools.

There isn't anything on this list of goals that we actually need charter skills to accomplish.

Is there any other goal I'm forgetting to-- oh, wait a minute.

Redirecting Tax Dollars

Charter schools do accomplish one goal that can't be achieved by public schools-- they manage to redirect public tax dollars into the pockets of private corporations, charter operating companies, corporate shareholders, and guys who just figured they'd make some money in the charter biz.

For everything else on the list, no charters are necessary. For everything else on the list-- well, imagine this: your car needs a new bulb for the headlight, has a flat spare tire, and is filled with discarded beer cans and McDonald's wrappers, and your mechanic says, "Well, obviously you have no choice but to buy a new car." And that makes no sense until you discover that the used car salesman is your mechanic's business partner.

The charter purpose that cannot be achieved by public schools is to move public tax dollars into private pockets. The one true difference between public schools and charter schools as currently envisioned is that only charter schools are making people wealthy. And if that's the only true thing different about charters, maybe we should stop talking about charters and start talking about fixing the issues-- the education-related issues-- that we really want to work on.

KY: Charter Salvation?

Kentucky is one of the few states without a charter law. But what they do have is a new governor, and Matt Bevin would love to bring Kentucky into the loving embrace of the charter industry.

Kentucky residents are getting a crash course in the charter biz. That includes all of the usual arguments, including Education Secretary Hal Heiner's call to put adult interests aside and Do It For The Children. Heiner is a long-standing charter booster and real estate developer who actually ran against Bevin in the governor's race; after defeating him, Bevin appointed him ed secretary.

Heiner and Bevin believe that the children of Kentucky need more choices, but Dr. Donna Hargens, superintendent of Jefferson County Public Schools, points out that the district offers 18 magnet schools and 52 magnet and optional programs.

Charter proponents have been pitching Indiana as a success story, including the Tindley schools of Indianapolis, and that turns out to underline the problem-- Tindley schools have just turned out to be in the middle of a financial mess, and their visionary leader will step down at the end of the year with some of his personal spending under attack. The school has been accused of having a high suspension rate, and there's also a case to be made that some Tindley charters have been the point of the spear for gentrification of neighborhoods.

But most of all, Indiana is one more place where it's becoming evident that you can't have a charter system without hitting the taxpayers up for more money. Tindley's charter company was itself begging just a few years ago when it took over Arlington High and found the finances insufficient for the job. Indiana is a bigger charter mess than we can get into here, but one thing they have conclusively proven time and again is that A) if you want to turn around a failing school, you have to spend more money on it and B) if you try to operate multiple parallel public and private systems, you will either spend a lot more money or watch a bunch of underfunded chaos and business failures. Or maybe both.

Bottom line: as a model for See How Great Charters Would Be, Indiana is a poor choice.

Kentucky charter advocates say that poor kids should have choice, and teachers should have the chance to have their pay linked to test scores.

The head of the Jefferson County School Board has called for charter involvement in the district because A) charters can be super-duper innovative and B) choice and competition are awesome. But he believes that choice is already present, and that it's up to the public schools to get the job done. He would like to bring charter operators in to just kind of help run the district, contributing their bold, innovative ideas. Will anybody be shocked and surprised when the bold, innovative idea turns out to be, "Give us more money"?

Public school proponents are pushing back. Brent McKim, head of the Jefferson County Teachers Association, wrote an op-ed that lays out the issues. Charters don't have financial transparency. Charters don't have public oversight. And he indicts charters for being agents of segregation.

There is a growing concern that the proliferation of independent charter schools is contributing to a much more isolated and homogeneous educational experience for young people that does not prepare them for the diverse and challenging world they will experience as adults.

McKim reminds us that part of the benefit of public education is supposed to be bringing students together from many different backgrounds to learn to live together and to get an education that reflects community values. There's no question that many public schools fail in this mission, but there's no reason to think that charter schools are likely to do any better. Why replace problematic public schools with charter schools which have the same problem? Wouldn't it be better to address the problem?

If Governor Bevin and his friends have their way, Kentucky will have the chance to address many problems. As a state starting from scratch, and with much to observe, they could conceivably be a state that learns from everyone else's mistakes and does charters right. Of course, that would be expensive, and charter fans never seem to want to talk about that with the taxpayers. Good luck, Kentucky.

Involving Introverts

I'm never a fan of embracing technology for technology's sake, but I do love a good technological solution to a teaching problem, and I have found some technology is an absolute boon to engaging introverts.

It helps, of course, to understand what the heck an introvert is. Introverts aren't necessarily shy, and don't hate all human contact. But interaction is work. The classic distinguisher for extroverts and introverts-- two people go to a party, where both mingle and talk and have a good time with all the folks in the room, but the extrovert comes out pumped up and ready to go do something else, and the introvert emerges wrung out and ready to settle into his own chair in his own room in his own home by his own self.

Some extroverts really don't get introversion and suffer from the notion that introversion is a problem that needs to be solved. This can be problematic in a classroom; many introverts can tell you a story of some extroverted teacher who decided to force the introvert to come out of her shell, or to get more engaged with the other students in the room.

When I take a test like, say, the Myers-Briggs inventory, I peg the introvert-o-meter. But I've been a performing amateur musician my whole life, and I was a union president. Your introvert students can do everything that your extroverts can; they just may approach it a bit differently.

Years ago I discovered Moodle, an open-source learning platform. One of its features was a discussion board that allowed threaded conversations. It was handy for any number of classroom activities, but its most powerful feature in my class was discussion. Moodle has a discussion board feature that allows for threaded conversations, and for some of my students, this was a dream-- they could say everything they wanted to say without having to navigate the challenges of group social interaction. Students who had previously had little to say in class now had a great deal to say. Moodle also allowed me to turn on a feature that let the students "score" each others' responses. This was helpful for cutting back on. "Yeah, what he said" posts, but it also underlined the fact that some of my students who weren't adept enough to earn social capital by live meatworld interactions were now earning it by the quality of their writing and reasoning.

For introverts, social interaction is work. As teachers, we often imagine that the social interaction piece of an assignment is not really a real factor, like having point on your pencil or knowing how to sit in a chair. But for introverts, removing the work of social interaction can help them focus on the work of developing an idea or solving a problem.

I'm not suggesting that we shuffle all of our students off to isolated cages or walled-in computer stations. That would be stupid. But just as some teachers try to accommodate different learning styles, it's helpful to remember there are different social styles, and that, for example, deciding to do an assignment as group work is not a break for all of our students-- for some it's more work, not less, to navigate that situation.

Introverts don't need to be fixed and we don't need to be coddled. We don't need to be in an introvert-centered classroom. But it helps is we have a teacher who recognizes how we interact with the world and other humans. It's just one more way that students can be different and teachers can help by recognizing that the differences exist as something other than a problem.

ICYMI: In like a lamb

 Let's kick of March with some good readings, both new and old.

Why I'm Not Impressed with Effective Teachers

Timothy Shanahan makes an important distinction between effective teachers and effective teaching.

Shut Up and Sit Down

Joshua Rothman in the New Yorker looks at our dangerous leadership obsession, tracing it up through the current leadership industry which assumes that leadership and power can be decoupled.

21st Century Learning, Inc

From a couple of years ago, here's Tara Ehrcke's look at the business of 21st century learning, and why it is a bunch of hooey and a marketeer's drea.

Marc Tucker and Common Core Fuel Injection

You probably read this, and you definitely should have. Mercedes Schneider hoists Marc Tucker by his own badly constructed metaphorical fuel injector.

The ESSA Negotiated Rulemaking Committee

A breakdown of who, exactly, is on that committee to flesh out the details of ESSA.

A Bill of Rights for School Children

Russ Walsh has a book coming out soon. I've already read it, and I recommend it not just for your own reading, but as a gift for the civilian in your life who hasn't been paying close attention to what's going on in education. This short piece is a sort of preamble to the book. Check it out. 

The Obligations of Wealth

This is not the blog piece you think it's going to be.

I am not going to write about how the Waltons or the Gates or the Kochs or the Rich Folks Whose Names I Don't Know should live their lives, spend their money, and generally behave themselves. It's not, mind you, that I don't have some thoughts about it. But those are not the wealthy people I'm going to write about today.

I'm going to write about me.

It's fun to focus righteous rage on Those People and condemn the profligate wealthy and their terrible use of their privilege and power and money. But years ago I needed to face up to something. I live in a rural/small town area, one that once upon a time has a decent industrial base, but has lost much of that over the past fifty years. We're not destitute. But we live among the residual pieces of an earlier wealth, the churches and homes and other fine buildings erected 150 years ago by oil barons and captains of industry. Want a beautiful Victorian home dirt cheap? We've got the places for you-- but you need to bring your own job.

As a teacher with thirty years in, I'm pretty well off. I make above the median pay for the county. Hugely above the per capita income for the county. I own my own home, and while it's neither large or without issues, it's also right up against the river and close to the center of town. I have reliable transportation (no small thing-- in the country homelessness isn't nearly as problematic as transportationlessness), and I'm only six minutes from work. I'm not rich in any absolute sense, and I have plenty of bills to pay with a paycheck that doesn't always stretch as far as would be handy. There are things I'd like to have that I can't afford, a level of security and insulation I'd love to provide my family, but can't.

So, to be clear, I am not arguing that I am overpaid and that our next teacher contract should roll our pay back. Because it shouldn't. But that's not what I'm talking about.

It is not easy for me to talk about this. It's not easy to talk about possessing privilege. I don't honestly know how to talk about the benefits I have in life without feeling like I'm bragging, and bragging about things that are just a much a product of luck or grace or whatever you want to call it as any hard work or skill that I brought to the table (and really, how many of my skills are founded on luck of the genetic draw). I have made more than enough mistakes, screwed up more than enough times to have earned a life far less rewarding than the one I've got. And that's before we even get to the things that never happened-- I never developed cancer, never got hit by a bus, never had a heart attack, never lost a limb in a major accident.

Anyway. When I contemplate my lot in life, I feel two things: gratitude and obligation.

It is easy to talk about what obligations Bill Gates should feel because of his wealth. But what should I be doing with my relative wealth? Here are some of the answers I've arrived at.

Think before I open my mouth

Nothing makes me cringe like a teacher complaining about the end of summer vacation. You know who doesn't get much vacation at all? Way too many American workers. Look around. There isn't a holiday left on which workers aren't called in to work a shift. And for people who are on the bottom end of the economic scale, taking a vacation is expensive as hell, because all vacations are without pay. One of the features of the decline of the middle class is that holidays have become a luxury available to only some of the population.

Complaining about the end of summer vacation is like complaining that you get tired walking from one end of your mansion to the other or that you can't get enough sleep because the hot model you live with wants to have sex all the time or that it's just so disappointing when you finally use up the whole stack of $100 bills in your wallet. Nobody who doesn't have a summer vacation wants to hear about it.

I try to think before I talk about my first world problems in front of people who have problems of their own.

Spend money locally

You can't drive past a bunch of local shops on your way to the Big City Mall and then talk about how sad it is that local shops are closing. I spend as much money locally as possible. I eat out at local restaurants, undoubtedly more often than is entirely good for me. I shop at local stores, even when it means I don't necessarily get exactly, precisely the item that I'm looking for.

These people pay my salary. They give up part of their pay to pay me. What a slap in the face for me to take that money and go spend it somewhere else. And at this stage of the game, most places in town employ my former students. If I want to see them become successful, self-supporting parts of the community, how can I not help them do that by spending my money at their workplace?

Support businesses

With more than just money. Everything I said in the previous section I also say to my students. Every dollar you spend is a vote for the kind of businesses that you want to see survive. Speak up in support of the people who finance your school and your job.


Support groups that make the community better

As a teacher, I have money and I have time, and that means I can become involved in parts of the community that add to quality of life. For me, that means playing in a 159-year-old community band and doing a variety of jobs in community theater. These are things I care about, and I care about them in part because I believe they make this community a better place to live.


I know there are teachers who feel once they've put in the school work that they've been paid to do, they are entitled to shut themselves up at home and that they owe the community nothing. I respectfully disagree. I have resources that many people in my community do not, and I have those resources precisely because those people gave some of their resources up. I owe them.

Listen and amplify 

Hear other voices. And where privileged to have an audience, try to get those voices heard. This is not the same as speaking for those people, but it is also not sitting back and assuming that they can make themselves heard as easily as I can, so they should just suck it up and get on it.

Don't forget

I try to pay attention to what my students' lives are actually and what challenges their families face, not just with an eye on the academic demands I make, but in understanding how their world looks. I do my best to remember that they don't see things differently because they are defective or wrong, but because I'm standing in a place that gives me a different view. This works both ways-- there are plenty of children in my classroom who are children of professional parents who are just as well-off (or more so) as I am, and so we already tend to speak a similar language, and I have to remember that doesn't mean they're better students or better people than my other students. More importantly, I also have to remember that I'm standing in a place because I have a standard of living that makes it possible for me to stand in that place.

Short form: I'm not better off because I'm better. My wealth gives me some options that not everyone has. That's it.

This is challenging

I wasn't kidding about how hard this is to write about. This has taken way longer than anything on this site ever does, and typing words like "I am wealthy" feels like a display of pride and bragadociousness that just makes my fingers itch. 

I am conscious that many teachers are NOT in my situation, that many teachers are struggling financially and are not wealthy by anybody's standards anywhere, and that many teachers give till it hurts and then they give some more. I am also aware that teacher wealth still lags far behind lawyer wealth and doctor wealth. But I want to-- cautiously, gingerly-- point out that some of us are not in that boat, and also that it is always easy to find people that we are poorer than.

It is easy when discussing privilege to dismiss the advantages that we have. We can always find someone who's better off and say, "Well, you don't need to talk to ME about wealth and privilege-- you should be talking to that Gates guy." But if we really want to push toward a world where people make responsible and ethical use of their privilege, doesn't it make sense to start with ourselves, however short our list of blessings may seem to be?

Silicon Valley Wunderskool

When we last met Altschool, it was May of 2015 and the new Silicon Valley educational disruptor startup was getting all kinds of press courtesy of some combination of good connections and the contribution of a buttload of Zuckerberg money. Now Rebecca Mead at the New Yorker is letting us know how Altschool has been faring since then.

The short pitch for Altschool is tech-based boutique micro-schooling for rich kids.

When I read about it last May, Altschool immediately reminded me of the free or open schools of the sixties. My aunt, a wonderful woman who had been traditionally trained as a teacher, opened one in Connecticut. The basic idea is that if you place students in resource rich environments and let them follow their interests, education will happen. Altschool is able to really, really up the ante on the whole rich resource portion of the idea, but putting technology in the hands of every child.

The other half of the Altschool idea is to put tech in the hands of the teachers. From Mead's observation of a pre-K class:

Several children were playing “restaurant,” and one girl sat in a chair, her arms outstretched as if holding a steering wheel: she was delivering food orders. “I’m taking a shortcut,” she announced. A teacher sitting on the floor told her, “That’s a good word—you used it correctly.” Then she took out her phone and recorded a video of the moment.

Altschool was founded-started-conceived by Max Ventilla, a former Google project manager who wanted to create a better school for his own tiny human.


The more Ventilla thought about education, the more he thought that he could bring about change—and not just for his own children. Instead of starting a “one-off school,” he would create an educational “ecosystem” that was unusually responsive to the interests of children, feeding them assignments tied to subjects they cared about. Ventilla’s vision fit the prevailing ethos of middle-class child rearing, in which offspring are urged to find their enthusiasms and pursue them into rewarding nonconformity.

All of this was evident when Altschool had its media moment last spring. What was perhaps less evident was just how thoroughly immersive the technological recording and data-collection for students would be. Altschool uses another version of a Competency Based Education model, with learning broken up into many small cells that students must demonstrate mastery of. This allows for a huge level of individualization.

But the demonstration of mastery isn't a matter of stopping school for some sort of test. Instead, teachers are supposed to hunt learning down and capture it.

“We are really shifting the role of an educator to someone who is more of a data-enabled detective.” He defined a traditional teacher as an “artisanal lesson planner on one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand.”  

There is a huge software component to Altschool, and that development is ongoing, with software engineers on site and meeting regularly to discuss, debug, debrief, and plan.


In fact, by the time you add up teachers, leaders, software engineers, visiting experts, etc, all deployed for a small number of students, the adult to tiny human ratio is something that poor urban schools can't even dream of. Altschool really is the answer to, "If smart, rich, well-connected people could create a school from scratch, what would it look like?" Altschool is funded by tuition, which is also far above the wildest dreams of any public school's per-pupil spending.

There are issues here. It will come as no surprise to most folks that Mead observes some incidents of technology not working as it's supposed to. How do you move forward if the tech is down and it is the whole spine and soul of your program?

There is a huge-- huge-- amount of data and images and video and just stuff collected for each child, and that's a bit troubling. Okay, maybe a lot troubling.

And as Mead observed, and my aunt learned fifty years ago, sometimes when you turn students loose in a rich environment to follow their own interests and impulses, you get something that's not very much like education at all. What Mead calls the "rabbit hole of the internet" only makes it more problematic.

And while the model is rising and advancing with hopes of more schools opening, it's not clear that anybody has figured out how such an expensive model can be spread to anyone other than the children of the rich. These are not the children most in danger of being lost in a standardized, one size fits all world.

There are things to like about this model (individualization, a reduced need for testing), but things to beware as well (data mining, tech dependency), and most especially, some critical issues that need to be addressed if Altschool is ever to be more than a pricey boutique (cost, scaling, and the eternal question-- how to split the difference between not caging curious kids while still prodding students forward who can use a little prodding and direction). I'm not yet convinced that Altschool is a real answer for US students, but it's a more interesting solution than one-size-fits-all test-driven baloney. We'll see.