Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Rhee’s lobbying group StudentsFirst has issued its first report ranking the  states based on how closely they follow the group’s platform, looking at policies related not only to tenure and evaluations but also to pensions and the governance of school districts. The group uses the classic academic grading system, awarding states A to F ratings.

With no states receiving an A, two states received B-minuses and 12 states were branded with an F.  The two highest-ranking states, Florida and Louisiana, received B-minus ratings. The states that were given F’s included Alabama, California, Iowa and New Hampshire. New Jersey and New York received D grades, and Connecticut a D-plus.

Other than some of the teacher bashing corporate foundation donors and FoxNews, it is not likely that this report will receive serious consideration.   Last week, it was reported that Democrats had all but abandoned her lobbying group. The New York Times reported this morning that:

Richard Zeiger, California’s chief deputy superintendent, called the state’s F rating a “badge of honor.” “This is an organization that frankly makes its living by asserting that schools are failing,” Mr. Zeiger said of StudentsFirst. “I would have been surprised if we had got anything else.”

In my opinion, StudentsFirst has one purpose and that is the greater glory of Michelle Rhee.  It should be renamed RheeFirst.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michael Bloomberg has accomplished a great deal during his tenure as mayor:  the city is a safer place to live and work, his advocacy for gun safety  is admirable, business is welcome, employment opportunities are decent and better than many other parts of the country.  However, his dealing with the New York City school system and especially his relationship with the teachers union leaves a lot to be desired.  He and his former schools chancellor, Joel Klein, developed this adversarial relationship that can only be described as a “toxic environment” where cooperation and consensus building is frequently impossible.  His latest salvo came a couple of days ago when he compared the leadership of the UFT to the National Rifle Association during  negotiations for a new teacher evaluation system.   This was not the first time Mr. Bloomberg had invoked the National Rifle Association when registering his frustration with the city teachers’ union and others. He voiced similar opinions at a news conference in 2007.  The New York Times reported that during his weekly radio show on Friday:

“The mayor had embarked on a lengthy stream of consciousness on the need to negotiate a new teacher evaluation plan with the United Federation of Teachers. Toward the end, Mr. Bloomberg, almost as an aside, likened the teachers’ union to groups like the National Rifle Association and others in which he said a few leaders were out of sync with large numbers of rank-and-file members.

“It’s typical of Congress, it’s typical of unions, it’s typical of companies, I guess, where a small group is really carrying the ball and the others aren’t necessarily in agreement,” Mr. Bloomberg said to the program host, John Gambling. “The N.R.A. is another place where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership.”

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers and the former president of its New York City affiliate, wrote a letter to the mayor, noting that two of the adults killed in Connecticut were members of her union. She said that despite Mr. Bloomberg’s “great work” on gun safety, he owed the city teachers and its union leaders an apology “for making such incendiary and insensitive remarks — especially coming on the heels of the tragedy in Newtown.”

The UFT was scheduled to hold a news conference today to underscore its outrage and to demand that the mayor apologize.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article on the profitability of MOOCs.  It starts with references  to Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng who started the online education company Coursera.

“The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities.

In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon.

Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing.”

All of this should bode well for MOOCs except no one has figured out how to make profit. One pessimistic analysis was provided by James Grimmelmann, a New York Law School professor who specializes in computer and Internet law.

“No one’s got the model that’s going to work yet.  I expect all the current ventures to fail, because the expectations are too high. People think something will catch on like wildfire. But more likely, it’s maybe a decade later that somebody figures out how to do it and make money.”

On the optimistic side, the article describes possibilities for charging students modest entrance fees, for licensing courses to colleges and universities and for charging fees for transferring MOOC credits to traditional college programs.  One conclusion was that:

“…educators predict that the bulk of MOOC revenues will come from licensing remedial courses and “gateway” introductory courses in subjects like economics or statistics, two categories of classes that enroll hundreds of thousands of students a year. Even though less than 10 percent of MOOC students finish the courses they sign up for on their own, many experts believe that combining MOOC materials with support from a faculty member or a teaching assistant could increase completion rates.”

I am skeptical about the last point mainly because with the open source movement well on the way, there is a good deal of material freely available for the asking.  Why pay for it?   Also faculty and instructional designers in many colleges are developing their own online support materials that might not be as glitzy as Coursera’s but will be preferred because they are customized to the instructor’s teaching style and learning goals.

Tony