What’s New at Asora in August 2020
Many of the current themes are extensions of subjects we have discussed in previous Asora Updates. You will find a number of relevant articles on them. They can be found in our What Was New pages by clicking here.
August 2020 Theme:
Transform Sick Socialist Schools into Healthy Capitalist
Ones
And do this based on strategies and tactics explained in
our just published book:
Sick
Schools
Diagnosis, Cure,
and Prevention of School Maladies
By
David V. Anderson
This theme does not require doctors of
education to push it forward. Instead it requires
capitalists who will invest in for-profit K-12 schools. How
various stakeholders can get this done is explained in
extensive detail in this book.
We know how to do it, but we need your help. Our new
book, Sick
Schools, provides
the roadmap. Buy it or access it at:
- Amazon.com
- Barnesandnoble.com
- Booksamillion.com
- Asora. For a signed copy. Email david.anderson@asoraeducation.com for purchasing instructions.
- Or download an excerpt gratis at our Books and Documents on Reform page. You will find it in the file SickSchools-Entrance.pdf. An even shorter description of the book is in the Abstract, which we display farther below on this screen.
Many of our current themes and much of the content of the book are extensions of subjects we have discussed in previous Asora Updates. You will find a number of relevant articles in them. They can be found in our What Was New pages by clicking here.
If You Are A New Visitor
If this is your first time visiting here, welcome to Asora Education Enterprises, which has been engaged in:
1.) The production of the just mentioned book that proposes many new avenues of K-12 education reform. This book, entitled Sick Schools, places emphasis on using economic forces as well as technological and methodological developments to make the K-12 education economic sector healthy, and one in which most parents can find schooling for their children that matches their interests and requirements. More on this in Abstract and Headlines displayed below in the next section.
2.) Publishing national and regional guides (hardcopy and online) to public and (now) private schools and the supplementary resources locally available that are needed to bring children attending these schools up to grade level.
3.) An achievement test consulting service, in which we analyze state administered test results to remove the exaggerations found therein. Our guides and guidebooks are, in part, based on the calculations we developed for those studies.
4.) The Stellar Schools Franchising Project, which plans to organize K-12 franchising networks of brick & mortar schools that are based on a blended format of self-paced online instruction, a flipped scheduling arrangement, online adaptive tutoring and e-books blended with real instructors, live tutors and hardcopy books.
5.) Helping to overcome the market failure in K-12 education. We can use our guides to inform parents. And they enable aggressive contrast marketing, which can help education enterprises thrive. Other stakeholders can use this information to inform and energize other stakeholders of education.
6.) A speakers' bureau focused on these topical areas.
If you're a new visitor to our website we suggest that you might review the Abstract and Headlines below before venturing into the other areas.
The Abstract of Sick Schools
Sick
Schools
Diagnosis, Cure, and
Prevention of School Maladies
Our story of education within western
civilization starts before the printing presses of the 15th
century. Then, most children were illiterate. Some learned
in small groups or were tutored. Once printed books became
more affordable, circa 1500, more students had access to
them, but the numbers of teachers were limited- for obvious
economic reasons. Group instruction fixed that mismatch.
Soon, graded schools with group instruction were
established- not really so much different than those of our
own time, almost 500 years later.
In United States K-12
education, a student’s age was traditionally used for
the initial classroom placement that could later be
adjusted by retention or double-promotion to align that
pupil’s placement with the his or her actual
performance level. That has changed. Now we have social
promotion in which students rise through the grade levels
of a school without actually achieving grade level mastery.
This means that report cards, transcripts and diplomas
generally misrepresent the skill levels of students.
Result: Sick Schools wherein many students perform below
grade level. We have statistics for this within the United
States from the Nation’s Report Card, which has been
in business since 1970. Reading and mathematics skills for
the early 21st century are dire: In public schools well
less than 50% are proficient in 8th grade, and by 12th
grade less than 35% are proficient in both subjects. And it
is much worse for history and civics. Sadly, private
schools are not much better. What are the problems? Who
should we hold responsible for this mess?
We could blame the
teachers, books and instructional methods. And some reform
efforts do that. Sometimes forgotten is the role that
healthy economic incentives can play in improving things.
Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman addressed this in
the 1950’s and proposed government funded vouchers
that would give parents more control over their
children’s schooling. But do they work? Yes, but not
all that well. Missing from that market is honest consumer
information to replace the reality that schools lie to
parents and others about their performance levels and other
characteristics. Parents are somewhat complicit in this
because they prefer hearing false good news more than the
truthful bad news about their schools.
Looking deeper, there are a number of
practices within schools that seem traditional, but are
also corrupt and dishonest. This book discusses some
promising instructional improvements, but makes the larger
argument that a healthy economic marketplace for K-12
education is a fundamental prerequisite that will provide
the incentives to develop the new methods, technologies,
curricula and institutions that will, in turn, give its
customers what they need and want. Given that vouchers,
alone, seem insufficient when parents have little accurate
information about school quality, we must generate that
information and get it into the right hands. We identify
the culpable parties to this epidemic of sick schools and,
though there are individual exceptions, no group in this
list escapes responsibility: Parents, students, teachers,
unions, school administrators, politicians, religious
leaders and even the private sector of our economy.
Finally, technological developments allow schools to be
structured in more efficient styles, but it is rare to see
them realized. That is ending. For-profit K-12 schools are
coming online. Some of them are the best in the USA. They
are tuition efficient operating at about a 40% discount to
the best non-profit K-12 schools. Education of our children
can be less expensive and much better. We can have a new
and Milton Friedman inspired Reformation of Sick Schools:
The “Free to Choose” Reformation. To find out
how, keep reading this book.
It first twenty-odd pages are free to
access in the file SickSchoolsEntrance.pdf.
You can find it by clicking on its webshelf:
Books and
Documents on Reform.
Headlines From Sick
Schools
Being metaphorical physicians of the diseased schools, we
examined these patients to find an assortment of ailments
as well as proposed courses of treatment for them. The
treatments we found are mostly preventative measures
designed to keep schools healthy and to improve their
levels of academic health. What we found and what we
propose is summarized in the following ranking of K-12
diseases, from the most important to least important as
follows:
• First is the disease of propagandaitis.
Its primary symptom is the presence of school system
propaganda that subsitutes for reliable consumer
information about school characteristics, and particularly
the academic performance of their students measured against
standards for college admission.
[ ]
[
]o
To
solve this problem, schools need to provide reliable
information that is publicly available while researchers
and news
media need to report their findings in consumer digestible
formats. This will help restore a free market to the K-12
economic sector in which the ensuing competitive forces
will push numerous reforms that its consumers, the parents,
want.
• Second, and nearly as important as propagandaitis,
is investorphobia
that is characterized by the
lack of investment capital going to for-profit schools.
Without that money, parents will rarely have any for-profit
schools to consider for their children.
[ ][ ]
o To solve this
problem, wealthy investors need to take a philanthropic
stance, and become what we have labelled adventure
capitalists—like those currently putting their money
into fusion energy.
• Thirdly, many public schools suffer from
cancerous neatoma
caused by the NEA. Its
primary symptom is the interference of teachers unions.
Here, sensible administrative policies are replaced by
union strategies that do not give priority to student
interests.
[ ][
]
o To solve this
problem, we would follow the advice of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and abolish these unions.
• Fourth, public schools suffer from the
tyrannitis
of so-called non-partisan
elections for electing school officials. This
non-democratic policy gives the teachers union the status
of a monopoly political party. That leads to corruption
that is disguised as tradition.
[ ][ ]
o To solve this
problem, candidates seeking election to school management
positions should run under the banner of a political party
or as an independent.
• Fifth, the management of public schools is
obese
and centralized at the state
level. That reduces local control, and makes it more
difficult for parents to have an appreciable influence on
school policies.
[ ][ ]
o To solve this
problem, schools need to be operated at the local community
level. Only a few educational functions would remain
centralized such as state testing. Then parents would have
more influence.
• Sixth, public educators have amnesia
concerning their Treaty
obligations under the UN Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, Article 26 that provides, “Parents have a
prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be
given to their children.”
[ ][
]
o To solve this
problem, the governments at the federal, state, and local
levels should be erecting educational frameworks that give
parents that]“prior
right.” Vouchers and other choice mechanisms will
help this. As Friedman advocated, parents should be
“free to choose” their children’s
schools.
• Seventh, nearly all schools are agoraphobic
and thereby perform their
official testing in-house in formats that invite cheating
and conflicts of interest. Look-good grading and social
promotion are two of the bad policies stemming from this
corruption.
[ ][ ]
o To solve this
problem, all official testing should be conducted off site
by an independent testing organization. High school AP
courses do this already.
• Eighth, public education attendance laws are
often megalomaniac
by prohibiting parental
freedom to choose part-time schooling for their children.
[ ][
]
o To solve this
problem, restructure truancy laws to accommodate more
flexibility in this area.
• Ninth, official state level standardized testing
has sociopathic
characteristics when it lies
about student performance levels, and reports results that
are often difficult to interpret against reliable
standards, such as those used in ACT testing.
[ ] [ ]o
To
solve this problem, use the ACT tests or something else
that is just as good.
Not adequately discussed in this list are vouchers and
other financial mechanisms allowing parents to have the
choices promised them in the UN treaty of which the United
States is a ratifier and signatory. We need a much more
robust means of giving them this financial support when
they are unable to afford school tuitions. We have the Food
Stamp program for nutritional needs that arguably works
well enough that few Americans are starving. We seek a
similar program in each state, call it an Education Stamp
program, that would provide vouchers to fund the school
choices made by parents.
There Is Much More
On Our Website
For further information, consider reviewing our home page
where there are links to more detailed descriptions of the
services and activities of Asora Education. Alternatively
you might consider visiting "What Was New" to learn more
about our recent and not so recent history.