What's New at Asora
Advancing
the Goal of Ending Education as We Know
It
For First Time
Visitors:
Welcome
to Asora Education Enterprises, which presently consists of
the Stellar Schools Franchising Project, the online
courseware brokerage, a speakers bureau, and the
achievement test analysis consulting service. To get
started, consider reviewing our home page where there are links to descriptions
of the many features of Stellar Schools. Then come back
here later to "What's New" and to "What Was New" to
learn more about our most recent
undertakings.
What Was New In Preceding Updates:
If you
have not seen our previous quarterly "What's New" updates,
then you might want to peruse our What Was New page.
What's
New In December 2009
December
Theme Is "Free Labor"
As some
of you know, Asora Education Enterprises is
undercapitalized. Or perhaps more bluntly, Asora's only
marketable assets are its achievement test analysis work
and maybe its Registered Trademark.
Finding investment capital and sweat equity players has
been difficult. On the achievement test work we will now
undertake projects without initially securing a contract.
In the area of Asora's Stellar Schools, we will likewise
work gratis in helping prospective and existing school
owners explore our proposed learning formats.
Beltway
Tri-State Guide to Schools
Asora's
work in the area of studying achievement tests has mainly
been that of converting state reported student
proficiencies, which are typically inflated, to ones
consistent with the Nation's Report Card or NAEP. By
estimating NAEP proficiencies for schools in adjoining
states, it is then possible to compare schools across state
lines, which may be of interest to stakeholders in
multi-state metropolitan regions. There are a number of
multi-state combinations of interest, including the
tri-state areas surrounding Chicago, New York, and
Washington D.C. We are going to focus on the latter first.
Getting
a Small Stellar Foothold
In our
efforts to find school operators who might want to adopt
the Stellar Schools instructional format, we have
concentrated mainly on existing schools. In doing so we
have neglected an important niche market for which Stellar
Schools may be a very good fit: Small schools with less
than 100 students. As a matter of fact, our business plan
discusses schools being composed of one or more 50 student
units. Below that number, loss of scale leads to higher per
student costs, but they can remain manageable depending on
the details of the situation.
If the Stellar School model allows efficient operation at
smaller school sizes than the alternatives, it should be
attractive to "communities" that seek small schools but
previously could not afford the types available. Among the
opportunities here are, religious schools serving
relatively small numbers of children that might pertain
just to the children of a congregation, private schools in
sparsely populated suburban or exurban areas, and public
schools that for whatever reason serve only a small
population of students. In this latter category, there is
Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, which reportedly
has only 7 students in its public school!