Mike Chihak invited me to talk about education on Friday’s Arizona Week. The episode is an instructive look at how the latest budget cuts are going to result in larger class sizes, fewer books and less staff support. I learned something new myself: This new idea of “blended” education that somehow involves spending a few days a week in the classroom and other days learning on the Internet. (David Safier, can you help out, please?)
I’m absolutely sure that schools need to retool for the 21st century, but it’s tough to innovate when you’re struggling to just keep the doors open.
This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2011.
Blended education. It’s the new and untested buzzword, supposedly a way to spend less on education and get more bang for the buck. As I understand it, you combine large group computer lab instruction using packaged curriculum and a few teachers in the room to give individual help with classroom instruction. Whether it’s cheaper or more effective is a big question. Some charters use the computer learning approach, but they aren’t getting great results — except for Carpe Diem in Yuma, but there are serious questions about whether the tests at Carpe Diem are doctored by staff after the students finish. It looks like Huppenthal doesn’t want to find out, because the high test scores reinforce his educational ideology.
Things get more complicated after that, with the proposed “Educational Empowerment Accounts” legislation in the Arizona lege (HB2706, SB 1553) where the idea is to head toward de-schooling and a cafeteria approach to education (an online class here, tutoring there, throw in some home schooling, etc., in a mix-and-match using voucher-like state funding). This is the hot new conservative small-government approach to education.