Today’s Bad Timing Award
…goes to the Wall Street Journal, for James K. Glassman’s review of Liberating Learning, a book by Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb. Glassman discusses the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School’s performance, and notes:
Messrs. Moe and Chubb report that there are 190 cyber charter schools today in 25 states, up from 57 such schools in 13 states in 2002-03. Many of the new cyber charters are managed by two for-profit companies, K12 and Connections Academy. Meanwhile, some students in traditional schools are taking individual courses online, and companies such as Educomp, based in India, are tutoring U.S. students after school hours.
Teachers unions, of course, are appalled. They know that “the new computer-based approaches to learning simply require far fewer teachers per student — perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that,” Messrs. Moe and Chubb write. Online charter schools employ two or three teachers per 100 students; the average public school employs 6.8 per 100. Technology also disperses teachers geographically (making them elusive for union organizers); lets in private-sector players who aren’t members of the guild; and enables outsourcing to foreign countries. For unions, technology is poison.
Accurate in theory, but unfortunately the review appears the same day as the news that teachers at a smaller Pennsylvania cyber charter school, PA Learners Online, just voted to unionize.
Indeed, the Pennsylvania State Education Association deserves some applause. PSEA has been trying to organize charter schools for almost nine years, and this is its second one (the other was absorbed into an existing local).
The big picture for charter schools is still very bright, however. It’s going to take a major change in attitude for other NEA state affiliates to start organizing virtual charters, and despite recent successes, the union’s market share of charter schools continues to fall. In yet another twist, this morning’s headlines bear that out.
June 18th, 2009 at 19:26
[...] That makes a WSJ review of the Chubb and Moe book, Liberating Learning, bad timing. [...]
June 18th, 2009 at 22:54
In what sense does the PSEA “deserve some applause?” I don’t mean this incredulously, I’m just unclear on what objective good there is in the unionization of a cyber charter.
Do tell…
June 30th, 2009 at 14:25
Hey Mike! I thought your spin on this was unfortunate. Seems to me you should be arguing, as we do, that distance learning and the rise of virtual schools will make unionization much more difficult in the future, and that technology is a very good thing. Yes, it is true that a union succeeded in organizing this one virtual charter in PA–but so what? That particular school is run by a consortium of school districts, and all the teachers work out of the same building–which, of course, makes them easy to unionize. A basic point of Liberating Learning is that, with virtual schools, the teachers do NOT have to be geographically concentrated, but can be anywhere. In the future, lots of schools will clearly take advantage of this (many already are), and for those that do, unionization will be quite difficult. That’s the point to be emphasized, not that this one teacher-concentrated school happened to get unionized.
More generally, I think it’s important for all of us to recognize the great potential that technology has to undermine the power of the unions. I would hope that EIA would be supportive and help to highlight technology’s revolutionary potential. EIA has a huge network, and its members are a great resource. If they were on board–pushing technology in state legislatures, etc.–change would come much faster and more forcefully.