When some Miami-Dade teachers examined K12’s materials, they were horrified by what they found. The curriculum was devised for, among others, K12's virtual charter schools: schools that are entirely online and receive taxpayer money for every student enrolled. K12 provided content, though teachers could change or supplement it. A spokesperson for the district referred questions to a public statement by Carvalho.Īnd then there was the built-in curriculum. “We never had the opportunity to really discuss it,” she says. Moreover, he didn’t need the board’s approval, she says. “Here you are coming in and telling us you’re going to solve our problems everyone was enthusiastic,” she says of Carvalho’s plan. The board went along with it, says Marta Perez, a board member. Later that month, he informed the school board of his plan to begin the year online only and to move all schooling to K12’s platform. “We are at the center of America’s epicenter for Covid-19,” district superintendent Alberto Carvalho told CNN in mid-July as he debated how to reopen schools. In a matter of weeks Miami went from relatively spared to a pandemic hot spot, with positive test rates spiking well above 20 percent. But the coronavirus was not on their side. When the 2019–20 school year ended in June, Miami-Dade administrators had been counting on reopening their school buildings in August. It also illustrates how, in a few intense weeks of summer decisionmaking, a charter-school curriculum written by a for-profit company was chosen and installed, with little scrutiny, across one of the largest districts in the country. The rapid pivot to, and even faster pivot away from, K12 amounts to a case study in how not to deploy a massive new software project. Doug Levin, an education tech consultant, calls the decision to use K12 “atypical.” Another ed tech analyst, Phil Hill, calls it “weird.” The platform was built by virtual charter school company K12, backed by one-time junk bond king Michael Milken and US secretary of education Betsy DeVos. If anything, the security breach merely obscured for a few days the crippling weaknesses in the district’s plan to move every aspect of its schooling-including a revamped curriculum-onto a platform that had only ever supported half as many students (and never all at once). But even once the district had quelled the distributed denial-of-service attack and a local teen had been arrested for the crime, “ Banana Dog” didn’t go away. “Too many people are online right now.”Ī rudimentary cyberattack had crippled the servers of the nation’s fourth-largest school district, preventing its 392 schools from starting the year online. “Oh bananas!” read one message from the district’s online learning platform. Instead a scruffy little dog in banana-print pajamas appeared on their screens, alongside an error message. On the morning of August 31, the first day of school, the 345,000 students in Miami-Dade County’s public schools fired up their computers expecting to see the faces of their teachers and classmates.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |