At 10:20 AM 12/28/00 -0800, you wrote:
>Notice how all the good guys come together.
>
>WILLIAM BENNETT FOUNDS ONLINE K12 SCHOOL
>Former Education Secretary William Bennett is founding an online private
>
>K-12 school that will offer the kind of traditional schooling long
>espoused by Bennett, including phonics, back-to-basics math and civics
>lessons. The for-profit venture, dubbed K12, is backed by a $10-million
>investment from Knowledge Universe Learning Group, a subsidiary of
>Knowledge Universe, which was founded in 1996 by Michael Milken, his
>brother Lowell, and Oracle
>founder Larry Ellison. The school, which hopes to attract 100,000 students
>by 2005, expects to tap into the estimated 1.5-million home-schooler
>market for its initial enrollment. "This is a hugely ambitious project,"
>says Bennett. "We're doing the whole thing. Every lesson, every day, for
>13 years." Merrill Lynch estimates that the electronic learning market for
>K-12 will grow from $1.3 billion in 1999 to $6.9 billion in 2003. (Wall
>Street Journal 28 Dec 2000)
1) will they teach Darwinism or Creation "Science" or a BS "balanced
treatment of both"? (Recently, I discovered that COMMENTARY, what used to
be a sane but right-wing Jewish magazine, had leaned toward anti-Darwinism!
Does Bennett, one of the icons of the
drill-patriarchal-morality-into-the-kids movement, which COMMENTARY also
endorses?)
2) previous efforts at for-profit schooling below the adult level have
failed (e.g., the Edison Project).
3) According to my good friend Doug, Milken ain't all bad since what he got
incarcerated for was simply what these financiers normally do --- he was
scapegoated because he was an outsider. In any event, he helped finance the
special-ed school my son goes to, so he can't be all bad. It's too bad that
he's into for-profit education, since I was hoping that he'd continue to
try to clean up his reputation, showering more money on charitable causes.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
