Edtech, или Школа не меняется
Опять про школьное. Эх, жалко birdwatcher в отпуске и не увидит. Из обзора рынка образовательных технологий в последнем Экономисте, про препятствия, встающие на пути edtech startups.
America’s teaching unions fear a hidden agenda of replacing properly trained humans with some combination of technology and less qualified manpower, or possibly just technology. Unions have filed lawsuits to close down online charter schools, including what looks like a deliberately obtuse proposal to limit enrolment at such virtual schools to those who live in their districts.
Шуточка всерьёз претендует на второе место после моего любимого пассажа из доктора Петрова про claims of racial discrimination and a short-lived demand for affirmative action.
Бонус-трек для дорогих коллег из Дневника.ру и Уебашки (русский венчур ничего не боится, ха-ха):
America’s 13,000 school districts still upgrade their texts and equipment on slow, unsynchronised cycles and follow a bewildering range of procurement processes. Glenn Anderson, a former Washington state legislator and consultant on education policy, emphasises that education is a highly regulated public utility in which rules can govern everything, from what goes into textbooks to how many children there are in a class. And local politicians can change rules or policy unpredictably. This causes problems for a start-up which wants to get its technology into a lot of schools. Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, takes the problem so seriously that it avoids any edtech investment in which a school or school district would be the main buyer.