St. Therese also is attracting families with a new emphasis on computer instruction.
All students in the K-8 school will soon be spending 30 to 50 percent of each school day on laptops, clicking their way through software that covers all of their subjects except religion, and lets their teachers track how they're doing.
With $433,000 in grants to date, including $300,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, St. Therese is the second Catholic school in the nation to adopt a blended-learning model, which combines computer-based learning with traditional classroom instruction.
The program is patterned after ones used in a handful of well-known charter schools — programs that have drawn criticism from those who think blended learning is just the latest unproven education fad, but have generated strong interest from schools like St. Therese, which are impressed with the results some of the charters are getting.
Not that everyone is down with it (from the comments section);
It's not surprising that Gates Foundation would fund a school that has kids spending up to 50% of their time on computers. One might see this as a bit of self interest.
and;
Of course I say this if you believe the argument for charters is to help kids who aren't performing in a public school. You're going to slap a kid who doesn't perform well in a regular classroom infront of a computer for hours a day? Really? That's going to work?
and
Foundations run by corporate people who have constantly sought an assumed unlimited growth by encouraging immigration-driven population growth, and now hand out money to gain solutions to problems caused by this, and groups like the Catholic Church push to sanctify the same push for an assumed unlimited number of people and, voila, a lot of numbers "success." Only problem is the whole thing is clearly unsustainable. They don't understand the meaning of "enough."
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