Public Education is Suffering while Private Education is Getting By

What's New at Asora

Advancing the Goal of Ending Education as We Know It

For First Time Visitors:
Welcome to Asora Education Enterprises, which presently consists of the Stellar Schools Franchising Project, the online courseware brokerage, a speakers bureau, and the achievement test analysis consulting service. To get started, consider reviewing our home page where there are links to descriptions of the many features of Stellar Schools. Then come back here later to "What's New" and to "What Was New" to learn more about our most recent undertakings.


What Was New In Preceding Updates:

If you have not seen our previous quarterly "What's New" updates, then you might want to peruse our What Was New page.

What's New In June 2010

June Theme:
Reform Is In Parents’ Hands
For too long, too many Americans and parents of schoolchildren have regarded education officials as the responsible parties for ensuring the proper education in K-12 schools. While most people agree that parents have the right to direct their children’s education, most don’t think about the parents’ obligations. We believe parents are also responsible to supervise, arrange and manage their children’s instruction. If parents agree, they will do what they can and seek vendors providing the needed materials and services. Below we discuss three activities here at Asora that will help parents find ways to address these needs.

Education Industry Association Activities

Our company, Asora Education Enterprises, has been a member of the Education Industry Association (EIA) since 2006. We have benefited greatly from the information shared by other members at the Association’s two annual meetings. This year we are pleased to be involved in two different sessions at its 2010 Edventures Conference being held in Chicago, July 22-24. More information about the conference can be found at www.educationindustry.org . Our roles at the conference are described under the next two headlines.


Marketing Supplemental Services

Asora Education is organizing a TableTalk discussion at this summer’s Education Industry Association Edventures Conference. It is entitled,

“Using Public School Guidebooks To Market “Supplemental“ Services.”


In this discussion we plan to discuss how Asora’s efforts in publishing such guidebooks can provide information to parents and other stakeholders that will be useful to them as they seek alternative and/or supplemental services for children who have fallen behind as well as those who are minimally proficient. In particular guidebooks can provide lists of various organizations, resources, vendors, products, and services. One of the most important categories is that of after-school tutoring services. While existing guidebooks and online versions of them can help parents find a public or private school, they generally will not help them find services that supplement or replace the schooling being received by their children. Asora does not aim to be a monopoly publisher of such guidebooks and invites competition. There is more discussion about Asora’s guidebook project below under
It Takes More Than A Village.


Joining Tutors And Online Technology

As some of you know, Asora has a plan to develop what we call Stellar Schools that would employ self-paced online instruction in physical schools. Other vendors are also working in this area as well. Asora continues to seek its niche in this area- and particularly seeks partners and investors in this quest.

We recently have been excited to learn of a charter high school in Chicago that provides most of its instruction online in classrooms in which the teaching staff work as tutors/facilitators. When the Education Industry Association sought proposals for presentations at its forthcoming meeting this July in Chicago, we offered a session that would highlight this development. In this session, which is now confirmed, there will be two presentations: First, Asora will present an historical view of self-pacing, group instruction, and distance education.
(You can download the PowerPoint versions of that historical view here.) That should set the stage for Cheryl Vedoe, the CEO of Apex Learning, who will describe how her company provides online content and instruction for the VOISE Charter School in Chicago and how this form of blended instruction can grow in the K-12 space.


Get On Board The Time Machine To 1956

The just mentioned historical view of distance education is based on more than historical documents but includes Asora CEO David Anderson’s own personal experience as a student in a Television Physics Course he took in high school in 1956. In his search for video clips of those lessons he has found contemporaneous video of his physics teacher doing a demonstration much like the ones that were in the course. See that and more by boarding the time machine to witness aspects of distance education in its toddler stage.


It Takes More Than A Village

We have completed the guidebook to public schools and alternatives for the Potomac Region and are looking at our options for publishing it. The full title of our book reads,

“In the Potomac Region of Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC,
It Takes More Than A Village to educate your child when out public schools are not up to the task.”

Our guidebook answers the question: How do public schools stack up in this three state region? And with this information what
more parents can do to ensure the proper education of their children.

Parents must do more than just choose a school for their children. When the schools provide an insufficient education (as they nearly always do in today’s public and private schools) children need their learning augmented by other means. The book addresses those needs under its two themes of parental responsibility:

1. That of choosing a school

2. That of providing supplemental or alternative instruction

The book aims to provide much of the information parents will want to have to fulfill these obligations.


Starting A Small Stellar School

For anyone who has read Asora’s business plan for Stellar Schools, starting a school may seem like a daunting task, but we think it will be easier than what one might first surmise. What we are proposing is really not much more or less than homeschooling that is done online. Many parents master that role. Instead of doing it at home we do it in a school. Here the parent is replaced by the tutor/facilitator. The child or handful of children are replaced by a larger group of children. We believe that such a small school can be developed from resources already available on the Web and in bookstores.

We think a school of perhaps ten children represents a good starting place. With luck you may be reading about such a school in forthcoming Asora updates.