What Was New
in Previous Updates

These items are presented in reverse chronological order with the most recent shown first.

What Was New in September 2011

By David Anderson

We have two themes this quarter because we don’t have the patience to delay one of them until the next quarter!

Our first theme regards the profession of teaching. We envisage radical changes coming to such an extent that teachers, as we know them, will become extinct. Supplanting teaching will be new forms of instruction, including online courses and various forms of tutoring. The total instructional work force will shrink significantly- we think a 25% reduction is in the likely range.

Our second theme, related to educational economics, is that education reformers should fix private schools first. Though not as dysfunctional as their public cousins, most private schools are mediocre, with more than half of their students (also) below grade level. We think non-profit private schools lack the incentives to thrive and therefore pin our hopes on for-profit schools. And just think: reforming a private school can be done with very little interference from the government and unions.

GDP Boost From Good Teaching- It’s In The Trillions
Recent research studies conducted by Stanford’s Eric Hanushek and others not only confirm the correlation between good teachers and student proficiencies, but also predict the effects better teaching would have on the national economy. They estimate that just replacing the bottom 10% of teachers with average teachers would move the United States student skill levels (in math) to equal those of the top European students (in Finland) and would increase the present value of future US GDP by more than $100 trillion. This is not a typo. More information on this can be found here.


I’ve Had A Good Look At Teacher Competence
Approximately ten years ago, I considered becoming a substitute teacher in California and was required to take an eligibility examination, the CBEST, that is used to screen California teachers to ensure their basic academic competencies. The test was quite easy and did not test beyond the 10th grade level. Yet, 30% of California teachers fail this examination on their first attempt. The national situation is not much different. In light of the preceding remarks on the value of good teaching, does this not suggest that we might replace the bottom 30% of teachers and by doing so elevate American students to skill levels well above the best seen in Europe?

Then Finland would want to catch up to us!

How Asora’s Stellar Schools Will Achieve Highly Competent Instruction:
If dismissing the bottom 10% of teachers has the beneficial improvements of bringing American children to Finnish levels of academic performance, what would the removal of the bottom 25% combined with the retraining of the remaining 75% do? In the Stellar Schools environment, (click here to learn more about this) the instruction is online, which requires significantly fewer teachers- or shall we say “instructors”-than before. In our model, the classroom teacher’s job morphs into that of a tutor-facilitator, whose role does not include much instructing beyond what occurs in the one-on-one tutoring relationships. A very small percentage of instructors would appear on-demand in the online self-paced environment where they would instruct many hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of children each. For these “on camera” roles, Stellar Schools can hire star instructors, which in many cases might be university professors who possess great content expertise as well as pedagogic skills.

How can one be so sure of this? Well, I experienced something like this in my 1957 high school physics class, which was taught via television with Berkeley physics professor Harvey White doing the instruction. If the “proof is in the pudding” I later earned a Ph.D. in physics. Even then the economy of scale was quite significant with 100,000 students, all across the United States, enrolled in this class.

Replace Teaching As We Know It With What?
Various prognosticators and futurists predict that K-12 education will evolve to implementations based mostly on self-paced online instruction in which the instructional model is that of tutoring. According to Clayton Christensen’s recent book, (Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns), more than half of K-12 instruction will be online within the next eight years.


If this is our destiny, what will happen or perhaps more importantly what should happen to the profession of teaching? We take a view consistent with our business plan for Stellar Schools which should not be meant to exclude other approaches involving online instruction.

In the subsector of online tutorial instruction we foresee that for every 100 teachers currently working in K-12 education:

1. Approximately 68 tutors will be engaged working in classrooms.

2. Another 6 tutors will work remotely at a “help desk” facility.

3. No more than 1 instructor will deliver content online.

By these estimates alone, it is clear that the population of instructional staff (those who teach, tutor or instruct) would shrink by 25% in this scenario. But not all of the remaining 75 instructional workers would continue his or her employment in K-12 education; rather there would be turnover based on finding the most competent individuals for each position. We presume that many current teachers will be retrained to work as tutors, which will not only include learning new pedagogical techniques and methods, but will also require many of them to “beef up” their content knowledge.

Adam Smith And Milton Friedman On Subsides:
In reviewing the student proficiencies of American K-12 students, it is noteworthy that 8th grade private school students do not perform anywhere near the popular conception. In fact, the Nation’s Report Card consistently reports that less than half of these students (about 45% of them) are proficient in reading and math. Public school children’s proficiency levels are lower- typically around 30%.

In earlier Asora updates we commented on the broken marketplace for K-12 education. What did Adam Smith contend and what did Milton Friedman say about this issue?

Smith wrote in his famous book, “The Wealth of Nations,” that subsidized teaching would tend to reduce the number of privately paid teachers and would act to bring the quality of private instruction down towards the level of the subsidized one. And Friedman once quipped, “Try selling a product that someone else is giving away!”


What About the Mediocrity of Non-Profit Private Schools?
We think non-profit private schools operate under weak incentives for success: There’s no profit motive except for the incentive of solvency. Without a profit motive there is little encouragement for growth and once the “seats are filled” there is little interest in further improvements beyond the relatively weak effects of altruism.

We think that for-profit schools, though currently limited in number, have the potential to be the engines of reform. Were it not for the broken marketplace of education, we believe nearly all K-12 schools would be for-profit or operated under contract with for-profit management companies.

Milton Friedman agreed that non-profit schools have these problems, when we asked him about these issues in 2003. The relevant correspondence and related report are contained in a pdf file downloadable here.

When Do Public-Private Joint Efforts Make Sense?
There are obviously many relationships between government schools and various kinds of private enterprises. Among the latter are the vendors of textbooks, specialized instructional & testing services, and education management organizations. In each of these areas, the government entity prescribes the goods and services to be purchased and has the authority to renegotiate different terms as the contracts specify or allow. Political interests often dictate these arrangements. If those interests are opposed to effective reforms, as is almost always the case where teachers’ unions hold sway, then the private goods and services will not contribute much to educational progress.

Asora’s Stellar Schools model also foresees public-private collaborations, but proposes that they be under franchising contracts. Under franchising, the for-profit franchisor is the party that dictates the resources and methods to be used and is relatively immune to political meddling. This is so because altering the franchise contract would damage the franchisor’s brand (and reputation) and would be resisted by the franchisor. We believe the franchising model allows the Stellar Schools franchisor to operate one or more networks of schools regardless of the legal format of the franchisee schools (government, non-profit, or for-profit). Learn more about franchised Stellar Schools here.


Asora Can Help Tutoring Firms Attract Private Pay Customers
In July 2011, Asora Education Enterprises participated in the annual EdVentures Conference of the Education Industry Association (EIA). Of the member companies within the EIA, a plurality are enterprises providing various kinds of after-school instructional services. At Asora’s booth we encouraged these “tutoring” companies to consider using our data (primarily of school and district level estimated NAEP proficiencies) to attract “private pay” customers, either by directly contracting with us or by using our guidebooks to public schools and supplementary instructional services. We continue to seek forward-looking providers in this area to solicit our help in developing prospective clients.


We Seek Help To Complete Our Guidebooks
Most of our efforts in the past year have focused on the production of guidebooks to public schools and supplementary instructional resources. Our first book, "It Takes More Than A Village," was published in February 2011. For the Potomac Region of MD, VA and DC it provides estimated NAEP proficiencies for nearly every public school and school district and it provides lists of vendors and other resources that provide "after school" supplementary services, which can help bring students up to grade level.

We have collected the data needed to produce a second guidebook, this time for the ten states in the Northeastern US. We seek collaborators to help us complete this effort.


There Is Much More On Our Website


For further information, consider reviewing our home page where there are links to more detailed descriptions of the services and activities of Asora Education. Alternatively you might consider visiting "What Was New" to learn more about our recent and not so recent history.



What Was New In June 2011

June Theme: Sharing the Blame for K-12 Education Market Failure
At Asora Education, we believe in the superiority of free market capitalism over its rivals to deliver the best quality goods and services at the lowest possible costs.

We do not believe what most educators hold: That education is a special industry that's immune from the laws of economics and free markets. In particular we believe that educational services and products would be far superior to what we have if a free market were allowed to operate in this economic sector.

Instead, the productivity of our education sector is low, the costs are high, and the quality of its "output" is mediocre at best. Not only is public education dysfunctional, but private K-12 education is also troubled- though to a lesser degree.

We believe the degradation of K-12 education has resulted from well intended but wrong headed laws and regulations that have been enacted over the past century (and longer), which have broken down the pillars of a functioning free market competitive economy in this sector.

Those pillars include:


1. The pillar of accurate information. With good information, parents and other statkeholders can make appropriate choices for a student. Without it, consumers will often choose inferior providers of educational services.

2. The pillar of fair competition. When providers are treated equally, only those providing high quality goods and services survive. That's unlike the current environment where monopolistic operators (the public schools) are receiving large subsidies that markedly distort the playing field on which the providers compete.

3. The pillar of the rule of law. When laws and regulations are applied fairly, healthy competition can ensue. Alternatively, when favoritism is shown the best providers may lose market share and risk going under.

Unfortunately, most efforts at reform concern themselves more narrowly. They tend to ignore the "pillars" while focusing on the details of the instructional systems. Thus most efforts at education reform in the K-12 sector involve attempts to make changes to the practices, to the tools, to the personnel, and to the curricula of primary and secondary education. But they haven't borne much fruit: Children perform at about the same low levels as they did during much of the last century.

A longer discussion of these concerns can be found on our page: What Ails Our Schools.


Teachers Are The Most To Blame
Who then should we blame for our dysfunctional K-12 schools? Ordering the "candidates" by their duty to educate our children we have:

Parents. They have been misled and typically don't scrutinize the schools of their children.

Teachers. Some can't teach well and most of them irresponsibly vote for the union.

School Administrators. They manage the bad practices.

Teachers' Unions. They work to "elect" their friends to school boards who then usually do the union's bidding.

School Boards. They often neglect their positions of trust and put the unions' interests ahead of their duty to children.

Law Makers. Many legislators are in the pocket of the unions who then resist prudent reforms.

Business Organizations. Chambers of Commerce and others complain about low skills but do little to help.

All of these folks should know better- and none more so than the teachers.

SES Providers Should Focus On Private Pay
There is currently much concern within the SES providers' community over the uncertain future of government subsidies to them for their tutoring services provided to public school children.


Whether or not the SES "sector" loses these funding streams, they should also consider getting more active in the "private pay" sector.


To attract parents to their services, SES providers need to have ways to market themselves based on the real needs of children. These needs are not always evident to parents and other stakeholders because of the public school system rosy propaganda to the contrary.


Asora's guidebook projects (and its ability to do contract research in the area) are resources that can be used to generate the "how bad it is" information about public schools. Companies within the SES sector might find this information beneficial in their marketing programs.

It Takes More Than A Village

As we mentioned in our previous update, we have had some difficulties in producing an e-book version. We recently contracted with a production service that will generate the various versions appropriate for reading on different mobile devices, including iPad, Nook, Cruz, and even Kindle. We hope to have versions for sale at the various online book sellers- with our first efforts being focused on the iBookstore of Apple.


But, in the meantime, we have published a paperback edition of our book. The front and back covers of our book tell you more:



[We thank, ChloroFill, LLC for their generosity in allowing us to use their art work. ChloroFill is a producer of environmentally responsible building materials. (www.chlorofill.com)]

and the back cover:
The book's extended title,

We will soon have our e-book available from the online bookstores operated by Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Apple's iBookstore. The book can be read on the color e-book readers sold by these same stores. Also, our book will be readable on Amazon.com's Kindle reader, but only in black and white. We look forward to color Kindle readers but we don't know when they will arrive?


In the meantime you can also purchase the book, either, in e-book pdf format, or as a paperback by clicking here to reach the guidebook area of the Asora website.

Next Book: Guidebook For The Northeastern United States

As we mentioned in the last two updates, we have assembled nearly all of the state reported assessment data required to prepare a guidebook for the ten states in the northeastern United States- from Delaware and Pennsylvania to Maine. This Northeastern Region encompasses a population nearly four times that of the Potomac Region.

While we don't currently have the financial or human resources to complete this project in a prompt fashion, we are nevertheless going to push forward and hope to have something in the fall.

Maybe someone out there reading this would like to collaborate? As authors and collaborators, we intend to generate some income from the book sales. Thus, we aim to make some profit from this effort even as we "profit" the parents and other stakeholders benefiting from our information.

Asora Is For Sale

When we say that our business is for sale, we mean that we are looking for others to help it grow. At one extreme this quest would result in the sale of our business with no further participation of Asora personnel, while at the other we'd still be involved in some aspects.

If we remain involved in some way, we envisage various kinds of collaborations: partnerships, joint-ventures, consulting arrangements. Asora's current management will likely need to be replaced within the next five years.

Most of our assets are intangible, including our expertise, our work product, and, perhaps, most important our registered trademark Asora®.

What Was New In March 2011

March Theme: Pervasive K-12 Corruption Thwarts Reform

We've been thinking quite alot about the forms of corruption that exist in our public and private K-12 education systems and how this misbehavior has greatly degraded the performance of these schools from their full potential. A longer discussion of these concerns can be found on our page: What Ails Our Schools.

One aspect of this corruption relates to the dishonest reporting of student proficiencies by most state departments of education. In our analysis of 2009 testing, only two states were free of this kind of propaganda: Massachusetts and South Carolina.

From the standpoint of economics, providing consumers with bad information about the products and services in a marketplace will lead them to make poor decisions- which would include the passive acceptance of their children's enrollment in an inferior local public school.

We think that an educational marketplace with honest information about student proficiencies would tend to increase the competition among schools (public and private) which, in turn, would lead to performance improvements that would be much less likely in the highly propagandized environment in which we live.

We at Asora Education are making an attempt to replace this propaganda with more realistic estimates of local school proficiencies. If we can prominently display our information in front of the consumers (parents and other stakeholders) we may be able to remedy some of the harm coming from this kind of corrupt activity. Thus our guidebook projects may provide a cure to this disease of lying- from so many state departments of education?

It Takes More Than A Village

We had a set-back in our efforts to publish e-book versions of our guidebook to the public schools in Maryland, Virginia & Washington D.C. (when the e-publishers were unable to deal with a book of this one's complexity).


But, in the meantime, we have published a paperback edition of our book. The front and back covers of our book tell you more:



[We thank, ChloroFill, LLC for their generosity in allowing us to use their art work. ChloroFill is a producer of environmentally responsible building materials. (www.chlorofill.com)]

and the back cover:
The book's extended title,

We later hope to have our e-book available from the online bookstores operated by Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Apple's iBookstore. The book can be read on the color e-book readers sold by these same stores. Also, our book will be readable on Amazon.com's Kindle reader, but only in black and white. We look forward to color Kindle readers but we don't know when they will arrive?


In the meantime you can also purchase the book, either, in e-book pdf format, or as a paperback by clicking here to reach the guidebook area of the Asora website.

Limbo Status Of Guidebook For The Northeastern United States

As we mentioned in the December 2010 update, we have assembled nearly all of the state reported assessment data required to prepare a guidebook for the ten states in the northeastern United States- from Delaware and Pennsylvania to Maine. This Northeastern Region encompasses a population nearly four times that of the Potomac Region.


We don't currently have the financial or human resources to complete this project. Maybe someone out there reading this would like to collaborate? We aim to make some profit from this effort even as we "profit" the parents and other stakeholders when they benefit from our information.

Asora Has Moved To A Less Hostile Location

In January, Asora Education Enterprises relocated to Atlleboro, Massachusetts from our previous location in Rhode Island.

Rhode Island was a difficult environment not only because of a great deal of hositilty to market based education reform, but also because policy makers and organizations that purported themselves to be friends of free markets were frequently dismissive of our efforts.

From the top to the bottom of the Rhode Island education establishment (Governor's Office, Board of Regents, Rhode Island Department of Education, and various School Committees) not one accepted our offers of pro bono assistance while some made efforts to discredit our work.

This was not a partisan issue. Players from both major parties were obstacles to us.

Massachusetts, though having the best public schools in the nation, still has many of the same problems seen in other states. To the extent Asora engages in pro bono work in our new location, we're hopeful that we can find partners accepting of our talents. We look forward to more harmonious relationships as we look for opportunities here in Massachusetts.


Our December 2010 Update:
December Theme: Franchising Is Key To Reform
Those of you familiar with the Asora Stellar Schools plans know that our goal is the provision of K-12 instructional services in real brick & mortar schools. Various kinds of online instructional systems including digital content would be provided to schools in a network.

A review of education industry developments shows many vendors moving to provide instructional services very much like those embodied in our business plan.

There is one organizational design feature of Asora Stellar Schools that is not being addressed by other vendors: establishing franchising networks of schools. We chose this network format over rival structures, such as licensing and wholly owned networks, because we think it is not only a better match to the ownership structures of exisiting schools but also because we believe it provides superior incentives for developing excellent schools.

More information about the advantages of franchising school networks can be found our Why Franchising Page. Our business plan for Asora's Stellar Schools provides many details about the relevant franchising arrangements. It can be downloaded from our Reports on Development Page.

It Takes More Than A Village

We are still in the process of publishing the guidebook to public schools and alternatives for the Potomac Region and will first sell it as an e-book that can be read on a variety of color e-readers as well as computer screens. The front and back covers of our book tell you more:



[We thank, ChloroFill, LLC for their generosity in allowing us to use their art work. ChloroFill is a producer of environmentally responsible building materials. (www.chlorofill.com)]

and the back cover:
The book's extended title,

We soon expect to have our e-book available from the online bookstores operated by Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Apple's iBookstore. The book can be read on the color e-book readers sold by these same stores. Also, our book will be readable on Amazon.com's Kindle reader, but only in black and white. We look forward to color Kindle readers but we don't know when they will arrive?

In the meantime you can also purchase the book, in pdf format, by clicking here to reach the guidebook area of the Asora website.

Finally, we also look forward to printing paperback and hardback versions of the book.

Status Of Guidebook For The Northeastern United States

We have assembled nearly all of the state reported assessment data required to prepare a guidebook for the ten states in the northeastern United States- from Delaware and Pennsylvania to Maine. This Northeastern Region encompasses a population nearly four times that of the Potomac Region.

Once we start generating revenue from the guidebook for the Potomac Region, we should be able to launch this far more ambitious publishing effort. As is the case for the Potomac Region guidebook, the school-by-school proficiency estimates will be freely available on our website but the guidebooks will be our profit center.

We Can Help Providers Of Supplemental Services

Our guidebooks are based on a premise familiar to providers of supplemental services: Schools are often failing children who can benefit from one or more of the services offered by that provider.
For us at Asora it is more than a premise or assumption. We have the proof. We have done the research covering tens of thousands of schools to demonstrate quantitatively that most students in most schools in most regions are below grade level. Thus the premise gains additional stature giving providers of supplemental services operating in these areas additional data on which they can base their marketing to families and other stakeholders who are seeking help for children at risk of falling behind.

Our September 2010 Update:


September Theme: Profits Can Drive Reform
A familiar refrain among those pushing for education reform is: “where is the funding?”

In every economic activity, whether within the government, whether among non-profits, or whether in profit making businesses a funding mechanism is key if that activity is to continue and grow. Education is no exception.

One of our business activities has been our assessment services. Our primary activity has been the production of estimated NAEP proficiencies at the school and district levels. At its root, it is a data analysis and publishing endeavor. A secondary role of this effort is that of providing marketing information to our Stellar Schools project.

Until recently, this work was sold as a consulting service in which typically a non-profit educationally focused organization would hire us to produce these NAEP estimates for the public schools within the states of interest and additionally provide analysis about them. We profited financially from this activity- albeit modestly.

Now we are developing guidebooks to public schools based on the same kinds of analysis and data processing. We see the provision of these NAEP estimates as an essential ingredient to education reform. After all, parents, educators, and other stakeholders need honest information about schools if they are to act in the best interests of the children attending them. The more information, the better.

If we can earn significant profits from these guidebooks, we can use a major portion of these positive cash flows to reinvest in more books, more editions, and other means of disseminating this valuable information. Thus, the more the profits, the better it will be!

To these ends we are in the process of publishing a guidebook for the Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC region, while at the same time developing the data sets for a much larger effort involving the northeastern United States. More information about these two efforts follows farther along.

It Takes More Than A Village

We are in the process of publishing the guidebook to public schools and alternatives for the Potomac Region and will first sell it as an e-book that can be read on a variety of e-readers as well as computer screens. The front and back covers of our book tell you more:



[We thank, ChloroFill, LLC for their generosity in allowing us to use their art work. ChloroFill is a producer of environmentally responsible building materials. (www.chlorofill.com)]

and the back cover:
The book's extended title,

We soon expect to have our book available from the online bookstores operated by Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Borders, and particularly at Apple's iBookstore. We emphasize the latter because it sells books for the iPad reader which can display color, which we use in some of our graphics.

In the meantime you can also purchase the book, in pdf format, by clicking here to reach the guidebook area of the Asora website.

Finally, we also look forward to printing paperback and hardback versions of the book.

Our 2nd Guidebook Is For The Northeast

In our most recent Asora update we suggested that our second guidebook would pertain to the four states surrounding Lake Michigan. We also suggested that our third effort would concern an area we called “greater New England.” Given the relatively lower marketing costs we expect to have in the Northeastern United States, we have begun work on a book for this region.

By the Northeastern United States we mean all of the states northeast of and including Pennsylvania and Delaware- ten states in all. At this time (early September 2010) we have obtained most of the data needed to perform our analysis. We hope to engage collaborators in this project. And we hope to make a profit selling these books. If we can make this project financially profitable, we’ll then be able to extend the geographical coverage to the entire Untied States and will be able to produce new editions every two years (to coincide with the NAEP testing calendar).

We Can Help Providers Of Supplemental Services

Our guidebooks are based on a premise familiar to providers of supplemental services: Schools are often failing children who can benefit from one or more of the services offered by that provider.

For us at Asora it is more than a premise or assumption. We have the proof. We have done the research covering thousands of schools to demonstrate quantitatively that most students in most schools in most regions are below grade level. Thus the premise gains additional stature giving firms operating in these areas additional data on which they can base their marketing to families and other stakeholders who are seeking help for children at risk of falling behind.

Towards The
Tutored Schoolroom

We were pleased to organize a session on this topic at the recent Education Industry Association’s annual convention- held in July this year in Chicago.

My presentation, though introductory of the principal speaker, concerned the history of the roots of online instruction. Starting before Gutenberg, I traced how we evolved from the in-person devoid of books learning environment of those primitive times to the “anywhere, anytime, and anything” characteristics of what is possible in current times- were educators to allow it. Click here to see how we went from “there, then, not much” paradigm to the one of “anywhere, anytime, and anything.”

Cheryl Vedoe, the CEO of Apex Learning, was the principal speaker of our session. She described how her company is now providing online content and instruction at the high school level for a number of brick and mortar schools around the country. Apex courses are rigorous. This is surely true in the sense that they “cut their teeth” on providing AP courses online.

In such schoolrooms, the routine chores of teaching have been automated thus changing the schoolroom into one that uses tutors to help children master the blended sources of information coming to them online and from the more traditional books. Thus tutors replace teachers or teachers morph into tutors.

Where To Go From Here?

For further information, consider reviewing our home page where there are links to more detailed descriptions of the services and activities of Asora Education. Alternatively you might consider visiting "What Was New" to learn more about our recent and not so recent history.



Our June 2010 Update:

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 our 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. You can download a draft version of its main body by visiting our Reports of Regional Guidebooks page.

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.


Our March 2010 Update:


March Theme: A Genuine Race to the Top
We at Asora® Education Enterprises like the concept of the Race to the Top. On the other hand, there are many powerful groups who don’t. Led by teachers’ unions, these beneficiaries of the status quo feel threatened by the implied reforms and will work to limit and weaken any reform that might limit those benefits.

Governors are Hijacking the Race to the Top

We are fearful that the Race to the Top is being degraded into a “minor league” competition that some have labeled the Race to the Middle. (Jamie Gass of Boston’s Pioneer Institute http://www.educationnews.org/ed_reports/thinks_tanks/60099.html)

We are alluding to the current effort by the National Governors’ Association to develop Common Core Standards for student achievement. We question whether such a group of state based politicians and education officials representing most of the states will succeed in negotiating rigorous common standards. Their current proposed standards are weak. Two states have already rejected them: Minnesota and Massachusetts. Their reasoning? They didn’t want to weaken their relatively higher standards they had worked so hard to establish.

We have a defacto national standard in the content tested by the Nation’s Report Card (the NAEP test), but political considerations have prevented it from being designated as such. We at Asora do regard the NAEP as the primary national standard and will do so until better criteria are established.

Looking ahead we think that national standards for student competence (or anything else) need not necessarily be a product of the states and/or the national government. They could also be the product of non-profit national organizations- as is the case in the field of accounting where a private organization sets the standards and does the testing of candidates for the CPA designation. In the K-12 space we already have the ACT and SAT tests which correspond to a set of “national standards” developed by their respective non-profit organizations. A large plurality of K-12 stakeholders already accept these tests and the content standards on which they are based. At Asora we are particularly interested in the ACT and how it relates to the NAEP.

We see the standards of the NAEP, the ACT, and the SAT as being roughly comparable and regard them as suitable expectations for student achievement in the Race to the Top. In comparison we reject the Common Core Standards in their current form and moreover see no need for a political framework such as the National Governors’ Association to be the author of academic standards.

So what is Asora Education doing to compete in this quest?

All of Asora’s activities represent efforts to improve student competency, whether in our work regarding student assessments or in our work to develop more cost effective schools. If this sparks your interest, please read on:

Asora’s Potomac Region Guidebook Project

The three “state” region of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia defines the geography of a guide to public schools and school districts we are presently generating. Using our mapping methodology, for each school in this region we generate estimates of the percentages of children who would have been assessed to be NAEP proficient in their studies. We do this for reading and mathematics at the 4th, 8th, and 12th grade levels to provide realistic measures of student competencies. We see two primary benefits from this:

1. We avoid exaggeration and use a realistic criterion of what it means to be at grade level: NAEP proficiency or better.


2. We enable stakeholders to make comparisons across state lines, which will be of particular interest in and around metropolitan Washington, D.C.


Given our interest in elevating student proficiencies, it is critical that we focus on demographic groups needing the most help. For each school, we also obtain and publish data relevant to disadvantaged children, including what fraction of each tested group is economically disadvantaged and what percentages of each is proficient according to our NAEP estimates.


We have developed some new metrics that focus on the achievement of disadvantaged children. For example, we have the Least of These (LOT) Status Fraction, which calculates the ratio of the proficiency of the disadvantaged student subset to that of the entire tested group at the school and/or district level. When this number is close to one, it indicates a school or system that more effectively educates the children of the Least affluent families, which is an important social and educational goal.


Other demographic information from the US Census relevant to each school is also presented. For a glimpse of a prototypical version and its accompanying spreadsheets click here.


As we complete the gathering of information for this guidebook, we are already seeing interesting data patterns that will be of particular interest to researchers as well as other stakeholders. Some districts and schools appear to do a better job educating the disadvantaged than others. Charter schools, in particular, are showing great promise in this regard.


As we complete the guidebook for the Potomac Region, we will embark on one for the four state region surrounding Lake Michigan. A third project we are contemplating will cover the Hudson River Region, including the New York metro area, and possibly extending to cover the entire region of Greater New England.


In these projects, we’d love to find a way to include the private schools as well, but their lack of participation in the same tests taken by public school children makes that unlikely in the near term.


We seek collaborators, co-authors, publishers, patrons, etc. to help us finance, generate and distribute these guidebooks.

Asora May Organize A Workshop:
 On Self-Paced Online Instruction In Real Schools

Asora is currently having discussions with the Education Industry Association, of which we are a member, about our proposal to organize a workshop on futuristic schools at the Association’s 20th Annual EDVentures Conference, to be held in Chicago this July. The subject schools would primarily rely on web-based instruction assisted by various kinds of tutoring. Our tentative title for this symposium is, Empowering the Schoolroom with Tutors and Self-Paced Online Instruction.

One of the motivating factors that have inspired this proposal comes from Clayton Christensen and co-authors who wrote a book last year, Disrupting Class, that made convincing arguments about how online K-12 education will gain market share of approximately one-half by 2019. If true, this prediction promises many opportunities and raises a number of questions.

One of the most important concerns and challenges: How will people and machines learn to work together in the provision of online instruction in real schoolrooms? What is the role of tutors in this? Will students perform better?

We hope to provide some answers and some conjecture in this workshop by providing presentations in the following topical areas (exact titles to be determined later).

1. Virtual schools operating in schoolrooms

2. Training teachers as tutors in this human and machine based environment

3. Integrating and augmenting content from multiple vendors

4. Administering practice tests and proctored assessments in an online system

5. Relevance of post-secondary successes with online instruction in classrooms

6. Transitioning from a group instructional format in easy steps

Many members of the Education Industry Association (EIA) have or are acquiring expertise in these areas. If the Workshop is approved, we hope to gather as many of them as possible to make presentations in the workshop while inviting others curious about these prospects and opportunities. We have identified at least a half dozen experts who will be invited to lead the topical discussions.
If we are not able to organize this within the context of the EIA we will consider finding a different venue for this symposium- if sufficient interest is shown.

In either case I’d appreciate your comments and feedback on this proposal- particularly if you would be interested in participating or attending.

Asora is Encouraged by Success of Rocketship Education Schools

We recently read about a group of charter schools in San Jose, California that utilize online instruction for a significant part of a student's day. Operated by Rocketship Education, which is a non-profit effort, several of these schools predominantly enroll children from low income families and yet have shown remarkable progress in elevating student proficiencies well above district averages.

We regard this as an important "data point" that suggests online instruction can be a key ingredient in helping children gain and maintain knowledge and skills needed to prosper in school and later. It encourages Asora's Stellar Schools effort to develop similar kinds of schools based on online self-paced instruction (in real buildings.)

Our December 2009 Update:

December Theme Is "Free Labor"
As some of you know, Asora Education Enterprises is undercapitalized. Or perhaps more bluntly, Asora's only marketable assets are its achievement test analysis work and maybe its Registered Trademark.

Finding investment capital and sweat equity players has been difficult. On the achievement test work we will now undertake projects without initially securing a contract. In the area of Asora's Stellar Schools, we will likewise work gratis in helping prospective and existing school owners explore our proposed learning formats.

Beltway Tri-State Guide to Schools
Asora's work in the area of studying achievement tests has mainly been that of converting state reported student proficiencies, which are typically inflated, to ones consistent with the Nation's Report Card or NAEP. By estimating NAEP proficiencies for schools in adjoining states, it is then possible to compare schools across state lines, which may be of interest to stakeholders in multi-state metropolitan regions. There are a number of multi-state combinations of interest, including the tri-state areas surrounding Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C. We are going to focus on the latter first.


Getting a Small Stellar Foothold
In our efforts to find school operators who might want to adopt the Stellar Schools instructional format, we have concentrated mainly on existing schools. In doing so we have neglected an important niche market for which Stellar Schools may be a very good fit: Small schools with less than 100 students. As a matter of fact, our business plan discusses schools being composed of one or more 50 student units. Below that number, loss of scale leads to higher per student costs, but they can remain manageable depending on the details of the situation.

If the Stellar School model allows efficient operation at smaller school sizes than the alternatives, it should be attractive to "communities" that seek small schools but previously could not afford the types available. Among the opportunities here are, religious schools serving relatively small numbers of children that might pertain just to the children of a congregation, private schools in sparsely populated suburban or exurban areas, and public schools that for whatever reason serve only a small population of students. In this latter category, there is Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, which reportedly has only 7 students in its public school!

Our September 2009 Update:

September Theme Is Assessment Corruption
Asora Education Enterprises would not be in the business of mapping exaggerated/inflated state reported proficiencies onto the NAEP scale if there were no deceptive state assessment systems. Many can be regarded as corrupt in that they knowingly continue the deceptions despite the evident harm they do. We have examined, to different degrees of specificity, over two dozen states’ assessment systems. Only two, South Carolina and Massachusetts, do not grossly distort their students’ proficiency levels as compared to the NAEP. An essay we wrote on this subject, “Exaggerations in Public Education Assessments: When is it deception? Is it sometimes corruption?” can be downloaded from our Reports on Reform page.


Asora Can Help The Race To The Top
The U.S. Department of Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, is conditioning the distribution of his department’s allocation of Stimulus money on the recipient state’s good behavior with respect to a number of favored reforms. The department is encouraging states to compete with one another as to which has the better reforms as part of the department’s Race To The Top. One of the sought reforms is that of making state assessment systems more robust and better aligned with the NAEP. When they are not so aligned (as in 48 of 50 states) Asora’s mapping service can be used to make estimates regarding local school and district performance as a temporary substitute for a properly functioning state-testing regime.


Studying The Great Pretender: Tennessee
Recently we have been making local estimates of NAEP proficiency for Tennessee public schools and districts. In the course of that work we have reviewed the state published proficiencies from its TCAP testing system and compared them to those of the NAEP, as anyone with an Internet connection can do. Not only does Tennessee exhibit the highest inflation nationally, according to one survey, but is also has such extreme inflation for ethnic groups that it claims high school Hispanic students are equally proficient as their White cohorts, in sharp contrast to the NAEP proficiencies showing Hispanic students’ proficiency percentages less than half that of White students. Our preferred hypothesis for this unexpected result involves abuses in the provision of special accommodations in the testing. Alternative explanations of outright cheating, doctoring scores, cooking books, etc. though possible, are unlikely.


Special Accommodations Violate The Precepts Of Good Science
The practice of Special Accommodations is mostly based on theory that student testing should be used to boost children’s self esteem as opposed to the idea that testing’s main purpose is to measure a child’s knowledge and skills. Giving special accommodations to children who are blind or have other handicaps, unrelated to their academic skills, is a worthwhile practice if the alternative testing measures student capabilities in the same units as the testing for non-handicapped children. However, it appears that special accommodations are mostly given to children who have learning disabilities and other characteristics that are related to their academic skills. Providing them with special accommodations has the effect of measuring their skills with a different metric. In other fields of science, using inconsistent metrics in the measurement of phenomena would be considered academic misconduct. But in education, the inconsistent metrics of special accommodation are not only allowed, they are mandated in the laws and regulations pertaining to public education! In Asora’s Stellar School assessment systems, special accommodations will not be provided except to blind students.


Publicity On Replacing Defective State Assessment Regimes
Nearly all state operated public school assessment systems use tests that are inconsistent with the NAEP. Even in the two states where the inflation is not significant (Massachusetts and South Carolina) their state operated testing systems are vulnerable to political manipulation. In Asora’s home state of Rhode Island, where the NECAP test is used, the testing regime suffers from at least six defects, including the structural conflicts of interest that arise when testing and instruction policies are set within the same government unit. We think an independent agency or organization should manage the testing. We would seek to use a test with a national reputation, such as the ACT tests, which are given in grades 8 through 12 in many schools nationwide. ACT test results are easily linked to NAEP proficiencies when the ACT scoring distributions are known- as is the case in Illinois.

We are currently making presentations in Rhode Island on these problems and will soon offer them to groups in Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont, which are the other states using or considering the use of the NECAP tests. The popular image of NECAP is that of a step towards reform. The reality is that NECAP is a major part of the problem. It’s surely not part of the Race to the Top. Rather we see it clouding the issues, which we believe retards effective reform.


The Asora Guidebook Project
Why isn’t there a “Zagat’s” guide to schools? We are considering the benefits and profits that may ensue from writing guidebooks for major multistate metropolitan regions. In such areas as New York metro, Washington D.C. metro, and even the three state region around Chicago, there may be interest in comparing schools across state boundaries, which is currently difficult given the inconsistent testing systems. With our NAEP proficiency estimates calculated for each school in such regions, these comparisons would be easier. We’d love to find a way to include the private schools as well, but their lack of participation in the same tests taken by public school children makes that unlikely in the near term. We are looking for partners in this project: equity and sweat.


Encouraging Protestants to Consider Stellar Schools
While all sectarian groups have interests in K-12 education, Protestants have a peculiar historical affiliation with public education and the group instructional models on which it is based: They were its founders in the early 16th century, after the Reformation. As public education took hold in 19th century America, it was almost exclusively affiliated with the Protestant outlook. Catholics in America saw this and established their own schools to preserve their sectarian values. Because of this historic connection, Protestants have tended to rely on public schools for their children’s education. Even in recent decades, when public schools have lost their Protestant sectarian attributes and have become quite secular in their approaches to education, most Protestants continue to patronize them. We can think of two reasons why Protestants might consider Asora’s Stellar Schools as a solution for their children’s educational needs:

First, through the Asora self-paced online instructional system, the curriculum can be tailored to provide that combination of core curricular subjects and electives that would reflect the church's values and religious beliefs.

Second, through the Asora instructional system, student proficiencies can be greatly increased as the model is designed to eliminate social promotion and the dysfunctions that accompany it.


Our June 2009 Update:

June Theme Is Assessment
To use the phrase, “A Perfect Storm,” probably overstates the coincidental nature of recent developments at Asora Education Enterprises. However, every recent activity has had assessment as its key component or at least as an important aspect.

Honest Assessment Drives Reforms
The need for honesty in public school assessment reporting may go unanswered within the public systems. Thus private testing and certification proposals should be considered. We have written on this in our report, "Making Tests And Diplomas Honest Will Drive Reform." It's here for download from our Reports on Reform page.

Tipping Point
There are now several indicators that online instruction has entered a rapid growth phase and will affect nearly all aspects of K-12 education going forward- if for no other reason because of its low cost. Perhaps our realization of this sudden surge in Online Education has been late and delayed by our earlier blindness to what was going on around us. As the two book reviews (below) suggest, online instruction will dominate in about ten years. We had better get busy doing our part!

Assessment As Profit Center
Those of you who have explored our business plan (available in our Reports on Development area) know that it has many facets. In terms of instructional modes of operation it proposes up to 15 different options within each course of study. The only one required, however, was the assessment component’s proctored examinations. In every other instructional mode, the student will be free to use it or not. Implict in that will be the freedom for students to take their instruction elsewhere. It suggests that we design our service to have two profit centers: instruction and assessment. Our brand will depend more on the latter- perhaps much in the same way that the accounting industry’s designation of CPA relates to the “test” and not to the learning process.

New Mappings
One of Asora Education's services has been the estimation of what local schools and districts would have attained on the Nation’s Report Card or NAEP. The ELQ method we employed converted or mapped the state reported (and almost always inflated) proficiencies into ones on the NAEP scale. We now have written a fairly detailed report that derives the old or Simple ELQ method and derives a new more accurate Piecewise Continuous ELQ method. It checks the errors of the methods in simulated examination environments and then applies them against known demographic groups proficiencies on the two exams. The report ELQ-Mappings.docx and its supporting spreadsheet ELQ-Derivation.xlsx are downloadable from our Reports on Reform page.


Discovery Of Enhanced Deception
Our analysis in the Mappings work brought us face to face with some of the harms inflicted by the states' almost routine use of inflation in reporting assessment proficiencies. Though always there in the published data we had not realized the extent to which inflation is different for different demographics. It’s small in good schools and large in schools where disadvantaged children predominate. How convenient for making public schools “look good!” It serves inflation in small portions where only a small amount is needed to make the schools look good. And for the truly dysfunctional schools it ladles giant servings to make the horrible appear barely passable. For the public education propagandists it optimally apportions the deception to where it is needed the most- to cover up the worst situations the most.

Taken For A R.I.D.E.
As an example of the Enhanced Deception just mentioned we wrote an op-ed piece for a Rhode Island newspaper. “Taken For A R.I.D.E.,” refers to the Rhode Island Department of Education and its use of inflation to make the good look better and the bad look not so awful. It is on our Reports on Reform page for your perusal or download.

Liberating Learning - Book Review
Scholars and policy analysts Terry Moe and John Chubb (both are both), have written the book, “Liberating Learning,” which is a very interesting review and prognosis of how online instruction will grow and help reform public schools. As is my habit, I generally write an online book review on the Amazon.Com website when I purchase books from the site and I did so for this excellent book. Their book was, more than any other input, influential in convincing me of the Tipping Point mentioned above. It is on our Reports on Reform page.

Disrupting Class - Book Review
Another book we reviewed is “Disrupting Class.” It also makes arguments about how disruptive innovation will develop within the education sector and confirms we are at or beyond this Tipping Point. My review of it, "Good wheat - Too much chaff," is also on the Reports on Reform page.

Our March 2009 Update:

Public School Achievement Test Deceptions
Most, but not all, stakeholders in public education are aware that state reported student proficiencies in mathematics and reading are significantly exaggerated above the well-respected Nation's Report Card (also known as the National Assessment for Educational Progress or NAEP). Asora consulting has reviewed recent trends in state reported proficiencies and found 12 cases with an additional type of deception: Not only are the proficiencies exaggerated, but they are reporting (false) gains in 8th grade reading proficiencies when, in fact, the NAEP shows them declining.

The states practicing this double deception, ordered from worst to least in terms of the false gain are: NY, WY, NM, RI, AR, NH, VA, IL, ND, LA, ME & AL. In Rhode Island and New Hampshire, we believe that a narrow curriculum coupled with teaching to the test may account for the false gains.

Three reports covering these matters are available. NECAP-op-ed.doc is taken from an op-ed piece that discusses the Rhode Island situation. NECAP-sequel.doc extends that analysis to include New Hampshire and Vermont. Finally, DoubleDeceptionDozen.doc discusses the twelve states practicing the double deception. All three reports are available from our Reports on Reform page.

Education Industry Association Foresees Large Role For Online Instruction
At its annual Washington, DC meeting, members of the Education Industry Association (EIA) were briefed on the outlook for various specialties within the field. We learned that publicly traded companies engaged in online instruction comprised one of the very few market sectors to see its stock market valuations rising over the past year. Additionally, we saw estimates that online instruction will comprise 50% of all K-12 instruction by 2019- as compared to about 1% currently.

Developing Asora's Brokerage Services For Online Instruction
During the past quarter Asora has contacted many prospective online providers to learn more about their offerings. We have also been developing a list of private schools- beginning with the New England states- that we are now in the process of contacting. For more information, please see our Courseware Brokerage page.

Offering Public Speakers
Asora Education Enterprises is offering public presentations about its many projects and accomplishments. For further information, please see our Asora Speakers Bureau.

Building A High School Physics Course
We are currently considering the creation of a Stellar Schools high school physics course that would build on the prototype we developed last year. By doing so, Asora would be able to offer this course to schools and homeschooling students. With such a course operational, suppliers of other courses would better understand the instructional formats unique to Asora's Stellar Schools.

Our December 2008 Update:

Everyone Is Using The 500-Year Old Protestant System
As mentioned elsewhere on this site, the age-based group instructional format that has been used in nearly all public and private schools was developed long ago by the Protestants during the Reformation as a way to improve literacy among the laity. Needless to say, Catholic parochial schools also use this traditional mode of instruction. Given that social promotion is a pervasive characteristic of age-based group instruction, the time has arrived to replace the latter with a format that structurally prevents social promotion: self-paced tutoring. This is what Stellar Schools and their online self-paced instructional systems are designed to do. The relevance of this to Catholic schools is discussed on our page devoted to Catholic education.

Asora To Establish Courseware Brokerage
As we take steps to develop Stellar Schools, we are now taking the first step in which we would provide online instructional services. This path begins with the development of brokerage services that would match school clients with providers of instructional courseware and other services. This service will commence in January 2009. Then Asora will have two revenue generating activities: The brokerage services and the ongoing achievement test analysis work.

Asora's Achievement Test Studies Reveal Pervasive Social Promotion In American Public Schools

Over the past 15 months, our consulting arm has generated estimates of how thousands of individual public schools would have performed on the Nation's Report Card. We find, in every state and region studied, high levels of social promotion in every public school- including the very best schools where 20% or more of the children are promoted beyond their skill levels. In the worst schools the percentages socially promoted generally exceed 95%.

This information convinces us that instructional systems need to be structured to prevent social promotion. Stellar Schools online self-paced instruction is designed to do that. These studies also provide us a marketing tool we can use to publicize the problem, which can help us "sell" the Stellar Schools concepts.

Click here for more information about the achievement test services. We also have reports on these studies available from our Reports on Reform page.



Asora's CEO Lost Election But Spread The Word
Asora Education Enterprises' CEO, David Anderson, failed to unseat the incumbent State Representative (from Providence's Upper East Side). Campaigning, nevertheless, had several important benefits. Based on many conversations with voters, we found that they are well aware of our dysfunctional public schools and yet feel powerless to help reform them. The campaign's platform included many school reform proposals (all consistent with developments towards online education) some of which might take root and maybe lead to incremental improvements. Yet there is also a public apathy that suggests reforming public schools will likely not succeed given the lack of public pressure on school officials. This public lethargy suggests that reforming private schools, as envisaged by our Stellar Schools project, may be the more fruitful path to success.

Our September 2008 Update:

Education Next Will Report On Choice
Paul Peterson, editor of Education Next, told an audience of think tank education experts that his publication will soon release information about school choice systems around the world that will show a strong relationship between the degree of choice available and the proficiency of students. Such information is welcome as it will encourage the enlargement of the opportunities for innovators to develop alternative schools and methodologies. This would make more room for Asora to participate.


Asora Analyses of State Achievement Tests
Continuing its work for stakeholders around the United States, Asora has now completed work analyzing how local schools and districts would have performed on the NAEP in six states: Oklahoma, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont. As we've noted before a similar picture emerges in each of these states: Social promotion affects every school and even the best public schools have very large fractions of their students below grade level.

Asora is seeking a contract to do all of the public schools in the United States. Recent discussions with GreatSchools.Net may lead to such a result. Or could lead to imitation (in which others would use our openly available methodologies) to accomplish the same goal.

Asora CEO: Candidate For State Assembly
David Anderson is now engaged in a political campaign for the Rhode Island General Assembly where he would represent its 4th district (located on Providence's East Side). See his campaign website for details. Given the severely dysfunctional status of the state's public education system, well over half of his political efforts are focused on it. Given the part-time nature of this body, he will be able to continue the Asora developments after his election. To avoid conflicts of interest he will propose Stellar School "like" solutions for public schools, but will suggest the use of other vendors such as K12, Inc. to provide the courseware.

From the point of view of public policy he is proposing:

1. The state adopt internal reforms of schools, including honest reporting of test results, Regent's diplomas (given to students who are actually proficient), alternative certification, and more online instruction.

2. The state adopt what we call external reforms by introducing funding mechanisms (scholarships, tax credits, vouchers) to give all parents a choice in selecting the schools their children attend. He would also change the labor laws to allow multiple unions to represent workers according to the workers' individual choices. This would be a form of a right to work law.

Asora Speakers Bureau
Asora Education Enterprises will offer public speakers to venues interested in K-12 education reform. Please use our contact page to request further information about having one of us make a presentation at your location.


Our June 2008 Update:


Asora Looks At Protestant And Other Sectarian Schools
We have now added some information that might be of interest to Protestants and other sects regarding their interests and responsibilities in the education of their children. Asora's Stellar Schools, or the non-profit version, can help. Please check Asora & Protestant Etc. Education for more information.

Asora Looks At The World's Schools
Recently reported research from the American Institutes for Research now allows us to estimate levels of proficiency in other developed countries with respect to math and science achievement levels they would have obtained on the United States' Nation's Report Card. While not all countries are covered, enough European, Anglophone, and Asian states are included to tell us that roughly 40%, 30% and 50% of 13 year old students are proficient in these subject areas, respectively. This means that social promotion is a world wide educational problem because, at best, only about half of the world's students (of those tested) are found to be proficient (at or above grade level).

Asora In Switzerland
CEO David Anderson was invited to make a presentation (June 16th) at a symposium organized at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne where he spoke about "Self-Paced, Online Physics Instruction." Given the fact that social promotion appears to be a world-wide problem, we announced that we have decided to look beyond the United States for potential partners in the development of Asora's Stellar Schools. You can view/hear the speech from our physics page.

Asora At The Vatican
As a part of our European visit we made some efforts to meet with Catholic education authorities at the Vatican when we visited there in late June. Although we were unable to secure an appointment for such a meeting on this visit, we plan to continue our efforts to offer our ideas that would potentially benefit Catholic schools around the world.

Prototypical Physics Course Example
Until now, the Asora website provided only one example of how a Stellar Schools course might operate. That is the Algebra 1 segment found elsewhere on this website. We have now begun the development of an AP level high school Physics With Calculus course. In it we have made further improvements to the Stellar Schools instructional model. By viewing the introductory Lecturette #1, site visitors can glean much about the twelve instructional modes being planned for this course (and similar ones for most of the other subjects in the core curriculum). Please visit our page on Asora Physics to learn more.

Asora Analyses Of The NECAP States
Continuing its work for stakeholders around the United States, Asora partnered with the Ocean State Policy Research Institute (where CEO Anderson also plays a role as Education Fellow) to examine the achievement test proficiencies reported in the states of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont- all of which use the NECAP (New England Common Assessment Program). Consistent with its previous studies in the states of Pennsylvania and Oklahoma as well as with its work for individual counties in California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, a similar picture emerges: Social promotion affects every school and even the best public schools have very large fractions of their students below grade level. Of the six tests administered by the NECAP, we were pleased to learn that one of them, its high school mathematics test, has proficiencies that are no longer inflated relative to our NAEP estimates. The worst NECAP/NAEP school in the NECAP states is Hope IT High School in Providence where less than 2% of its 11th grade children were found to be proficient. Despite that statistic, nearly all of those tested will receive high school diplomas next year. Go figure!

Asora Extends Its Work For Oklahoma
In addition to our achievement test analysis service in which we predict what proficiency percentages individual schools and districts would have obtained on the NAEP, we have been working with the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs to disseminate relevant estimates of local schools and districts to media outlets in the various Oklahoma localities. Written as op-ed articles, we have used mail-merge to provide locality specific information as to the best and worst schools at the various grade levels within the state's counties and districts.

Asora Announces Appointment of CMO
Susan Anderson has accepted our offer to manage Asora's marketing operation. As Chief Marketing Officer, Susan will be responsible for the relations with and the development of investors, suppliers, collaborators, and customers.

Asora CEO Will Run For State Assembly
David Anderson recently announced his candidacy to run for the Rhode Island General Assembly where he would represent its 4th district (located on Providence's East Side). Given the severely dysfunctional status of the state's public education system, about half of his political effort will focus on it. Given the part-time nature of this body, he will be able to continue the Asora developments after his election. To avoid conflicts of interest he will propose Stellar School "like" solutions for public schools, but will suggest the use of other vendors such as K12, Inc. to provide the courseware.

Asora Speakers Bureau
Asora Education Enterprises will offer public speakers to venues interested in K-12 education reform. Please use our contact page to request further information about having one of us make a presentation at your location.


Our March 2008 Update:

Registration of Asora® Trademark Complete:
Asora Education Enterprises received its Certificate of Registration for its trademark from the United States Patent and Trademark Office in late February.

Demolishing Inflation In Oklahoma & New Jersey:
Asora's primary revenue producing activity has been consulting in the specific area of analyzing state administered achievement tests. Typically, states report markedly higher numbers of children as proficient as compared to the Nation's Report Card. Our analysis converts these inflated proficiencies to ones consistent with the Nation's Report Card (NAEP) on a school-by-school basis.

During the winter, Asora Consulting added Oklahoma and New Jersey to the states where it has analyzed reported achievement test proficiencies of public schools and public school districts. All schools and districts were evaluated in Oklahoma while only those in Hudson County were studied in New Jersey. While we see some quantitative differences among the jurisdictions we've studied, the picture of pervasive social promotion is a constant characteristic. Our earlier studies evaluated schools in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Bristol County in Massachusetts, and Ventura County in California. Click here for more information.

Currently discussions are underway with various patron organizations about adding another eight states to our "portfolio."

Asora® Business Plan Revised:
The Asora business plan revision is now complete and available here on Asora's website (in the files ExSum2008.doc and FullBP2008.doc). Our previous plan was undercapitalized and required nearly ten years to reach a profitable status. This plan requires significant investment capital, of at least $40 million, but it foresees profits in the fourth year. There is quite a lot of detail in our plan and it takes 150 pages to describe it!

We are well aware that there are other paths to Stellar Schools, including the marriage of existing businesses. For example, joining an online provider, with a content provider, to an existing school network would be one avenue of development.

Starting these schools in the non-profit world is another alternative and is one we are encouraging through our plans for a non-profit Stellar Schools Development Corporation. More information on that can be found on its website.

Reform Ideas Presented to Rhode Island Regents
In his role as Education Fellow of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute, Asora CEO David Anderson made a presentation to the Rhode Island Board of Regents, who direct its K-12 public education system. He reviewed the evidence suggesting social promotion is a primary cause of our dysfunctional systems. He advocated a three-phase reform strategy that would convert the state's schools into ones resembling Stellar Schools. His presentation, RI_Regents_01.doc, is available in our report download area.

Stellar Schools Go To Switzerland
As a part of a physics symposium to be held in June at the Ecole Polytechnic Federale de Lausanne, in honor of retiring Swiss physicist Ralf Gruber, David Anderson will speak on "Self Paced, Online Physics Instruction." European education systems, though often more efficient than their American counterparts, also suffer from the ills of social promotion. Thus, the remedy of Stellar Schools may have application outside of the United States.

Asora Adds New Management Officers:
We are pleased to announce two new players to our team. They are:

Jon Scott of Providence, Rhode Island: COO
Jon is serving as our Chief Operating Officer. He has devoted his life to helping children. He's done that in a number of ways, as a lobbyist in Washington advocating for financial aid, as a consultant to group home providers, as an athletic coach in children's sports, and as a politician- who most recently ran for the U.S. Congress. Jon also chairs the Board of Trustees of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute.

Jay Jacot of Newport, Rhode Island: CFO
Jay brings to his position of Chief Financial Officer a background in business management and forensic accounting, among others. Jay also serves as a Director of the Ocean State Policy Research Institute where he is the treasurer.

Asora Supports the Ocean State Policy Research Institute
Asora Education Enterprises have provided various services to this newly established Providence based "center-right" think tank, mostly on a pro bono basis. CEO David Anderson is also an Education Fellow of the Institute.

Stanford Report on Education and Economic Growth:
Their relationship is discussed in a current article in Education Next, authored by Eric Hanushek, Dean Jamison, Eliot Jamieson and Ludger Woessmann.

Our review of it:

Duh! "It's not just going to school but learning that matters," say the authors. They quantify this by showing that if, measured by student cognitive skills, the US K-12 system (24th place out of 50 countries) were as good as Canada's (9th place out of 50) then our GDP would be significantly higher than it is- enough so to pay for all US K-12 public education costs out of the difference (about $500 billion dollars).

Stellar Schools are designed to be signficantly better than Candaian schools so their widespread adoption and imitation should have robust economic benefits.


Our December 2007 Update:

Asora Trademark To Be Registered:
Asora Education Enterprises was notified in December that we will have our Trademark AsoraTM registered in January 2008 if no one successfully appeals its issue.


Asora Consulting Work In Pennsylvania:
Asora Consulting added Pennsylvania to the regions where it has analyzed all public schools and public school districts. As in its earlier studies of schools in Rhode Island and Ventura County in California, there is considerable evidence of massive social promotion taking place. Click here for more information.


Currently discussions are underway with various research organizations about adding Arizona, Connecticut, Kansas and Tennessee to our list of states we have analyzed.


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Business Plan Revisions: