Granny Cloud

Sugata Mitra is mainly known for his kids'-self-education TED talks in 2007: Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves and 2010: The child-driven education. He continues, with the 2013 TED Prize, to develop A School in the Cloud and the Future of Learning

Mitra recruited an army of retired teachers, all women, whom he dubbed the “granny cloud.” The grannies connected to Mitra’s schools via Skype, and when the kids were assembled in groups of four to six they asked questions like “Can anything be less than zero?” “Will robots be conscious one day?” and “How do my eyes know to cry when I am sad?”
Then they sat back and let the kids do the learning, injecting themselves only to offer the kind of encouragement that only grannies can. “If there is a child in trouble we beam in a Gran,” Mitra jokes. What Mitra saw was that the Granny cloud kids’ English improved, their science scores soared. By most measures they were learning more and more quickly, and doing it mostly on their own. “It just requires broadband, collaboration and encouragement,” Mitra says.
... What Mitra proposes is the dismantling of an educational machine created by the British over centuries of Empire building.... “I am not saying its bad, it’s brilliantly constructed, but it’s not needed.”
What Mitra envisions are “schools in the cloud,” classes of 24 students in actual brick-and-mortar spaces managed in person by his volunteer grannies. The grannies ask the questions, offer the encouragement, everything else happens remotely, the lights, heating, and locks are all manipulated via the cloud. For now Mitra envisions these cloud schools will function as a supplement...

If Mitra's vision (in many countries) seems to be working, it's likely that we'll see volunteer+paid organizations of grannies, grandpas, and others, trying to make small schools work better by a mix of "child-driven" online and offline experience. It might be effective, too.
Or then again, maybe not.

Parents as problem v. School as problem?

National education policy -- oh, how it's changed

"Poor students were framed as trapped in failing schools, and needing parents to rescue them, in 2001. This is a reverse of the framing in 1965, when they were portrayed as trapped in culturally impoverished families and needing schools to rescue them,"

"Won't Back Down"

Teachers on the Defensive - NYTimes.com

“Our very best teachers ought to be treated much, much better than they are today,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “But in order to get there, we need to be able to say out loud that some teachers are better than others.”
That’s precisely what “Won’t Back Down” says. Although the movie is bound, in this politically charged climate, to be analyzed solely in terms of the position it seems to take on parent trigger or its qualms with union behavior, it’s ultimately about the impact of superior teaching, the need to foster more of it and the importance of school accountability. Who could quibble with any of that?