Remember the obnoxious, hyperactive paperclip that popped up in Word when you were trying write a letter? As soon as you typed "Dear," up popped up Clippy:

It looks like you're writing a letter.
Would you like help?

Uninvited.

You'd been writing letters for decades, but Microsoft insisted you needed what they called "proactive help." And there was Clippy insisting he could show you how to do your job better. No matter how many times you clicked "Just type the letter without help," Clippy would pop up again, insisting you must need help.

Your train of thought melted as you tried to remember how to get rid of the dorky paperclip.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal , Stanford professor Clifford Nass reports, "One of the most reviled software designs of all time was Clippy, the animated paper clip in Microsoft Office. The mere mention of his name to computer users brought on levels of hatred usually reserved for jilted lovers and mortal enemies. There were 'I hate Clippy' websites, videos and T-shirts in numerous languages." Nass observes that "Clippy's problem was that he was utterly oblivious to the appropriate ways to treat people. Every time a user typed "Dear," Clippy would dutifully propose, "I see you are writing a letter. Would you like some help?" --no matter how many times the user had rejected this offer in the past."

And he wouldn't stop smiling. You're pounding the keyboard trying to find the "DIE!" function but he keeps smiling.

YouTube offers a hilarious "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" audio segment on the death of the reviled Microsoft mascot. Listeners voted this the funniest segment of all time. The show host Peter Segal says, "One day the engineers at Microsoft said, you know, the people using our products, they're frustrated, they're angry, but they're not insane with rage. How can we focus their rage? How about if just in the middle of doing something, an animated paperclip pops up on the screen and says: 'Can I help you? What are you doing? Oh, can I see?'"

The segment includes the Bill Gate memo titled "Clippy Must Die."

But now, teachers across America are discovering that Clippy has been reborn--with Gates barnstorming the country with pronouncements about effective teaching. Never mind you've been teaching for decades, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is there popping up with compulsory proactive help, insisting they can show you how to do your job better. No matter how much you beg, "Just let me teach," Clippy Bill is there insisting you must need help.

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StateImpactOhio has a great piece today, Charters Schools Part III: Cashing In on Education. It discusses at length to for-profit nature of Ohio's "non profit charters". It starts with the tale of one charter teacher experiencing her own kind of "Corporate innovation" - not getting paid.

Nagorsky says the it took her by surprise, but in hindsight, she says there were definitely some tell-tale signs: “I remember obviously the pay checks bouncing, which was huge. I remember the phone call telling me I was $900 in the hole in my account because everything I had sent out had bounced.”

Of course an article on profiteering charters would be incomplete without mention of White Hat Management and David Brennan

White Hat has been sued by some of its own schools, and critics keep pointing to the poor grades most of the schools get on annual report cards.
[...]
Minson says that would not have bothered him, if he felt like students in his schools were getting a good education.

He did not.

“We saw a lot of strategies put in play that tried to lessen the cost of educational delivery on a couple of different points, and that really gave us the vision that the number one priority of prosit was in direct competition at times with educational delivery.”

That's from the board chair of two of White Hat's own schools!

But lawyer April Hart says White Hat’s problem isn’t tough students. She argues it’s a teaching method that relies on computer instruction – a model she says is good for profits but not students.

“If you don’t care at the end of the day what’s going on in the school as long as your enrollment numbers are up, you’re going to have a problem in a for-profit situation,” says Hart.

So charters prefer not to hire too many teachers, and when they do, some even prefer not to pay them. Left holding the bag are thousands of students getting low quality, high profit educations from Ohio's accountability free charter school system.