Students at the Secondary School for Journalism walked out to protest the Chan-Zuckerberg Summit depersonalized learning program, but thought Mark Zuckerberg might not have noticed. So they wrote him a letter to explain why they don’t like interacting for hours a day with a computer. They wrote and told him that they were learning little or nothing, and they complained about the collection of their personally identifiable data. They asked why Summit (and CZI) was collecting all this data without their knowledge or consent. Great points!
The article appears in EdSurge, a tech journal that is partially underwritten by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. I bet Mark and Priscilla see it.
They had tried before to address their concerns with the program, says Kelly Hernandez, one of the organizers of the protest. But no matter how many times they talked to their principal, or how many calls their parents made to the school to complain, nothing changed.
“We wanted to fight back with a walkout,” Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior, tells EdSurge, “because when we tried to voice our concerns, they just disregarded us.”
The Secondary School for Journalism is one of about 380 schools nationwide using Summit Learning, a personalized learning program that involves the use of an online instructional software, called the Summit Platform. This program grew out of Summit Public Schools, a network of 11 charter schools based in California and Washington, and soon caught the eye of Facebook, which lent engineers to help build the software. The platform was later supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Earlier this year, Summit Public Schools announced it would be spinning the program out as an independent nonprofit in the 2019-2020 school year.
This is not the first time that the Summit software has attracted questions and protests. Around this time last year, a Connecticut school suspended its use of the software just months after implementing it.
For Hernandez and her classmates, the breaking point came the week of Halloween, when students got their report cards, she says. Some weren’t showing any credit for the courses they’d taken and passed—courses that were necessary to graduate. Others had significant scheduling errors. “It was just so disorganized,” Hernandez recalls.
So she and her friend, senior Akila Robinson, began asking around to see who might participate in a walkout. A few days later, on Nov. 5, nearly 100 students left the school to protest Summit.
“We didn’t necessarily want attention,” Hernandez says, even though they got plenty from the media. “We wanted the changes we felt we needed.”
Some changes have come. The school dropped the learning program for 11th and 12th grade students, because teachers of those grades didn’t receive any professional development for Summit. It is still using it with 9th and 10th graders, which Hernandez wants to change.
She believes a lot of the problems with Summit fall on her teachers and administrators, who were not properly trained in using it. Summit Learning officials, in an email to Education Week, also attributed the problems described by the students to poor implementation and a lack of professional development for teachers.
But fundamental issues with the learning system, as well as concerns over the data Summit collects and shares about its students, must be addressed with the people behind Summit, Hernandez feels. That’s why she and Robinson drafted and sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Thursday.
Below is the full text of the email the students sent to Facebook’s chief executive. Diane Tavenner, CEO of Summit Public Schools, is also copied on the note.
[Please open the link to read the students’ letter.]
Disclosure: EdSurge has received grant support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Good for the students; however, the parents need to invade a school board meeting. Lots of them. School boards only pay attention to bodies in the room.
We don’t have a school board in NYC. Only a mayor- appointed bunch of puppets called the Panel for educational policy.
That’s THE problem.
Great letter, students!
😦
more power to Akila Robinson and Kelly Hernandez, student leaders at the Secondary School of Journalism and other students who questioning what they are learning from the Summit Program. They are correct in saying this is not about “implementation” which is the typical way of ignoring a program that meets with justified resistence.
Plutocrats using young students for sociological experiments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjkdynBFHuQ
Wow. I clicked on this link, not knowing what to expect. Touché! Eddie Murphy and the great film, “Trading Places”. So true. I especially love the scene when he disrupts the rich people Christmas party.
For anyone who is suffering from T.D.S. (Trump Depression Syndrome)….this film is highly recommended. You deserve a few good laughs about now. Note: there are a few R rated scenes in there. But now that the presidency has become thoroughly X-rated, well, I guess concerns about decorum and respect are going right out the window…..of the White House.
LOL. Thanks for checking, John. Ed Reform often reminds me of that movie. Good point about the White House.
Trading places is a very accurate critique of the supposed American “meritocracy”.
The saying that “it is not what you know but who you know”(and in particular, how much money they have) is very true.
BTW hats off to the students protesting the Summit Platform. Younger adults give me hope for our nation.
Teachers working at the original Summit have been complaining and defecting for years. The CEO of Summit, Diane Tavenner, is a graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education Program, and many of the founding teachers were as well. I am ashamed of my Stanford program to see how many of my former classmates have been part of this tech funded faux “personalized” learning experience. The word from others who left Summit charters is that Diane Tavenner does not listen to her teachers. They have increasingly relied on recent graduates from TFA to fill their positions, as more experienced and concerned teachers leave to work in public schools where their voices will be respected, they will have more creative freedom to create authentic and engaging lessons, and where their students will have a larger range of social interactions and opportunities outside of boring screen time curricular units.
If the leaders of Summit won’t listen to their teachers and the resignation letters they have received over the past several years, maybe they will listen to students. Bravo to these student leaders!
Now what would really get attention would be if these students could manage a nationwide boycott of Instagram (for a week or more)……which is owned by Facebook. That could tank Markety Mark in the stock market world.
Fakebook is a better name to describe Facebook. Z-berg’s company hired Definers Public Affairs, a PR firm that employs Republican operatives. Its sister organization, America’s Rising, has the stated goal “… can drive the toughest negative narrative against Democrats.”
Tech Crunch described Definers’ diabolical plotting today.
Un-friend Fakebook:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/16/facebook-big-company-tech-world-truth
The should not just unFriend it.
They should Enemy it
And not just Democrats — Republicans, Libertarians and everyone else.
Fakebook is profiting hadsonely at the expense of EVERYONE in our country, with the exception of the Oiligarchs like Zuckerberg.
It is truly frightening that Fakebook posses such intimate data about so many families and children, information that WILL almost certainly be used against them in the future. Junior wants a job? How about that picture he posted in college with a beer in his hand?
The East German Stasi would have drooled over the information — and hence power — that Mar Zuckerberg possesses on a good fraction of people in the US.
Or (gasp!) the picture he posted with a joint
Amen, Lisa.
AGREE! These terrific students need to be told about this. Wish I knew the students.
In the EdSurge article and links, Tavenner’s “implementation” snipe claims the program is adaptable [schools are encouraged to include their own content]. Maybe it is & maybe it isn’t, but the suggestion seems absurd when it’s clearly peddled as a cost-cutter you can just plug in & walk away from.
“They asked why Summit (and CZI) was collecting all this data without their knowledge or consent.”
Because Zuckerberg and his wife Elizabeth Chan don’t know the difference between right and wrong?
Perhaps their parents never taught them about that sort of stuff. Who knows, maybe lack of ethics is genetic.
Someone should do a study and use the Zuckerberg and Chan families as subjects.
Good idea, Poet. I read about a recently published book that claims 5% of families commit 1/2 of all crimes in the U.S. A possible parallel could be established showing that the richest 0.1% commit an overwhelming portion of crimes against humanity.
Priscilla Chan
The Center for American Progress posted (2017) the organization’s funders, Gates, Waltons, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Walmart and, not surprisingly, Chan-Zuckerberg.
While Z-berg’s company employed a Republican PR firm to attack opponents to the company’s political influence/views (New York Times article about Definers Public Affairs), he was contributing to a “liberal” organization that promotes school privatization.
Facebook’s top people are connected through Harvard educations. Harvard has one of the top 7 most conservative law faculties and, its school of ed. led the school privatization campaign. Tech Crunch, today, speculated on Facebook’s management who hired the Definers firm. Tech Crunch describes Facebook’s chief lobbyist who attended Harvard at the same time as Sandberg. When Kavanaugh was confirmed, the lobbyist had a party for him and he sat in his cheering section during the hearings.
The hawking of the fraud that Silicon Valley tyrants and Harvard are politically on the left, as if they aren’t part of the Republican concentration of wealth and anti-democracy forces, has come to an end, we can hope.
We get to watch a “predictably flimsy and characteristically late” explanation from Z-berg and Sandberg. We get to watch them theatrically recoil in pretend horror when exposed. And, like Gates, Bloomberg and the Waltons, the destruction of America’s most important common good is at their feet.
Diane Ravitch is a hero for working so diligently to stop the greed that destroys public education and the duplicitous rationales that underpin it.
Linda,
I will post The NY Times expose of FB political strategies tomorrow
I refuse FB. Vote with your $$$$$ and time.
Thank you, Diane. 👍
Thanks, Diane
Linda,
The FB story is not today. Either tomorrow or next day.
Thank you, Diane. But, no update to me, that requires any of your time is ever needed. Everything that you post has priority. I am in awe of your productivity. The appreciation you deserve is beyond measure.
Linda
Harvard has always represented the elites of this country.
To expect any different would be to expect the impossible. It’s who they are.
And while some of their departments are top notch (particularly in science and math), several are just abysmal.
Harvard has a positive public image that it doesn’t deserve similar to the Center for American Progress and Bill Gates. Strip away their facades and what’s left is the crass looking out for themselves with no regard to truth nor impact on others.
CAP published a paper earlier this month perpetuating the lie that charter schools are public. The lie is funded by Gates, Waltons, Z-berg,.. 80% of charter schools in Michigan are for-profit. A judge ruled charter schools in Ohio are NOT public. “Depraved” describes an organization that exerts influence on education policy by labeling as public, contractors who protect their records from scrutiny (a right afforded to private business) and, who avoid sunshine law requirements.