In the second part of his two-part essay about the education technology industry, Tom Ultican reviews the highly profitable side of so-called “personalized learning,” where investors profit, not students.
He recognizes that not all EdTech is bad, but goes on to explain how many popular EdTech programs are based on bad pedagogy or are designed to make money.
The pandemic brought a bonanza for online content providers and classroom organizing software. Programs like Google Classroom and Class Dojo which previously seemed superfluous performed a needed service during the crisis. Unfortunately, some of the edtech companies whose businesses spiked were taking advantage of the situation to sell profitable but harmful products based on bad education theory…
As an example:
The Khan Academy is another content provider that saw their traffic soar in 2020. Originally, the academy generated an image of this selfless Silicon Valley guy, Sal Khan, making math education videos and distributing them for free. In 2007, he formed his non-profit but it was not until 2010 that Bill Gates (EIN 56-2618866) and other billionaires began sending him money.
It turns out that Sal Khan is not so selfless. His non-profit is making him wealthy. Khan Academy tax records (EIN 26-1544963) reveal that between 2010 and 2019 his salary totaled $6,009,694 and since 2015 his yearly salary has been more than $800,000. Between 2012-2017, the Gate Foundation gifted the Khan Academy $12,951,598 and the Overdeck Foundation (EIN 26-4377643) has kicked in $2,154,300.
In 2019, Khan Academy took in $92,559,725 of which only $27,629,684 was from contributions. The Academy has turned into a big-revenue generating non-profit.
In October 2020, Khan Academy announced a new joint effort with NWEA called Khan Academy Districts. There sales pitch says “Khan Academy has partnered with NWEA, creators of MAP® Growth™, to empower teachers to differentiate their instruction based on assessment results and meet the needs of all students.”
NWEA is the company that generated a lot of buzz with their covid-learning loss “research.” NWEA sells standardized math and English testing. They take in noisy data (All standardized testing data is noisy and fraught with error) 3-times a school year, do some fancy arithmetic and report out student growth determinations.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One industry site emphasized it’s in necessary to know anything about education before building an EdTech business.
I am not surprised.
A few years back when I was actively looking to work at a large education publishing company…. most of the jobs required a sales background. Even if the title was ‘Education Coordinator/Manager/Specialist.” The ability to convince people to buy the product was more important than forming relationships with schools based on sound pedagogy and how to implement well developed program.
there it is: convince people that the product is more important than its actual educational value
so many “educational entrepreneurs wanted” sites now, with no mention of education or experience in education
Big tech equals big dollars for edupreneurs. The expansion of technology in public schools has little to do with education. It has a lot to do with the influence of Big Money.
Ultican mentions several caveats about personalized learning and other such platforms. There is no research that supports increased screen time for students.
“CBE is just an update of previous failed teaching strategies. In the 1970’s it was called Mastery Learning and in the 1990’s it was called Outcome Based Education. CBE is simply putting Mastery Leaning on a computer instead of using worksheets and paper assessments.”
There is mounting evidence that too much screen time is inappropriate for students, and it is mentally and physically unhealthy. Doctors report an increase in ADD, anxiety, depression and other assorted problems in students that sit in front of screens too long.
Public schools are expected to receive increased funding from Title I and IV this year. “The 2016 rewrite of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 named ESSA, specified big money for edtech in Title’s I and IV including grants promoting “personalized learning”
Big Money made sure that “personalized learning” is an allowable use of federal dollars under the law. We should expect that large amounts of public dollars will be spent to fund needy students sitting in front of screens. How much of those federal dollars will used to fund student screen time remains to be seen. What we do know is that disrupters are experts at selling their snake oil to politicians and administrators.
If only that money could be used for more materials, smaller class sizes, more class offerings and more field trips …..but we can’t even get our HVAC systems upgraded to reduce disease transmission.
Yet there’s always money for high-stakes testing and consultants.
Lots of teachers’ salaries have been funded in part by Title I funds for many years. While this may continue to be true, Big Money will be hard at work trying to convince school districts to divert federal dollars into on-line learning instead so investors can profit from the collected data.
“to empower teachers to differentiate their instruction based on assessment results and meet the needs of all students”. I’m still amazed but not surprised that this constant push for “data-driven instruction” implies teachers somehow are operating in a vaccuum and have no idea how their kids are doing and which ones need more support. Really? Take your disingenuous concern for our “empowerment” (along with your assessments) and just. go. away.
I am so sick of even hearing the term “data-driven.” It sounds like drivel to me.
My decision of what to cook for dinner is “data-driven.”
The friends I choose and how I interact with them are “data-driven.”
Whether or not I go for a bike ride or kayak this week is “data-driven.”
Equally nonsensical is having elementary education be “data-driven.”
It has become the unfortunate responsibility of every educator in the country to ignore all standardized test scores and refuse to let data drive. Get Big Data out of the driver’s seat. Put him in the trunk. He doesn’t need air. He doesn’t have lungs or, you know, a brain.
Personalized learning means that even siblings do not have access to the same curriculum. Data analytics cuts off access to the next level unless a student shows “mastery” on the previous question set. I’d call that invisible segregation. EL and SpEd students get the worst of it. One student gets privileges like being in grade level core academic classes with electives, and another student is imprisoned in a screen-based world of repetition, going over and over the same thing, like being in a sweatshop, with no electives. That is an injustice.
And putting any of the kids right back on a computer after the covid-19 pandemic is especially cruel. That’s still not even the worst part. Google is getting all the children’s and their families’ personal information because it owns so many of the CBE companies. Two words: Cambridge Analytica. Forcing teachers to use technology is cruel, unjust, and irresponsible. It’s dumb.
Friends,
I posted some comments recently, but they have not appeared. (I spoke of the problems in education going back to the undoing of “progressive” education and politics. Said that McNamara’s dictum, “If you can’t measure it, it didn’t happen,” was part of the problem. So was Admiral Rickover’s criticisms of “The American High School Today,” in the ‘50’s.
Is there any way to retrieve or find my comments? I have commented before, they’ve been posted and mentioned by Ravitch.
Thanks,
Jack Burgess
Retired history teacher & former
Executive Director of Cols. E.A., Ohio
Jack, there are no comments in moderation. Perhaps your comments were posted and you missed them.
Sometimes comments just don’t upload for some reason. They don’t go into moderation; they just disappear. My phone just goes back to the same screen as before I clicked “Post Comment” sometimes with the comment gone. I usually remember to copy my comments before a I click so I can paste and retry. I don’t know if it’s WordPress or something else.
Things like that happened every day to my students when I was teaching online. People’s work just disappeared. It happens during online, high stakes testing too. It’s like freezing on Zoom. Stuff gets lost.
This is a great subject, and perfect time for Tom Ultican to kick off the rallying cry– now that so many parents (and not just well-to-do white parents) have been exposed to the reality of watching their kids struggle with solo at-the-computer instruction for hours at a time. Even many essential & gig-workers were sidelined from their jobs for at least a couple of months, and this experience has likely connected them more closely with the classroom. Despite their desperate lack of time, they may be more likely to ask kids specifics, and perhaps are a little more likely to speak up if, as kids go back in-person, they don’t like the answers they’re getting.
Strike while the iron is hot! At the moment, righties– even those who were fine with cheap aide-monitored canned programs recently (cuz, taxes)– are still well into ‘in-person with real teacher/ other kids good, alone at computer bad.’ Putting them on same page with everybody else. All that’s necessary is finding a way to publicize it when state tax cuts force ‘personalized learning’ onto returning students.
One thing I’d like to know: what’s the rest of the story? (a)Is it true as LCT says that Google et al are getting student/ family personal info to go with those digital profiles? and (b)regardless: to whom and for what purposes [& for how $much, if anyone knows] are these digital profiles sold, once scooped up from CBE used in the classroom?
I read this in part 1 of Ultican’s series: “This scandal is just starting to play out, however a look at the businesses involved is interesting. Renaissance Learning is funded by CapitalIG which belongs to Alphabet (formerly Google). They sell testing and personalized learning apps for math and English.” That’s the new year round testing app I had to subject my students to during the pandemic, except for a few opt outs. I think it’s proper to assume there are additional connections between a plethora of edtech companies and Alphabet (and Microsoft).
Renaissance has the STAR test which we use at the elementary level. If you don’t monitor young children and they decide to get up or just look out the window…. they will time out of questions and it impacts their score. Our kiddos overall do really well… but it’s unnecessary and takes time away from developmentally appropriate learning activities and play.
I’ll bet you can’t guess how students can improve their test scores??
Anyone??
Well …. as you may have guessed…. Renaissance sells programs to individualize instruction based on students STAR scores.
Imagine that. They are full service…. testing and test prep.
Just caught up with this, belated thanks beachteach. I hadn’t even thought of that, but of course: schools can buy ‘full-service’ where the ‘student profile’ (i.e., test data) is retained and recycled for ‘personalized’ test-prep. Just another form of CBE, used specifically to raise scores on which teachers/ schools are measured. I wonder if they build in test questions that tease out consumer preferences so they have something to sell to marketing firms? As I recall, nothing prevents them from selling anonymous data to third parties.