One of the much-hyped new ideas of our time is the “School of One.” This is a new use of technology in the classroom.
It was declared a success in 2009 by Time magazine before it was ever implemented anywhere.
It was created by TFA alum, Broad-trained, ex-Edison, ex-NYC DOE executive Joel Rose and implemented on a pilot basis in the New York City public schools.
There are two different stories embedded in The School of One.
There is the story of the business of education, and School of One is a cutting-edge venture in edu-business.
The other is whether it is pedagogically sound. On this count, Gary Rubinstein has posted an informative review.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane,
If you select the link Gary set up for Klein/Amplify there is a video embedded halfway down. I couldn’t get past the first thirty seconds….it has this dreadful death march music and the trumped up facts about how we are all failures. I left this message for Mr. Klein and thank you David Berliner, I can be happy today.
On more point from a NY Times article about Amplify: Klein added, “I’m candid that if this isn’t embraced by teachers in America, it won’t work.”
Dear Mr. Klein:
I am an educator and a parent and I don’t embrace anything being promoted and sold by you or Murdoch. You do not care about children, teaching and learning. You care about profits, profits, profits.
Stay away from our children. I don’t trust anyone associated with a company that hacked into the cell phone of a missing, murdered 13 year old.
I will collect and track student results the old fashioned way. I will get to know each of my students as individuals with dreams, strengths, goals and opinions. We will create individual portfolios with writing samples and journal entries. We will read fiction, non fiction, memoirs, news articles, essays, short stories, poems. We will share ideas, opinions and create long term projects: research, book trailers, original plays, book blogs, etc.
As a teacher it is my responsibility to be data informed NOT data driven. I promise you I will not waste time staring at a computer, tablet or wireless device.
Instead I will look at my students and see and hear them. So, I will tell you now I take a pass on your “digital learning tools” and instead I will use my brain, my instincts and my 26 years of teaching experience to guide me, something the faux reformers (you, Rhee, Bloomberg, Sternberg) know nothing about.
If you want to watch the propaganda video: http://gettingsmart.com/news/news-corp-unveils-amplify-for-k-12-digital-innovation/#comment-5283
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Gary Rubinstein’s critique is interesting partly because he has an interesting way of thinking about things, partly because he actually visited a school, and partly because he is a math teacher. He confirms some of my misgivings and raises some new ones for me. Thank you for drawing attention to his post.
I discuss the School of One in my book, in the eighth chapter (where I also discuss virtual schools and “affect-aware tutors,” all of this in light of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and his critique of the Crystal Palace). My main concerns as expressed in the book is that (a) the hype allows no criticicism to poke through and (b) the computer algorithm, which determines students’ “playlists” on the basis of their performance on multiple-choice quizzes, may not make room for the deeper and more fluid exploration of topics that is so important to mathematics. In math, you need room to go forwards and backwards–to bring up concepts and problems that have come up earlier and to hint at problems to come. That way, the students can see the motion of a problem.
I am not a math teacher, but my parents are both math professors, and I grew up not only surrounded by math but immersed in it, When I was in fourth grade, my mother organized a symmetry festival that brought together people from many fields. My father would let me “program” those gargantuan computers that read punch cards. On our long road trips, I would work on math problems in my mind. To this day, I work on math problems for enjoyment and challenge; my book includes an explanation of a Newton theorem. Thus, while I am by no stretch an authority on this subject, I have some inklings about what math can contain.
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Gary Rubinstein’s observations of students using computers in School of One reminded me of my son. He has struggled with math since the beginning. One source we used to help him was math computer games. He loved computer games and would play the math games by the hour. But he didn’t get better at math in school. I finally watched him play the games and realized that he was just guessing until he got the right answer so he could get whatever reward. He got very good at guessing. And that “helped” him later on to score well on at least some standardized tests, though he scored better on some than on others.
When the ACT said he was “college ready” in math, we celebrated his success in overcoming his math issues. Until he took college math classes and did poorly, barely passing college algebra and failing every other math class he tried. I finally realized that his uneven performance on standardized tests was based on his ability to guess on that particular day and test and had nothing to do with his ability to “do” math.
While computers have their place in learning, I am, to say the least, skeptical of any claim that computers, especially computer games, can teach math better than a teacher.
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