Larry Ferlazzo notes that the latest requirements for Race to the Top is just more lipstick on a pig.
By which, he means that when RTTT refers to “personalized learning,” what it really means is using online learning for adaptive testing.
That’s pretty much what the hawkers of technology mean too.
But teachers had something else in mind, something that would encourage students to explore and think and make their own decisions, not just answer test questions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
When I saw the title of this article I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite sayings:
“Never teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and annoys the pig”
Back in about 2006, personalisation was being touted in England as “the next big thing”, though the term has considerably reduced in use since then. (At one point the Department for Education and Skills – which then had a “Technology Group” – even had someone in it with the job title “Programme Director for Personalised Content.) I wrote about this at the time in Fortnightly Mailing in The personalisation virus is spreading, Personalisation – just a slogan in search of a meaning and Personalisation and innovation in education. These links may be a bit of a distraction for US readers.
My main point, however, is that personalisation is a genuinely big software engineering challenge which has not yet been solved. Why otherwise would the US National Academy of Engineering have defined “Advance personalized learning” in 2008 as one of 14 Grand Engineering Challenges for engineering, alongside, for example, “Make solar energy economical” and “Provide energy from fusion”. Personalisation is important; technology will play a part in it. But as the NAE’s own rubric about personalised learning, the challenge is very hard to solve.