In an earlier post, one of our readers asked whether it was appropriate for the United States Department of Education to endorse commercial products. The product that won plaudits from federal officials, paid for with our tax dollars, is called Edgenuity. As you might expect, it is a computer program that replaces teacher-student interaction. The U.S. ED wants to solve the high cost of teachers by funding Teach for America and technology that replaces teachers.
Is Edgenuity a great product? Evidently not.
A blogger described what happened when his school district adopted Edgenuity.
He writes:
Students have expressed quiet and loud frustration; parents have also complained. To find compromise and rest the restless, a Digital Learning Committee was formed consisting of teachers, students, and concerned parents. Complaints center around concerns surrounding the implementation, the quality of education, student/computer over-use, and lack of teacher/student interaction. Some students are not only unhappy with the system but they are feeling as though their education is being hindered and many parents are feeling uncomfortable with the system, as well.
Students are not happy with the loss of a real teacher:
Some students have been concerned about the quality of education they are achieving through the Edgenuity system. Hazel voices this concern when she says, “I’m not a strong supporter of online learning in general, but I realize that it is useful for elective and language classes. However, it is only useful if the classes are of high quality, which Edgenuity has more than proved itself not to be. The lectures are not lectures at all; rather, bland Powerpoint style screens read by a talking head who clearly knows very little, if anything, on the subject…Do I think that Edgenuity is improving my education at Kenny Lake? Overall, no. It is a constant, daily source of frustration for me and my peers. I am not graded fairly. How can anyone’s intelligence be judged by multiple choice questions and virtual teachers?… Some courses, like government/economics, are completely unnecessary to have online since we have great, real teachers already willing to teach them. Many are wrought with factual errors, so what is the point of having them at all?”
With the addition of Edgenuity and other online learning courses is the sudden end to most student-teacher interaction. As Hazel said, the days were once filled with “…banters with teachers…” and “…thought provoking group discussion…” which are now replaced by long silences with nothing but the clacking of fingers on keyboards, while the teacher stands and paces in the classroom without much input or excitement. In fact, there is no excitement in the learning and no passion in the teaching. “The program wasn’t designed to be used in conjunction with an actual teacher,” Patty says. “Where I would see a compromise, like I said, is where it would be used for classes that aren’t available and where there isn’t a real live teacher.”
Most devastating is the blogger’s conclusion:
In general, Edgenuity has not been well-accepted within the Kenny Lake community. Many appear to be against it or at least in support of a modified version of it. The program itself adopts an industrious attitude that leaves much more to be desired (“Education is not an industry,” Hazel notes). There is no passion and no heart in the teaching – a listless and boring system that repeats a monotonous cycle. If this is the future, the future is a place of tedium: a place where learning is no longer embraced by schools enthusiastically: a place where we are fed information, instead of inspired by knowledge. Hopefully, next semester will be one with less strife and all the kinks will be worked out.
No passion. No heart. A listless and boring system.
Who could ask for anything less?
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
My district uses this for “Credit Recovery”. Students are able to complete lessons in a shorter time and regain credit for classes that they chose not to give an effort in the first place.
My district does exactly the same thing. My school is expecting the students to get BOTH original and make up credit for two terms total in four weeks of three hours a day.
That’s about the same hourly math used here in the Houston area.
“I’m not a strong supporter of online learning in general, but I realize that it is useful for elective and language classes.”
Really? Language and electives would be the absolute last classes I would think would be suitable for online use. Language is best learned in immersive conversation with a fluent (preferably native) speaker. Electives are the classes that are supposed to be students’ choices – things that actually spark their interest. Online electives would probably kill even that interest. Do most kids hate health as much as I did? Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad online (at least, no worse than it was in person). Maybe the written parts of drivers’ ed.
Because the reality is school districts are ALREADY replacing live teachers with online courses which you will never, ever hear mentioned when “blended learning” is being sold by politicians and tech companies.
It’s already happening.
A dozen yrs ago I dropped in at one of the first chain-daycare/PK’s in our area to see if they’d be interested in optional [parent-paid] for-lang enrichment. “Oh, we already have Spanish,” said the director, waving an arm toward a wall where three computers sat, displaying Rosetta Stone for kids or some such. Collecting dust. Funny, no 3 or 4y.o.’s seemed interested.
My first year teaching ESL, a portable language lab (I didn’t order) arrived for my students along with cubicle partitions, and I was told that twice a week for one class period was advised. We did it for six weeks until the students revolted. My mostly Haitian students said, “We not babies that need to repeat like them. We learn more from you.” I agreed. Learning a language is a lot more than repetition, just ask Chomsky or Krashen. There is nothing better than “innovation” to sell more products.
I agree about language learning, but in checking out this article, it appears that it is not an adult blog but is written by a student for a student newspaper at a small school in Alaska. Kenny Lake School apparently is a combined elementary and middle school with 75 students and only six teachers, plus other staff. In other words, the school probably can’t afford a language teacher, like so many of our rural schools in Montana.
Boring? They should look at the EngageNY modules. Those are the most tedious lesson plans I’ve ever seen. Some of them spend four–five days on a single, one-page worksheet.
The giant government/private sector marketing campaign should make any rational person wary.
Why are the foundations/federal government pushing this so hard? They’re creating a market. Obviously.
Public school district leaders would do well to recognize if they put this in and it’s a waste of money and a disaster, the ed reform foundations and the federal government won’t be blamed- the local leaders will.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
Is this the world for OUR children that Bill Gates and a few other billionaire oligarchs are willing to spend billions to create? It’s not for their children, who attend expensive private schools, schools that teach the old fashioned way without scripted computer lessons.
There are a couple of interesting review sites for Edgenuity, “Answers.Yahoo, ‘Is there a way to cheat Edgenuity?’ ” and “Glassdoor”, a site where employees describe their opinions about the company.
Wikipedia reports that Johnathan Grayer founded the company, Weld North (in partnership with KKR), that owns Edgenuity.
On Wall Street and in cellophane valley, there is no bottom depth to making money, lofty verbiage but, no lofty ideals.
At the Edgenuity website, there is a link to the Foundation Center. The Center’s Board members represent exactly the foundations I expected- Hewlett, Rockefeller, Kellogg, and Ford.
Congress owes the American people, hearings on education privatization and corporatizing.
Ya think? AMEN, Linda. YES: Congress owes the American people, hearings on education privatization and corporatizing.
But this is CC$$ and high-stakes everything where MONEY is everything … sick.
Public hearings are the last thing they want because it will let the “cat out of the bag.” The typical citizen, unless they are a victim of privatization, is largely unaware. The corporate media is under a gag order as money silences. Corporations want a silent coup. One day the public will wake up when there are no public parks, postal service, Social Security, Medicare and public schools and libraries and wonder where they all went.
The public needs to vote those compromised by corporate money out of office, or the above scenario could be reality. Sooner than we think.
Congress owes the American people hearings, and more than a few US Attorney’s Offices owe them some RICO indictments.
Yvonne if Congress really wanted to do something to help the people…they would all resign.
You’re absolutely right.
My fear is younger parents won’t know that kids in public schools were once “entitled” to a teacher- a “live” teacher will become a kind of luxury they can’t expect.
I have already seen that happen with field trips and music education here- those parents weren’t in the system when we had those things so they just assume these “extras” are no longer something they should expect. It’s like the bar for what constitutes “a functioning public school system” keeps going lower.
It’s apparent in that piece- they’ve already given up on having teachers for languages and electives- now they’re just trying to hold the line on core courses.
That’s my fear too. That will occur after we have lost our collective voice in the land of government, by, for and of corporations.
The federal government has no business “endorsing” products. These corporate-government “partnerships” are unethical. The government should not be involved in marketing products to citizens. Their job is to govern within the limits of the Constitution, nothing more.
There are no rules and they make them up as they go to suit their needs.
That this, and others are so bad, who is surprised?. I’m not.
How do these products incorporate the students’ learning styles? I learn best by hearing something. When I took an online class, I was rather bored just sitting there reading a powerpoint presentation. Missed the professor’s life experiences about the subject and the class discussions.
But what was the costs to you and the organization delivering the training? Cost, not value?
I don’t believe an MBA can measure value, but they can apparently measure costs all day long.
And the modern CEO only has one tool in his arsenal, cutting costs.
@NoReformNeeded
Actually, it was a college class not training. It cost ME more than going to a classroom. They add a technology fee, and I still had to pay a parking fee even though I wasn’t parking on campus.
The way to maximize profits is to keep lowering the bottom line. Cheaper and cheaper until we hit the holy grail of profits, cyber charters. Micheal Milken, former junk bond king, who is now described as a “humanitarian,” not jailbird, will be happy to sell them to us.
You guys need to lighten up on these companies and their CEOs. These guys have it tough after all. They have shareholders to make happy, they have to show a profit, they have to show growth no matter what. And they only make like 400 times more than a front line employee for all that stress. That’s a pittance. I’m sure theses CEOs lose sleep when they have to lay-off employees and outsource jobs.
You just can’t put out Cadillac products and meet all those criteria I just posted. Something has to give. So we have a price driven market for the most part. After all, Walmart is the worlds largest company. And what’s wrong with PowerPoint presentations anyway? Everyone loves PowerPoint presentations don’t they?
Walmart: Largest retailer in North America. (Not largest company in the world.)
Wikipedia says different
Largest in the world revenue wise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue
They’re big any way you run the numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart
Exxon, GE, P&G all larger; Microsoft and Google more than 2x the size…
many others, but “size” usually refers to market cap, not revenue.
There is no single measurement that is used, uniformly, to describe the size of a business entity. As an example, the SBA, for its purposes, uses several determinants.
Revenue, number of employees, asset holdings, etc. are all meaningful, as measures.
I’ll add a couple to the mix. (1) How many politicians a firm owns. (2) How many associates the company has in the revolving door of governmental agencies. The Sunlight Foundation provides some answers to those two questions.
Surely there is a single measurement used to determine the size of a bank account. Market capitalization is measuring the size of a company according
to generally accepted accounting principals. (GAAP) S&P uses the same
standard. ( I know these traditional ideas have been tweaked in this age opaque derivatives, and the trend is toward more deception, but I think we should
all be wary of using Wikipedia as a reliable source.)
The sub-category, investors, evaluate, using multiple measures (e.g. market share). Even so, Wall Street’s 6 people, dedicated solely to assessing the strength of Enron, reportedly, a firm among the “top 10 U.S. companies”, were completely shocked at the firm’s cataclysmic failure.
Measurement, when a community’s core, is hollowed out by the decisions of a predatory discount retailer, whose owners, increase their 40% share of the nation’s wealth, a half a continent away, is by, despair, lost opportunity and poverty.
As an interesting exercise- Bill Gates, singularly, has the most influence on education, in the Senate and House, the World Bank, and the U.S. Dept. of Ed. Mother Jones reports that Microsoft has a huge amount of money offshore, avoiding taxes. Microsoft, by estimate, employs less than 1/2 the number of American workers that the 50th largest U.S. employer does. Gates claims to be giving away his fortune, in his lifetime (he’s 60ish), which, if true, would leave him without capital. He and his wife send their children to schools that reject his education designs.
So, what criteria should be used to explain Gates’ influence on education?
I agree, John, you shouldn’t use Wikipedia info., without corroboration.
I think “Edgenuity” is supposed to be spelled “Hedgeannuity”, cuz that’s really all it is.
Just a couple of comments. “The program itself adopts an industrious attitude that leaves much more to be desired (“Education is not an industry,” Hazel notes)” Shouldn’t “industrious” be “industrial”? Also, “Many are wrought with factual errors, so what is the point of having them at all?” Shouldn’t “wrought” be “rife”? Picky, picky, I know. The product sounds truly awful and I agree with what everyone is saying.
The article may have been written by a middle school budding journalist because she (or he) writes that she is quoting her mother, who is protesting the new computer program.
smart kid!
Look at the website for the Copper River School District. What catches your eye?
The whole district is underwritten by Bill and Melinda Gates and the Helmsley Foundation?
Thanks for that information, Liz! But I was thinking in terms of the religious support the district gives to one certain sect-the christian sect. I’m amazed that they are getting away with that but then again Alaskans voted in Palin the Quitter for governor so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised.
On a serious note I know some folks who work at Imagine Learning, one of North Welds holdings. They love it there and say that North Weld is actually very hands-off. I think NW acquired them in 2014?
In July, 2013, the New York Times, published a piece titled “New Roads to Learning”, which is somewhat about Edgenuity, but mostly, it’s a resume and reason-for-being, for the CEO of Edgenuity, IMO.
After reading all 11 paragraphs of the …actually, I can’t think of a word to describe the stuff.. the reader finds out where the CEO grew up, what her parents occupations were, where she went to school, what her husband does, and that she worked, all of one summer, teaching. After that summer, she used her vast experience to develop reading and math software for students. It was a surprising move given her epiphany during her brief stint in the classroom, that she “didn’t have the right tools to assess (the seventh graders taking remedial math) nor, to help them master the material.” (An apprentice carpenter doesn’t blame his tools.) After 9 mind-numbing paragraphs, listing companies she worked for, that were acquired and listing promotions in her ladder to success, the CEO described a “piercing observation”, that led to her continued inspiration, as a contributor to education. The cosmic event was when a student said about Edgenuity, “Why did I have to fail to be able to learn this way?” The CEO said she realized that “many students don’t have the opportunities they should have.” Unfortunately, the NYT interviewer, didn’t have the epiphany to ask, if the CEO’s children or, the children of her friends and family are availing themselves of Edgenuity’s products and, as a follow-up, if those same kids attend a for-profit school.
I used to be the tech guy at my school(s). I’m ashamed to have had anything to do with the rollout of such promising tools that have been bastardized in a manner such as this. Absolutely terrible.
Duncan should be chastised for missing the opportunity to headhunt at Edugenuity.
Isn’t a skip through public service (just long enough to deem it a failure), the ideal criterion for a job candidate, in the revolving door of Washington federal agencies?
My school district is adopting “Schoology.” Anyone know anything about this company? Two red flags for me: 1. They describe student data as a “business asset” and 2. There are no teachers on their “leadership team.” All I see are techs, engineers and business majors. Grrrrrr…..
Katie, it doesn’t sound good.
The Edgenuity site has a link to the Foundation Center, which no surprise, has a representative from the Hewlett Foundation, on its Board.
The Ford Foundation’s representative, on the Center’s Board, is, an adjunct professor at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service. ….Yes. “Public Service”.
The adjunct is a graduate of Rogoff, Rhinehart and Chetty’s Harvard. Her bio. assures the target audience that, “She proved herself to be an entrepreneurial thinker.”
IMO, poor kids need less victimization by the type of entrepreneurial thinking that enriched the Waltons. I deduce that, that viewpoint didn’t make the syllabi, in the education, government and public service departments at NYU and Harvard.
Edgenuity’s CEO failed in her 3-month teaching stint but, quickly after, when privately employed, was able to develop reading and math software for students?…. Puzzling.
(NYT, “New Roads to Learning”, July 27, 2013.)