Larry Cuban is a keen observer of the marketing of new technologies to schools. In this post, he looks at the common practice of claiming that the product being sold causes guaranteed success, I.e. a “proof point.” The salesmanship involved is akin to the advertisers’ claim that their product will cure all illnesses, calm your itch, make you beautiful, and fix your hearing.
Schools have long been targets of fast-talking salesmen, but now the snake oil is presented professionally as a miracle cure to raise test scores. In addition to the usual profit motive, there is today the entrepreneur’s devout faith in disruptive innovation. Heaven help the schools. When they come calling, slam the door and don’t let them put their foot in it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Add adaptive technology to this hype. Students depend on human relationships with their teachers to learn, build skills, and to develop a love of learning. Blended learning, online learning, and adaptive technology are poor excuses for high-quality learning. Technology has its place and benefits, but the above ideas are simply ways for entrepreneurs to cash in on public-school tax dollars. Let’s use technology to get kids thinking critically through research and creative projects.
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Los Angeles administrators are obsessed with iPads and Chromebooks. For the past eleven years, I have worked for three principals, all of whom spent a majority of their time googling blended, flipped and other tech consultants’ programs. Just let me teach. They spend all our funds on whatever program pops up claiming to raise test scores. Just let me teach. Then, they force their purchases on everyone.
With the degree of expertise on display here, I’m surprised I haven’t been forced to use Bill Gates’ chickens in my classroom yet. Just let me teach.
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“Just let me teach.”
AMEN! Brother/Sister LCT!
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I second that Amen!
And if anyone challenges this concept (trusting professionals to do their job) and brings up the point of “teacher accountability”, please remind them that so-called “accountability” is a bullshit term made up so that others can pretend to be in charge. Accountability based on test scores or on one 40 minute observation by an administrator that couldn’t teach his way out of a wet paper bag are less than meaningless. They are as bogus as they are insulting.
Imagine a world (and blog) where dentists would continually have to beg for the equivalent: “Just let me drill!”
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“Just let me Teach”
Just let me teach
Just let me nurse
Just let me preach
Nothing is worse
Than pol overreach
An ignorant curse
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I specialize in TV advertising. What we see here is a common occurrence.
In uncontrolled situations like individual selling to schools through a brochure, there is little regulatory oversight to ensure that the results are valid. Transfer that sales pitch to TV and there’s a huge set of agencies who can become involved ensuring the sales proof points are valid.
None of this selling would pass the proof requirements of the FTC. In fact, these sales approaches remind me of the are of worst sales pitch abuse – multi-level marketers where there’s no control over what someone will tell their neighbor about the magic outcome of using a product.
Even worse, it’s often the U.S. Department of Education or a state DOE who starts making the pitch. Why shouldn’t our government organizations be held to “rigorous” standards for sales claims? The same standards as, say, a dishwasher soap?
Seems like the risk involved with their sales overstatement is no less than the futures of our kids – pretty high risk compared with dishwater hands….
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Yes. I’ve noticed that for years the endlessly advertised noise about school “reform” and school choice in our district is nothing but smoke and mirrors. The “sales claims” made directing our children and their parents to sign up for this or that program or school have no substance simply because no one pushing the noise is ever held accountable. It is all hype, not product.
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Doug Garnett and ciedie aech: well put.
And consider how all this fits in so neatly with a for-profit privatization outlook. Rather than a public good that is governed by (at least in words) high-minded civic and moral goals, there is a seller-buyer relationship that promotes glib promises to provide everyone with a yuuuuuuge ROI that Trumps all other considerations.
Why does this make a difference in how things are stated and defined and explained? In the first, there is less of an inducement to overstate claims—at times even a disparagement of hyperbole and jargon because of at least some transparency and review—while in the second there is every reason to push verbal boundaries because of that all important numerical goal—
One Metric to rule them all, One Metric to find them,
One Metric to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
In the Land of Rheephorm where $tudent $ucce$$ lies.
Thank you both for your comments.
😎
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“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
– Carl Sagan
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Then
“The salesmanship involved is akin to the advertisers’ claim that their product will cure all illnesses, calm your itch, make you beautiful, and fix your hearing”
would be educational snake oil.
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After spending a week or so in the woods at the Jacks Fork River in Southern MO, I could use something to “calm my itches”.
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“Even worse, it’s often the U.S. Department of Education or a state DOE who starts making the pitch. Why shouldn’t our government organizations be held to “rigorous” standards for sales claims? The same standards as, say, a dishwasher soap?
Seems like the risk involved with their sales overstatement is no less than the futures of our kids – pretty high risk compared with dishwater hands…”
USDE sells a lot of products, services, and ideas at arms length by contracting for “technical services” from specialists in marketing. A case in point is the marketing of “student learning objectives” by the so-called “Reform Support Network” created to churn out publications, webinars, and the like for the odious Race to Top provisions, including pay for performance.
The contractors for RSN trying to sell SLOs ( a version of mangement-by-ojectives recommended that officials improve their “messaging” for teachers. Among
the suggested techniques are teacher surveys, focus groups, websites with rapid response to frequently asked questions, graphic organizers integrated into professional
development, websites, podcasts, webinars, teacher-made videos of their instruction (vetted for SLO compliance), and a catalog of evocative phrases tested in surveys and focus groups. These rhetorical devices would help to maintain a consistent system of messaging. RSN writers also suggested that districts offer released time or pay for message delivery by “teacher SWAT teams that can be deployed at key junctures of
the… redesign of evaluation systems.” See Engaging Educators, A Reform Support Network Guide for States and Districts: Toward a New Grammar and Framework for Educator Engagement Retrieved from
www2.ed.gov/about/inits/ed/implementationsupport-unit/tech-assist/engaging-educators.pdf
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All of the “case studies” were funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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It’s really quite shocking – how the Departments of Ed are getting away with a PR campaign based on phantoms in the mist… But imposing their mythology with rules that don’t require legislative approval.
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Don’t look now, but another 1%er is ready to reinvent schools. This time Jobs’ widow with the Emerson Project is ready to throw money around and “fix” the schools.
You can bet teachers will be ignored, at least the teachers that don’t fit the reformy mold of silicon valley and billionaires.
It really isn’t that difficult and I can save them $50 million (or just write me a check).
Hire and retain good teachers with credentials and professional compensation.
Make sure kids are healthy, secure, and ready for school.
Give teachers control over their classrooms and freedom to innovate.
Abolish high stakes standardized tests and VAM
Get billionaires and politicians out of the classroom.
Talk to teachers, not at or past them.
That hardly cost anything and wasn’t in a slick commercial or glossy brochure. I’ll just wait now on my millions.
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I wrote this essay on this subject years ago: Magic Elixir: No Evidence required!
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Magic-Elixir-No-Evidence-by-Susan-Lee-Schwartz-130312-433.html
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Go to Larry Cuban’s actual post and check out the graphic he included. It’s a laundry list of logical fallacies being promoted as sales techniques. It is quite literally a list of ways to lie to your clients and current and prospective customers. The blog source he found this graphic at is apparently clueless as to the significance of this. Here is a master list of fallacies for reference. http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm
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