After Mike Petrilli of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute read my post yesterday, he wrote to say that it appears we have some common ground. He wonders whether the contrast between real teaching and machine teaching is comparable to organic food vs. processed food. Yes!
Fortunately, Mike has two sons the same age as my grandsons, so children are not a theoretical construct to him.
Personally, I think conservatives (and all parents, whatever their politics) should be leading the charge against robot “teachers.” Genuine education will never emanate from programmed machines.
And they will never be “personalized.”
That’s why I hope Mike will adopt the term “depersonalized learning” to describe computer-based instruction. There may be times when it is useful. But computers can never replace human interaction, a kind look, a stern look, a loving word, a caring and committed person with a heart, a brain, and a soul.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s probably ok for “other people’s kids”. Those less worthy and not valuable to his world view
I agree with the concerns expressed by both Mike and Diane. To which I’d like to add the following.
My question is about the motives we have and those of providers of computers. Why are we pushing for so-called “personalized” learning?
As for high tech companies–the huge education market and competition among them for a share of that market, I get that.
But why are schools buying into it? Has it ever been proven to be the best way to teach and learn? I haven’t seen that evidence.
I am concerned that we are pushing “personalized” learning as a way to make today’s classroom focused on inclusion work–that is, to have all sorts of learners in the same classrooms with teachers “differentiating.”
Voila–computers offer the way! But, do they really? And don’t they ignore evidence we have for what actually works–LIN–least intervention necessary; not LRE–Least restrictive environment. That is, we need to focus on the students–and their current performance and interests, not location, location, location– a standard that works in real estate but not here.
Bottom line, The motive for this push may not be what’s best for our students. Rather, it may be what will make our current notions and fads of equity and all-in-together-now “work.” But will it? Will it be real education? Will it enhance lives? Watch the back door of vouchers and choice on this one.
I share Mike’s and Diane’s concerns. And you?
“But why are schools buying into it?”
Because the adminimals have minimal critical thinking capabilities. In order to not seem stodgy, they have a tendency to be taken in by the supposedly newest shiniest educational “toy”. Glitter sells for them. Newest and bestest is the way to go.
For a couple of years one of our asst supe adiminimals attempted to have me request the newest thing at the time, an interactive whiteboard because, well you know that teachers who use the interactive white boards supposedly increase their student achievement by 17%. Amazing, eh!! Why wouldn’t you want one to increase your students’ learning?
Well, how about amazingly naive that asst supe adminimal was. I asked her if she read the “research” (it was by Marzano) and she said no she hadn’t. I sent her a “peer review”* of Marzano’s research which totally debunked that research. She still insisted upon telling staff it would increase student learning by 17%.
And that example is just one of many instances of an adminimal being an adminimal. And why “schools are buying into it”.
*http://edinsanity.com/2009/06/02/marzano_part1/
Computers are useful tools. They allow students to learn about the world, make contact with others, and they are a marvel a word processing. Computers can assist teachers in diversifying instruction for students at both ends of the bell shaped curve. They are best suited to skills based subjects that build upon previous information like math, even then they should be used under the guidance of a qualified teacher.
Robots cannot replace human interaction and connection that is essential for understanding the big ideas of great literature and the social sciences. Humans are social beings, and IMHO this need is even more important in teaching poor students, which I have done for several decades. Poor students have lots of emotional baggage. As an ESL teacher, I was more than someone that delivered information. I was a lifeline to a a frightening new world and sometimes, I was like a substitute parent or confidant. Through my personal connection with students, I have talked a least two high school students out of suicide and helped parents get better better housing and access to medical care I have intervened in bullying cases and been a advocate for students’ programming decisions. None of these things have anything directly to do with “scores.” However, if we fail to address these issues, we have failed the student. A robot cannot replace a human, and the suggestion is naive and disingenuous.
“The Bots have us Beat”
Any kind of human goal
A robot can exceed
From sex to drugs to rock-‘n’-roll
A robot fills the need
The robot puts us all to shame
We really can’t deny
We only have ourselves to blame
So might as well just die
“might as well just die”
Thanks for the memory of a song, “Be kind to your web-footed friends…Well, you may think that this is the end. Well, it is.”
Nope, just unplug em!
“Can’t just unplug em”
The robots run on nuclear power
So can’t just shut ’em down
With atoms splitting by the hour
They’ll always be around
One of the basic questions many conservatives need to ask is exactly this. Would you put your own kids in that school. They put themselves in a trap when they say poor kids need something different. Poor kids need exactly what suburban middle class and elite private schools offer. Would the affluent pug their kids behind s screen all day with programmed learning? We know the answer.
Gates was apparently frustrated with the slow pace of tech intrusion into schools. The schools told him they cannot afford more. He discovered the well known fact that school board budgets are 70% teachers and 10-15% supports staff remuneration.
Bingo thought Gates. REPLACE the teachers with tech and there is no additional costs to boards (or charters or vouchers). You can even pay the few remaining teachers higher salaries.
This is the plan. BIG TECH does not care if “personalized learning ” actually works so long as it Jacks up tech purchases.
The Deweyist language around ‘personalized learning’ is enough to make you vomit.
Unfortunately, in some areas (I live in the DC suburbs) parents really do push for technology in school. They see it as a way for their children to get ahead. The people in these parts are brainwashed into thinking that being able to spend more money on things will make their kids smarter. Money and greed rule, competition(especially among children) is rampant and the free market/ed tech people are making a killing. Yes….the wealthy people in some areas would put their children in these schools.
AND THE craziest part of this game is that what Gates and his Silicon Valley counterparts are doing is, over and over, labeled as PHILANTHROPY in the media.
Teaching at the K-12 level involves a heavy social component. I fail to see how authentic social development occurs through “machine learning”.
The wealthy and privileged will always have their kids taught by live humans. But many of them will patronizingly recommend cheaper and inferior experiences for the plebes, because “we just don’t have the money.”
I hope your campaign to expose the PR and money behind the absurd claims of “personalized learning” will gather support.
Nearly 300 foundations fund education and function as an organized lobby for education policies and priorities.
In the near term their priorities address the following issues/topics–the top 5 of about 33 issues/topics.
1 Social and emotional (non-cognitive) learning
2 Personalized and/or competency-based learning ****
3 Teacher voice initiatives
4 Workforce and career readiness
5 Education of English language learners/immigrants
These are among the issues/topics ranked as the lowest priority
28 Expanded learning time/lengthening school day
30 Performance management systems
31 School turnaround/low performing schools
32 Students with disabilities
33 Teacher evaluation and compensation systems
(School choice came in at 27)
This survey was conducted before the era of Trump and DeVos and the exact number of respondents is not given. The survey results also show the issues/topics ranked by the flow of grant-making dollars (2015). Here are those rankings
1 Postsecondary success/attainment new
2 STEM (science/technology/engineering/math)
3 Early learning: quality enhancement new
4 Charter schools/charter school networks
5 Early learning: expanding access
28 Performance management systems
30 Use of technology in the classroom ****
31 Teacher evaluation and compensation systems
32 Students with disabilities
33 Dropout prevention/disconnected youth
Notice that the voiced priority for
Personalized and/or competency-based learning ****
is not strongly unrelated to grant money for
Use of technology in the classroom ****.
Although I found this survey interesting here is a caveat. This survey of Grantmakers for Education was conducted before the newest and most conspicuous funder and leader of Grantmakers for Education joined the group, namely the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. In 2017 the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative kicked in $100,000 or more as a top tier sponsor of the GFE conference, also a top tier sponsor in 2016 along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
See the Appendix, pp. 15-18. https://www.edfunders.org/sites/default/files/Benchmarking_2015_web.pdf
Last night PBS broadcast interview with Bill Moyers speaks beautifully to your point. The importance of face to face connections cannot be replaced.
Bill Moyers said that PBS has represented a search for truth. As you will learn from the political propaganda 3-hour series called “School Inc.,” this is not always the case. I have seen the entire series. It is propaganda, financed solely by rightwing foundations.
The most basic questions that need to be hammered home are these: If computer delivered instruction is so great, as in wave of the future great, then why are there ZERO elite private schools that are doing this? Why are Silicon Valley exec’s. sending their kids to Montesorri schools that refuse to use computers/screen time in any way in the classroom? If you truly believe in free market competition, aka the “business model”, why are you not competing with the most elite schools, ones that will never replace their teachers with the flawed, narrowly focused algorithms at the core of so-called personalized learning? Why is there no discussion about the transfer of wealth out of communities via replacing teachers with machines? Computers do not spend money in the communities where they are located, they do not contribute to local economies at anything remotely similar to the way that teachers do, the funds spent on this tech atrocity leave the communities so affected, and often leave the state and the nation as well.
To characterize so-called education reform as “conservative” is a fallacy and a perversion of language, one that aides the hostile takeover of public education.
So-called reform is in fact quite radical/revanchist, in that it seeks to destroy and replace a cardinal feature of US democracy – locally-controlled, free public schools open to all and replace them with private, for-profit (de jure or de facto) vendor schools. It also seeks to transform the ancient and noble profession of teaching into semi-skilled temp work.
Looters, privateers and power freaks are not “conservative,” and so-called reformers, whose deceptiveness and destructiveness is unbounded, should not be described that way either.
My point, Michael, was that conservatives should be fighting the corporate takeover of public education. They should be defending public schools. They should be protecting everyone’s children from data mining. They should insist that our children are taught by professional teachers. That’s where conservatives and liberals should join together.
The corporate takeover is radical, risky, dangerous.
The privateers come from both sides of aisle. In fact, it is people like Eli Broad and DFER with huge donations to Democrats that have caused much of the tepid support for public schools from the party. The only time they are the party of unions is during an election cycle. Then, they revert to their “don’t ask, don’t tell” stand on unions. These people wield their wealth like a sword to attack the Common Good.
Agree. I’ve been writing for a while now that many if not most of those who currently use the term conservative to describe their political leanings are full of shit. They are reactionary regressives or as you stated, Michael, revanchists or as Bannon has purportedly proclaims himself-Trotskyite permanent revolutionists (who would love to be Stalinists if they could).
Conservatives seek to preserve societal goods of which governmental functions being just one part. True conservatives do not destroy those goods from within, do not seek to “capture” the government in order to overthrow it and replace it with a plutocratic oligarcharcic kleptocracy. Conservatives seek to preserve clean water, air and the environment not to wholesale pollute it.
Trumpistas are not conservative. They are reactionary regressive revanchists who seek to go back to a time in the U.S. that never was and never will be, a time of supposed greatness and be “great again”. More falsehoods, lies, prevarications and cynical manipulation of the populace by those who lead this pseudo tea party movement.
Fordham’s 2013 tax form, posted at its site, showed and exchange of money with the Center for American Progress.
In political terms, “conservative” means the goal of concentrated wealth. With CAP driving the Democratic Party, we recognize concentrated wealth’s concubine party i.e. 1000 legislative, executive and judicial seats lost.
I know Mr. Petrilli lives in Bethesda, MD (DC suburb / Montgomery county) but I don’t know if his children attend Montgomery County public schools. For background…MCPSS is Pearson owned, full on CC, PARCC manic, rabid AP and very much into “depersonalized” learning. If Petrilli sends his kids to these public schools and he doesn’t like what is happening, maybe the “reformers” are starting to see the error in their ways. My guess is that his children attend one of the many, high priced private schools in the area. Until I hear him truly advocating for MD public schools to ditch the ed-tech (CC, PARCC etc etc) while sitting in his Governor appointed position at MSDE, I will choose to believe that this is another one of his puff pieces. Waiting on Finn to add his 2 cents to the commentary.
I believe his children attend Montgomery County public schools.
Do Aaron Churchill and Chad Aldis’ kids attend ECOT, which taxpayers have spent a billion dollars to fund?
Never mind.
Diane-
Would you ask Mike why every Ohio newspaper article on education policy quotes Fordham (never identifying its funders), while reporters apparently can’t locate Progress Ohio or Phillis?
Conservative and anti-democracy, are those synonyms?
Question for Mike Petrilli-
Why didn’t Fordham employees, who benefitted from the public’s sacrifice for their state university degrees, attend legacy admission colleges instead?
A troubling trend at my school is the idea that once teachers put their classroom materials on Google Drive or One Drive or any other management system, then that is the entirely of their course. They could even put them together in an iBook!
In the minds of my admin, this means that homebound students can take their course via those materials, and only those materials. Or kids who were in “our” charter could take the “same” course as offered at the school. We are also looking at eSnow days where students would do some lesson at home instead of having a snow make up day.
When I brought up to my tech admin about the conversations the student would be missing, he glibly replied that we could just audio record the class. There is absolutely no acknowledgment of the role of active learning grounded in language! Have these people no knowledge of how people learn?