Steven Singer has a warning for teachers: Use technology wisely. Do you collaborate in the industry’s plans to replace you with a robot or an iPad.
He begins:
“Dear fellow teachers,
“Thank you for coming to this meeting on such short notice.
“I know you have plenty more important matters to attend to this morning. I, myself, left a pile of ungraded papers on my desk so I could get here. Not to mention I urgently need to fix my seating charts now that I’ve finally met my students and know who can sit with whom. And I’ve got to track down phone numbers for my kids’ parents and go through a mountain of Individual Education Plans, and… Well, I just want you to know that I get it.
“There are a lot of seemingly more pressing concerns than listening to a teacher-blogger jabber about the intersection of politics and our profession.
“Is that all of us? Okay, would someone please close the door?
“Good. No administrators in here, right? Just classroom teachers? Excellent.
“Let’s speak openly. There’s something very important we need to talk about.
“There is a force out there that’s working to destroy our profession.
“Yes, ANOTHER one!
“We’ve got lawmakers beholden to the corporate education reform industry on the right and media pundits spewing Wall Street propaganda on the left. The last thing we need is yet another group dedicated to tearing down our public schools.
“But there is. And it is us.
“You heard me right.
“It’s us.
“There is an entire parasitic industry making billions of dollars selling us things we don’t need – standardized tests, Common Core workbook drivel, software test prep THIS, and computer test crap THAT.
“We didn’t decide to use it. We didn’t buy it. But who is it who actually introduces most of this garbage in the classroom?
“That’s right. US.
“We do it. Often willingly.
“We need to stop.
“And before someone calls me a luddite, let me explain. I’m not saying technology is bad. It’s a tool like anything else. There are plenty of ways to use it to advance student learning. But the things we’re being asked to do… You know in your heart that they aren’t in the best interests of children.
“I know. Some of you have no choice. You live in a state or district where teacher autonomy is a pathetic joke. There are ways to fight that, but they’re probably not in the classroom.
“It’s not you who I’m talking to. I’m addressing everyone else. I’m talking to all the teachers out there who DO have some modicum of control over their own classrooms and who are told by their administrators to do things that they honestly disagree with – but they do it anyway.
“We’ve got to stop doing it.
“Corporations want to replace us with software packages. They want to create a world where kids sit in front of computers or iPads or some other devices for hours at a time doing endless test prep. You know it’s true because your administrator probably is telling you to proctor such rubbish in your own classroom so many hours a week. I know MINE is.
Listen, there are several reasons why we should refuse.
“First, there’s simple job security. If your principal brought in a Teach for America temp and told you this lightly trained fresh from college kid was going to take over your classes, would you really sit down and instruct her how to do your job!?
“I wouldn’t.
“That’s the entire point behind this tech industry garbage. You are piloting a program that means your own redundancy.”
Read it all for the conclusion and the links.
Never forget the power of NO.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bravo. This is so true. One year I was told that I was participating in a tech project 5 days hence. No respect for the awesome project we had going. I had 120 very bewildered students.
Now Dojo really takes the cake. Its mentally retarded… literally.
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This is one of the best pieces I’ve read on this blog. I hope all teachers read the whole thing.
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“Do NOT be a good soldier here. Do not just follow orders.”
I call the vast majority of teachers and adminimals that implement the various malpractices of this century, sad but yes this whole century, Go Along to Get Along (GAGA) Good Germans. According to Hannah Arendt the massive killings, attempted genocide by the Germans was not the result of the vast majority being “evil”. No, on the contrary! Somewhere around 12% of the population were Nazis, add in a lesser number of SS and perhaps there were at most 20% of the population that one might consider as evil. The vast majority (hey didn’t I just say that above?) of Germans were GAGA either turning a blind eye to the atrocities being committed or were using the excuse of “just following orders/mandates” of those “above” them in the social structure of 1930s Germany.
That vast majority allowed the atrocities to happen, many were afraid of losing their possessions, home and life. Why is it that the vast majority of GAGA teachers and adminimals comply so rapidly and willingly with educational malpractice mandates when they don’t have to worry about their own skin?? Willing abettors? Or perhap as stated from one of America’s premier writers:
“The mass of men [and women] serves the state [education powers that be] thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, [administrators and teachers], etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt.”- Henry David Thoreau [1817-1862], American author and philosopher
Do not GAGA teachers and adminimals take a professional ethics course these days? Do they not know how to resist and cease doing harm to students that the GAGAers do everyday in instituting the standards and testing malpractice? I’ll let someone far more intelligent than I comment:
“Should we therefore forgo our self-interest? Of course not. But it [self-interest] must be subordinate to justice, not the other way around. . . . To take advantage of a child’s naivete. . . in order to extract from them something [test scores, personal information] that is contrary to their interests, or intentions, without their knowledge [or consent of parents] or through coercion [state mandated testing], is always and everywhere unjust even if in some places and under certain circumstances it is not illegal. . . . Justice is superior to and more valuable than well-being or efficiency; it cannot be sacrificed to them, not even for the happiness of the greatest number [quoting Rawls]. To what could justice legitimately be sacrificed, since without justice there would be no legitimacy or illegitimacy? And in the name of what, since without justice even humanity, happiness and love could have no absolute value?. . . Without justice, values would be nothing more than (self) interests or motives; they would cease to be values or would become values without worth.”—Andre Comte-Sponville in “A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues” [my additions]
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When a teacher does take a stand, she stands alone.
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Been there, done that. When I found BATS (BadAss Teachers) they listened to me. They felt my pain. Beth Dimino and the group from NYSUT that new truth helped, too. There are others who know and speak out. We just have to stick together and make change statewide as well as nationally. It will happen. The entire plot of privatization will fall down. Unfortunately, it takes time and kids get lost in the process. Quality teachers get lost too. Until they find great school districts who don’t play the game.
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Again, where are the UFT/AFT, NEA etc. in all of this?
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Oh, I have tried. I even tried had Randi Weingarten interested in visiting our school and talking to our NYSUT members. The president of the organization was furious with me and told Randi he was very busy. Such apathy amongst us. Unless you hear from around the country, you do not realize there are others who think this is all horrible. Look at the Leonie Hamson’s of the world, to name only a few. Look at the Steven Singer’s, Marla Kilfoyle’s and Diane Ravitch’s. They are our heroes, speaking out of the injustice. If we didn’t have them the story would never continue.
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Or he!
I can attest from personal experience. And one must be strong to withstand that “aloneness”.
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It is up to master teachers to stand up. I stand alone, but I try whenever possible to kick the chairs out from under the newbies and get them to stand with me. Steven Singer is right, we teachers tend not to be risk takers. I take risks. That’s why I need my union to have my back when I am kicking chairs. Even more, I need my students and their parents to back me up when I am kicking chairs. One act of justice at a time, while I continue to master my craft so I have the support I need. That’s the most important part, mastery.
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And where is the NEA, UFT/AFT etc. in all of this?
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I am guilty. Since 1993 I am one who thought computers were going to be one of the best tools ever for teaching. Anything that came out was utilized in my classroom. If the school didn’t have the money to buy it, for the sake of my students, I would. I bought so many gadgets to open up a whole new world and convinced the schools how important technology was for the classroom. I myself became an online learner. I then became an online facilitator. I brought the world of SmartBoards, Flip Camcorders, laptops and more into my classroom. I thought the NYSCC Modules, that provided online links for learning would be a great tool and teachers helping teachers with students struggling math concepts could help. I believed all of this was good…until I met data mining programs used to push kids into an era where teachers walked around the room, monitored the progress of each child in front of a screen full of learning, learning designed for them supposedly at the level they were at. Have you ever been in a room where 20 students are sitting there tuned into the monitor of learning? It is truly learning I don’t want to see. Absolute silence is in the classroom full of students with headsets and no one is making a sound, But look at their faces. Faces of excitement, then frustration bottled all in with no verbal responses. No communication with another human. The only time they call on the teacher is when the program freezes or if they can’t hear well out of the earphones. So, so sad. We have lost what education is all about if we continue on this path.
So what did I do? I spoke out as I have about many things, including the developmentally inappropriate modules and Common Core Standards. Today, I continue to speak out. But it appears no one listens.
My last BOE meeting was trying to convince the BOE and administrators of the continued ills of the testing regime now discussed to be online testing. If students refused the tests they must use i-Ready the entire time. I spoke out against this as did parents. The administration said it was now part of the curriculum. I have walked the walk and explained to the board what I witnessed from programs such as this. I was speaking to those who had already made their minds up. They knew that this program was going to give them something badly needed for glorification that their teachers were or weren’t doing their jobs-data. This school district as so many others has turned to data being the most important item, not the students.
I retired last year, not because I wanted to, but because I was a thorn in the side of this team of administrators and their board who liked when people did not show up and ask questions. Besides they had the teachers who said yes to anything to speak out for them. The teachers who shove a worksheet or laptop in front of the students and think learning will be acquired in one way or another. I say, no. I don’t believe this. I believe the teacher is the one who inspires the child.
Yes, I am at fault. I am one of those teachers who thought technology could take my students to places they could never go…and it did. But now as I look back, was it all worth it? I never, ever meant to have them become a number. I will fight against this type of learning and data mining for as long as it takes for people to realize this is a national nightmare. Students are not just a number.
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Thank you for sharing your story. It is a cautionary tale for every GAGA teacher that jumps on the tech bandwagon. I am glad you caught on to the real intent of all the technology. What teachers need is more legitimate evidence to take to administrators and boards of education before they unleash the data monster on young people.
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Many teachers have found the evidence when they see the children not making much progress on the reports. They have shown administration this and the companies tell them they will show loss until they get how the program is teaching them. UGH!
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In my experience technology has a place in so far as it lessens the time-consuming tasks teachers must devote to recording attendance, calculating student grades, keeping track of assignments, etc. Perhaps computers can be useful to help teachers in the classroom but only as an tool for the teacher, not as a replacement. Ex: In economics, a graph of supply & demand curves as they shift one way or the other so students can more easily understand the relationship.
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Except that using tech for recording attendance, calculating student grades, keeping track of assignments, etc. feeds the Big Data beast — $$$ — and encourages the tech industry to further invade. I think there are good uses for tech, but none of the good uses involve usernames or passwords, none involve grades, assignments, or any kind of collectible data. Stay anonymous on the net. Keep your students anonymous on the net.
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I did not say to use computers for grading etc. to be shared in any way. I used a program called “Grade Quick”. Did not involve personal student info other than their name. I used it in place of delaney cards for keeping track of attendance, grades, projects etc. It was on my own personal computer and saved me a LOT of time.
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Sounds good. Just keep the kids’ names off the net.
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Store the data on your computer, not in the Cloud.
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So important.
You don’t have to hate technology or be “Luddites” or “protect the status quo”. You just have to approach vendors AS VENDORS and not as someone giving you objective advice.
They are selling something. It’s their job. YOUR job is to be the expert and not get sold a pig in a poke.
It only works if both sides do their jobs. They’re salespeople, you’re experts who analyze value. Don’t mistake one for the other.
Parents will love you for it. They really will. Use YOUR judgment, not Apple’s or Google’s or Microsoft’s marketing. Be careful. Look at who is funding the sites that tell you to buy this stuff. Marketing is incredibly sophisticated and often opaque. Remember who is behind much of ed reform- the same tech companies and billionaires who are pushing “personalized learning”. You don’t have to hate them but you do have to accept that they are pushing product. Be wise.
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And be wary of “free”. Not all costs are money. If they’re offering “free product” but that product involves you or your students testing this stuff for them then it’s NOT free.
Your time is worth something. Your student’s time is worth something. Upending your school costs a lot. Even if the products are free if the experiment costs (and it will- time) then there’s an opportunity cost- you could have been doing something with more value.
They will tell you there’s no risk. That’s simply not true. There is ALWAYS risk and there is ALWAYS cost. Anyone who tells you otherwise can’t be trusted.
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Mr. Singer’s excellent advice notwithstanding, one reliable technology that I insist my students always use is the Bio-Optical Organized Knowledge device.
Also known as a book.
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I sometimes think adults are the people pushing this:
“In the future, books won’t be books at all. Pixely plots will replace cut-creating pages, and cover art will become a strange relic to be studied by our puzzled descendants.
That’s the narrative we’ve been told, anyway: print is dead, and ebooks are the way of the future. But a slew of new studies have thickened the plot.
Most recently, Naomi S. Baron — author of Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World and a HuffPost blogger — surveyed the reading habits of students around the world, and found that a whopping 92 percent of them prefer print.
Baron cited the pleasure of feeling the progress you’ve made in your reading (rather than making note of an onscreen percentage) as one possible explanation for print’s popularity.”
My son told me hates the online Common Core tests because he wants to see a math problem in sequence without scrolling. He literally uses paper alongside the screen for homework. I get that, I really do.
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I totally agree with your son. As an educator for over 30 years, I have always believed in putting your mouth (pencil) to paper to do the talking!
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Chira: I agree with your son. Many of my students have expressed frustration at having to scroll to see a problem.
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Love it!
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Me too.
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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/
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Duane: thanks for that link. I read it with interest, especially since it referenced ideas I have had or wondered about. I am going to digest this a bit.
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Everything old is new again. OKD is good enough to rebrand the books tech.
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I’m following the marketing of “Reinventing Schools” by ed reformers.
This is the dedicated site where they’re pushing the book:
http://reinventingschools.the74million.org/
It’s capsule reviews of cities ed reformers chose as “success stories” (there are no failure stories) but what’s amazing about it is how there are NO public schools.
Apparently there are no public schools worth mentioning in Washington DC or Indianapolis. Only charter schools make the ed reform cut. Families in public schools do not exist within the echo chamber, although they are 55% of families in DC, for example.
The “agnostics” once again excluded public school families (and public schools) in their plans to “reinvent schools”. Boy they sure spend a lot of time selling charters for people who are supposedly “agnostic”. You can’t find a public school anywhere in ed reform.
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Mr. Singer’s excellent advice notwithstanding, one reliable technology that I insist my students always use is the Bio-Optical Organized Knowledge device.
Here’s a link that gives a detailed description of this revolutionary technology, which is sometimes referred to as a BOOK:
http://www.english.msstate.edu/undergrad/BOOK.html.
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Wonderful and thank you for providing the link! Reminds me of that Willie and Waylon song: “Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Stupid.”
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Also, for those of you who don’t know and related to Mississippi State, in December they will open the U.S. Grant Presidential Library: http://www.usgrantlibrary.org. How odd is that?
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Did they get a grant?
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Apparently there was some disagreement and litigation concerning a move from Carbondale, IL to Miss St. So I read in the frequently asked questions on the link you provided.
The irony of this placement was not lost on me, and it reminded me of working for a week or so in the town of Fitzgerald , GA. I was doing work in the city sewer, and found myself looking for a manhole cover between Sherman and Sheridan St. A street named for Sherman in southern Georgia is begging for an explanation, and it was not,long until I popped a cover near an historical marker. It explained that the town had been planned by a group of northern generals who found the climate of the south to their liking, anticipating by a full century that decision on the part of so many others. Hearing that this town had given money to an African hunger mission, they chose it for their little utopia. All the streets were named for generals from the union and the confederacy, as well as Indian heroes like Tecumseh. I could not help but notice the absence of Fredrick Douglas St.
The people there seemed nice. I remember eating a really good burger and having a beer at a restaurant owned by a man from Kentucky. His employees had a large jar with money in it and a sign that said “fund to send [his name] back to Yankee land.
I think this was the genesis of my observation that the mason Dixon line had evolved into a small circle around each xenophobic individual.
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Mason, Ohio city schools has a “Chief Innovation Officer”. Do they have a “Chief Caring Officer” or, a “Chief Officer for Democracy”? Speculating-hell no. Mason’s Innovation Chief praises the Chamber of Commerce’s local CEO who is part of a program
“to improve the cradle to career education pipeline”. Kids don’t belong in a pipeline. Pipelines are for inanimate objects. The Chamber decided it was in a “war for talent” and the victims of that war are innocent kids.
The Chamber aligning with government, whether it is schools, prisons, and other common goods, further erodes a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
The program described is the Association of Chamber of Commerce Executives’ Fellowship for Education Attainment. When the Chamber succeeds in privatizing schools, corporations will make the decisions for the “pipeline” and the democratically-elected school boards will be in the trash heap of American democracy.
Mason, Ohio has a Red, White and Blue festival for July 4th. It ought to celebrate the color green, for money.
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NYC started the trend of creating ridiculous titles for education officials. Bloomberg did it to give a corporate appearance, also making it possible to hire unqualified MBAs for supervisory positions.
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Sorry for raining on this parade. I’m strongly opposed to school privatization, and I’m a vocal critic of what’s called “personalized learning”. However, I must say it’s almost always counter-productive to argue against a technology because it displaces workers.
History teaches us that technology is an inexorable force. The most effective argument against it is not a change in the workplace. Rather, to rein in a particular technology, the better arguments are: it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, it’s a waste of money, it threatens privacy, and in certain cases, it’s dangerous.
Pitting technology against teachers is especially fraught, because it’s difficult to distinguish the good from the bad—and here I’m referring to the technology. This applies to the many different programs and devices which make their way into schools, and also to any single technology which can be employed wisely, ineptly or counter-productively. And what about products that blur the lines? Public TV, for example, is increasingly corporate-backed, as are many other curriculum and classroom products made by putative non-profit companies. Are these things technology? My point: anything that goes into a classroom has to be evaluated carefully and used in a circumspect way. Generalizing about them is probably a disservice to teachers.
I think we get further carried away, or create more divides, when the argument is about “test prep” and “testing companies”. For example, is test prep bad for an AP subject? If poor kids and rich kids alike take the SAT, how is the former to do equally well without test prep, since poor kids have higher hurdles to get over? It’s a cop-out just to say dispense with the SAT, because a similar question can be asked about kids who’ve fallen behind, or have special needs, or want to do well in an academic competition. Are companies that make test- or worksheet generators, which can replace old-fashioned cutting-and-pasting and thereby save teachers time—are they inherently evil because their tools can be used for drill-and-kill or teaching to the test? Is the product to blame or the end-user?
In the end, we have to be really careful. When the printing press came out, it was opposed by religious leaders on the (anti-democratic) grounds that a priestly class was needed to prevent the spread of dangerous ideas. Yes, a book like Mein Kampf can and did spread a dangerous idea. And the printing press did cause people (monastic scribes) to lose their jobs. But we’re still better off. In the end, individuals must decide if they want to read the high-brow Ada or low-brow 50 Shades of Grey—or just do snapchat. And though 21st century technology may threaten the professionalism of teachers, we must combat that with strong arguments and not just rail against a whole class of things (pun intended).
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DL –fair points, but many of us are speaking out against a specific incarnation of technology: the raft of all-inclusive digital curricula that publishers are now creating and districts buying. Because assignments and assessments are embedded in these packages, and because they feed data directly to administrators’ desktops, and may themselves become the new stand-in for high-stakes tests, they have a major competitive advantage over other curricula, especially the patchwork of heirloom variety hand-crafted, home-made lessons that I and many other teachers cherish. I fear we’re at a tipping point in the battle between human professionals and this new army of administration-deployed robo-teachers.
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While you may be correct that we should not argue against technology because it displaces teachers, I would submit that this is substantially different from the printing press displacing scribes. Making letters is a fairly basic process, and printing is obviously the western development that created and motivated history, both the good and the bad.
Printing expanded the number of literate people, which expanded the number of necessary teachers. What some envision is reducing the number of teachers using technology. Most of the above posts suggest that this would be a catastrophe. I would like to suggest that it will not happen. Soon after the arrival of the screen, the demise of printed material was predicted. Two decades later, we are all drowning in the sea of paper made possible by computers, reams of paper spent on telling us things about our finances we never really needed to know. If tech helps people learn better, it should increase, not decrease the number of teachers needed to help people learn.
That said, there are voices that clearly see artificial intelligence as a way to destroy the evil teachers and their choakhold on the poor children of America. The iPad can rule the kid better than the teacher. Mathis is myopic at best and pernicious at worst. When my kids come back to school with their own children, it is the personal stuff they remember, the validation I gave them as human beings. How could we rob our children of that experience wi a clear conscience ?
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Perhaps it’s important to argue specifically against technology that can be used to collect personal information. The public, from what I read, is fully prepared to push back against privacy violations. Big Data is the enemy not just of public education, but of the public.
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Right on, LeftCoast teacher! The privacy argument resonates—probably more so with the recent data breach at Equifax. Parents do not want their kids’ personal information bought and sold. This is the way to combat “personalized learning” schemes. All we need to ask is why is Facebook is involved? It’s the Zuckerberg’s private for-profit company that’s pushing Summit Basecamp/PLP for crying out loud!
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