Tom Ultican left a career in Silicon Valley to become a high school teacher of physics and mathematics. He is one of our most perceptive critics of the role of technology in schools, having lived in both worlds: high-tech and high-school.
In this important post, he lays waste some of the most pernicious frauds of our times.
There is a great deal of optimism about the tech market in schools, but none of it is about making schools better. It is about making money for investors.
He begins:
Last year, IBIS Capital produced a report for EdTechXGlobal stating, “Education technology is becoming a global phenomenon, … the market is projected to grow at 17.0% per annum, to $252bn by 2020.” Governments in Europe and Asia have joined the US in promoting what Dr. Nicholas Kardaras called a “$60 billion hoax.” He was referring specifically to the one to one initiatives.
An amazing paper from New Zealand, “Sell, sell, sell or learn, learn, learn? The EdTech market in New Zealand’s education system – privatisation by stealth?” exposes the promoters of EdTech there as being even more bullish on EdTech. “The New Zealand business organisation (they spell funny) EDTechNZ, indicates on its website that educational technology is the fastest growing sector of a global smart education market worth US$100 billion, forecast to grow to US$394 by 2019.”
These initiatives are fraud based agendas because they focus on advancing an industry but are sold as improving schools. Unfortunately, good education is not the driver; money is.
He writes:
The trumpeting of a “STEM shortage crisis in America” is and always was a hoax. This same con is deforming public education. The new Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards were motivated respectively by Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Louis Gerstner (IBM). As a result they devalue humanities and glorify science and engineering based on this same fraudulent STEM claim. There must be a thousand charter schools that advertise themselves as STEM academies.
Here in California this same lie is being used to promote yet another attack on local control of public schools. In July, Raul Bocanegra (D-San Fernando) announced new legislation that would create a State authorized STEM school for 800 students. It would be privately managed and sited in Los Angeles county.
The news organization Capital and Main stated, “For a district that is already the largest charter school authorizer in the nation and is still gun-shy after recently fending off a takeover attempt by billionaire school choice philanthropist Eli Broad, any scheme that promises further stratification is an existential threat.”
Eli Broad wanted a STEM school to call his own but paid for with public money, and the state’s two major newspapers thought it was a grand idea to let a billionaire get a school just because…he is a billionaire:
It seems the fourth estate no longer ferrets out fraud and corruption but is instead complicit in these nefarious plots.
In the age of Trump, investigative reporting doesn’t matter. Nor does principle. Money matters.
Of course, technology can be well used, but what is happening today is that technology is being used to replace human contact. That is a mistake and a fraud.
Hi-Tech and digital initiatives are careening down a dark road. Because of the extreme power of hi-tech corporations like Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and many others, the development of education technology is being driven by their needs and not the needs of students. Students have become their guinea pigs as they release one untested technology after another into America’s classrooms.
Technology has a potential to enhance education but it also has the potential to cause great damage.
A century ago, there were people taking correspondence courses and getting great value from them. Today, the modern equivalent of the correspondence course is the online class.
However, students at screens like correspondence students will never achieve equal benefit to students with a teacher, because the teacher-student relationship is the most important aspect in education.
Teacher-student relationships are different than those with friends, parents or siblings. My personal experience was that I felt a genuine selfless lover for my students and we communicated about many things; often personal but mostly academic. I also felt a need to protect them. In America’s public schools, a student might have that kind of close relationship with more than 40 adults during their 12 years in school. This is where the great spark of creativity and learning leaps from teacher to student.
I have put students at screens in my career, but I never found great benefit in the exercise. On the hand, I have found technologies like graphing utilities to be highly beneficial, but it was the interaction with my students that was of most value for deep learning, enhancing creativity and developing a love for learning. If technologies destroy these relationships then they become a net evil.
Here is his ominous conclusion. We ignore it at our peril, and the peril of our youth:
A faculty colleague of mine said, “the last thing 21st century students need is more screen time.” I believe Jean M. Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me and iGen would enthusiastically agree. She recently wrote an article for Atlantic magazine describing the dangers of screen time to the current teen generation she calls the iGen. Based on her research she said,
“Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)”
“The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.”
“There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.”
“In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.”
Obviously, many of our institutions have been corrupted by the immense power of concentrated wealth and especially by hi-tech industries. The money being chased is enormous, but there are more of us. If we educate ourselves, our families and our neighbors we can reform these greed driven forces into forces for good, but we need to pay attention.
Silicon Valley benefits from creating a faux STEM crisis. If more students study science and technology creating a glut of STEM workers in the market, it will drive wages down. These high tech sharks know exactly what they are doing. They have bamboozled America long enough with the assumption these “smart” people know what is best. What they know is not education, children, teaching or learning. They know what is best them them, lots of money. They have no deeper insights into other issues.
JUST….Another MANUFACTURED Crisis. Thanks, retired teacher!
It’s good that someone is finally calling what the tech giants are doing a fraud.
They are not ignorant and not simply going along for the ride.
They ARE the ride.
And we are the ones being taken for a ride.
a roller coaster ride which keeps going off the tracks
Companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook can’t be “reformed” except in the sense that breaking them up is “reforming” them.
They are monopolies that far exceed in money and power any of the monopolies broken up by Teddy Roosevelt or since (Ma Bell)
And they do whatever they DAM well please, legal or not.
It may not even be possible to break them up at this point, especially given the current climate (with Citizens United and all the rest)
Sick people own these companies…and I mean these people are really, really sick and need deep therapy and this will take years and years and they may never be whole people. More than sad and bad that they foist their “issues” on our public schools.
I don’t have a lot of faith in adults in this area- they seem to go completely insane for anything with STEM in front of it- but I do have some faith in kids.
My son is MUCH less impressed with ed tech than these adults are- he treats it like a tool. He has no qualms discarding it if it doesn’t fit the job, either. I’ve seen him doing math problems alongside some expensive piece of junk the school district got duped into buying with a pencil and paper. He wants to see the whole problem, which is completely understandable.
Los Angeles is the worst. Would any of the adults who bought all those Ipads like to write extensively on an Ipad? Of course not. If you’re going to buy them expensive tools at least buy them something that works for the task you’re making them perform. Boy, did Apple see them coming.
Demand more. You’re the customer. Public schools are OVERWHELMINGLY the largest purchasers of ed tech. They’re not doing you a favor lending you their alleged brilliance. You’re doing them a favor allowing them into your school. The burden is on THEM to show value- it’s not on you to defend on why you won’t buy it.
Ignore DeVos and all that nonsense about Luddites standing in the way of progress. She has no idea what she’s talking about.
It’s a product. Treat it like one. You’re not obligated to buy ANY of it.
My daughter, who attends a system that is very avant guards and has quite a bit of tech stuff, is exactly the same way. Her tech is her spiral notebook with her poems (which seem fantastic for a 11 year old to an adoring father). She is, however, taught by teachers who can see how to use the tech when it is needed and discard its use appropriately.
And since public schools are the largest purchasers of ed tech public schools should demand these tech company billionaires stop lobbying to eradicate their schools.
They’re trashing you at these conferences and a week later showing up to sell wares! Find a vendor who doesn’t pour money into lobbying to gut public schools. You’re not obligated to indirectly fund your own demise.
If public schools are good enough to enter into contracts worth millions of dollars with these people then public schools should be good enough to get some respect from the self-proclaimed Best and Brightest. You’re not the lesser party to this transaction. You’re the buyer. Act like one.
Audrey Watters is good on this stuff- NOT overly impressed! 🙂
http://hackeducation.com/
Neither am I! About 30 or so years ago I had to evaluate a tech company’s awful educational software. I wrote that the entire foundation of this software program is shaky and based on BAD information. Nothing has changed except more AWFUL and horrid stuff being crammed down ours and our young’s throats FOR $$$$$ of the few.
I doubt that most of the so called educational software” that is now sold to schools has even been reviewed/ evaluated by teachers or anyone else who is knowledgeable about teaching and curriculum.
Many of the people who develop software think they know everything about everything so there is no need to bring in subject experts — on education or anything else.
They think that because they have a computer “science” (sic) degree, they are experts not only in sciences like physics and biology but just about every other discipline as well. I worked with these types for over a decade.
It’s bad enough when know nothings develop “educational” software but it is downright frightening when they program self-driving cars. Yikes!!
“[T]he last thing 21st century students need is more screen time.” Exactly.
I have been reading Neil Postman’s extremely relevant “Teaching As A Conserving Activity” (written in 1979!). He argues that education should serve a “thermostatic” function in society, to “make visible the prevailing biases of a culture and then…to oppose them.” And, “[t]he school stands as the only mass medium capable of putting forward the case for what is not happening in the culture.”
In contemplating the vast, all-consuming force of technology in education, I can’t recommend his book highly enough.
“The fact is that in our own time, the technical thesis is advanced so vigorously and on so many fronts that it has created an ecological problem, and a dangerous one. We have a generation being raised in an information environment that, on one hand, stresses visual imagery, discontinuity, immediacy, and alogicality. It is antihistorical, antiscientific, anticonceptual, antirational. On the other hand, the context within which this occurs is a kind of religious or philosophic bias toward the supreme authority of technicalization. What this means is that as we lose confidence and competence in our ability to think and judge, we willingly transfer these functions to machines. Whereas our machinery was once thought of as an “extension of man,” man now becomes an “extension of machinery.” It is no accident that so much energy is being devoted to the development, in computer technology, of “artificial intelligence,” the purpose of which is to eliminate human judgment altogether. Or, if not that, to create a situation in which only a few people who are in control of the machinery have the authority to exercise human judgment. He who controls the definitions and rules of technique becomes the master, especially in a situation where people lack the intellectual ability and motivation to understand the assumptions of the technical thesis.” Neil Postman (1979) “Teaching as a Conserving Activity”
YES, NHMom. You are right.
It’s a jungle on screen. Eeew.
Postman published this book the year I started teaching. It was extremely influential then, and I continue to consider the idea of counter-cultural influence on society. This book preceded the computer revolution by almost a decade, but laid out an approach to education that laid out some of the most egregious problems of any technology.
The mark of a good Treatiese is its ability to make you consider connected trends in human history. Postman had me thinking of the printing press, the reformation, the age of discovery, on and on. Even today, as I teach my children the story of John Paul Marat and his poisoned pen, I think of how the printing technology of that day affected a populace and the course of a revolution.
Tech is being pushed into early childhood programs tooting it as utmost important to innovative classroom practice. Children looking at a screen instead of passing around something to look at are not learning to interact with others… children glued to a prompt on a screen instead of walking up to the board to point to their answer and getting focused attention from their peers are not learning about community and its contribution to learning. These “tech driven” strategies for learning are actually harmful to the all important social and emotional development of a child. AND this is in addition to haptics and how this factors into brain development in a human’s early years. Touch is important. Who among us does not understand this? So sad.
Nice typo: “tooting” in our family means breaking wind. Fits better. Maybe I should not accuse you of a typo. Great joke.
The DEFORMS by the “so-called” high tech industry are horrid. Our young are just $$$$$$$ to them. We are systematically being striped of our humanity for the profits of a few.
And…
Private schools are “breeding grounds” for tunnel vision.
Inequality seems to be the American way.