Tom Ultican left the high-tech industry to teach math and physics in high school in California.
He reports with outrage that the 2015 education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act is larded with millions of dollars for the tech industry.
He reviews the evidence and can’t find support for this massive investment in digital learning. The tech lobby prevailed in Washington, D.C.
He writes:
“Bad Education Philosophy is the Source of “Personalized Learning” Failure
“The behaviorist ideology of B.F. Skinner informs “competency based education.” CBE is the computer based approach that replaces the failed 1990’s behaviorist learning method called Outcome Based Education. Outcome Based Education is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery education” theory. Mastery education’s failure was so complete that it had to be renamed. It was quickly derided by educators as “seats and sheets.” These schemes all posit that drilling small skills and mastering them is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.
“Today’s proponents of behaviorist education hope that technology including artificial intelligence backed by micro-credentials and badges will finally make behaviorism a winner. It will not because little humans are not linear learners. Non-alignment with human nature is a fundamental flaw in this approach. In addition, behaviorism is not known as a path to creativity or original thinking. Those paths are created between teachers and students through human contact; paths undermined by “digital education.”
“Artificial intelligence is more science fiction than reality. Computer scientist Roger Schank, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence notes,
“The AI [artificial intelligence] problem is very very hard. It requires people who work in AI understanding the nature of knowledge; how conversation works; how to have an original thought; how to predict the actions of others; how to understand why people do what they do; and a few thousand things like that. In case no one has noticed, scientists aren’t very good at telling you how all that stuff works in people. And until they can there will be no machines that can do any of it.”
“With no unbiased positive proof of concept, hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars which were earmarked for education are being spent on technology. It is likely that much of this spending will cause harm and that schemes like “personalized learning” will not deliver benefit to anyone who is not in a hi-tech industry.
“These dollars could have been spent on better facilities, smaller classes, and better teacher education. Instead, the money is wasted on dubious theories propounded by leaders in hi-tech industries.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
What public schools need to understand is if they make dumb and reckless decisions regarding ed tech at the urging of ed reformers, the public won’t blame ed reformers-no one knows or cares who any of the “experts” are- they’re accountable to no one.
The public will blame their local public school for making dumb decisions.
It is in your interest to resist this sales job. Don’t sign ridiculous vows to be “Future Ready!”, don’t sink billions into devices, don’t fall for it.
DeVos and Duncan don’t live and work in your community- you do. The blowback won’t fall on Zuckerberg or Gates- it’ll fall on YOU.
We just saw this in Los Angeles. National ed reformers cheerled a device program but who was punished for it? The public school supporter on the school board.
“Human Intelligence (HI)”
Do humans have HI?
I seriously doubt it
Cuz then they wouldn’t buy
AI, but live without it
If I’m an ordinary public school parent and my public school leaders decide to take the Facebook/Summit charter school “free” program I don’t have any way to hold Facebook or Summit Charter school accountable. I’ll hold the public school accountable.
Remember that when they come selling these wares. The salespeople will be down the road when the public finds out.
These programs do nothing except put kids in ticky tacky boxes. The tech industry is out of control thinking that computers and screen time can provide useful information for instruction, which they don’t. I haven’t found one that is theoretically and pedagogically sound, despite the marketing ploys from these companies. Teachers know this is just about PROFITS for the few. The students know those activities on the screen are shallow, thus, they disengate. I know I would.
This perspective (high tech is the answer) is just so demeaning and simplistic. There is more to the teaching-learning situation, which NO computer program can know.
That is: NO computer program can replace the classroom teacher or even come close to being able to inform instruction let alone teach critical thinking.
Learning is not an isolated activity as the high tech industry would like to think. We learn in community with others.
Kidwatching: http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/TP/0222-may2011/TP0222Inquiry.pdf
“The tech industry is out of control thinking that computers and screen time can provide useful information for instruction….”
I’m not at all convinced that’s what the tech industry believes. After all, leaders of the tech industry overwhelmingly send their own kids to low-tech or even no-tech schools.
I think what the tech industry thinks is that tech can provide a helluva bottom line boost when forced on captive school children (those children, of course). And they’re right.
dienne77,
Tech industry is just marketing their bad wares using propaganda techniques. And far too people BITE. OY.
SO worth repeating and repeating: “Learning is not an isolated activity as the high tech industry would like to think. We learn in community with others.”
I have this myself, so I agree. I have been against Computer Aided Instruction (CAI), especially if they rely on only this, for K-12, for at least 10 years now..I call it entertainment for the kids, or perhaps Computainment…
Bill Gates has put over $2.5 billion of his own money into Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and it require the use of computers. Michael Dell of Del Computers also pushed CCSS. Thankfully, Texas did not buy into it.
These two examples cannot speak for all of Silicon Valley (or Silicon Hills in Austin) but it a good indicator.
The Common Core was one of Gates’ foundational steps to launching his Depersonalized Learning platform. The CCSS is supposed to provide the content, which includes continuous opportunities for testing, data mining and flow of cash to Gates.
Common Core was THE critical step because without a single set of standards, tech companies have to develop lots of different software versions, each customized to the particular standards being used by states and/or schools.
From what I can see, Common Core is already a failure with regard to this original goal.
Not all states came on board to begin with, many states have already dropped it and even several of those that did not drop it entirely have renamed it and are now changing it to suit their purposes.
The latter change is particularly unwelcome for any company that was depending on developing a relatively small number of software versions to serve thousands of schools.
It means that they will now have to return to customizing the software for the states/schools which means they can no longer take advantage of the economy of scale that Common Core promised.
The goal of Race to the Top was to use Common Core to standardize everything and open up a national marketplace for tech and all other products. I quote the director of Race to the Top saying so, in my book Reign of Error.
Personalized learning has the word “person” in it….to me that implies there is a person other than the student involved, namely a teacher (qualified, trained, certified teacher goes without saying). Parking a student, most especially a special needs student, in front of a computer and expecting that student to excel, is beyond unreasonable – it is just bad teaching…but wait, there’s no teaching involved, is there?
It is interesting that the big tech moguls send their own children to creative schools such as the Lakeside or Waldorf schools which do not promote technology. Sitting in front of a screen all day is reserved for other people’s children.
The thing that amazes me about computer aided instruction is how little so much of it has changed in recent decades.
Ultican is right: it’s still very much like Skinner’s pigeon setup where students are rewarded (get to move on) if they answer correctly and penalized if they don’t.
My nephew was doing this stuff just a few nights ago for Spanish and after getting the first nine in a series of 10 questions right, he got the last one wrong simply because he forgot to capitalize a word.
And the program then proceeded to force him to start all over from the beginning with ten new questions because of the one capitalization oversight!
Mindless dreck designed by people who don’t know anything at all about teaching and learning.
I did an online grammar exercise in Spanish yesterday to prepare for class last night. It was useful in giving me extra practice and immediate feedback on whether my answers were right or wrong, but it didn’t do what class last night did. It didn’t explain to me why one answer was better than another. It didn’t have a lively, laughter filled debate with the teacher. I don’t even remember the answer to the computer question, much less the question. I do remember the class “discussion” and its resolution.
CAI is really an electronic version of what the old “mastery learning” was. it is tedious, boring, and unmotivating for students. Deeper learning occurs from human instruction from a caring, trained individual. More effective learning is social and human. Technology can be a useful tool in the right hands, but it has its limitations.
I never cease to be astonished at how brain-dead administrators will fall for a sales pitch from one of these tech companies (“We have cute avatars”!) and pour a lot of money into one of these programs that is basically worksheets on a screen with lots of glitzy filler. Inevitably, kids are fascinated for the first three minutes, then bored, and by the second time they have to use the program, they would rather have a tooth extraction. So-called “mastery learning” (aka “programmed learning”) is one of ten thousand tools in a teacher’s toolkit, useful in small doses for a very limited number of low-level tasks.
I suspect that most computer aided learning software only deals only with low level tasks because those are precisely the things that are easy to program.
I also suspect that most educational software development is not driven by what teachers and students need and want, but by what companies find easiest to produce and maintain.
The latter is undoubtedly the reason why Bill Gates wanted a single set of national standards that could not be changed: to make it easy for companies like Pearson and Microsoft to produce and maintain software that would be sold to thousands of schools and used by millions of students.
Rather than having to design, develop and maintain thousands of different custom software packages — or even just lots of different versions of the same basic package — companies could produce just one version. If/When a change needed to be made, it would just need to be made to one version, which could then be sent out to all the schools.
In other words, simplicity and efficiency — and, of course, profits — were the underlying motivation.
Many years ago Gates gave a speech in which he lamented the cost of schooling, which is mostly in facilities and salaries. The solution? Lots of tech from companies like Microsoft. Yes, he paid to have the Common Core created so that there would be one set of national standards to correlate software to. And our idiot education establishment allowed itself to be led by the nose.
There is no reason to believe that Gates’ approach to education is any different from his approach to software development.
Anyone who has been involved with software production understands how Gates thinks and where he is coming from. And anyone who has not been so involved may have no idea about how he thinks.
But understanding how he thinks is not even really that important.
All you need to do is look at the quality of the products that his company has produced to know that you probably don’t want him having anything to do with what goes into the schools.
Much of what Microsoft has produced over the years is rather poor (some of it just junk) and even the stuff that was eventually “good enough” or even (on rare occasions) “decent” was only made that way after literally thousands of bug fixes, patches, revisions and updates.
Needless to say, this kind of what can only be termed “hacking” is not the way one would hope to approach the education of millions of school children in the US.
But unfortunately, that is precisely what has happened.
With Gates involved in each step of standardizing and delivering instruction, Gates was offering seed money in order to corner the ed tech market. That may explain his insistence of still clinging to the Common Core, even though it has been rejected by many states.
If you want a forecast of the ed tech market from 2017 to 2025, with analyses by sectors, that report will cost you several thousand dollars.
The internet offers several of these marketing forecasts for sale with a summary form intended to make you think the full report of 130 pages is worth over $4,000.
The summaries and table of contents for these high-cost marketing reports suggest that the global E-Learning market is poised to reach approximately $325 billion by 2025.
Reports differ in how they analyze this market. Some of the categories for analyses illustrate the scope of the tech intrusion into education.
Here is a sample of the categories for analysis from one report: managed services; security services; network services; cloud & IT services and unified communications; large, medium, and small organizations; market trends; leading players; supply chain trends; technological innovations; key developments; future strategies; existing players and new entrants, and markets by major geographies (e.g., North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East, Latin America and Rest of the world).
There are specialized reports. One centers on enterprise resource planning (ERP). In education. ERP includes systems to outsource and integrate management of data in cloud-based warehouses and on-site databases. ERP technologies focus on efficient and real time uses of data, including for example, ”comfortable and user friendly management of student information.”
The analyses of the ERP market extend to management of financial information, transportation planning, efficient enrollment procedures, student and staff scheduling, and the like. The analyses are segmented for end-users —pre-school and kindergarten, K-12 and higher education, and for services such as consulting, training & support for users, system maintenance for automated transfers on information, and software updates. ERP systems will benefit from a bill pending in Congress that would allow personal identification of students, and also end most privacy regulations on the use of data for tracking students “cradle to career.”
More than one of these market reports looks at trends in the global E-Learning market. Among those given attention are: learning through gaming; IT security and cloud based data warehousing, “learning content management systems,” expansion of online “digital” content, wearable technologies, mobile e-learning, simulations, and virtual classroom technologies.
There are specialized market reports on augmented reality/virtual reality, wearable devices, and the Internet of Things (IoT)—all of these producing a glut of data— Big Data—along with new algorithms and investments in “augmented reality” (AR) and “artificial intelligence” (AI) for education.
AR technologies such as virtual science labs are marketed as supports for “collaborative and experimental learning.“ Other “learning experiences” with features of AR include audio-video demonstrations, games, challenges, quests and overlays of 3D images and text over an actual environment, all in real time.
AI technologies change conventional textbooks into “personalized” resources. The interactive “virtual textbooks” are marketed to fans of student-centered learning. Like AR applications, these texts allow students to choose content and have adaptive assessments These apps also scoop up of tons of data, for which there as a growing secondary market—sales or leases of data.
I looked at five of these reports purporting to guide investors in the ed tech market, with projections from 2017 to 2025. Each report mentioned some key companies. I put the names of these companies in a spreadsheet. Sixty-five were mentioned. Of these, several were mentioned more than once: Adobe Systems, Apollo Education Group, Cisco Systems, Desire2Learn, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. All of these companies have Wikipedia profiles.
If you want to get a grip on the plans of the tech industry at a global scale, visit the World Economic Forum website “Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.” The Center, based in San Francisco, is devoted to maximizing “ the benefits of science and technology for society.” That sounds high-minded and possibly benign, but the aim is to “co-design and pilot innovative new approaches to policy and governance.”
The “partners” who are assuming a leadership role in co-designing projects sponsored by the Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, include some with an interest in precision medicine. Becoming a “partner” means contributing some money, but how much is not something disclosed. I did not check further, but the major contributors are:
(tier 1) Safesforce,
(tier 2) ABB, Accenture, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft Corporation, Plantir Technologies, SAP and
(tier 3) American Heart Association, Baker & McKenzie, BBVA, Dignity Health, Huawei, IDEO, Reliance Industries, Sompo Holdings, Turkcell, and Wipro.
You can lean more about the projects of the Center and how technocrats envisioned “governance” systems here.
https://www.weforum.org/center-for-the-fourth-industrial-revolution
Educational publishers are hurting and see testing and ed tech as a way back. In the days when I worked for the big publishers, I had access to such reports. They generally weren’t very useful, though one could mine them to support a project proposal
I was into personalized learning before it was a fad. In my day, it was called curling up with a book. Or playing with machines, saws, and junior chemical sets. Or scribbling and figuring out math problems with a pencil and paper. Or digging for fossils on the sides of hills. Dagnabit! But I didn’t have to walk five miles to school bare footed. So I was somewhat privileged.
nice
Mr. Ultican’s analyses that more $$$ is going to technology is based on the funds AUTHORIZED in ESSA… time will tell if the BUDGETED funding will match the AUTHORIZED funding. If I were preparing a school budget for 2018-19, I wouldn’t be counting on the authorized amounts. Case in point, taken from a recent fact sheet: “The President’s FY 2017 budget proposal would provide $500 million for the Title IV, Part A flexible block grant, less than one-third of the authorized $1.65 billion level.” https://www.shapeamerica.org//events/speakoutday/upload/Title-IV-fact-sheet.pdf
Bottom line: the federal government is not going to be a source of revenue for anyone involved in public education until we get a change in administrations,
I agree. Unless I am mistaken federal funds are usually about 9% to 12% of school budgets with the remainder about equally split between local and state sources. The tech industry has lobbied for federal funding for a long time and succeeded in capturing a chunk of federal money. The sales reps for tech are out in force trying to seduce state legislatures to require budgeting for tech, in addition to the marketers who arrange meetings and perks for superintendents, regional “service providers,” and district tech people…all built on a hope for investments. Add the direct funding and influence of many private foundations in pushing tech as essential for students, all wrapped around largely unsubstantiated claims that tech is best, always, all the time. Some like Knowledgeworks.org want to “de-school” education altogether in favor of tech mediated learning selected from any options that students and parents can find and afford.
Interesting article: https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/11/08/the-cases-against-personalized-learning.html#