A few days ago, I posted an article by Kristina Rizga about Summit charter schools and their online lessons. On the whole, it seemed to me, the article was admiring.
Leonie Haimson has a different view of Summit.
Haimson has played a leading role in the movement to stop data mining of students and to protect student privacy. After writing a column in The Answer Sheet Blog expressing her concerns about the Summit charter schools and their online platform, Haimson was contacted by the founder of Summit and invited to visit one of their schools.
“Summit charter schools and their online platform, now used in over 300 schools across the country, both public and charter, have received millions of dollars from Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg; Zuckerberg has pledged to support the continued expansion of the online platform through his LLC, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.
“Shortly after my Washington Post piece appeared, I was contacted by Diane Tavenner, the CEO of Summit charter schools, who asked if we could meet when she was visiting NYC. I agreed. We had lunch on Sept. 15, and I handed her a list of questions, mostly about Summit’s privacy policy, most of which my associate, Rachael Stickland, had already sent to Summit staff that she had met at SXSW Edu the previous March, and to which she’d never received a response….
“During the lunch, I mentioned that I was going to be in Oakland the weekend of Oct. 14- 15 for the Network for Public Education conference, and that I would be interested in visiting some schools after that are using the Summit platform. I said I was especially eager to visit public schools, since I’d heard from many public school parents in five states who told me their children had negative experiences with the program. These parents were upset that Summit had withdrawn the right of parents to consent to the system shortly after CZI took over, and they were concerned about how their children’s personal data was being shared with Summit and then redisclosed with unspecified other third “partners” for unclear purposes.
“Diane later emailed me and said that I could visit Summit Prep charter school on Oct. 16, in Redwood City, their flagship school. An Uber would come and pick me up at my Oakland hotel, she said, and the drive would take about an hour each way…
“At Summit Prep, I was met by two school leaders, and we talked in an empty office for about a half hour, where they explained to me about the platform and how it was designed. Then we briefly toured two classrooms. In the first classroom, there were about thirty students engaged in “Personalized Learning Time”, gazing at computer screens and working on their individual “playlists.” These playlists include content in different “focus areas” delivered via various mediums, including online texts and videos. When students have learned these materials, they’re supposed to take multiple choice online tests to show they’ve “mastered” the area. In addition, in each of their courses, there are projects they are supposed to complete…
“I visited another classroom where 12th graders were engaged in peer-reviewing essays they had written at the beginning of the class, grading them according to the Summit’s complex rubric of cognitive skills. When I asked why the essays were written on paper rather than on computers, the school leaders told me that this was because they were practicing for the California state exam in which students are asked to write essays on paper.
“I noted that I had seen no classroom or small group discussions. The Summit leaders said that was because none were occurring during my brief visit. It is true that the amount of time I spent in classrooms wasn’t sufficient to make an informed judgment either way, but what I saw did not encourage me.
“When we returned to the office, I questioned why delivering content primarily online was an effective method of teaching. Shouldn’t learning happen in a more interactive fashion, with the material presented in person and then discussed, debated, and explored? Why did they have this comparatively flat, one-dimensional attitude towards content? And how could math be taught this way, given that math requires helping students learn how to solve problems in a more interactive fashion?
“They told me math is taught differently, and indeed had to be taught through teacher-student interaction, but that this isn’t true of any of the other subjects, whether it be English, social sciences or physical sciences.”
Leonie reviewed the many complaints that she has heard from parents at Summit charter schools, especially regarding privacy of student data and long hours in front of a computer.
She writes,
“Yet the juggernaut that is Summit will be difficult to stop. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation gave $20 million to Summit in 2016. The Gates Foundation awarded Summit $10 million in June 2017, “to support implementation of the Summit Learning program in targeted geographies.” In September, the day before I met with Diane Tavenner, Summit was one of the ten winners of the XQ Super High School prize, receiving another $10 million from Laurene Powell Jobs’ LLC, the Emerson Collective, to create a new high school in Oakland.”
Besides, Betsy DeVos loves Summit.
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Summit says they “partner” with public schools. But we never hear from a public school. All we hear from is the founder of Summit. They didn’t even invite these “partners” to the Harvard event where they all lauded Summit for genius.
This must be another ed reform partnership where public schools are the silent partner.
The junior partner, maybe. Collecting data and sending it in to the managers.
I’m shocked at how fast Facebook/Summit are rolling this experimental product out. It went from 130 public school districts to 300 in a matter of months. That’s a lot of kids spending whole days in service to “improving the platform”. Are they sure that’s a wise use of time and resources?
“I pointed out to her that according to the list on the Summit website, there were several public and charter schools in Oakland near the hotel where I was staying that had adopted the platform, as well as several Summit charter schools just ten minutes away. Why couldn’t I visit any of these schools instead?”
Why does the Summit founder speak for the public schools who are using her product?
Why this tight control over PR, where the founder arranges tours to “the flagship”? That’s not how partnerships work. It isn’t how experiments work either.
Unless this has quietly changed again, the XQ Super High School project quietly canceled the plan to give its $10 million to an Oakland school and quietly transferred the plan to an existing Summit charter school in Daly City, an unassuming suburb just south of San Francisco.
“Several years ago, Indianapolis Public Schools looked like a lot of urban school districts. The vast majority of students attended traditional public schools, though enrollment was dwindling, and the district had an adversarial relationship with its small but growing number of charter schools.
That’s no longer true. The district is actively turning over schools to charter operators, and it’s rolling out a common enrollment system for district and charter schools that could make it easier for charters to grow. Nearly half of the district’s students now attend charters or district schools with charter-like freedoms.”
The portfolio strategy is a way to replace all of the public schools without political opposition or public approval. Every one of these cities will be all-charter in a decade.
I don’t mind that they’re promoting it. I mind that they continue to get around the public with these meaningless rhetorical distinctions and language tweaking.
Just say you want all charter schools. That is in fact what you want. Then we can have a real debate and we can discuss if the children in existing public schools will be harmed while these elites manage the transition to privatized systems. Public school parents need this information. They need to know their schools are being phased out. Then they can move their children to the charter sector, because those are the ONLY schools that will be supported DURING the transition. Tell them that.
Will Chan and Zuckerberg send their children here? If they can’t walk the walk, then they should get out of the education business now. Please.
Do you know of any high end private schools that tell parents – we are going to put your child on a computer all day ? Most high end private schools are actually highly progressive with projects and dig in activities.
What Chan and Zuckerberg want is an endless stream of income off the backs of other people’s kids. It’s this simple.
My husband told me that Gates owes him money for debugging his operating system as well as Word. (Unfortunately, where my husband worked, Microsoft was used as the operating system.) YUCK. The scientists hate it and dislike Gates.
Gates decided to put a lousy product on the market and let the users debug it for him. Then the others followed suit. This is why there is such awful software products out there. Gates led the way for junk.
If you want a good word processor, use OPEN OFFICE. IT’s free and can be used to open any other word processing program. And others can “open” OPEN OFFICE documents, too.
Summit Charter Schools is obviously a digital personalized-learning model. By virtue of that, it will soon become– obviously– a scam, taking in public taxdollars in exchange for mediocre or worse outcomes. So why are we even discussing it?
To expose it.
Speaking of exposure, I was hoping that Leonie would ask Diane Tavenner about the infamous “Rape-gate” scandal that took place at Tavenner’s Summit Tahoma franchise in San Jose.
For a primer on that doozy of a story — one involving a different kind of … uhh … “personalized learning” — go about halfway down the Comments section here:
https://dianeravitch.net/2017/09/06/leonie-haimson-parents-revolt-against-summit-czi-plans/
(and there’s a follow-up post near the end of the COMMENTS Section that includes pictures of all the participants and possible participants in Summit’s “Rape-gate” scandal, including Ms. Tavenner.)
It’s interesting to note that I posted all this stuff on this blog on September 5, and according to court records (BELOW), Summit suddenly reversed course, then capitulated and settled with Rape-gate’s victim on September 6:
https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_State_Santa_Clara_County_Superior_Court/16CV302178/N.V._vs_Summit_Public_Schools_et_al/
Coincidence? I think not. (or strongly suspect not.)
Hmm – – Let’s see… Socrates, Dewey, Maxine Greene, James Comer (every student known well by at least one caring adult)… and all the one-room school house teachers who “differentiated” instruction before there was differentiated instruction and personalized all learning … or “Summit”
Sadly, can you believe this is even a debate?
I wonder if Mr. Zuckerberg would have have made it to Harvard if his education had been online, rote, regurgitated – – but it’s ok for everybody else.
Thanks for writing the inside story – – and if that was the showcase can you imagine what they didn’t let you or want you to see