I applaud those who defect or dissent from received wisdom. I know from personal experience that it is especially hard to dissent when it means stepping off a money train and leaving behind your friends.
Paul Emerich was a true believer in “personalized learning.” On this Blog, the term is translated to mean “depersonalized learning.”
Peter Greene is not sure whether to congratulate him for waking up or to chastise him for his cluelessness.
Greene writes:
“I’ve been trying to understand why this piece, which confirms so much of what many of us have said, and does so from the perspective of someone who’s been there– why does this rub me the wrong way. The best explanation is this: Emerich calls himself naive, but I think he’s letting himself off easy. I don’t think he’s so much naive as arrogant, and the same arrogance that was displayed in heading off to charter techno-teaching without doing any due diligence is the same arrogance that leads him to make this Momentous Announcement of things that he has personally discovered, as if a few thousand other folks hadn’t already caught on years and years ago.
“I appreciate his point of view, and his confirmation that charter school companies are businesses, not schools, and that personalized learning via computer is a sham and a fraud, and I’m happy that people are sharing this like crazy. But dammit– if more of these tech folks would do their damn homework, we wouldn’t have to keep learning the same old lessons over and over, and we wouldn’t keep subjecting live human children to foolishness that we already know is foolishness. In the meantime, he’s now the Academic Chair at the high-end private Latin School of Chicago. I guess time will tell what lessons he actually learned from his stay in Silicon Valley.”
I’m willing to be charitable and welcome Paul to the Club of Reformed True Believers.
In most cases, I suspect that the “conversions” are driven by expediency.
One can only deny for so long the obvious in the face of overwhelming evidence before it becomes untenable to keep doing so.
In other words, in order to avoid looking foolish and becoming completely irrelevant, folks like Emerich need to change their tune.
The easiest way to do that is to say “I was naiive”.
Much easier than saying “I was stupid” (and presumably still am stupid) or “I was just an ideological free market hack” (and still am, but a kinder gentler hack)
Bill Gates has used the same “I was naiive” excuse time and again to explain why his projects have not lived up to his earlier rhetoric. Of course, in the case of Gates, he usually hedges a bit and says something like “I was naiive to think that teachers would not oppose Common Core and thereby sabotaged it, ensuring that all the wonderful things I predicted did not come true. Damned obstructionist teachers!”
“The Defector”
I’m a defector
Naiive as can be
The only defect here
Is really in me
Some DAM Poet: you and everyone else on this thread deserve high praise for making so many insightful comments.
My hat is off to one and all.
😃
As a rather meager but sincere expression of gratitude for what everyone else has contributed, I will just add my own very small grain of sand to the mountain of sage observations the rest of you have already made.
What often strikes me about those pushing corporate education reform and all its gimmicks and magic bullets and panaceas and quick dirty fixes—
Is that they lack even the pretense of humility. IMHO, this explains a lot. For example, why the chief beneficiaries and enablers and enforcers of rheephorm are not just particularly susceptible to the Rheeality Distortion Fields they generate, but seem to [almost invariably] prove to be the first victims of what might under current circumstances be called the ‘Trump-aloonian’ “truthful hyperbole” they peddle to others.
In other words, their knee jerk reaction [default setting] is that they are inherently superior to the vast majority of humanity. Not for them to be on guard against willful ignorance or self-serving delusion or mistaking preferences for facts or the casual cruelty of noblesse oblige.
Oh no… Character flaws, from the emotional to the intellectual and whatever else you can come up with, is reserved for the drawers of water and hewers of wood, the peons whose best interests are served by leaving all real—not Rheeal—choices up to their divinely and/or naturally appointed superiors.
Modesty and self-sacrifice and being a “stable genius” sort of people, natcherly being one of their most outstanding characteristics—as they see it.
🙄
Of course reality has a way of slapping these folks in the face. At which point they bitterly complain that the rest of us don’t appreciate how much we owe them for all they’ve done to, er, for us.
Go figure…
😎
“Not for them to be on guard against willful ignorance or self-serving delusion or mistaking preferences for facts or the casual cruelty of noblesse oblige.”
They cannot be on guard against that which they embody
Hubris, arrogance and free market fantasy drive the tech moguls to sell everyone depersonalized learning instead of research and a deep understanding of learning and child development. Tech companies have already made billions from the use of computers as tools in education. However, they are always looking for a bigger share of the market despite the fact that there is zero evidence that computers should supplant learning guided by trained, caring professionals.
“Hubris, arrogance, free market fantasy and greed drive the tech moguls”
Fixed it for you.
It’s not just that there is no evidence that computers can and should supplant human teaching, but that there is loads of evidence to the contrary.
People like Gates actually use this “We need evidence” claim to justify their unethical “experiments” on millions of school children when in fact, there is loads of evidence showing that their ideas like testing, VAM, closing schools, firing teachers, Pearsonalized learning and all the rest are bad ideas and likely to have the opposite effect of what they claim (very negative effect on the schools)
These people don’t really have interest in evidence, despite their claims to be “data driven”. The only data they are actually interested in is cherry picked data like the results of Raj Chetty (as pointed out by Moshe Adler).
**I am with Peter that we should all “do our homework” and that Paul is only FINALLY understanding what so many have already understood for years. But Paul sounds real to me?
The problem, however, is not only doing one’s homework about what works, but recognizing exactly what one’s motivations are and what kind of question is driving one’s insights? As seems clear in “Some Damn Poet’s” note above about Bill Gates, he claims to be naive, but only about **NOT EXPECTING EDUCATORS TO SABOTOGE HIS WORK–instead of about his own expectations of applying business and techie principles to the education of real people. That’s even IF Gates’ interest really is educating children.”
So there’s the “two masters” problem (half-conscious and split motivations), which comes through in Paul’s comment about “stepping off the money train” and losing friends. That is, is my main purpose educating children the best way we can (Paul and Gates and others)? . . .OR is my main purpose making money, creating a small kingdom in which I am king, and along the way, (who cares?) destroying the democracy which keeps trying to take my money to give it to undeserving others, and control me? CBK
Larry Cuban also posted Paul Emerich’s “would not do it again” thoughts.
Impersonal learning is the result of a process of delegating instruction to algorithms. The algorithms are conjured from afar by unknown persons and groups and then delivered online to teachers who offer their own and their students’ data to the data-mongers.
Depersonalized online instruction is not different from substituting artificial intelligence (computer generated programs) for human interaction.
Depersonalized learning is strictly about getting the right answers to questions determined by anonymous others who have figured out how many ways a question can be answered right or wrong.
Eliminate the IZED in personalized. That recommendation comes from Alfie Kohn. Several sources remind be that the suffix “ize” means to “to cause to become.” So the promoters of personalized learning are really saying that the interactions between teachers and students are impersonal until they experience the wonderful world of computer programs. Hog Wash.
Having worked as a programmer for a long time, it sometimes amazes me — to say nothing of scares me — how readily we as a society simply accept and adopt the (often meaningless) jargon of techies.
The fellow (it’s always a fellow) who dreamed up “Personalized learning” to describe computer mediated instruction was very likely someone who went into programming specifically because they did not know how to deal with people on a personal level and we’re much more at home dealing with entirely impersonal machines.
The field is filled with these types who would not know what “personal” means if it hit them in the head like a personal blow from a boxer.
It makes the personalized learning term doubly ironic.
“Reform” is laden with euphemisms to make disastrous ideas seem benign and innovative.
Plenty of blame to go around. Paul seems pretty arrogant to me. He seems like one of those “best and brightest” types that the rephormers like to butter up. They tell these wet-behind the ears puppies how much smarter they are than those “dumb” teachers who “graduated in the bottom half of their class”, whereas people like Paul were the top of their class. They also feed them a line about “entrenched” teachers and the “status quo”, whereas people like Paul are young and dynamic and flexible enough to be “innovative”. LIFO-lifer teachers are just in it for the paycheck, whereas Paul and his type are in it for the children. It goes on and on how they drive a wedge between ‘naive” (brash, arrogant) youth (who are all too eager to lap it up) and the experienced teachers who could actually help them see reality up front.
It’s in our culture too. Old people are a “drain” on society, just sucking up their Medicare “entitlements” and not “contributing”. Our law firm always gets magazines celebrating the “Top 30 Under 30” – I assume other professions have similar things. Movie stars, musicians, dancers, etc. are all “wash-up has-beens” by the time their 30.
Not that I think there’s any one solution to all that ails this sick country, but shutting up and listening to our elders would go a long way sometimes.
“The Dunning Kruger Effect”
Arrogant
Are never wrong
They’re only just “naiive”
Rave and rant
The whole day long
To make us all believe
Ugh, sorry. They are = they’re, not their. Yes, English is my first language.
My husband gets the Wharton magazine which often features the top 30 under 30. Some of them are legit while others are funny. A perfect example was a woman that started a franchise, “Everything Potato.” Another is an app that tells us how much sun screen to apply!
“Spotlighting”
Who deserves the spotlight more?
Epiphanite defector?
Or one who understands the score?
A scrupulous objector
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
charter school companies are businesses, not schools, and that personalized learning via computer is a sham and a fraud
The techies are acting like depersonalized is already a legitimate approach, they are ‘wining and dining” superintendents and boards of education to entice them to sign up. It is very appealing to many districts that are cash strapped after years of slashed budgets. Communities should be vigilant and know what is going on in their local districts. The tech companies want that public money, and they are trying to infiltrate districts to get it.
The tech companies see the schools as a Cash cow that keeps on giving milk forever.
They have been trying to break in for a long time.
They thought Common Core was at last their big break, but things did not go quite as Bill Gates and others planned.
Many states still have standards that are similar to common core. But similar won’t cut it when the goal is to produce a single set of standards that software and textbooks can be written for.
The standards have to be exactly the same. Which was the whole point of copyrighting Common Core and making sure that whoever owned the copyright was not controlled either by the schools or by the government.
Gates is now trying to salvage whatever he can from the wreck of the Common Corestandards.
It might seem that he did not fail, but from his standpoint he did.
Utterly and miserably.
His “One Standard to rule them all” has been thrown into the Cracks of Doom. like Gollum, Bill clutches his Precious to the very end.
Here here, retired teacher and SDP! I welcome young hipster teacher Paul Emerich to the world of the not so cloddish and gullible. I personally do not care how blockheaded he was a few minutes ago. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that he left Silicon Valley because his company there remained with its head firmly planted in the sand, and he got tired of it. Good for him! What matters more is how much Big Money is still behind tech abuse of children. When tech moguls have epiphanies and stop zuckering school administrations into misusing tech, that will be good for all, not just the students of one hipster.
A couple of Waldorf schools in Silicon Valley figured this out years ago as well, and all of the tech upper management that sends their kids to those schools did too. Wait, What, Why? No computers or screens of any kind are used or even permitted in the schools. For the kids of techies. In Silicon Valley. SPOILER: They’ve always known about this, just wanted the money and glamor of pretending to be on the cutting edge. They were, but it was the edge of a rusty axe aimed at true public schools.
When I originally heard about the concept of charter schools, I was excited. It seemed like a wonderful idea where teachers would have input and schools would be able to implement innovative ideas without worrying about the dictates of the school district. Unfortunately, the vision was not the reality. Even before I started being a Ravitch disciple I was beginning to have doubts. The more invasive the charter schools became the more I realized they were like the Asian Carp – a foreign entity which was not only dangerous, but could destroy the system if not kept in check.
Flos,
Charter kudzu
A characteristic of youth is to discover what somebody already knew. Friday I heard a presentation on John James Audubon in which the presenter suggested that many of the new ornithological theories coming out in research were actually in Audubon’s literature. The most excited religious converts are often excited about ideas they might have grown up with had they just paid attention. Thus it is with youth.