One day, we might wake up and discover that half a dozen people own all of our schools. One of them, you can be sure, is Mark Zuckerberg, who owns the personal and sort-of and sometimes private data of about one billion people.
Peter Greene tells the story here of Summit Learning, which is controlled by Zuckerberg. It has infiltrated scores of public schools as a cheap way of delivering in-line instruction. Parents have fought back, apparently wanting teachers who are actual living human beings.
If you happen to have a child in a school that has joined up with Summit, you should make inquiries about your child’s personal data.
Facebook has recently informed tens of millions of its users that their personal data were compromised.
Depersonalized Instruction is stoppable if parents speak out.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I presume that people like Janette Tovar who commented in a prior post also backs Z-berg because her Linked In page uses every buzz word from the tech tyrant lexicon, except “leverage”. I’m sure she can work it in, too
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Money and power corrupt!
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Parents should continue to fight back letting boards of education and administrators know that depersonalized learning is no substitute for a trained human teacher. They should also know that the research has not found depersonalized learning to be effective. It is the tech oligarchs that favor this approach because they make lots of money from it. They will also sell your child’s data and invade his or her privacy. Technology is a useful tool; however, it should not be imposed on districts and students. Nobody really knows the impact of too much screen time on children’s brains and eyes. Do we really want to subject our children to increased technology to make money for Zuckerberg and Gates?
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Zuckerberg again … he’s a nightmare.
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I had this almost comical parent/teacher conference with a Summit-like blended learning program last year.
I sit down and the teacher starts showing me graphs of my son’s “progress” in science. His progress was measured by the (literally) hundreds of short tests they’re taking. They’re on a whiteboard so teacher can click thru these representations of data quickly, and it was just ludicrous. It’s an OCEAN of information but I don’t know if it matters or why it matters. I was left wondering “what does he do in here?” so I asked my son, and that’s what he does. He reads short informational pieces on the science term or idea and then he watches a video and then he takes a test. If he gets an 80 on the test he moves on to the next series. That’s it. What I was seeing was test scores presented in many different ways.
He was just hugely unimpressed with this, and so was I. Given the hype I thought it would be more than what could be described as exhaustive, endless test prep.
This is all that’s on offer now in his high school- if you’re taking science it’s this approach or nothing so for the next 2 years if he takes a science class this is what he gets.
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OMG … crazy. I really do FEAR for this country. We are fast becoming a nation of idiots. Well, dump doesn’t believe in science. I guess the GOP likes VOODOO.
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What I want to know: is this just happening in Ohio — the Wild West of charters, where Duncan had to back-pedal & attach strings after the uproarious national laughter when he gave them [another] $80million to expand their fraud-plagued, resultless charters?
Chiara – I know you have told us Ohio parents are getting wise to charters, press has been covering the fraud etc– but your post shows that meanwhile, Ohio’s corrupt DofEd has managed to push the worst of ed-reform maltech right into the heart of the public schools while Ohioans were distracted w/ the charter controversy!
This post suggests that what Laura Chapman has been warning us about, re: depersonalized tech coming soon to a public school near you– already, I gather, on the books in Maine as well– has been implemented on the ground in Ohio public schools.
Where else is this happening?
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feels like you just took us on a little trip inside Zuckerberg’s mind
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Despite concerted efforts to inform the Cheshire School Board that there is more than one narrative associated with “personalized learning”, the elected BOE members stubbornly refuse to provide meaningful oversight over the district Personalized Learning Task Force that it had created. By putting the Superintendent (who is already invested in its outcome) in charge of developing recommendations for moving forward, it ensures that computerized instruction by way of preprogrammed electronic platforms in student learning will return in some form. Nick Tabor’s recent New York Magazine online article just touched the tip of this narrative iceberg; there‘s a bigger story here just waiting for an investigative journalist willing and permitted to tell it.
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This is the problem when superintendents can be bought and sold, and personalized learning can be imposed from above without much input from teachers or parents.
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That’s the way Reed Hastings wants it and he has accomplices.
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The problem is probably even worse. My impression is that not all of the education reformers even believe public school buildings will be necessary in the future.
If you haven’t checked out InnovateEDU Inc. and its initiative Project Unicorn, which want access to the data of children and which are ramping up very quickly, please consider checking them out. InnovateEDU Inc.’s website list of supporters includes among others the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, I am assuming that over time, those who want access to education data will also want to merge it with other data and make money from the data and use the data to track and manipulate our behavior.
Thank you for continuing to write about these issues and allowing us to comment.
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And, thanks to Diane for her activism in protection of the kids of the middle class and poor and, for fighting for American democracy.
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