This is an amazing story of a town in Connecticut where parents looked at Mark Zuckerberg’s ideas about how to educate their children and said “Hell, no.”
We live in a strange era where a handful of billionaires have taken it upon themselves to transform education. Think Eli Broad, Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg. They decided, not based on their own experience but based on their inflated egos, that they alone know how to re-engineer the nation’s schools, the schools that enroll 50 million children.
The schools of Cheshire, Connecticut, are fine schools. The parents are happy with their public schools. But the schools’ administration decided to adopt the Summit Learning Program, putting students on Chromebooks for their lessons. Things went south, and eventually parents rebelled. At some point, they realized that “personalized learning” is actually “depersonalized learning.” Worse, they learned that their children’s personal data would no longer be private, and that the learning program was data mining their children.
And Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning Program was kicked out of the schools of Cheshire, Connecticut.
Read the article to learn how it happened.
Last year, several classes in Cheshire, Connecticut’s elementary and middle schools switched to a new classroom model, where lessons were supposed to be tailored to every student. The kids and their parents were caught off-guard that first week of school. “We walked into math class,” recalled Lauren Peronace, now an eighth-grader, “and my math teacher said, ‘Everyone open up your Chromebooks. We’re going to go on a website — Summit.’”
Reactions were mixed. Most everyone in Cheshire, which is between New Haven and Hartford, is there for the public schools, which are among the area’s best. Some parents were skittish about the creep of more technology into the classroom, especially when they found out Facebook engineers had helped build the software and Mark Zuckerberg was spending millions promoting it. Others were at least cautiously optimistic. “My son initially thought it sounded cool,” said one parent, Theresa, who asked to have her last name withheld because of all the drama that followed. “The teachers told him, ‘You’re going to be on your own; you’ll be independent; you’re going to move at your own pace.”
The program had come with money for 130 Chromebooks, so every student could have one — courtesy of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic LLC, and Summit’s other wealthy backers. But to hear the administrators explain it, the technology would be only one piece. The Summit Learning Program, which originated at a series of West Coast charter schools between 2012 and 2013, is conceived as a comprehensive program of “personalized learning” that promises to put students in charge of their own education. It’s now being used in some 380 districts and charter schools nationwide. Rather than having a teacher stand at the front of the room and talk, it emphasizes group projects, dialogue between students, and one-on-one time with teachers, guaranteeing at least a ten-minute “mentoring” session for each student every week. It also makes use of specialized software for regular lessons and assessments. Cheshire’s teachers had gone to training that summer in Providence, Rhode Island, at an event also funded by Summit.
But the implementation over the next few months collapsed into a suburban disaster, playing out in school-board meetings and, of course, on Facebook. The kids who hated the new program hated it, to the point of having breakdowns, while their parents became convinced Silicon Valley was trying to take over their classrooms. They worried Summit was sharing their kids’ data (it is, with 19 companies at present, including Amazon and Microsoft, according to its website), or, worse, selling it. It isn’t, but given that the guy who’d helped buy them all laptops had created a $500 billion company out of vacuuming up data and creating economic value from it, it seemed reasonable to have suspicions that the learning platform backed by CZI might also be data-hungry. Concern turned into exasperation when bizarre and sometimes inappropriate images appeared on their kids’ screens on third-party websites used as reading assignments: a pot plant, a lubricant ad, and then the coup de grâce, an ancient Roman statue of a man having sex with a goose.
Ultimately the superintendent halted the program, making Cheshire the only one out of hundreds to do so. To the program’s supporters, this makes it a fluke, the only one that never got past the learning curve. To detractors, the Cheshire parents are among the most articulate voices on Summit’s perils, the model of successful resistance.
Hooray. Thanks for this information, Diane.
Z is a creep.
The Chromebook Kids are like the Stepford wives of the 21st century education reform movement. Complacent and compliant, clicking the day away with their silicon babysitters doing the job of real teachers. Google has taken over the majority of public school systems; the data they are mining could be measured in zettabytes. If they were serious about being education friendly they would have altered the Chromebook platform to make it impossible for kids to stray or cheat,
taking over the classrooms with Chromebooks also means taking over the curricula: who is writing the software for our kids in modern days
Yeah but Chan Zuckerberg is such a generous person donating all that money for the kids….Facebook is so riddled with flaws in their own house of allowing personal data to be shared with others around the world so why would anyone think that there “education software” would be any different regarding security issues.
But Chan and Mark Zuckerberg have such great education ideas. After all, facebook has turned into a multi billion dollar idea so who is to say that their education ideas cannot turn into multi billion dollar ideas…….literally billions in their pocket while the kids play guinea pig.
“Basically we would do the math work we would be doing with a teacher any other year — alone,” she recalled.
Out of the mouths of babes…
Also- I can say that my son and his friends are definitely doing this:
“They also noticed the computer was easier to trick than a teacher. They could skip the lessons and pass the multiple-choice tests, if they were so inclined, either by making educated guesses, or by working the odds, retaking them until they answered eight out of ten questions correctly (even though the teacher would get pinged after a few consecutive failures). ”
It’s glorified test prep and they know it.
I’ll adopt it in my school district after the best public school districts in the country adopt it, and work all the bugs out.
Let me know when that happens. I object to being used as an experimental population for ed tech providers. Why the big rush? Why do they over-sell this stuff so much?
They are in a hurry because they want to capture as much money as possible before the public catches on to the failure. Corporations did the same with charters. However, with charters it has taken years to expose the lies, failure and endless profiteering.
BINGO, retired teacher. ANY curriculum model that depends on school-purchased product will be subject to the product-marketing cycle, which builds in rapid scale-up/ expansion, obsolescence/ upgrade-replacement. We’ve all seen it w/textbooks, where thro the decades publishing houses encourage [if not drive] the search for pedagogical silver bullets to justify wholesale upgrade-replacements. The cycle moves very quickly now, thanks to digital tech. And our current laws support an even swifter spiral: trickle-up economics spawns billionaires, & lax campaign-funding undermines democratic institutions so billionaires dictate ed policy & cut thro regs to place products directly into the classrooms
Communities with educated parents whose children attend quality public schools have no interest in Zuckerberg or Gates and their depersonalized learning. They know that all that glitters is not gold. In these types of school systems parents are savvy advocates for their children. They know how to research any proposals presented by administrators. I can guarantee some of the parents know who Diane Ravitch is, and they read this blog. They are not going to allow a tech pirate like Zuckerberg invade their school system. The problem is that many working class and poor districts do not have enough parents that know how to fight back until the failing program is implemented, and sometimes it is too late. Then, it is an uphill battle.
They were able to beat Mark Zuckerberg, because Cheshire is a town of wealthy, educated people, i.e. tons of doctors and lawyers. What hope is there for towns with poorer, less educated residents who have all this nonsense foisted on them?
There’s no one from a public school on the Summit Learning board:
https://blog.summitlearning.org/2018/10/summit-learning-program-today-and-tomorrow/
So they have 350 public school districts adopting the Summit/Facebook program but public schools aren’t invited to sit with the Best and Brightest who manage this operation.
Public schools are the subordinates in this “relationship”. You’ll be taking orders from Facebook and ed reform CEO’s and managers. If you really want to turn your school over to Facebook and just hope it turns out okay, be my guest, but I think it’s nuts to invest so much trust in Facebook. That’s crazy.
Why not turn your public school over to Wells Fargo or Caterpillar? What’s the difference? Facebook has some magical fairy dust that makes them a better for-profit actor than a bank or a heavy equipment manufacturer?
yes, sir. We should definitely turn public schools over to this company:
“Advertisers in a class action lawsuit against Facebook say the social media giant committed fraud, knowingly inflating the amount of time users viewed videos by as much as 900 percent for more than a year, causing businesses to spend more on ads than they otherwise would have.
The allegations, which were first reported by The Wall Street Journal, arose in a filing unsealed Tuesday in northern California federal court. The small advertisers say the company’s skewed numbers gave it an unfair advantage over its competitors, such as YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-committed-fraud-lawsuit-claims/
In general, I don’t like to clutter other people’s comment forums with links, so I apologize to Diane. That said I recommend this excellent essay from the current issue of “The New York Review of Books” on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/facebook-autocracy-app/
“Personalized learning” may be the most Orwellian term that the Ed Deformers have come up with, and they are very good at coming up with Orwellian terms. Replace a human transaction (interaction with a teacher) with a machine running an algorithm. Call this personalized because it shuffles the kid into a particular learning track. Aie yie yie. Insane. But the word magic works, at least long enough for people to sell their products.
“Reform” is Orwellian, because it’s practitioners want to destroy public schools, toy with them, Privatize them.
Indeed. It’s all about privatizing to enrich a Feudal ownership class. According to an article I saw in the Sloan Economics Review, since 1970, there has been an 86 percent increase in productivity in the US. So, workers are creating almost TWICE the value. But they’ve seen only 2 percent of that in real wages. The rich are becoming phenomenally wealthy. We now have, again, a robber baron class in the Un-tied States. And they want more. They want to convert every public good into a profit-generating business. And it doesn’t matter to them what they destroy in the process, including our public schools.
Schools of education have laid the groundwork for this kind of thing by denigrating “sages on stages” for decades.
Exactly. What do you mean, I reply when I hear this monstrous phrase. You’re telling me that you WANT to have someone running the class who is not sagacious about his or her subject? Seriously? What a novel concept: a teacher with nothing to teach, a guided journey with no guide.
Great wealth buys power and that power becomes corrupted. The more money you have the more power you buy and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This isn’t my quote. This is based on what Lord Acton said in the 18th and 19th centuries.
& this quote is why people in Chicago must make sure that Paul Vallas is NOT in a runoff in the Chicago mayoral race…or anywhere near it.
I’ve been told it will never happen.
That’s what people said about a Trump presidency.
Congratulations to people for PUBLIC education (Cheshire & Bridgeport) in Connecticut.
I completely agree! Ditch Summit. Our children are guinea pigs to this system this year because our school board/admin drank the red kool-aid. They are being taught by a chromebook (I am sure handed out for free by the Gates/Zuck folks) while the teacher is now the proctor. They are begging for interaction with students and teachers. They are NOT learning. It is the worst system I have seen in a time where kids already have too much screen time. They have no idea how to communicate effectively. I cannot imagine how they will ever be college ready.
Ms. Ravitch, thank you for sharing this story far and wide. Please know there are still many districts fighting their school systems over this. My town of Indiana, PA fought back and we were able to get Summit reduced from four core classes to “opt In” only: we collaborated with other parents from Cheshire CT and beyond, and created a website:
http://Www.wetheparents.net
Please visit the site and learn about our fight.
Did it emphasize group projects and dialogue between students? That part of it could have been ok.