Leonie Haimson provides a comprehensive report on the context for the Brooklyn high school protest against the Chan-Zuckerberg tech program called Summit. As she says, this is a David-Goliath situation. The students are powerful!
Last week, on November 5, about 100 students at the Secondary School of Journalism in Brooklyn walked out of their schools to protest the Summit online program. This digital instruction program, funded by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates, forces students to spend hours staring at computers, left at sea with little human interaction or help from their teachers, all in the name of “personalized learning.”
As one of the students, Mitchel Storman, said to Sue Edelman who reported on the protest in the NY Post, “I have seen lots of students playing games instead of working….Students can easily cheat on quizzes since they can just copy and paste the question into Google.”
Zenaiah Bonsu, Kelly Hernandez and Akila Robinson credit: Helayne Seidman
Senior Akila Robinson said she couldn’t even log onto Summit for nearly two months, while other classmates can’t or won’t use it. “The whole day, all we do is sit there.” A teacher said, “It’s a lot of reading on the computer, and that’s not good for the eyes. Kids complain. Some kids refuse to do it.”
Since Norm Scott wrote about the walkout on his blog, and Sue Edelman’s reporting in the NY Post, the story has been picked up elsewhere including Fast Company and Business Insider. The online program, which originated in the Summit chain of charter schools in California, and was further developed and expanded with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, Facebook and nowthe Chan Zuckerberg LLC, has now invaded up to 300 or so public schools, and is collecting a huge amount of personal data from thousands of students without their knowledge or consent or that of their parents.
I have been writing and questioning Summit for the past two years, and last year, met with Diane Tavenner, asked her all sorts of questions she never responded to, and toured her flagship charter school in Redwood City. My description of this visit is here.
Since then, parents in 15 states have reached out to me in huge distress about the negative impact of this program on their children. Many report that their children, who had previously done well in school, now say that they aren’t learning, that they feel constantly stressed, are beginning to hate school and want to drop out. Some parents have told me that they are now homeschooling their kids or have decided to sell their homes and move out of the district
I predicted that students would be the ones who would slow the ed tech marketing blitz 🙂
They’re really unimpressed with it in our public school. They joke about the testing system- it’s on a ten point scale and they re-test over and over to hit the 7/10 mark that they need, so they describe it in those terms- “5/10, 6/10, 7/10” To me it’s an elaborate standardized test. Remember- these kids are VERY familiar with standardized tests- ed reform has dominated education policy their entire lives.
I think adults forget that they grew up with this stuff, and they’re really savvy about how it’s sold to them and over-hyped. Relentlessly. Constantly. Since birth.
“Personalized Learning” is like Pavlov’s dogs applied to humans. It is boring, tedious electronic testing pretending to be education. It provides maximum opportunity to sell student data since we have no privacy rights when it comes to Silicon Valley. The EU just passed a sweeping privacy law which states that people own their data, but I doubt the US will pass a similar law. If students accept being treated like a non-human, they will get a lot more of it. Students need to revolt against such treatment.
The funny thing about Pearsonilzedlearning is that it has been around forever.
It’s little more than a computerized version of a Skinner box where pigeons punch buttons to get a reward and get a shock if they fail.
My nephew was doing homework recently using a Pearsonalized math program and it was the same sort of stuff I did 40 years ago in college on what was supposed to be a state of the art computer program at the time. It’s pathetic how little progress has been made since. The homework software lesson test expected a certain number of correct answers out of ten and if you got less than that number, you had to start again with a whole new set of problems. There was no partial credit and no suggestion by the software of what you might have done wrong. It was absolutely pathetic. I think some of the dumbest people on the planet must be producing this stuff because it is pure unadulterated crap.
What goes around comes around. I remember the Skinner box from psychology years ago, but now it’s “innovation” because Silicon Valley insists on imposing it on young people. Garbage in, and garbage out $$$!
Poet,
It seems to me that a non-profit, government-run curriculum lab could obviate some of these problems. These private businesses try to reinvent the wheel. They don’t have the wherewithal to build quality curriculum, a job that’s much more time-consuming and difficult than any private entity is going to undertake.
My son had to do this “adaptive” math program several years ago, as part of his class grade. He had terrible scores in this section, and we wondered why.
Turns out, the stupid program would mark him wrong if he didn’t go out to FIVE decimal points. Nowhere in the instructions does it ever say that, and the teacher was unaware of the requirement as well.
Because the program was “adaptive,” when my son would “miss” a problem, he would have to do three or four more like it every time. He was way behind because he kept “missing” the problems. Frustratingly, because he kept “missing” problems, he unlearned what he was supposed to do, because he was getting them “wrong.”
Absolutely infuriating.
Actually, it’s not Pavlovian, it’s Skinnerian. Classical conditioning is just pairing an involuntary response with a particular stimulus. Operant conditioning is all about controlling the response to the stimulus to produce a desired behavior. Operant conditioning is far more sinister because it can twist an animal/person’s behavior out of its natural behavior, for instance, like making pigeons fly airplanes. Or students wile away tedious hours in front of a screen “learning” to get the “right” answer.
Oh yeah, my junior high students HATE “personalized learning.” They know it’s crap, and when I explain that teacher evaluation may be based on test scores, they are FURIOUS. They know that teachers only have a certain amount of influence, and that the tests show nothing.
Would that policymakers and adminanimals would actually listen to kids…
And this rebellion should be coming on at charter schools across the country (see earlier post about Noble Charter Schools reblogged from Fred Klonsky’s Blog). Yes, and “the children shall lead!”
(BTW, WBEZ in Chicago just reported that Mike Milkie, former head of Noble Charter School, Chicago, has been accused of very serious sexual harassment charges by several Noble alumnae. Why he resigned, in addition or instead of the recent student rebellion there? A non-profit charter chain? He was making $262,000+!)
This will tell you a lot about the Summit “requirements” for students, teachers. If the program does not work, the fault (of course) is implementation… this came up first as an ad for the program.
https://www.summitlearning.org/join-us/program-requirements
Good lord. They could have abbreviated this.
“Terms and Conditions: Anything goes wrong, it’s your fault.”
Go students. It is your future. Hooray.
Here’s another rub. By 2025, the internet will contribute 5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, rivaling automobiles, and use 25% of the world’s electricity. Online “education” isn’t just bad for students; it’s bad for the environment. Arm those already powerful kids with more facts.
Maybe by inflicting this ridiculous testing and learning scheme on the kids of today, we are making a generation of adults who will rise up against it later.
Meanwhile our cell phones are collecting data: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/smartphones-data-collection-security-privacy
We have evidently unwittingly made a trade-off: we get all the goodies technology offers us in exchange for information that can be used to market stuff to us. We need to develop a new curriculum that teaches children how to ignore the propaganda that is the basis for advertising and the noxious politics in our country…. maybe the tech billionaires can personalize it and develop a standardized test to see how well the children are learning it. OR…maybe teachers can do that without the standardized testing part!