The AltSchool opened with high hopes. It was going to revolutionize education (you have heard that one before, haven’t you?). The school was designed by a former Google executive. Every student would have his or her own laptop. It was entrepreneurial and innovative, and investors poured millions into the idea. The schools would be “learner-centric,” with each student moving at his or her own pace. Mark Zuckerberg was one of the investors. What could possibly go wrong? Almost everything.
This is a story of a teacher, Paul France, who wanted to be part of the dream. He left his teaching position to join the AltSchool team and was featured in many of the articles about the chain.
AltSchool was flooded with applicants willing and able to pay tuition of $30,000 or more for their children to attend, and became one of the hottest start-ups in educational technology; to date, it has raised more than $170 million in investment. It was part of a broad investor rush to ed tech. Last year, venture-capital investors put $2.7 billion into ed-tech companies, up from $1.6 billion in 2016, according to CB Insights, a software company that examines technology trends. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and the Gates Foundation have given millions of dollars to schools implementing technology-based personalized learning—many of them urban charter schools serving low-income children.
But in the midst of all the excitement, there’s little strong evidence that classroom technology, including personalized learning, is improving educational outcomes. A 2015 report from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development found that countries that invested heavily in computer technology for schools showed “no appreciable improvements” in reading, math or science, and that technology “is of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students.”
AltSchool was not the only venture that relied heavily on screens.
Another school network that has been using technology and personalized learning for years in an effort to eliminate the achievement gap, with mixed results, is the RocketShip chain of charter schools, which serves low-income Latino and African-American students, mostly in and around San Jose. It has won credit for pushing up test scores but has also been criticized for its heavy reliance on computer-based instruction.
At Rocketship Los Sueños in San Jose, students spend 30 to 60 minutes a day on laptops in their classroom and another 90 minutes in the Learning Lab—a large room where kids sit at long tables, wearing headphones and working on laptops, supervised by classroom aides. On a visit last June, I found that few things broke the silence: when kindergartners filed in from recess; when a staff member pulled kids out for testing. Students scarcely talked and when they did, or their attention drifted too far, they were admonished. “Stephanie, focus,” Nicki Muñoz, a supervisor, said. “Yuridia, sit up.” She counted down—“8, 7, 6, 5, 4”—when it was time to switch from one software program to another. The kids looked zoned out, with blank expressions on their faces. Ninety straight minutes on computers is “way too long,” Munoz told me. “Kindergartners will focus for 15 minutes.” Some kids get dizzy or have problems with their vision, she added.
Presently, the article says, more than a dozen charter and private schools, along with four school districts in California, are using AltSchool’s technology. But Paul France became disillusioned and left the venture to return to teaching in a traditional school.
Only in the “reform” world would an app with such limited adoption be considered a noteworthy achievement.
Read how Paul France became disillusioned by the heavy emphasis on screen time.
He spent the past year teaching at a traditional private school that’s been around for a century and, in his view, sees the “value in using a plain old notebook and pencil to engage in the writing process.” He still uses technology when it’s appropriate. His class last year did a project on Chicago neighborhoods and visited many. Since they couldn’t get to all of them, they used Google Earth to virtually walk through several. “I’m not anti-technology but I’m definitely for minimizing it,” France says. “You use technology to remove a barrier. And the question always should be: Is the tech in my classroom going to preserve or enhance human connection?”
The article actually gives a brighter portrayal of AltSchool than is deserved.
My friend, the diligent researcher and parent advocate Leonie Haimson, sent the following corrections to this article:
The company closed its Palo Alto school and shelved plans to open more of its own schools in favor of providing its platform to more partners.
Yet AltSchool closed 3 schools not one, one in Palo Alto , one in SF and one in the E. Village in NYC, as reported Nov. 3, 2011 in WSJ.
“…Leaders of AltSchool said Friday they were closing three of their seven private schools, including an elementary site in Manhattan’s East Village, so they can concentrate on developing their software platform for districts to purchase.. .We have finite resources,” said Max Ventilla, the company’s founder and chief executive. “Closing a school is an incredibly hard and painful decision for everyone involved.”… The company is closing one school in San Francisco and one in Palo Alto as well. Remaining next fall will be two in California and two in New York City.
The Atlantic writer also repeats uncritically this claim – that “AltSchool was flooded with applicants willing and able to pay tuition of $30,000 or more for their children to attend” which I doubt very much.
See many previous articles about problems w/ Alt School, many of which they quote the same teacher Paul France:
Edsurge announcing closings on Nov. 6, 2011: https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-11-06-educators-question-altschool-s-pivot-where-does-silicon-valley-s-philanthropy-end-and-profits-begin
Parent discontent and pulling out in Business Insider: https://www.businessinsider.com/altschool-why-parents-leaving-2017-11 Nov. 21, 2017, 6:00 AM
At a September birthday party attended by numerous parents, one mother told us she’d pulled two children out of the program and placed them in a neighborhood public school; the rest of the parents in attendance said they were actively working to place their children elsewhere next fall. The biggest reason they cited was that their kids are falling behind academically. One mother, who asked not to be named, told us that in addition to paying yearly tuition of roughly $30,000, “We’re all spending a fortune on tutoring to supplement what our kids aren’t learning.”
Next day in Tech Crunch https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/22/altschool-wants-to-change-how-kids-learn-but-fears-that-its-failing-students-are-surfacing/
Compounding their anger these days is AltSchool’s more recent revelation that its existing network of schools, which had grown to seven locations, is now being pared back to just four — two in California and two in New York.
And again in January in ed surge says they are trying to sell their faulty software to other schools – why would they buy considering the failure of Alt School?
Today the startup announced its first two public school partnerships, Arcadia Unified School District located in Los Angeles County and Menlo Park City School District in the San Francisco Bay Area….But being an AltSchool partner is not free, districts do pay a price. Arcadia, which has a three-year contract with the platform, will be paying approximately $5,000 per teacher in exchange for the use of AltSchool’s personalized learning platform, class coaching, IT support and professional development opportunities. According to AltSchool representatives, most partner districts will be paying the $5,000 per teacher per year for the first year of training and onboarding support from AltSchool. After the first year, the price is around $2,500 for the use of the platform and ongoing support from the company.
Now supposedly many public school districts have bought into this crap, at least according to the school PR:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90228225/altschool-expands-to-serve-19-new-partner-schools
Education startup AltSchool, one of the leaders in the movement to individualize instruction using technology, said today that it will expand to serve 19 new partner schools in 2018-19. In addition, AltSchool will continue to serve its six existing partner schools, including two public schools that began piloting its technology in 2017-18….
Partners range from private schools serving affluent communities similar to AltSchool’s own lab schools, to public schools serving low-income communities. Vodicka, a former superintendent, hopes to positive results in each new school environment. “The first groups of teachers are finding that they’re saving time and able to better develop better relationships with their learners as a result,” he says. “That’s leading to higher levels of learner engagement overall.”
In addition, there is this article in Education Week, saying that AltSchool is closing and consolidating schools so it can focus on its investors’ priorities, which is software development.
Personalized-learning pioneer AltSchool is closing one of its private schools and consolidating several others, moves the company describes as “tough choices” necessary to pursue unexpected new business opportunities and demonstrate to investors the viability of its long-term plan to sell software to K-12 public schools across the country.
“Closing any school is painful,” AltSchool founder and CEO Max Ventilla said in an interview. “But ultimately the path for the company to be sustainable and impactful is to provide the platform we’re developing to schools we don’t directly operate.”
AltSchool was founded in 2013. The company has been backed with more than $175 million in venture capital from such Silicon Valley luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Laurene Powell Jobs of the Emerson Collective. It currently runs seven of its own schools, which typically charge more than $25,000 per year in annual tuition. Those schools also serve as laboratories where AltSchool can pilot, test, and improve its technology, which seeks to merge the insights of top-flight engineers and progressive educators into a platform that can be used to better understand how every child is developing and tailor students’ learning experiences accordingly.
AltSchool’s closure of its Palo Alto campus, first reported by Bloomberg Technology, will affect about 65 families. The company’s six remaining schools will be consolidated into four sites—two each in New York City and in San Francisco, where the company is headquartered.
Several dozen parents at AltSchool’s Palo Alto campus signed an online petition saying they were “shocked and saddened to hear of the plans to close our school,” in just its third year of operation.
Critics described the move as a sad, but not surprising, example of a deeper challenge faced by the ed-tech sector at large, and the personalized-learning movement in particular.
Many such ventures “involve grand experimentation on students in order to develop and sell products to other schools,” said Audrey Watters, an independent researcher who maintains the popular Hack Education blog.
“So much of what these companies do is really for their investors, and that really dictates the kinds of decisions that get made,” Watters said.
Ventilla expressed frustration that AltSchool, which previously received criticism for focusing its attention on private schools serving mostly wealthy families, is now taking flak for choosing to prioritize efforts to serve a broader universe of more diverse students in the public-school sector.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The outline to open a magic bullet school goes like this:
With no data and evidence, boast, in language that sounds as if it is already a fact, that this new alternative education “idea” is earth shattering and will revolutionize education.
Spend millions on a misleading propaganda advertising campaign to “fool” as many people as possible.
After all, even Abraham Lincoln said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time!”
The target of their misleading campiagns is “those people” because if you can grab hundreds of thousands or millions of easy to fool people, that translates to a lot of public money pouring illegally into your offshore bank accounts knowing that when your scam eventually is revealed by an investigation you can’t buy off or control, the fines and prison time will be insignificant compared to how much money you managed to siphon off and steal.
Take a page from Hitler and Trump’s playbook and never admit you are wrong no matter how much evidence piles up showing your alternative ideas never have worked, don’t work, and will never work.
When the original misleading propaganda stops working, launch another campaign focusing on new boasts and key words without evidence and data that it will work while shouting “if we only give it more time like a few decades or centuries”.
When anyone comes up with valid data that your alt-education idea is a total failure and fraud, attack those individuals with misleading claims to smear them and cast doubt on their evidence. This is another tactic borrowed from Hitler and Trump.
Repeat … repeatedly so the lies become false truths.
Lloyd,
Don’t forget to boast about your long waiting list!
Thanks, I forgot about that lie, the fake long waiting list.
In NYC, the best publicity for a new restaurant is to say it is almost impossible to get reservations.
Ah, so they are using the same tactic to fool parents into thinking they better hurry to nail down this “incredible” charter school for their child that is promising miracles by making the promise sound like a fact.
At SomeDAM Poet restaurant, it IS impossible to get a reservation — because it does not exist.
But maybe I should advertise.
Then again, if it is impossible, I guess no one would even try.
Maybe I should say “Near impossible”.
Impossible is near impossible, right?
In fact, you can’t get any nearer to impossible than impossible.
How about this: make your reservation at least six months in advance and pay a $100 deposit to hold it. If for some reason due to events beyond our control, we have to cancel your reservation, we will refund half of your deposit.
LoydLofthouse The method is a treasure-trove of variously-named logical fallacies.
Also, Hannah Arendt would love it as it abbreviates but dovetails nicely with her “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” CBK
The whole idea of personalization of curriculum is bogus. No one knows enough or can learn enough to effectively personalize a curriculum … save the students themselves. Personalization is the job of students, not teachers! Not allowing/requiring of this step really handicaps students. Teachers jobs is to lay out the curriculum and suggest ways in which their students can make it relevant and interesting to them. It is impossible for everything taught in schools to be … interesting to all students, for example. But teachers can help students learn how to generate their own interest in a topic, and make it personalized for them.
Claims of “personalized curricula” are scams, they are just “individualized” and that is a scam, too. Education is a social process. It requires lots and lots of communication between learners and teachers and learners and learners. Cut this social element out of the curriculum and you cripple the learners, possibly exactly what is desired bu the education wreckers. They want their kids to have a good education, defined as better that the education those losers over there are getting.
On a totem pole, the only to know you are not on the bottom is to be standing on someone else.
Personalized learning is not, if it is delegated to a computer program. The computer programs are properly called instructional management systems and there is absolutely no guarantee that they cause learning.
You know it must be bad if Bill Gates is pushing it.
As a fairly reliable rule, you should stay away from anything Bill says is good because if the past teaches us anything, it’s that Bill produces crap.
“Personalization is the job of students, not teachers! ”
Totally makes sense to me. I would call it differentiation, but then all responsibility for making it relevant and interesting falls back on the teacher.
Diane Excellent article. Best sentence: “And the question always should be: Is the tech in my classroom going to preserve or enhance human connection?” CBK
I agree with Mr Ruis. Education is a social process, where communication between learners, which includes teachers, is necessary. How often have I needed to hear a classmate talk about his or her experience or ideas surrounding a concept in order for me to fully grasp the concept? A lot.
Hey, this is a bit off-topic, but: What suggestions do people have to influence the local movers and shakers in my town (about 10,000) to changing our school system into the asset the town needs, i.e., a world-class public education system? As just another schnook on the bus, I don’t have the creds to influence them. Any suggestions would be most helpful.
Chuck,
Start by asking members of the school board The the superintendent to read “Reign of Error.”
I’ll let you know the results, Diane. Thank you.
Alt schools
Like Alt facts
Hype rules
But truth lacks
economy of words….it amazes me !
Right on time 🙂
Sent from my iPhone
>
AltSchool failed at running its own schools, so it decided to tell other schools how to run theirs. This reminds me of the failed teachers who become ed school professors so they can tell teachers how to teach.
I’ve seen this again and again. All the hype about some new tech. The kids are excited for the first few minutes. Then they get bored. Then the boredom turns to actively hating the program and doing anything they can to avoid having to do more of it. There are legitimate uses of technology, such as making accessible material that otherwise wouldn’t be. It’s awesome that a grad student in English can have all the extant corpus of Old English on a thumb drive or that one studying comparative religion can find most of the sacred texts of the world on sacred-texts.com. It still amazes me that I can go online and thumb through the Voynich manuscript or the original Cotton ms. of Beowulf. It’s great that my friend who is studying the Scottish Enlightenment can read hundreds of out-of-print books by thinkers from the period on Gutenberg or the Internet Archive. It’s great that I can set a guitar student of mine down in front of a Youtube video of a master performer and walk him or her through a piece well played. There are many, many wonderful uses of Internet-accessible multimedia for making particular points. I used a lot of these when I taught film. And sometimes, with animations, one can show students things that would otherwise be impossible–Here’s a journey through the circulatory system.
But these learning programs that attempt to replace teachers with screen time are crap. Their makers simply don’t realize that teaching has always been an interaction between people. What kids get most, if they get anything, is the windfall of the teacher’s enthusiasm, and that of other students, for the material.
In his “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell wrote, “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification.”
“Personalized learning” is my candidate for the most Newspeak-y term the Ed Deformers have come up with yet. Eliminate the personal interaction. Then call that “personalized learning.”
cx: “sit,” not “set,” above
Forget the touchy-feely stuff: human beings are just far better machines for delivering information. They can detect students’ interest level, they can speed up or slow down as kids need, they have “presence” that draws attention, they have a voice that modulates to express emotion or emphasis, they make jokes, they can draw, they have brains that can draw in tangentially related information when appropriate, they have judgment… WE are vastly better technology than the technology. Too bad we’ve been blind to this.
Ponderosa Only SOME of us have been blind to what you say.
Unfortunately, these are self-fulfilling principles of shallowness reigning down on our children from what is mistakenly conceived as “on high” aka: “successful.” CBK
Computers are great tools, but instruction by algorithm is a death march with no end. Students must revolt, or Silicon Valley will keep using them to sell their products.
AltSchool Newspeak from the article: “The company’s mission was to help move the American education system from an industrial-age model ‘where schools were set up to resemble factories and students had a conveyor-belt-like experience’ to a more ‘learner-centric’ approach…” This quote should be illustrated w/a photo of the very active turn-of-last C elem classroom, where teacher moves among groups at board, at desks, in reading circle– and another of the “personalized learning” classroom, w/each kid hooked up, “Matrix”-style, to his digital-learning apparatus.
Yes, this tired, old cliche of the factory model school needs to be put to rest. For one, it’s false. Cooperative learning and project based learning have been all the rage since 1920. Second, even if it were true, whole class instruction led by a “sage on the stage” is not the abomination implied by this pejorative claim. Everyone from De Vos to Alfie Kohn trots out this fake news to justify imposing their dubious pet ideas.
Bob,
Right on the mark! Thanks.
LOVING this line: “What could possibly go wrong? Almost everything.”
Hi Diane,
I’m sorry I’m so behind and just finding this. I’d love to connect. I’m Paul France, the teacher in the Atlantic article that used to work at AltSchool. I’ve written quite a bit on this experience and would love to send you a copy of my book about it.
I read The Death and Life of the Great American School System towards the end of my time at AltSchool, and it aided in the rapid shifting of my perspective. I will always be grateful to you for that.
Thanks for your leadership,
Paul
paul.emerich.france@gmail.com | paulemerich.com