Audrey Watters writes here about the promises and realities of EdTech.
Why the boom in education technology? Is it the pursuit of the total transformation of schooling? Is it marketing, competition and the pursuit of profits? Is it an effort to cut costs by replacing humans with machines?
Watters writes:
OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, more than $13 billion in venture capital has been sunk into education technology startups. But in spite of all the money and political capital pouring into the sprawling ed-tech sector, there’s precious little evidence suggesting that its trademark innovations have done anything to improve teaching and learning.
Perhaps, though, that’s never really been the point. Rather, it may be that all the interest in education technology has been an extension of a long-running campaign to make over American schools into the image of corporate endeavor—to transform education into a marketplace for buzzword-friendly apps and instruction plans, while steadily privatizing public institutions of learning for the sake of enhancing the bottom lines of the business interests promoting investment-friendly school “reforms.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Love Watters. She’s a breath of fresh air in an industry that is absolutely riddled with inflated claims and endless, endless BS that is sold as fact.
It’s depressing to watch if you’re older than 30. All of these smart outsiders who were considered “nerds” all turned into banal, lock-step sales and marketing pros. They’re the victims of their own success. They are indistinguishable from people selling laundry detergent or cars, except people who sell laundry detergent or cars actually have to back up their claims. These people all get unearned deference.
….when the word “get” might be even more exactly written as “buy”
“In this essay, Travis Pillow and Paul Hill explore what it would take to ensure that personalized and weighted funding follows students across multiple learning experiences, and could meet the needs of all students. Information through online portals and navigators who help families select the best options for their children are critical, the authors argue, as are addressing oversight and helping manage the transition from traditional funding models.”
Formerly known as “the backpack voucher”. Ed reform lurches further Right again.
I think we’ll see more and more of this as Democrats see increasing political peril in being tied to privatization. The “movement” will become more and more ideologically aligned with the far Right.
Just in the last 5 years they’ve gone from opposing vouchers to promoting wholly voucher based funding. Beyond Barry Goldwater’s wildest dreams. A wholly deregulated marketplace for educational services, and all of it publicly funded. It’s a multipliers as far as jobs. Cobbling together “a school experience” from thousands of contractors will mean many, many more people getting paid from public school dollars. Each slice and dice adds employees.
The end goal is not publicly funded schools. It is colonialism where a few are selected from the lower class to be educated and they then are beholden to the ones who paid for their educations but, they remain 2nd class citizens.
This is an excellent article. Thank you for introducing me to this author and Baffler magazine, which I’d never heard of. I just subscribed.
Yes!
Here’s some pure pro-charter and antipublic school propaganda brought to you by the public employees at the US Department of Education:
“We went from one subject to the next,” he notes. “The school’s structure wasn’t giving me an opportunity to actually grasp the concepts. Also, I was being bullied, and that made everything more difficult for me. I think the only two classes I was passing were art and physical education.”
Micah had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder – ADHD – and his parents wanted to enroll him in a local public charter school they felt would best meet his needs: San Diego’s High Tech High – a village of thirteen elementary to high schools. The trouble was students could only be accepted to this highly-competitive charter network by winning a lottery.
“My parents had been trying to get me into one of the High Tech Elementary Charter Schools since second grade,” Micah explains. “I was in the lottery and on the wait list every year. That was really stressful for my parents. I thought the support structure for kids with ADHD and disabilities was much better and I’d achieve there.”
They printed an ad for High Tech High, and gave it to the credibility of the federal government.
That’s the sum total of the work this week- promoting their preferred school contractors.
Your tax dollars at work. They are indistinguishable from charter lobbyists. The echo chamber has melded into one giant advertisement. I just wish Walton or Gates would pay for this- I don’t know why the public is picking up the tab.
I’m surprised they used that testimony [4th para from end of yr post] in an ad: it basically says this so-called “choice” school was unavailable to this apparently well-matched kid despite yrs of attempting lottery… Or maybe that’s why they chose it. Just like lies about 1000’s on waiting list, paints a picture of desperates drooling at the gates of one’s oh-so-fabulous school. [The more deprived a population is, the more popular its lotto games.]
If all of ed reform and the US government are telling the public that charter schools are oversubscribed and so we must open more of them, then why do charter school contractors spend millions of dollars blanketing cities with ads for these schools?
Has anyone outside the echo chamber looked at the numbers they claim?
Can we hire a private regulator, since the publicly-paid officials are completely captured? Taking the contractors self-reported numbers as fact is bad practice. It’s not valid information. Why are they giving the public such poor quality information?
“The financialization of education, that is to say, is not particularly new nor is it coming from a particularly innovative crowd—just a decidedly persistent one.”
The fact that most of technology that purports to deliver instruction has never been examined in terms of efficacy should be a major concern of educators and parents. Tech companies are working to force schools to adopt delivery systems of uncertain value. We also do not have enough information about the long term exposure to screen time in developing brains and eyes. Parents and teachers should not rely on Silicon Valley to protect young people. Their goal is profit which they get when they sell more products. Billions of dollars are being invested in the “education market” because companies with slick marketing campaigns are seeking profit. Real educators care about students. They care about students’ health and well-being today and tomorrow.
Computers are useful tools, but teachers should be making decisions about how and when to use them, not companies, politicians or even top down administrators.
It has always been like this. This is how business work. The best business is a long-term contract with a government structure with a fixed price. This protects the business from market fluctuations. Say, a Texas Instruments graphing calculator costs nowadays the same $100 that it did twenty years ago. These calculators are basically mandatory in most high schools. They are not just a part of the fable, they are the part of a curriculum, look no further than to Core-Plus Math. This program has been developed under the guidance and using the standards set forth by NCTM back in 1989. If you look at the list of sponsors of NCTM events, you can see that Texas Instruments is always a major sponsor and has its own booth. Compare this to other companies selling their calculators on the open market, they cost cheaper, sometimes ten times cheaper. Compare to smartphone market, it is shrinking. Last year I bought a quite decent smartphone for just $20.
Anyone who thinks that anything used in schools — textbooks, furniture, whiteboards, and of course “technology” — is bought by districts because of real need, based on open competition, is delusional. THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN LIKE THIS.
“Anyone who thinks that anything used in schools — textbooks, furniture, whiteboards, and of course ‘technology’ — is bought by districts because of real need, based on open competition, is delusional.”
BA, you evidently don’t have any idea how public schools work. In most cases, from my thirty years of teaching in the public schools in California, before our schools purchased items from the list you mentioned, teachers and administrators and sometimes students and parents took the time to study each item and decide what to purchase based on what they thought would help the teachers in their classrooms.
In fact, in every school where I taught in the one district where I worked, before we purchased anything with district funds, one or a few teachers would pilot the product/s to see how they worked before the decision to buy products like textbooks, et al, was finalized.
Then all the teachers would meet and hear the reports before voting. This would only happen after the district administration earmarked money for these purchases. Some teachers buy these products out of their own pockets. I did that several times over the years and that expense cost me thousands.
Some teachers would fill out grants for things like whiteboards and “technology’. I know I did and my proposals were accepted by the corporations that offered those grants to teachers.
That decision was based on what teachers wanted because the pilot programs demonstrated the products helped improve the teacher’s ability to teach their students. It wasn’t based on need. It was based on want after a year or more of pilot programs.
We did this with new textbooks, whiteboards, and technology. Not so much with desks, tables and chairs.
Of course with the era of top down decisions where everyone else is cut out of the process, all it takes is a bribe of some kind to the purchasing district administrator and then teachers get stuff they never pilots/tested and most of the time that ends up not working out at all and the money was wasted.
In fact, textbook publishers often donated a class set to the few teachers piloting the books hoping that would lead to a purchase from several schools in the district. One teacher would pilot a class set of books from one publisher while another teacher piloted the textbooks from another publisher. After a full school year, all of the teachers would meet and listen to the reports then the staff would vote to adopt the new text book with the best results.
Lloyd, I am glad that back in the time and the district where you worked this happened with participation or even initiative of teachers and parents. Really, no smirking, that was wonderful. But what I am seeing today is not like this. Remember the $1B contract of LA district with Apple for iPads? Granted, this one fell through, it was too grandiose. But smaller ones happen constantly. Not even technology, I am talking textbooks. Math program that the district voted against twenty years ago was accepted just two years ago because it was “aligned” with Common Core. Well, it was not. All that happened is the new cover. But the high school math teacher who liked the books (or “liked”? I don’t know how much he got from the publisher in kickbacks; he was featured in the publisher’s newsletter) is now the main dude in the district authorized with shaping math curriculum – what a magical coincidence. Or iPads in our school, the district proudly reported that each student now will have an iPad. What for? What is being improved with this, except paying to Apple and the distributor and for software and for support? 6-grade students are obliged to use them for typing their essays instead of handwriting. Worse, the iPads have no keyboard, so the students type using virtual onscreen keyboard. Or a fence around the school. It was supposed to be made from fine mesh to prohibit climbing, but instead was built from chicken wire with larger mesh, it is twice cheaper. Can be climbed over. But all the allotted money were used. All the while the kids have desks that are smaller than I had for my son when he was an infant. So please excuse my cynicism.
BA write, “what I am seeing today is not like this (I think he was referring to my comment). Remember the $1B contract of LA district with Apple for iPads?”
Exactly, It’s all been downhill at a fast pace since NCLB followed by the Common Core crap rank and punish high stakes tests.
This has all been caused by Top (DC) down meddling with education across the country and repeated and constant attacks on those alleged incompetent teachers that are wrecking the world. To get rid of those alleged incompetent teachers, there has been a war on all public school teachers for decades.
Yet, in the Los Angeles Vergara trial, the two Harvard experts that testified for the prosecution that libertarian, anti public everything billionaire oligarchs paid for, said on the stand that the could only estimate that 1-to-3 percent of the teachers were incompetent.
What about the 1 of every 4 parents that are permissive or indulgent, or are uninvolved (for whatever reason) in their child’s life and education?
“Parenting styles have been viewed with extreme interest recently. Parents, as primary caregivers, exert a significant influence on the development of their child’s present and future emotional health, personality, character,11 well-being, social and cognitive development, and academic performance.12–18 Parenting style is an essential determinant of children’s coping styles, and a child’s behavior toward adults varies according to different parenting styles. This transfers to the dental office, affecting the interaction with the dentist. Parenting style also influences how a child copes with stresses and stimuli, including those in the dental setting.1”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4559268/
Instead of firing and/or punishing the 1 to 3 teachers out of every hundred that are allegedly incompetent, why don’t we take children away from incompetent/bad parents?
Hmm, what to choose? NCLB that mandated phonics for elementary school English classes, or school autonomy where teachers can choose Whole Language? This is a toughie.
Nothing tough about the choice between NCLB and teachers making the decisions. All we have to do is look at Finland where teachers make the decisions to know the right choice.
NCLB is a solid No, No, No, No, No, No!
Professional, highly educated, supported teachers making the decisions from the bottom up is YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! YES!
The title of NCLB is the clincher: No Child Left Behind. The reality is that every one cannot succeed. There is no example in recorded history of everyone winning. If that was true, then every athlete competing in the Olympics would only win gold medals. And every horse race would only have winners and no losers. And everyone would be a billionaire.
A teachers job is to do the best job possible to teach every child to learn. After that, it is up to the child to cooperate and do what it takes to learn what the teacher teaches. Even the parents have a role in that. The parents/guardians support the child at home to learn what the teacher teaches.
NCLB and all the other crap out of DC that followed that mess were lies, magic bullets or pills that let students and parents off the hook.
After President Ray-Gun’s flawed and fraudulent “A National at Risk” report, the responsibility to learn shifted to the teachers. NCLB shifted that blame even further on the teachers. Common Core and the high stakes rank and punish tests continued to shift the blame all on the shoulders of teachers.
No reason for a child to learn because it was never their fault.
No reason for a parent to parent because a failed child was never their fault.
Teachers teach.
Children learn
Parents support the teacher and child.
When a child doesn’t learn, the parent is often the one with the most blame followed by the student and then maybe the teacher if it can be proved the teachers wasn’t doing their job.
Finland uses synthetic phonics nationwide, while many teachers in the U.S. don’t even know what phonics is and cannot teach it, and when presented with phonics they are amazed “why no one told us that!” This just shows that the bulk of the teachers in the U.S. have no knowledge or desire to look outside the box that is provided to them by their districts and instructors. Seriously, how can an ELA teacher not know about Flesch’s book?
Cannot trust teachers to make right decisions. Instead, a scientifically-researched national program must be designed and used throughout the country.
If you read my book “Left Back,” you will learn the history of the phonics-whole language/whole word controversy
BS – I disagree with our opinion.
Teachers are the best people to decide what their students need to learn. Not some ass-hat with millions or billions of dollars and that has never taught a day in his or her life.
When I was teaching, I knew teachers that believed there was a place for phonics and/or whole language depending on the needs of their students. Some of those teachers used phonics. Some used the whole language approach and many mixed the two in their lesson plans.
When teachers are forced to follow a script and cannot make decisions in their classrooms based on their students’ needs, then the public education system will not work.
If every teacher in Finland, as you allege, uses synthetic phonics nationwide, then that was because the teachers decided to do it on a school by school, department by department basis. Finland’s government did not force those teachers to use phonics in their teaching. That choice was up to the teachers. Finland has a national curriculum but that’s all it is, a suggestion. Implementing that curriculum and teaching it is up to the teachers. They are not required to teach all of that curriculum.
No one in the government tells Finland’s teachers how to do their job and there is no rank-and punish-high stakes tests that force teachers to teach to the test like in the United States.
I meant to say “Your Opinion” and not “Our Opinion”
There is no place for Whole Language. Teachers cannot be trusted to make a right choice. As I said (do you need links? quotes?) many of them are completely clueless about what is happening outside of the teaching materials they are provided and seminars they attend, so the best pedagogical techniques must be chosen and distributed nationwide. Sadly, the federal government is neither allowed nor interested to do that. Common Core was a botched attempt for a national math and English curricula because of the existing limitations for USED.
Please read Left Back. It contains a history of phonics/whole word/Dick and Jane/Flesch/Chall
BA says public school teachers can’t be trusted to decide how best to teach the children in their classrooms and public schools.
The only other choice is that we must trust blindly in Donald Trump, Betsy DeVos, Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Pearson Media Company, a for profit British-owned education publishing and assessment service to schools and corporations, David Coleman, Charles and David Koch, the Walmart Walton family.
None of the above have ever been properly credentialed public school teachers.
Back in 1975-76, it took me a full school year to earn my teaching credential. I interned full time for the entire school year with a master teacher in a 5th grade classroom in a public elementary school with a child poverty rate higher than 80 percent.
In the afternoons after the school day ended, I drove to Cal Poly Pomona to attend the classes required to earn that teaching degree. In those classes I learned all about how to teach and how children learn.
Then after I started teaching after the full year program to earn my credential, I and every other teacher in California was required to continue learning and prove it. We had to take classes and workshops after our workday or during the summers to keep our credential active. We were required to learn the latest teaching methods and materials.
When I taught, my work weeks ran from 60 to 100 hours a week for thirty years. Teachers met in departments to discuss best methods and set goals and work together developing new lesson plans based on the latest and best research that we all had to read and understand.
And an ignorant person with a name like BA (Bad Ass???) dares to allege we can’t trust our teachers and must put our trust in people like Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos and corporations that have one primary goal, profits, and also trust the others on that list above.
This proves my point – cannot trust a teacher.
Although there is a flip side to that, which is everyone who just “invented” a “new” teaching method wants to become a consultant and make money off it; does not matter that this “new” method has been known for decades or centuries. They produce junk “methods” like this: https://www.amazon.com/8-Step-Model-Drawing-Singapores-Problem-Solving/dp/1884548954 This zeal for never-ending courses, classes and consulting is simply another facet of businesses making a buck or two off the education system.
Nothing proves what you think. Just because you think teachers can’t be trusted doesn’t make you right — unless you are just like the Orange Idiot we all know as Donald Trump.
For instance, this is what evidence looks like vs an individual’s opinion: when Gallup polled people about honesty and ethical standards in different occupations, teachers came in third place. Only nurses and military officers were ranked higher.
“As can be seen from the following infographic which shows a selection of the professions examined by Gallup, 82 percent of Americans consider nurses to have high or very high honesty and ethical standards. Military officers come second with 71 percent saying they have high honesty standards while grade school teachers come third with 66 percent placing a high level of trust in them.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/01/04/americas-most-and-least-trusted-professions-infographic/#2805681465b5
The least trusted professions are:
last place: lobbyists
Hey, BA (Bad Ass), I have a question for you — Are you a lobbyist?
BA is in moderation because of making so many sneering remarks about teachers.
I would not trust a nurse. A doctor – maybe.
Ask a U.S. Marine, a combat vet, face to face, how much they trust a Navy corpsman (a trauma nurse in uniform) and then make sure to say how none of them can be trusted because no one should trust nurses.
Depending on the Marine and if they have a bad case of PTSD, get ready just in case the Marine decides to take you apart, piece by piece.
And if you can’t find a Marine, walk up to a combat vet who served in Special Forces and bad mouth their medics (who are also trauma nurses in uniform) and tell that vet that those medics cannot be trusted.
Before you try on that face-to-face experiment, watch this movie: “Hacksaw Ridge”. It’s based on a true story.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
The FAKE promises behind school reform explained.
Most school reform driven by the private sector marketplace is based on greed with a touch of extremist religious beliefs mixed in.
The little “L’ libertarians and some among the religious are useful idiots
paving the way for Gates and hedge funders.
Yes, if they aren’t the corrupt and evil (by any standard) billionaires paying for the manipulating, the rank-and-file, working class libertarians and religious freaks (who probably have never read the Bible) are more than just dupes. They are deplorable, ignorant dupes. They are the kind of people who supported the rise of Hitler and his Nazi Party.
They get their talking points from Fox, Hannity, Limbaugh,….
Hannity, Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter are the secret Troika, the real DEEP STATE, that rules the United States through Fox-Trump, their puppets.
A report from ed-reform movers & shakers. Always edifying to hear what’s happening on Planet 9. Particularly loved this: “But you know the old aphorism: those who don’t learn from history are condemned to network their way into well-connected luxury and clout.”