Mark Zuckerberg and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funded the Summit learning program, which is computer-based online instruction. not personalized learning.
Students in Kansas sent a message to Zuckerberg:
Another student #walkout vs #SummitLearning – this time at McPherson MS in Kansas. Like earlier one in Brooklyn, protest was sparked by students’ frustrations about inadequacies of the online Learning program http://midkansasonline.com/news/?id=23280
https://www.mcphersonsentinel.com/news/20190130/mms-students-stage-walkout-to-protest-summit
Waving signs and chanting “No Summit, No Summit, No Summit,” the students spent their afternoon out of class venting their frustration with the changes in their curriculum…. “It’s a learning program that is supposed to be a better way, but you are just on a computer,” said Drake Madden, a seventh grader. “Every time I get home, my head starts hurting.” he said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Drake Madden, a modern day patriot fighting the Z-berg-Chan oligarchy.
Right on, kids!
Are they not beautiful? After participating in an earth shaking strike, I consider them my brothers and sisters. Walk with them. Bring them food and water. Make sure they have good shoes and dry socks.
One more thing. Zuckerberg is a child. The students walking out on him are young men and women.
Well said, LeftCoast!
Unfortunately, these children/teens still use his social media platform…..Instagram. Many don’t know this is a Z-berg creation. Theses kids are screwed before they even start because the enemy already knows the plan and is working on damage control before they can even walk out the door to protest.
Here’s one of the most high profile charter cheerleaders, putting together what amounts to an advertisement for Summit in US News:
THE FIRST TIME I visited a Summit Public School, in February 2014, I pulled up in front of a one-story building in an office park. I was sure I had the wrong address – but no, there was a sign. This was Summit Denali, in Sunnyvale, California.
Inside, my surprise deepened. All the students, then sixth graders, were in one big, open area. Most were working on their own, at laptops. A few were working with another student, or in hushed conversations with teachers. All their chairs, desks, tables and whiteboards were on wheels, so the space could be instantly reconfigured.
Diane Tavenner, Summit’s co-founder and CEO, explained that she and her colleagues had spent two years piloting profound changes in their education process, and this year they had rolled out the new, personalized model in all seven of their Bay Area charter schools. “The industrial model is really driven by adults,” she says. “Kids come in, they’re told where to go, where to sit, what they’re going to learn, when they’re going to learn it. You’re on the assembly line. We believe the next generation models are about the students being empowered to drive their own learning.”
The title of the story is “Summit Schools Are The Schools of the Future” so you can see they applied their usual rigorous, fact-based analysis before drawing any broad conclusions.
Based on ads like this they managed to sell this to 350 public schools, so shame on the public schools who bought based upon hype and clever marketing. Be wiser.
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2016-01-19/californias-summit-public-schools-are-the-schools-of-the-future
“You’re on the assembly line.” Boy, that says it all! They aren’t teaching children, they are training meat widgets. Diane Tavenner is telling everyone what they are doing and will anyone care to tell Zuckerberg to take his crap and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine!
You describe an environment that has been industrialized and is an example of education in a warehouse and on the fly–roll around furniture, eyes-on those computers. It is horrible.
exactly
If you search for “Diane Tavenner” you will get hundreds of hits- everyone from the Broad Foundation to Harvard promote this “learning program”- there is absolutely no criticism of it. Everything she says is taken at face value- that she’s creating students who are somehow uniquely suited for the 21st century and on and on and on- claims that are completely unverifiable, let alone “verified”.
They don’t have a shred of anything to back any of this up, yet they sold it aggressively to public schools nationwide, based solely on her narrative and it wasn’t just the paid ed reform promoters- it was universities too.
The Koch’s from Kansas, hell bent on the nation’s fossil fuel dependence which sabotages our country. Today, GM halted operations at 11 Mich. plants because the natural gas to fuel homes is dangerously low. Michigan voted for Trump.
Public schools should be more discerning before taking the cyber plunge. They should not sign on assuming Silicon Valley has all the answers. They don’t! Public administrators need to be better stewards of the public trust given to them by taxpayers. There is no evidence of value in cyber instruction while most people will agree that computers are useful tools. The students are evaluating the program with their feet, and administrators should listen. There is growing concern about the long term effect on cyber instruction on developing brains and eyes. Recent research is also showing a link between too much screen time and depression in adolescents.
Retired–You are spot on. Were there any pilot programs adopted before this was rolled out across the entire district? What solutions are being considered? Is it possible to offer some classrooms with teacher lead instruction?
t appears these students seem to be saying I have no interest in learning this way. In my observations of middle school students with online learning they lose interest and motivation with hours of screen time. They lose focus and learn to “game the system”. They will keep guessing an answer until they uncover the correct answer or the program gives them the correct answer/. Parents should insist that options be provided so all students have the opportunity for success.
Humor
The Koch’s Gov. Scott Walker, unable to refrain from being intellectually lame, attempted to explain using a contrived comparison about student grades, why billionaires have the right to exploit.
An internet commenter quipped, “Maybe don’t make analogies about an A student if you think like a m—f-ing D student”.
Ha. Ha. Ha.
It’s interesting that there the curriculum page on the Summit Learning site is empty and that there are no samples of its online learning modules up on the site. Two big red flags. The site contains only very high-level vagueness–a lot of hype, no substance. There’s a lot of vague talk on the site about “projects” and there are lots of pics of smiling teachers and students interacting with one another, but the reporter visits and sees a lot of kids in a warehouse-type room working at keyboards. Personalization without persons. Orwellian Newspeak? Sounds like it. Marketing hype? Definitely. Substance? Where is it?
It’s also interesting that Summit describes its program as involving three areas of overall concentration–cognitive skills, content knowledge, and habits of success. Its overview gives a timeline of research and advocacy for content knowledge but doesn’t even mention the foremost proponent of knowledge-based education in the 20th and early 21st centuries, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. Why? This is a little like making a list of scientists who worked on relativity theory and not listing Einstein. Why the omission? Because Hirsch is a controversial (and much misunderstood) figure, and everything on the Summit site is marketing hype. As such, it as a distinctly rotten smell.
So, where’s the substance, Summit? Or are you all hat and no cattle?
Wonderful idiom, Bob. I got to laughing, hard too. You got me tore up,as a can of kraut.
I wish it were mine, Roy. It’s an old saying.
And “tore me up like a can of kraut,” that’s pretty darned good too!
The frequent use of “aligned” in the Summit marketing (and ALL I see is marketing) suggests that this is yet another glorified online test prep program in which students take a diagnostic test online and then are plopped down for an endless series of online test prep modules aligned to specific Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic]. I don’t see anything on the site suggesting otherwise.
Just like Khan Academy. I liked it when it first came out, but now it’s changed and it’s nothing but test prep.
Me too. When it first came out, it was wonderful. Quirky, but real. A teacher teaching. Then came all that Gates money and all the strings attached. The site has been ruined. What a loss!!!
This statement by one of the students protesting Summit Learning in Kansas is particularly revealing: “Another 7th grader Joel Eilert said it’s better to learn by the teachers than Summit.”
The marketing hype around this program contains lots of pictures of kids working collaboratively on projects and a few pics of a kid at a computer, always with a parent or teacher by his or her side, interacting. But the reality seems to be that this is yet another set of online Common Core computer modules that kids plod through on their own–depersonalized “learning.”
If what you want is complete command and control of the training of prole children to do precisely and only what they are told to do, this is how to achieve that end. I would like to be wrong here, but I see no evidence to the contrary.
Sad reality. I remember reading an article years ago about how the advent of testing meant a future bent to creating three categories of citizen: Richy rich comptrollers, do what I say managers, and I do what I’m told drones.
Parents/ voters must be sound asleep in this district. There have been so many articles w/data on the utter failure of K12-style online learning. How on earth could they allow the same inferior method to be imported into their own brick& mortar schools– & pay their teachers to stand around helping individual puzzled students instead of leading the class? How could they allow their own kids to lose months of learning while admin stands around collecting data to prove to themselves they goofed?
Because parents have been disengaged from the schools….ON PURPOSE! Everyone has to work to” keep up with the Jones'”. …Competition. If the letter grades that their kids are bringing home are good, why should parents think that the kids are getting fed a load of garbage in the classroom? And speaking of those letter grades…..that is also something that parents use to compete against each other and the same with standardized test scores driving the real estate markets to live in the “better areas”. Parents don’t know because after 2nd grade, admin doesn’t want parent volunteers in the school because the whole scam would be exposed. Parents aren’t asleep….they are busy doing other things.