Leonie Haimson, NYC Parent Activist, is blessed with a long memory and deep knowledge.
In this post, she explores the origins and evaluations of a blended learning program called Teach to One.
She writes:
Last week, two different studies came out about the results of the well-known blended learning program originally called “School of One” and now called “Teach to One”, created and sold to schools by an organization named New Classrooms. If you want to cut to the chase, you can read about the contrasting analyses in Education Week, Chalkbeat or the Hechinger Report. If you want to know about the history of this much-hyped program that was first developed for use in NYC public schools and uses software programs and algorithms to deliver instruction, read on here. It provides lessons in how insistent the promoters of online learning have hyped programs with little or no evidence behind them, how negative evaluations have been suppressed or discounted and how conflicts of interest have been ignored – all in the service of convincing schools to adopt these programs far and wide.
According to his Linked-in profile, Joel Rose was a Teach for America corps member for three years, until he was hired to work at the headquarters of Edison charter schools in New York City, a national for-profit chain of charters headquartered in NYC. By 2003, he was running a division of Edison called Newton Learning that provided tutoring to students through the supplementary services program (SES) that was included in No Child Left Behind. NCLB required public schools with low test scores to pay for their students to receive tutoring services from private companies. In 2003 alone, Newton Learning was paid more than $5 million by the NYC Department of Education for its tutoring services.
According to NCLB, parents of students at these schools were supposed to be provided with the choice of tutoring companies. Yet in 2005, the NY Post found that in some NYC schools, principals and parent coordinators were incentivized to recruit students for Newton. In one Bronx school, as a result, the school distributed flyers to parents saying “Newton Learning is your best SES choice. The Newton Learning Adventure offers FUN and EXCITING activity-based lessons.” Some parents were told by their schools that the only choice was for them to enroll their children in Newton Learning, or they would receive no tutoring at all.
In March 2006, the NYC Special Investigator of Schools Richard Condon released a report, revealing how several SES providers, including Newton Learning, had engaged in a number of “questionable business practices” in their dealings with DOE officials, parents and students. These companies had been involved in the “misappropriation and misuse of confidential student information and the offering of self- serving incentive programs”, and Newton staff had been improperly allowed entry into schools to directly solicit students. In one case, a principal permitted Newton reps to perform skits in front of students during class time to promote their services.
Newton staff had also improperly obtained student contact information from school staff and had offered financial incentives to principals and teachers if their students signed up. They had promised gifts to students in exchange for enrolling, including CD players and $100 gift cards. This sort of chicanery continued even after DOE told Newton to stop these practices, according to Condon’s report. Newton also had failed to carry out required fingerprinting and background checks for the staff they hired as tutors.
According to the DOE rules, Newton and other tutoring companies could use classroom space in the public schools free of charge, if granted a “permit” by the school’s principal. Yet in return, any company was also supposed to give students a 9% reduction in fees. Yet every company which had asked for a waiver from this discount was granted one by David Ross, the head of DOE’s Division of Contracts and Services. (Remember that name, David Ross; it will come up later.) Here’s an article in the NY Times, with more about the special investigator’s findings.
Condon’s report and news articles about his findings were apparently ignored by DOE, as shown by the fact that a few months later, in December 2006, Joel Klein hired Chris Cerf, to be his Deputy Chancellor, even though Cerf had led Edison schools during this period. In February 2007, Cerf brought Joel Rose to DOE to be his chief of staff.
Rose created the School of One pripogram, Which was hailed as the greatest, most revolutionary education program before it was ever implemented.
Read on to learn more about this remarkable job of marketing.
The story of hype and suppressed evaluations is fascinating and well worth reading.
Haimson concludes:
“Teach to One has been the most praised and promoted online learning program in the nation, aside from the Summit Learning platform, which has had its own serious problems. While Summit has refused to allow any independent evaluations of its efficacy, New Classrooms has suppressed studies with less than stellar results, with the help of the federal government.
“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools. The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that “the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point. ”
“Yet both Summit and Teach to One, along with other online learning programs, continue to be generously funded and promoted by Gates, Chan-Zuckerberg LLC and other foundations. In April, the Dell Foundation gave New Classrooms another million to expand into high schools. On January 29, New Classrooms announced that Emma Bloomberg had joined its Board of Directors. How many negative evaluations have to be done before billionaires stop funding and helping these companies experiment on children?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This country has lost its mind and soul at the behest of the “deformers,” and just for $$$$$, too. SAD that so many have been snookered and our public schools and public school teachers are starved and then blamed.
The funniest part of this whole scam is the kids KNOW it’s a scam. My son and his friends are completely unimpressed with the blended learning product that is constantly being shoved onto them. They showed me a high school science program that operates by testing and retesting, over and over, until they reach 70% correct answers. It’s absolute junk. All they’re doing is taking short tests over and over until they guess the correct answer. They KNOW it’s a joke.
Only the adults fell for this. Kids saw through it immediately.
Contemporary Online Learning Programs Are Behaviorist Programmed Learning Brought Back from the Dead–Put a Stake in Them
Sometimes it is overt, and sometimes it is hidden and not so obvious, but most of these depersonalized learning programs are implementations of an approached called “programmed learning” cooked up by Behaviorists back in the 1920s. The basic format goes something like this:
You give a pretest. Based on that, you drop the kid at a particular place in a predetermined sequence of “learning modules.”
Each module, or mod, contains contains a tiny bit of instruction followed by a check test for mastery (defined as correct or incorrect or as some percentage, such as 85 percent, correct).
Based on the check test, the student either goes back for a remediation module or gets a reward (points or something) and moves forward to the next module.
Often, mods are grouped together into units and preceded by a pretest. If the student achieves a mastery level of that pretest, he or she tests out of the unit and goes on to the next one.
The programmed learning approach was based on now-discredited Behaviorist learning theory–though often the developers of the new online programs are so unfamiliar with the theory on which their own program is based, or with anything having to do with the sciences and arts of learning, that they don’t know how to implement even their de facto Behaviorist theory optimally–they don’t know, for example, that intermittent reinforcement is more powerful than continual reinforcement is–though they could easily learn that from video games.
The early instantiations of programmed learning were print based or oral-instruction based (in labs that typically had both print materials and audio materials that students listened to on headphones), but text-based computer instantiations were developed in the 1960s, once text-based computer terminals were available.
Research in the 1960s showed very little positive result from these programmed learning approaches. They sounded good in theory (they allowed for some minor individuation, for immediate feedback, for carefully sequenced instruction that ensured that prerequisite learning was in place, and for continual checking for mastery), but in practice, students rapidly got bored with them and hated being treated like rats in a maze, and extrinsic rewards turn out to be disincentives for cognitive tasks because they don’t build intrinsic interest, and such programs do’t take into account the human need for autonomy and self direction, and completion rates were, VERY LOW.
And, of course, that’s what happens with every one of these online learning programs. There’s a lot of hype. The kids enjoy it for the first couple days because it’s something new. And then, after a week or two, they would rather have all the hairs on their heads plucked out, one by one, with tweezers than have to sit down at that program again.
IT’S REALLY FUNNY TO SEE THESE OLD APPROACHES BEING DUG UP, DUSTED OFF, AND TOUTED AS THE NEXT BIG THING IN EDUCATION. I predicted this rebirth of programmed learning back in the early 1990s–that graphical user interfaces had become sophisticated enough that people would start reviving programmed learning models and instantiating them, this time around, in programs with graphical formats.
Old vinegar. New bottles.
It’s also not surprising that the oligarchs love this stuff. Conditioning for prole children who need, anyway, they believe, to be taught to sit down, have some grit, and persist in whatever personally unrewarding tasks are assigned them by their masters in the New Feudal Order.
At best, programmed learning is useful in short spurts for very particularly definable learning–e.g., learning the moves that the various chess pieces can make, for example. At best, it is one of an enormous toolkit of pedagogical approaches, good for some few tasks in some few circumstances, and not good for most.
Please forgive the few typos in that post. Oh, for the ability to correct minor errors in posts on these WordPress pages!
Here’s SXSWedu’s reigning expert:
Jeb Bush – Governor, Foundation for Excellence in Education
No dissenters are invited. The only view presented will be that of Jeb Bush and his echo chamber, ed reform followers who are all lockstep ed tech cheerleaders.
There’s no “debate” in ed reform. Only one opinion and viewpoint is presented- that of Jeb Bush and his lobbying shop.
Check out SXSWEDU:
https://www.sxswedu.com/news/2019/school-safety-gubernatorial-elections-free-speech-more-policy-forum-preview/
100% ed reformers. No dissenting opinions or other voices.
Public schools aren’t even represented at these echo chamber events. Why are they setting policy for our schools when none of them know anything about our schools?
This is why they palm off such junk on public schools. They don’t value our schools or our kids.
After reading this, my main proviso is that for-profit education is corrupt. The people in Silicon Valley are determined to impose some form of cyber instruction on our students to a gain access to the billions of dollars in public education. The minute profit is introduced into education, the goal becomes to sell more products and increase market shares. The profit motive corrupts! The focus of education is supposed to be the student, not products, markets and profit.
These Silicon Valley oligarchs act like a combination of willful toddlers and organized crime bosses. The money that they keep putting into their various reinventions of computer assisted instruction is what keeps their bad ideas alive, not the value of the so-called programs. They are determined to override and bypass evidence, students, teachers and parents to impose electronic behaviorism on our young people despite its clear failure.
Agreed. But why do schools have so little immunity to such snake oil?
Follow the money.
electronic behaviorism. precisely
When will a majority of parents revolt?! Against this, high stakes tests, charters, all of it! It’s the only way to stop for-profit vultures. How do we make this happen??
About 25 percent of the schools that have signed up for this math only Teach to One program have dropped it.
The program requires the school to give up the space for the library–repurpose the space so it will house up to 68 students at a time, working in rotations with assignments. At the end of the session, students fill in exit slips that are sent to central computers. Those computers “score” and classify tjhe exit slips and send the next day’s assignment back to all students who have the same “problem.”
This is not personalized learning. It is also absurd that the entire school day and allocations of space are disrupted for the sake of raising test scores in math.
This program is supported by the Bezos Family Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Chan-Zuckerberg Educational Alliance, New Profit Inc., Oak Foundation, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and about 47 other investors. https://www.newclassrooms.org/about/supporters/
I recommend this article about Teach to One, including the links within the article. http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/02/teach_to_one_what
happens_when_computers_pick_what_students_learn.html
Recent research on the program has determined it is ineffective. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2019/02/teach_to_one_personalized_learning_no_effect.html
Good coverage!
How can we refuse to let our children become fodder for the corporate profit-off-education machine any longer? We need grassroots action.
I agree that there are problems with the Teach to One program, but I wish that Leonie or Diane would try to talk to the principal of MS 88 in Brooklyn to hear what it can do.
We want “diverse” middle schools but no one really addresses how to teach a grade of students when some of them are significantly above grade level, some of them are at grade level, and some are way below grade level. So I ask the teachers on here, what is the answer? Is is just putting students of severely mixed abilities into a small class size of 20 and it will all be good? Do you separate the strong math students from the weak ones which often leads to segregated classrooms? Do you let the strong students fend for themselves because they meet standards so it doesn’t matter?
The Teach to One program seemed like a way to have a diverse classroom while allowing kids able to move quickly through material to advance and those having trouble with it to stay on the subject. After hearing non-stop lip service from educators talking about how teachers were giving “differentiated instruction” — which never happened — I thought having a math program like this in a school where the students’ were coming in with wildly different mathematical abilities was certainly something that sounded like a good idea.
I’m sure it has problems. But what I’m not seeing is any attempt to analyze what is and what isn’t working — just how it is a failure because state test scores didn’t go up.
There are a lot of teachers on here so I ask what they believe would be a better system to teach math in a middle school where students come in with wildly different abilities and desires to learn math.
In the ideal form, the students work on the computer AND meet for lessons in smaller groups with kids working on the same concepts. I never saw it as something that would replace teachers, but something that allowed the teachers to focus on what the students needed instead of teaching a math class where some students were bored and others were completely in the dark.
You make some excellent points here
I have ways of dealing with diverse ability levels in my middle school history classes, though I don’t think they’d transfer to math classes. My mainstay is essentially lecture with cartoons projected with a document camera and digital projector. I pitch the content to the average student, but the clarity of exposition (particularly the simple bold pictures) carries the weaker students along. Along the way I throw in vocabulary, concepts and questions pitched to the top students to keep them stimulated and enriched. Thus everyone gets something out of the class.
I think if I were a math teacher I’d want ability level tracking. At our school most of the math students are lumped together and it sounds grim.
I suspect, Ponderosa, that it would be a great delight to sit in on some of your classes. I suspect that kids actually leave your classes knowing things that they didn’t know before. It’s sad to say how many classes there are, these days, in which that isn’t the case.
There is nothing wrong with using a tool such as a computer to help bridge the gaps among diverse learners. Elementary teachers have always regrouped for reading and sometimes math as well. The ambitious tech leaders will not be satisfied with an ancillary role. That is why they make the outlandish claims that computers can do it all. They make more money!
This is true. In our experience with our son’s “non-screened” school — in math classes with a very wide range of learners — “differentiated instruction” consists of this: Some kids finish their math work faster than other kids, so they then go to the back of the classroom and get more math problems to do. Their time gets occupied, but they don’t learn advanced material.
There is significant demand from parents for “streaming” in math at the school. The school administration’s response thus far is to say, in so many words, “no, that’s not our vision,” and then to repeat the same lip service about differentiated instruction.
So we do the only thing we can do: pay for a tutor to come to our apartment and teach my son more advanced math. And school remains an exercise in marking time for my son, like a boring office job.
Flerp!,
You might take a look at The Art of Problem Solving ( https://artofproblemsolving.com/ ). They target students who are bored in their traditional math classes. University math departments often have events for K-12 students. Making connections there can be helpful.
TE, I never imagined I would hear myself say this, but we are actually considering home schooling for 7th and 8th grades.
I suspect your son could thrive if he was in the type of School of One classroom I saw at MS 88. There were multiple teachers and not one per 100. Obviously the system can be mis-used, but the idea seemed worthwhile. There were some very bright kids who loved math who seemed to like it.
My kid is now in a different middle school that doesn’t have School of One but the students use iPads a lot in math class. The best thing about it is that my kid has had very little math homework because there is no need if kids are working problems in their math class. There might be math homework once a week at most and as a parent I applaud it.
I think School of One can work for Math but not necessarily for other subjects. And it must have the same relatively small teacher-student ratio as a regular math class — not be an excuse to put one teacher with 100 students. That is absurd and wrong.
Interesting to read the list of board members and advisors for this company–the usual suspects–representatives of the oligarchs, their minions from various Ed Deform front organizations, the Common [sic] Core [sic] State [sic] Standards [sic] guy Wilhoit. Pages and pages and pages of marketing hype which all boils down to the same claims made for programmed learning back in the 1960s and ’70s.
Evidently, Teach to One is not a single program of modules but, rather, a “blended-learning” program that combines sessions with human teachers and sessions on computers using software from a large number of companies. However, the software runs the show by determining, based on check tests, what instruction a given kid needs–work in a software module or a small-group session with a human teacher. So, it sounds like an improvement on the basic programmed learning approach to the extent that human teachers have a role to play. This might have some limited success in math classes but has the potential to be an utter disaster in ELA. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. One of the articles listed by Laura Chapman, above, describes a math class with one teacher and more than a hundred students. Aie yie ye.
Dear Ms. Haimson: That is one amazing article. Thank you. Fascinating.
There will be experimentation on the children of labor as long as there’s money to be made by the clique around ed “philanthropists”.
How democracy dies-
Bio’s of selected staff at the Charter School Growth Fund (1) Partner- Pahara Fellow, Broad resident, KIPP employee, BAEO board member (2) Exec.in Residence- KIPP and TFA, New Orleans recovery district (3) Director- Aspire, “scaled blended learning” (4) Principal- KIPP and TFA (5) Manager- City Year
NYC Welcome to Tulsa’s Hell
RECOMMENDATION: Renew the agreement with New Classrooms for the 2018-2019 school year authorizing New Classrooms to support the continued delivery of Teach to One: Math at schools listed below. Teach to One is a math program that is highly personalized and allows each student to move at their own pace. The agreement will renew in future fiscal years upon mutual ratification and appropriations by the district.
McLain Junior High
McLain High
Hale Junior High
Webster Middle
Webster High
COST: $683,000.00
FUND NAME/ACCOUNT: Grant Funds, 11-0224-2573-XXXXX-000-000000-000-05-005-0224
RATIONALE: This is a donor-funded program that has shown positive results in these schools. Last year participating schools saw student growth in math based on MAP scores. Many of the farthest behind students showed the greatest growth.
ECOMMENDATION: Renew the agreement with New Classrooms for school year 2017-2018 authorizing New Classrooms to support the continued delivery of Teach to One Math at McLain Junior High, McLain High School, Hale Junior High School, Webster Middle School, and Webster High School. The agreement will renew upon mutual ratification and appropriations by the district in future fiscal years.
FURTHER RECOMMEND: The attorneys for the school district prepare/approve the appropriate contract document(s) and the proper officers of the Board of Education be authorized to execute the document(s) on behalf of the district.
COST: $745,200
FUND NAME/ACCOUNT: Foundation for Tulsa Schools, 11-0224-2213-503600-000-000000-000-05-005-0224
RATIONALE: This is a donor-funded program that has shown positive results in these schools. Last year each school that participated in Teach to One math saw student growth in math based on MAP scores. We averaged four points growth from 6th grade math to Algebra 1. In many cases, this translates to a year’s growth for students who had not achieved such growth in multiple years. Many of the farthest behind students showed the greatest growth, for example McLain Algebra 1 students who arrived 4.5 years below grade level achieved an average six points growth. Programs such as Teach to One, that use a personalized approach to instruction and show promising results in their first year of implementation should leverage donor investment to determine their long term viability for student outcomes.
RECOMMENDATION: Enter into an agreement with New Classrooms, New York, New York, to implement its Teach to One: Math (TTO) personalized learning model at four TPS school (Clinton Middle School, Hale Junior High School and McLain Junior High and High School), beginning in the 2016-2017 school year.
FURTHER RECOMMEND: The attorneys for the School District prepare/approve the appropriate contract document(s) and the proper officers of the Board of Education be authorized to execute the document(s) on behalf of the District.
COST: Not to exceed $900,000 (donor funding – TBD)
RATIONALE: New Classrooms’ Teach to One: Math is a middle school math program that replaces a school’s traditional curriculum with an innovative personalized instructional model. Teach to One: Math, which serves students in grades 5-9, uses resources from multiple classrooms combined into a redesigned space to give each student a targeted, individualized learning experience. In this model, teachers and students move between different learning stations throughout a single 90-minute class period. Students may work on their own, in small groups, and with teachers on different skills at the same time. How and what each student learns, and when, is based on each student’s personalized learning plan, which is generated daily by a complex scheduling algorithm. Teachers use these plans to customize instruction based on each student’s learning style and academic proficiency. Instruction is delivered at the right academic level, using the most suitable instructional format, for each student, each day. These programmatic elements are determined by the unique TTO platform. The TTO platform is a suite of New Classrooms’ and third party software that includes the program’s scheduling algorithm, original content, assessment tools, and various other user benefits. New Classrooms proposes to work with TPS to support the implementation of TTO for the 2016-2017 school year and beyond. This first year will focus on the initial launch of the Teach to One program in four schools, with a focus on partnering with the district and the school’s team to implement the program with the highest of fidelity.
That’s another $2.3 Million wasted