The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is outraged that The Audacious Project is honoring the Waterford online preschool program, which will use this platform to expand their efforts to open additional online preschools. Early childhood experts agree that this is harmful to children. I say it is a mean and stupid idea. Efforts to put little children in online schools should be denounced, not celebrated. Children need real interaction with real human beings.
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For Immediate Release
Contact:
David Monahan, CCFC: david@commercialfreechildhood.org; (617) 896-9397
Early Childhood Advocates Call On The Audacious Project to Reconsider Major Award for Online Preschool
A TED philanthropy project would widen educational inequality and deprive children of the hands-on preschool experiences they deserve.
BOSTON, MA – April 12, 2019 – Early childhood advocates are calling on The Audacious Project, housed at TED and designed to fund ideas for social change, to postpone plans to designate Waterford UPSTART, an online “preschool” program, as one of the participants in its funding program for 2019. Award winners will be announced at TED2019 in Vancouver on April 16. Last year’s award winners averaged $63 million in new funding. According to a Waterford representative, the funding will allow UPSTART to dramatically increase the number of children enrolled in its program.
In their call for The Audacious Project to postpone funding, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) and Defending the Early Years (DEY) point to their October 2018 Position Statement on Online Preschool, which has been endorsed by more than 100 experts in child development and early education. The experts and advocates say that online preschool programs like UPSTART are poor substitutes for high-quality early education, and that funding online programs instead of high-quality early education will make inequality worse, not better.
“There is a tremendous need for universal pre-K, and it’s admirable that The Audacious Project wants to address educational inequalities, but online preschool is not the answer,” said Nancy Carlsson-Paige, EdD, Professor Emerita at Lesley University and DEY Senior Advisor. “Kids learn by playing, exploring, and interacting with peers and caring adults – not by memorizing letters, numbers, and colors presented to them on screens. Children who receive UPSTART’s screen-based version of a preschool experience will be disadvantaged compared to children from more resourced communities who have play-based, experiential early education. A truly audacious project would take the funding intended for these online programs and direct it instead to giving low-income, rural, or otherwise underserved children the high quality, face-to-face education they deserve.”
UPSTART, which started with public funding from the state of Utah and has spread to at least seven other states, claims to promote “kindergarten readiness” through 15 – 20 minutes per day of online instruction. But advocates say that UPSTART’s lessons are poorly designed and developmentally inappropriate. An analysis of one UPSTART lesson by DEY found it was pedagogically unsound, “confusing” and “overloaded with distracting images.” UPSTART also recommends that children wear headphones and complete lessons alone, contrary to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendation that parents “co-view with your children [and] help children understand what they are seeing.”
“Online preschool should never be rewarded or considered a legitimate alternative to high-quality early care and education,” said Denisha Jones, PhD, JD, Director of Teacher Education at Trinity Washington University and Director of Organizing for DEY. “I implore The Audacious Project to reconsider giving money to a screen-based program at a time where early childhood experts are increasingly concerned with screen time and the loss of high-quality interactions between children and educated early childhood teachers. Programs like UPSTART may be less expensive than real universal preschool, but those savings come at the expense of the low-income kids and kids of color they purport to help. We should be investing our money, time, and resources to ensure all children have access to affordable, high-quality, early childhood education.”
Last year, seven of The Audacious Project designees were granted a total of $441 million from partners including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. It is not yet known which groups are funding UPSTART, or exactly how much money the program will receive, but an email from a Waterford PR representative indicated that the award will be enough to “provide an opportunity for every four-year-old to be ready for kindergarten.” (Emphasis in original.)
The DEY/CCFC letter pointedly states, “We don’t believe your impressive list of funders and partners would be satisfied if their own children spent 75 minutes a week on a computer in isolation as a substitute for face-to-face preschool rooted in caring relationships and social interaction.” It also warns that a major expansion of online preschool could derail the growing movement for real universal preschool. It asks The Audacious Project to postpone the award and meet with advocates to better understand their concerns.
Added Josh Golin, Executive Director of CCFC, “Over and over, we’ve seen educational technology such as 1:1 programs, virtual charter schools, and personalized learning software falsely marketed as a panacea for inequality. Now the EdTech evangelists have set their sights on preschoolers. Isolated children on computers guided by algorithms can never replicate the joyful exploration and interactions at the core of the preschool experience. We urge The Audacious Project to rethink this award.”
The DEY/CCFC letter can be read in full here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Fraudacious Project?
All that is audacious is not necessarily worthy. This award is backed by a number of foundations led by disruptors including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We have witnessed a number of Gates’ unworthy, audacious plans go up in flames.
I recently saw an interview with billionaire, Ray Dalio. He was talking about innovation. When middle America hears the words “disruption or innovation,” they understand that large numbers of people will be put out of work. Dalio believes in education, and he has donated to charter schools and TFA in the past. Upon further investigation, he has withdrawn his support for these organizations. He is now donating $100 million to the public schools in Connecticut. However, the governor is going to use the money for more public-private “disruption,” perhaps social impact investing. The disruptors are looking for cheap, easy, often technology driven, shortcuts to address poverty. Unfortunately, their projects fail to understand human nature or in this case child development. We all would be better off if we had collected more tax from these disruptors instead of allowing them to redesign our education system with horrible ideas and repeatedly use our young people as guinea pigs. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6891183/Connecticut-receives-100-million-donation-education.html
It’s very ironic.
Originally, disruption had a very negative connotation.
It is only very recently (due to some Hawvid business school clown) that it has been adopted as the be all and end all of everything from business to education.
It should be obvious to anyone with even two neurons in their head that not everything disruptive is good.
But the two neuron requirement may well rule out the originator of the disruption business model
Or maybe they have two (or more) neurons but they are simply not connected.
Disruption is the theme of my new book.
The vampires behind on-line preschools are beyond disgusting. They are inhuman. They are monsters. And yes, they would happily support someone like MAGA want-to-be today’s Hitler, Donald Trump.
“Gray Matters: Too Much Screen Time Damages the Brain:
“Neuroimaging research shows excessive screen time damages the brain.”
“But what about kids who aren’t “addicted” per se? Addiction aside, a much broader concern that begs awareness is the risk that screen time is creating subtle damage even in children with “regular” exposure, considering that the average child clocks in more than seven hours a day (Rideout 2010). As a practitioner, I observe that many of the children I see suffer from sensory overload, lack of restorative sleep, and a hyperaroused nervous system, regardless of diagnosis—what I call electronic screen syndrome. These children are impulsive, moody, and can’t pay attention—much like the description in the quote above describing damage seen in scans.”
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-wealth/201402/gray-matters-too-much-screen-time-damages-the-brain
Are you ready to learn what is behind the increase in mass killings with semi-automatic weapons?
The answer is: Too much screen time starting at an early age. We are always going to have mentally sick people that are capable of murder but today we are raising our children to be more at risk of joining that group.
“These children are impulsive, moody, and can’t pay attention—much like the description in the quote above describing damage seen in scans.”
Then throw in violent video games, and we have a horrid storm, a polar vortex of anger.
“Violent video games make children more violent”
“Other studies have considered longitudinal effects, where individuals have been followed over time and video game play at point A has been related to aggression at later point B, both in the lab and also in real life; the more violent play individuals engaged in, the steeper the increase in aggressive behaviour[ix].”
http://www.educationalneuroscience.org.uk/resources/neuromyth-or-neurofact/violent-video-games-make-children-more-violent/
Suicide rates are much higher in adolescents as well. This may be due to too much screen time. A cyber program for toddlers is absurd. I hope the children just get up and walk away.
Very young children are not likely to object to screen time. They trust adults. Even those who are not acting in their best interest.
I don’t think you have to be a psychologist or neuroscientist to recognize this.
I have observed the same sort of impulsiveness, moodiness , anger and even violence (directed at inanimate objects, luckily) in adolescents associated with screen time, particularly games like Fortnite.
And I have also noticed that much of the online instruction (eg, for homework problems) is just junk, no better than it was decades ago when computer aided instruction was first introduced. The programmers and computer “scientists” (sic) who come up with the stuff have no knowledge of teaching and no imagination. They keep recycling the same old garbage.
Singer-songwriter Grace VanderWaal ended up being an online student for a full year after she won America’s Got Talent in 2016 at the age of 12 and landed a recording contract with Columbia Records.
In interviews, Grace said online schooling didn’t work for her and she returned to a brick and mortar classroom after that year where she didn’t learn much at all because it was so easy to avoid doing the work. She said maybe online schooling will work for the few who set goals and make themselves log on and get the work done on time every day, but it wasn’t for her.
That one year off turned her into a lover of going to school with children her own age. She now attends an exclusive private school near her home because that school makes allowanced for her time off when she is working – concerts, movies, modeling, interviews, TV appearances, attending award ceremonies.
Grace turned 15 in January and is in her 9th grade year of school.
Here’s is one of her own songs. She wrote it when she was 12 and the song was used in a Windex Commercial with her 12-year-old voice.
“…she didn’t learn much at all because it was so easy to avoid doing the work.” And thousands of teachers, IF ASKED, would echo this: giving kids open time to finish work on a computer is more often than not a disastrous idea.
A totally online school is just a dumb idea because it eliminates one of the most important aspects of education: social interaction.
It’s no surprise that much of the online instruction has been produced by people who are social misfits and who pursued the career path they did precisely to avoid human interaction.
These are the folks like Bill Gates who spent their formative adolescents years in the computer lab interacting with a computer rather than with people.
They don’t know how to interact with humans (only with machines), so it is not clear why we should let our children use the stuff that they have designed (supposedly) for education.
Are you inferring that Bill Gates is human? I didn’t know Bill Gates was human. I thought he belonged to the same species MAGA Man and all the members of ALEC sprouted from.
In fact, it is pretty clear that we should not.
Research shows technology can be useful with highly motivated students that want to learn discrete information or tasks. That is why Youtube videos can be helpful in training someone to install a dishwasher, for example. On-line instruction is mostly a stimulus-response, electronic workbook. It is fine for procedural tasks and special operations in computer science, math or even grammar in a language. It will not work with very young or poor students that need human interaction and encouragement. Technology also does not work well instruction for the big ideas in literature or social sciences.
My son did very well with his on-line courses, but they bored him to tears. He was a motivated learner that stuck with them. He found his instructor led courses to be much more interesting and engaging.
This award is a small part of a much larger problem. I recommend the following website for some really scary stuff in the works, especially preschool slippers that track some biometrics and sociometrics and other gear. Start here and follow some of the other tech moves into survellience systems and pure entertainment for pre-schoolers designed to be addictive for each user via algorithms https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/09/13/our-future-as-social-machines/
I call this “CHILD TRAFFICKING!”
Are the people promoting this abomination insane? The ONLY point of sending your children to preschool is to give them the opportunity to have supervised interactions with other children so that they can learn some social skills. Some early literacy (sounds/letters,etc.) and early math (counting) is okay in kindergarten, but it is not really necessary before then. Preschoolers should be playing. I didn’t have any academic education until kindergarten and I did just fine. In fact, my half day kindergarten class was mostly free play, organized group games, singing, and art. Before I started school, my parents read to me, but that was about it.
Where is the petition? I could not find a link to it.