Today, the New York Times posted a story about a rebellion in Kansas against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning platform.
They said NO to Facebook’s “personalized learning,” which replaces teachers with Chromebooks.
Good for the students of Kansas!
WELLINGTON, Kan. — The seed of rebellion was planted in classrooms. It grew in kitchens and living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents.
It culminated when Collin Winter, 14, an eighth grader in McPherson, Kan., joined a classroom walkout in January. In the nearby town of Wellington, high schoolers staged a sit-in. Their parents organized in living rooms, at churches and in the back of machine repair shops. They showed up en masse to school board meetings. In neighborhoods with no political yard signs, homemade signs with dark red slash marks suddenly popped up.
Silicon Valley had come to small-town Kansas schools — and it was not going well.
“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.
Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.
Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit’s program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.
Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad’s hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone.
“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son’s fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.
In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform…
The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit’s platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017.
Hello, Mark Zuckerberg! Students want teachers, not interfacing with computers!
“Personalized learning” means human interaction, not interfacing.
Summit, go away!
Epic cluelessness from the same article ABOVE:
All these reports about kids suffering, being damaged, and “turned into zombies” … those mean nothing to the creeps running this sh-tshow:
Diane Tavenner, a former teacher and Summit’s chief executive, founded a series of public charter schools starting in 2003 called Summit Public Schools and began developing software to use in the classrooms so that students could “unlock the power within themselves.” The resulting program, Summit Learning, is spinning out into a new nonprofit called T.L.P. Education. Ms. Tavenner said the Kansas protests were largely about nostalgia.
“There’s people who don’t want change. They like the schools the way they are,” she said. “The same people who don’t like Summit have been the sort of vocal opposition to change throughout the process.”
That’s Ms. Tavenner, earning her six-figure pay, while Kansas students and families suffer as a result.
Tavernner’s quote ABOVE sounds like one of the earliest arguments that tobacco execs used to make.
No, it’s not that late 1960’s pitch:
“Cigarettes are NOT BAD for year health.”
Way back when, their early 1960’s (and earlier) initial message was,
“Cigarettes are actually GOOD for your health.”
(Watch the first seasons of MAD MEN to see how that particular sausage was made.)
Incredibly, that’s the slop that Tavenner is trying to peddle.
Then again, perhaps it’s not so incredible, as she’s earning a huge salary to spew such baloney.
Computer instruction is the real “factory model” of education that DeVos accuses public schools of providing. I worked in a school that tried to meet the needs of different students. Through flexible groupings trained teachers bent over backwards to meet students’ needs. With charter drain many public schools are being presented with huge classes that make it impossible to teachers to meet students’ needs. Privatization is undermining the ability of public schools to do their best work.
Students should follow the students in Kansas and refuse a “zombie” education full of electronic worksheets and testing. Force your states to provide a meaningful education with trained, human teachers.
Great points.
“Factory model” is part of the arsenal of weaponized words used to discredit traditional public education. Betsy DeVos now uses this cudgel, but it was handed to her by the progressivists (the Dewey school of educational philosophy). Other examples: “rote learning”, “regurgitation”, “disconnected facts”, and “passive learning”. Just as Republicans have their well-worn slurs they use to discredit government (“nanny state”, etc.), influential members of the education world have polluted our minds with loaded words that form an ugly caricature of the kind of teacher-led, content-rich instruction that has proven its worth from time immemorial. The reasons for this disinformation campaign are varied; there are many reasons people might want to demolish an old institution.
I love Zuckerberg’s presumptuous claim that the computers free up teachers to do what “they do best: mentor”. Ha! How in the world does he know what we do best? Implicit in this claim is that we suck at the teaching part of teaching.
The Summit Program and others like it are properly called “instructional management systems.” These systems are being promoted internationally by IMS Global. IMS stands for Instructional Management Systems. The aim is to put everything possible about instruction into computer code within an internationally standardized system, then have IMS certified providers of products for these systems. The IMS certification is a customer’s guarantee that the products are “plug and play,” easy to upload and interoperable. IMS, started in 1997, was originally associated with EDUCAUSE. See the current EDUCAUSE agenda at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTjzT89YO0s
Summit is one example of the larger IMS Global program. These systems are gathering data on the assumption that all of the computer programers know exactly what any student needs to know, when, and whether “mastery” has been achieved. In some versions, badges are awarded for mastery. Those “competency-based programs,” are already available, not just in schools, but for awarding teacher professional development credits.
The National Center for Education Statistics is participating in this pretense of omniscient understanding of “what students need to know and be able to do.”
Here is one small part of this “future of learning” nightmare from the techies. CEDS ELEMENTS, computer coded aspects of instruction, with mention (for example) of the Bloom Taxonomies (1956) and Howard Gardner Multiple Intelligences (1983) https://ceds.ed.gov/elements.aspx
Here are some additional links
K-12 DIGITAL LEARNING REVOLUTION PROGRAM: https://www.imsglobal.org/background.html
IMS CERTIFIED PRODUCTS: https://clever.com/schools/ims-oneroster-standard ALSO https://www.getmagicbox.com/magicbox-launches-support-oneroster/
PLUG AND PLAY EDUCATION: Bill Gates http://www.livingindialogue.com/classroom-future-student-centered-device-centered/
See also Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE): This source shows how artificial intelligence—machine-based instruction—requires computer-coded “competencies.” https://www.imsglobal.org/introduction-case-competencies-and-academic-standards-exchange-case
Who are the major funders of IMS Global? For K-12 Education, apps, and data analytics plus higher education curriculum, the Platinum funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (all four categories). Other Platinum funders of K-12 curriculum are eLumen, Blackboard, Canvas, explorance, and intellify. Other Platinum funders of apps are Class Link and Safari; for data analytics
Vital Source. There are other Platinum funders. For One-Roster (plug and play) Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill, Pearson, and Renaissance.
Notes are from a powerpoint I presented last year… and likely more than you wanted to know.
The LMS started out, ofc, as simply a sort of online gradebook. But it has evolved in the imaginations of Ed Deformers into something like a Total Information Awareness program that would suck up grades, test scores, disciplinary records, health records, demographic data, IEP and 504 and LEP and other student classification data, and–beyond school, employee evaluations, certifications, and so on. These “visionaries” have even gone so far as to envision real-time monitoring and storage of degree of gritful student time on task and emotional responses via contraptions like wrist bracelets to measure galvanic skin response and glasses to track eye movements (I wish I were making this stuff up–the last of these was part of a Gates-funded Duncan-era USDE study). As currently envisioned by Deformers, the LMS is beginning to look a whole lot like the Chinese Social Credit system–a way to extend to the quotidian lives of ordinary people complete surveillance, command, and control. All this appeals to folks at the top of the New Feudal Order and especially to ones who are themselves somewhere on the spectrum and relate better to machines than to people and who wish that people would be a lot more machine-like. These folks aren’t going to let the InBloom vision die. Add to all this the emerging power of data-mining and artificial intelligence, and we can see that there is a real monster being cobbled together in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab.
And, ofc, that’s what Summit is. It’s an LMS that connects to depersonalized learning software and records information from it.
I am not suggesting that Summit does all those terrible things that an LMS of the future might do. Just to be clear about that.
And, ofc, the folks pushing the new era of interoperable digital standards for LMS systems see this stuff as cradle-to-grave–the resume and transcript will be replaced by material from the LMS (e.g., “badges”) that can be drilled into to any level of detail.
Might as well just call these Total Information Awareness systems.
scientia potentia est–knowledge is power
That could be the motto for this entire enterprise–the concentration of knowledge about citizens in the hands of a few power persons.
Sorry, Mr. Shepherd, but you are having ideas and showing initiative, either of which is grounds for termination as per section K-21-468-10, subparagraph 666a, of the Universal Employee Handbook and Cherry Motivational Guide. Please report to Rm 101.
cx: in the hands of a few powerful persons
Let me repeat that with the typos corrected:
scientia potentia est–knowledge is power
That could be the motto for this entire enterprise–the concentration of knowledge about citizens in the hands of a few powerful persons.
Sorry, Mr. Shepherd, but you are having ideas and showing initiative beyond your permissions levels, either of which is grounds for termination as per section K-21-468-10, subparagraph 666a, of the Universal Employee Handbook and Cheery Motivational Guide. Please report to Rm 101.
Mrs Zuckerburg, as a pediatrician, knows the fallacy of on-line learning. She knows the developmental issues involved with reduced human contact. No doubt money is her driver. My children would have never gone to her for medical needs. Parents should boycott her practice, what goes around should come around to these two. They clearly ignore what is best for kids and instead chase the almighty dollar.
Did Z-berg’s wife ever practice? Or, did she just take a coveted spot in a medical school, graduate, abandon the career and then, subsequently pretend she has expertise?
Mark should hire the PR firm that created a reputation for Bill Gates’ wife that she doesn’t deserve
Zuckerberg’s wife did practice, working as a pediatrician at San Francisco General Hospital. The misguided and destructive uses of Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative money can’t be blamed on her lack of experience.
How long did she practice?
Chan can’t have practiced very long — she’s young and certainly isn’t in practice anymore. Just noting, to be fair, that she did at some point.
According to Heavy, Chan’s Linked in account states 2015-2017 she worked at a hospital named after Z-berg and, during that same period, she was CEO of the Primary School where she taught and, she founded the Chan-Z-berg initiative. Multitasking?
This may be the same hospital that petitioned the city of S.F. to remove Z-berg’s name because of FB scandals
Wouldn’t America be better off if Z-berg had married a bimbo? The nation could have, then, had a practicing doctor. The country’s
students, hopefully, wouldn’t be subjected to the Harvard arrogance that leads a woman to use her husband’s money to inflict machine learning on students far removed from their castle in places where they pay no taxes for the schools.
Steve Wynn’s ex-wife wife seemed sincere when she took over the helm of Nevada’s state’s public education department.
Anybody know of a practicing doctor who in the first two years after residency had time to teach in a primary school, run it and, found a billion dollar foundation?
The calls to remove Zuckerberg’s name from S.F. General:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/SF-politician-wants-to-remove-Mark-Zuckerberg-s-13429100.php
“‘[Dealing with Zuckerberg] rarely comes without some bumps in the road [see Cambridge Analytica]’ said Gordon Mohn, McPherson’s superintendent of schools. He added, ‘Students are becoming self-directed [protesters] and are demonstrating greater ownership of their [hijacked schools by protesting].’”
There will never be an algorithm for teaching. Period.
Hijacked is a perfect word for what is happening. Computer instruction is rote and deadly dull. AI cannot replace teachers because real teaching is too complex with lots of nuanced applications. Frankly, developing students need human contact as people are by nature social beings. The best learning occurs in a social setting in my opinion.
Grand theft schola.
exactly
Bravo! Must be done by ALL students nationwide.
& the same goes for “standardized” testing.
A good way to get exercise (that students will not get {&, oh, we have an obesity epidemic, do we?!} when students sit at computers all day)–walk out. RUN out.
& just ask opthamologists how great for the eyes it is to stare at computer screens all day & the, again, to do homework.
Citizens in Kansas, Connecticut, Penn. and Brooklyn should find out about SETDA’s state department of education employees. Gates funds SETDA which
fosters public-private partnerships, promotes digital learning and “takes action on important issues facing public education”. SETDA provides opportunities for organizations to showcase products, offers “high energy pitch fests” for ed tech start-ups and seminars to help scale up.
A former SETDA director said they lobby, implying they lobby government. Who are the state employees lobbying for, themselves, their “gold, silver, event and strategic partners” or, SETDA’s funder, Bill Gates?
At SETDA’s site, it lists states that have mandates to implement digital instructional materials and other comparisons that would be helpful to marketers.
A difference between SETDA and ALEC is ALEC is elected officials not, state employees. Both organizations claim to be non-partisan but, are there any Democrats in ALEC?
Better yet, Mark Zuckerberg go away, leave the planet and never return and take Summit and Facebook with you and infect an alien race that lives on another planet orbiting another star. If justice prevails, the aliens will eat you and anyone on your starship with you.
More like Nadir Learning.
Contemporary Online Learning Programs Are Behaviorist Programmed Learning Brought Back from the Dead–Put a Stake in Them before They Take Over Your Kid’s School
Sometimes it is overt, and sometimes it is hidden and not so obvious, but most of these new “personalized” learning software programs are implementations of an approach to instruction 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 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 programs are 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 don’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 new 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. Still not wine. Drinking it will make you sick.
It’s also not surprising that the oligarchs (Gates, for example) love this stuff. It’s 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.
And it’s because these programs do some minor individuation based on pretesting that they are given the Orwellian NewSpeak name “personalized learning.” Replace teachers with machines and call this personalization. Only a speaker of Reformish (one of the Goblish languages) could use such a term, for this junk, with a straight face.
Considering that Bill Gates father was a leader in the Eugenics movement and his son clearly thinks the same way, this should not be a surprise.
“Bill Gates, Monsanto, and eugenics: How one of the world’s wealthiest men is actively promoting a corporate takeover of global agriculture” …
“If you control agriculture, you control the population of the world.”
http://www.thelibertybeacon.com/bill-gates-monsanto-and-eugenics-how-one-of-the-worlds-wealthiest-men-is-actively-promoting-a-corporate-takeover-of-global-agriculture/
Lloyd, your link is to a site run by crazies, and they call Gates’s father a Eugenicist because a) he has had some involvement with Planned Parenthood and b) Planned Parenthood was founded as an organization to assist The American Birth Control League, which was founded by Margaret Sanger, the birth control pioneer, who also happened to be a Eugenicist, as were many prominent intellectuals of her day, including George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. I have lots of issues with what Gates has done to U.S. education, but it doesn’t help the Resistance to make these kinds of claims.
I was in a hurry when I found that link.
Yeah, I totally understand, Lloyd. Btw, are you writing any more novels? Love your work!
Thank you for asking. Yes, I am working on more novels. I have two finished drafts that are both going through revisions, and I plan to turn both of them into a series.
One is a Science Fiction-Fantasy series called “Becoming Merlin”. It’s already gone through five revisions and is in its sixth. It’s a hard one to write but I like the concept and refuse to give up.
The second book was sort of an accident. It’s called “The Patriot Oath”.
“The Patriot Oath” was an unplanned story that sprouted when I decided to try turning the weekly writing prompts from my two VA, PTSD writing support groups into a story with the same characters. “The Patriot Oath” has a military theme and is set in 2018. Considering that my writing groups are made up of combat vets with PTSD, I had lots of support writing this one. There’s is even a PTSD service dog in the story called Audie Murphy and a PTSD counselor called Doctor Tate or Dr. T to her patients and Dr. T served more than twenty years in the airforce before she retired and earned her Ph.D. to become a counselor working out of the vet centers. Dr. T is modeled after a real PTSD counselor at the vet center I go to. She’s very popular among the former Special Forces troops she works with.
The main character served in Special Forces for more than twenty years, and Dr. T is his doc, but he left the military to become a private military contractor who lives his life by the oath he took as an officer in the military.
At first, I thought these stories were all going to be separate but with the same characters. Each week, I took the two prompts and wrote another scene based on those prompts, but eventually “The Patriot Oath” took on a life of its own and I never knew where it was going, up to the Epilogue. In fact, I didn’t even know the novel was going to have an Epilogue until I wrote it. That one will be the next book I publish. Revisions are necessary to make sure the storyline stays consistent. I have lots of patching to do to make that happen.
Here’s are the first few sentence in “The Patriot Oath”.
“Josh Cooper was on his way home for the first time in twenty-three years, because his younger sister had been raped. When Josh joined the United States Marines at eighteen after graduating from high school, he didn’t plan on returning home to Montana.” …
Josh Cooper started out as a Marine Corps sniper scout and then became a Navy Seal.
They both sound fascinating, Lloyd. Great opening!
Thank you.
These online programs have a couple of legitimate roles to play:
a. As occasional reinforcement or remediation
b. As a fallback means of instruction in extremely remote parts of the world where well-trained teachers are not available
c. As resources to be used by highly motivated adults who are willing to slog through them (few are)
But as a steady diet for instruction, they are dreadful. I’ve seen this time after time after time. First the hype. Then the initial excitement. And then the kids would, after a few days, rather sit through a lecture by David Coleman or have their teeth drilled than to do another module.
Bad idea.
When will Ed Deformers learn that how people tick–waht actually motivates them–matters in this business of education?
cx: “a couple,” above, s/b ” a few”; “waht” s/b “what.” Sorry. It was a hastily written note.
So agree … tech is an adjunct and really can only be that…it should not be used as primary instruction.
I wonder how much failure it will take before these folks who think they can do mostly ed tech get a clue?
The Ed Tech vampires don’t care how much failure there is because teaching students to learn is not their goal. Their goal is to keep their tech companies alive and profitable. They are desperate to keep money flowing into their bank accounts and the war on public education is only a money-raising scheme that comes with a warlike propaganda campaign full of misinformation and lies to help them win.
Trump is the only vampire out there that worships wealth and is addicted to power. To these vampires, nothing else counts … nothing.
For instance, IBM Posts Flat Revenue, Falling Hardware Sales.
https://www.cio.com/article/2397087/ibm-posts-flat-revenue-falling-hardware-sales.html
Yeah, the old snake oil salesman shtick. Sell your cure-all for cancer and bug bites and skedaddle out of town just ahead of the law.
One of the things standing in the way of the tech Industry’s plans to control education is the workforce. Specifically: a highly trained and experienced (two go hand in hand) workforce.
The procurement, maintenance, and disposal of tech hardware, software, and subscriptions is an expensive and self-perpetuating business. Removing a good living wage with benefits (aka: collective bargaining) from the teachers’ lives makes the situation much easier for the tech pushers.
Then of course there’s the fact that so many of these “reformers” just simply don’t like unions in the first place and have made it their unhidden mission to destroy them…
I was the tech guy for the six sites I work at for more than a decade. All of my PD’s would stress the use of technology as PART of every lesson. I would model teaching a class in this manner. It worked.
That’s the ironic and, it would seem, devious twist to this whole story. When technology was first introduced to the schools it was billed as a wonderful tool for the teacher. This has changed quite a bit over the years, to the point where, now, the teacher is expected to be the tool of the technology.
For those of you who are on the fence on this subject, please know that what I’m saying is not just idle conjecture or theory. I have witnessed this progression first hand, from the beginning and actually felt the need to apologize to my colleagues for being such a big part of the tech rollout that now threatens our profession.
The technology centered classroom is not an acceptable (much less, superior) alternative to one that revolves around a human being (aka: teacher) working with the children.
I’ve never seen an example of “personalized learning” for language arts so I shouldn’t talk. But I laugh at the very concept every time Word “helps” me write. No insight into grammar at all. Any part of speech will do in any context as long as it’s spelled correctly.
Inquisitively laminated, Bretree5! As bullhorns waft, obsequious potboilers triangulate boastfully when, that is, gelatinous poseurs excoriate calligraphies expectantly!
New Learning Software (Now with Personalized Avatars!)
Day One: Cool! OK, how come this isn’t working? Oh, OK. Thanks! How do I change the background color?
Day Two: I finished the thing, and it gave me three more! The videos are kinda interesting. Yeah, if you’re a total dork. It’s not that bad. Beats listening to Mr. Shepherd drone on about commas and Mary freaking Shelley. It says I’m not connecting. Try again later. This is so stupid.
Day Three: Please, Mr. Shepherd. Let’s do something else. What do you mean we have to do this? It totally sucks. How many of these modules are there? The WHOLE YEAR? You’re kidding. No way.
Day Four: I’;m not doing it. No way. C’mon, Mr. Shepherd. Let’s do Mary Shelley again. Mr. Shepherd should freaking marry Mary Shelley. Really, Mr. Shepherd? Yay!!!!
Here, for your amusement, is a little Devil’s Dictionary of Reformish that I’ve been working on: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/category/ed-reform/
Oops, here’s the link to the Devil’s Dictionary of Reformish: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/from-the-reformish-lexicon/
Dear tech billionaires, hedge fund managers, et al.
Please stop being solutions looking for problems. Your medicine has become the disease—and your kids certainly do not have to endure what you have so arrogantly imposed on schools. We got this.
Love, teachers
AMEN!
Exactly…
Any time I see Mark Zuckerberg offer something for free, I immediately think of data mining. A few years ago I staffed one of two bills to protect student privacy that were ultimately signed into law in California. That process taught me how to spot the loopholes in the privacy statements and terms of use that companies like SL use. I describe a few on my blog at 5ivepoints.net.
Thanks for letting us know about the blog.
SETDA, funded by Gates, which advocates for public-private partnerships, has a privacy statement ostensibly written by state board of education directors of technology (a collective of all 50 states). The SETDA association purports to be governed by public employees. But, to me, the site content looks crafted by Gates or the tech industry. If Gates and tech firms wanted to set up an ALEC- type operation, would it look like SETDA? One reply I got to a question said the organization had saved the state a bunch of money. So, is that the camel’s inducement to be allowed in the tent? Not good for a democracy.
A former SETDA director stated that the association lobbies which raises the question, for whom? – a funder, Gates, the “gold, silver, event and strategic partners” or, the collective of public employees.
If you have time, does SETDA’s privacy statement look like it has loopholes?
This is an example of the breathless adoration Summit it treated with inside ed reform:
https://www.the74million.org/article/andrew-goldin-named-new-director-of-summit-learning-spin-off-t-l-p-education/
They all promote it without hesitation, discussion or criticism if any kind.
Of course public school families are raising objections. No one had ever looked at it critically before.
The ed reform echo chamber lock-step endorsed it, without a shred of evidence that any of it had any value.
Why do public schools insist on taking orders from ed reform billionaires? Why do they fall for every ed reform gimmick and fad that is sold to them? Stop taking direction from people who don’t value our schools or our students. That’s not a good plan.
We’re going to turn education over to Facebook? Really? Is that wise? The same corporation who regularly mislead and cheat their users, advertisers and customers should be entrusted with 50 million public school students?
That’s more than naive. It’s so reckless and irresponsible all the adults selling this should be fired.
Public school students are now an experimental population for Facebook, and that’s a-ok with all of ed reform? What are they thinking? Or, have they stopped thinking because they’re all getting tens of millions in “grants” from Zuckerberg?
It’s really a perfect description of ed reform’s approach to public schools.
First they gut the public school budgets and leave them reeling and desperate. Then they parachute in with some cheap gimmick to “save” the schools they just gutted.
Why don’t they just restore funding to Kansas schools? They could just undo the damage they did and the public school kids would at least end up even instead of worse of.
Years ago, Bill Gates gave a talk in which he pointed out that the costs in public schools were all in facilities and in teacher’s salaries. Depersonalized learning is an answer to that–put 500 students in a room with computers and a single proctor. It’s good enough for Prole children.
“Years ago, Bill Gates gave a talk in which he pointed out that the costs in public schools were all in facilities and in teacher’s salaries.”
Bill Gates isn’t the only autocratic oligarch that thinks this way. The U.S. is ranked 7th in the world for the density of robots replacing human jobs.
“US robot density now more than double that of China”
https://ifr.org/ifr-press-releases/news/us-robot-density-now-more-than-double-that-of-china-ifr-says
It’s as if people like Bill Gates does not see workers like teachers as humans. What he sees are numbers that he wants to reduce because human workers cost money.
I want to propose that we “replace” everyone worth $100-million or more with a robot.
A very interesting book could be written, however, on the parallels between Eugenics and Ed Deform. Both really bad ideas, founded in pseudoscience, supported by lots of wealthy patrons, leading to horrific consequences.
And, ofc, both obsessively “data driven.” LOL. Francis Galton was, among other things, a statistician, but the conclusions he drew could not reasonably be drawn from his data. So, in effect, what he was doing was numerology. And that’s what the Ed Deform people have been doing is well. Their “data,” based on these unreliable, invalid high-stakes summative standardized tests, doesn’t support the conclusions they draw from it or the decisions they make based on it, just as the policies of the Nazis were not supported by the Eurgenics “data” prepared by people like Galton and Harry H. Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs Harbor, L.I.
Pseudosciences, based on bad “data,” leading to social experiments with horrific consequences. History repeats itself.
There’s an old joke about replacing CEOs with Magic 8 Balls that say, Yes – definitely; As I see it, yes; Outlook good; Ask again later; Cannot predict now; Don’t count on it; My reply is no; My sources say no; Outlook not so good; or Very doubtful. Would the company fare as well? My Magic 8 Ball says, “It is decidedly so.”
Issac Asimov saw this coming, many decades ago, in his lovely little short story “The Fun They Had.”
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education.
Zuckerberg gets worse by the minute.
I’d like to see this TED Talks go viral:
Extraordinarily chilling. How much did Russia pay for those FB ads?
“Extraordinarily chilling. How much did Russia pay for those FB ads?”
Right…or whoever?
And the concept that FB is above the law…
I’ve been hearing about this subject for awhile, but the way she lays it out really nails it on the head.
The newly found prosperity of that town, due to their cooperation with the EU, was rendered meaningless by the specifically targeted propaganda campaign that was waged through FB. Then move on to the Trump campaign. Just a few buddies getting together and sharing notes.
“Chilling” is an apt description.
Thank you for that video. So powerful!
You’re welcome, Bob. As I said: I’m hoping it goes viral and am doing my part to help that along.
This was a coordinated attempt to undermine the EU and NATO, as was the social media campaign for the benefit of Trump. This is blindingly obvious. And in both cases, this was accomplished largely by stirring up anti-immigrant feeling. It’s the same disinformation campaign, in different contexts, but with the same purpose.
According to AdAge.com, Russia spent $1.25 million per month on ads – dated February 2018
“Those involved spent some $1.25 million per month on ad campaigns and measured their efforts much as an ad agency would, according to the indictment. It says the group kept track of metrics like views and comments, and measured engagement.”
https://adage.com/article/digital/russia-spent-1-25m-ads-acted-agency-mueller/312424
The membership of the Facebook board is proof that the corporation can not be redeemed.
Marc Andreesen, Peter Thiel, Reed Hastings, the CEO of the Gates Foundation, Mark Z-berg and Sheryl Sandberg.
I am against the tech giants coming into the public K-12 context without any educational mindset and any attempts to replace offline schooling with online learning. But this does not necessarily mean that I am against any attempt to introduce online learning platforms to the school settings. First and foremost, I am still optimistic about the future of online learning platforms as they can democratize the learning, which I mean they tend to provide high-quality lectures to the vast number of audiences. I think an online platform can complement offline learning when it was well organized. The problem comes more from the business mindset and poor connection to the offline classrooms and teachers, but it still requires more time to adjust to it. Students are not used to computer-based learning as they spent and invested most of the time for offline learning. That is the same whenever there are recurrent research findings saying that handwriting and paper books guarantee better learning than computer devices. I don’t agree with such an argument as that is only a reflection of our established learning habit, where our education has invested a lot to structure their learning in that way. We can modify the online learning platforms to create a better hybrid system and train the teachers and mentors to fix this problem. Students need to have successful experience of using online learning platform at their K-12 education because, at the post-secondary education setting, self-directed online learning is essential to develop their skills and enjoy their lifelong learning. See the article about how the previous successful online learning experience promotes better online learning afterward. (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01587919.2013.835779)