Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports that the Chan-Zuckerberg tech-based schools called Summit have been underreporting the percent of schools that quit their program every year.
After multiple news reports of high school students walking out in protest against the Summit tech platform, Summit responded by saying that only 10% of schools leave every year. That figure, writes Barnum, was widely reported.
Summit has led the “movement” for “personalized learning,” which is in fact “depersonalized learning.” To be personalized, there must be interaction between at least two persons, not interaction between a computer and a student.
Barnum writes:
When nearly 100 students walked out of their Brooklyn high school in protest last year, saying they were spending too much of their days in front of a computer, the story took off.
The students were complaining about their school’s use of Summit Learning, a curriculum and online learning system backed byFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the organizations behind Summit pushed back, saying the issues raised by the Brooklyn students weren’t representative of what was happening at the nearly 400 schools using the program.
One piece of evidence they offered: just 10% of schools quit using the platform each year, a number that ended up in multiple newsstories.
New data obtained by Chalkbeat — from Summit itself, in response to a public records request — shows that figure is misleading. Since the platform was made available, 18% of schools using it in a given year had quit using it a year later.
Asked about the discrepancy, a Summit spokesperson explained that its 10% figure comes from averaging the dropoff rates for each of the first three years. The number of schools adopting the platform was 19 in the first year and 338 in the third year, so Summit’s approach is skewed heavily in favor of the first year’s low attrition number.
Looking just at schools that signed on to the platform last school year, a quarter of them are no longer using Summit this year.
The Brooklyn walkout was one among many and a bellwether for the future. Students want human teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are some few teachers who love the high tech stuff. These are the ones who are totally burned out and embrace an opportunity to put the kids on the machines and diddle around. But the rest of them are wise to this stuff. They’ve seen it over and over and over again. All the hype. Then the precipitous decline in interest on the part of the students. Then the rebellion. Diane’s last line, above, says it all.
First we had the Stepford Wives. Now we have the Chromebook Kids.
All with a similar affect: disinterest, apathetic, jaded, and yes, wise to the indifference shown by adults who think more screen time is a good thing. Even while they diddle around, down deep, the kids know better than the adults who fell for the tech-ed explosion.
LMAO. Indeed! The kids are really wise to this. They know who loves this stuff.
The total hours per day that the average kid spends on a smart phone, Chromebook, laptop, and X-Box should be setting off a five alarm warning to the adults in charge. Unfortunately, too many of them can’t put down their phones long enough to notice.
You mention The Stepford Wives. I am a big fan of Ira Levin, whose work is generally dismissed by critics as too popular and lowbrow. But I think him a master of a certain kind of fiction writing. I rarely write about popular literature, but here’s a fan piece dealing with Rosemary’s Baby. I recently reread all of Levin and watched his movie again. Superb. https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/rosemarys-baby-a-review/
Bob
Walk down the hallway of any public school, peer into the classrooms and they almost all look the same. Kids on Chromebooks held in an electronic, pixilated trance; many of them straying to play games, send snapchats, or view funny videos.
I honestly believe that smart phone use should legislated out of the hands of children and adolescents. At age 21 you earn the legal right to the adult smart phone. Apple can create a “Kids Phone” for parents who insist that they are necessary for emergency contacts. No internet, no camera, just texting.
Levin’s method was to apply to really far-out topics (witches’ covens, Nazi geneticists, robot spouses) a realist/documentarian style in which you let the characters’ words and actions speak for themselves, without the intrusion of authorial/narrator commentary or loaded language or internal monologue. It works exceptionally well. He was very, very good at writing in this way.
I hear you, Rage. And as a teacher, I’ve seen this up close and personal. However, I’m not so sure. We certainly need a national discussion, and a lot of solid research, on the effects of screentime. In my school, we dealt with this by banning smartphones from the classroom except when teachers authorize their use for a particular purpose. This worked, usually.
I think it doubtless true that there has been a decline, among high-achieving students, of reading of substantive books. When I was a young man, if you went to a college town, there were tons of bookstores selling trade books (not textbooks) for independent reading, and most kids were carrying around with them, in addition to their textbooks, something they were reading for enjoyment. Not so today.
But I also think that there is a new kind of literacy emerging. Kids are not reading deeply, but they are reading a lot online, and this gives them considerable breadth. They know a little about a lot rather than a lot about a little. I suspect that there is a new kind of literacy emerging and that we need to know much more about it than we actually do right now. There are some interesting phenomena afoot that we don’t read much about. For example, on social media, there is a lot of social sanction. When someone says something racist or sexist or homophobic, others pounce on this person, and so the young people I encounter tend to have very tolerant, progressive attitudes, and this is borne out by survey studies. This phenomenon, I think, ameliorates an opposing tendency, for people online to become isolated online in their ideological Galapagos Islands.
Rage: before you outlaw smart phones, consider Grace, who carefully took photos of every problem I demonstrated in Geometry class, went home and tried to understand each one, and returned the next day with questions that evidenced that she had done this. Tools are tools, dangerous or not.
Roy
Never use an exception to prove a rule.
Can I counter that with sixth graders sexting each other?
There have been some studies done. When reading a screen instead of paper, one’s eyes wander across the page more aimlessly and skip more words, and less is remembered afterward. The brain goes into a sort of distracted zombie mode, not just when looking at a screen, but even when a screen is known to be present in the room. Then there are the hidden costs, such as the loss of privacy, the loss of authors’ freedom and the diversity of literature because when Zucks or Bezos gets to direct our attention to authors they choose we wind up reading only articles about the greatness of Zucks and Bezos. I’ve been given online textbooks with articles about how brilliant Gates’ invention of emoticons was and about how Twitter is “changing the world” for the better by allowing people [one named Donald] to communicate in short texts. And then there are the distractions you both mentioned… including pornography, violence, and hate. And the vision problems, the headaches, the dizziness and nausea.
Give me a chalkboard and chalk. Give me paper, pens and pencils. Give me paperbacks and hardcovers. Give me the freedom to discuss facts and ideas with my students. Give me to my students. Give the Chromebooks to the children of tech billionaires.
A few years ago, a national standardized test had questions based on a brief story about the heroic accomplishments of Bill Gates.
I could tell you about a similar question on this year’s test if my entire profession hadn’t been placed under gag order.
Rage: I did not intend to prove a rule. Nor would anyone approve of sixth graders setting or anything else. Moreover, the screen time issue is troubling in its own right.
My issue with banning anything is that it tends to have the opposite effect of the intentional action. My student who uses her phone is a tool for learning is joined by many who do. She is also friends with many who abuse its use to their detriment.
Many of my fellow teachers agree with you that these instruments should not be a part of school. I fall on the other side of the question. I feel that caring adults should help children learn to use their environment. When he was a small child, George W. Carver learned all the plants in his Missouri woods and their use from his grandfather. Caring adults are needed to teach children how to use electronic tools just as I learned to use a skill saw, a really immediately dangerous tool
I really do understand what your point is, and I do have questions about whether school is the place for children to be taught how to use phones.
There are indeed studies that show less comprehension and sustained attention when reading on screens. This is why, when I ran a publishing house, I had my last-pass proofreaders work on hard copy. They were not pleased with this, but the difference in number of errors caught was dramatic. Some of this research is discussed in Baron, Naomi S. Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World. Oxford UP, 2015.
” wise to the indifference shown by adults …” A crucial point.
Rage, “peer into the classrooms and they almost all look the same. Kids on Chromebooks held in an electronic, pixilated trance.”
And when not in classrooms, on the smart phone. This is modeled by adults everywhere around them. To think I used to be irritated when someone took a call in the middle of a conversation. Now I feel like I live on an alien planet. Everyone, everywhere you go— stores, buses, trains, planes– walking down the block fer ferksake. Could they see a rose let alone smell one? Kids walking w/parents or babysitters have to “interrupt” to get attention! (Would you walk down the block reading a book?) And this makes me yell “Grr!” tho it is the rule no longer the exception: people who walk their dog while perusing the phone.
Unbelievable that this has been imported to the classroom. As said here, adults need to train kids how to use devices appropriately, and surely they can be used as tools. But I think adults would think twice about parking students in front of a screen in a classroom if they weren’t doing it so often themselves.
A sketchy organization with Z-berg at the helm- what a surprise (sarcasm). When, or if, Mark, Priscilla or their underlings are compelled to testify, they will, on that occasion, promise to do better in the future…. and, will say the same in each subsequently scheduled hearing that is convened to address wrong doing. The organization will follow up with continued trespass. High ranking politicians will tell their colleagues to go easy during the hearings. (Schumer’s daughter works for Z-berg.)
A nest of vipers are trying to destroy public schools.
Curiously, people like Zuckerberg and Gates never have to testify about or even justify in writing their “experiments” on school children.
There is essentially no oversight on the programs they foist on schools.
They just do whatever they please with no accountability whatsoever.
This is a miserable failing by Congress.
Our education leadership is profoundly to blame here. They should have laughed VAM and school grading and the Common [sic] Core [sic] in ELA and the high-stakes standardized tests off the national stage. That they didn’t is a profound indictment of their level of preparation and seriousness and knowledge. The fact that so many state department people and school administrators went along with such nonsense means that there is something seriously, seriously wrong with the training of these people. Of course, it’s not surprising that so many professional EduPundits went along with this stuff. They have been acting as paid mercenaries, for decades now, for the Gates fiefdom. Or, to switch metaphors, the EduPundit Deform collaborators have had an incredibly lucrative ride on the Gates gravy train. EduPunditry has always had its share of grifters. But it’s the education professionals who have gone along with this hogwash for whom I have the most disdain. THEY SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. Where were the English professors when Lord Coleman issued the CC$$ in ELA? Where were the language arts coordinators. Were the latter THAT ignorant? It really seems so.
It’s sickening, really, that they were so poorly prepared for their jobs that they, for example, thought that the high-stakes tests were valid and reliable or that the puerile Gates/Coleman “standards” were “higher.” Sickening and shocking. Clearly, education schools have some soul searching to do.
Our leaders are not making rational decisions to purchase and enforce the use of edutech products. They are accepting gifts with attached strings. Tech companies offer all kinds of free and donated hardware and software without mentioning the data collection in small print. They are being lobbied, bribed, and tricked.
Robert wrote:
“Our education leadership is profoundly to blame here. They should have laughed VAM and school grading and the Common [sic] Core [sic] in ELA and the high-stakes standardized tests off the national stage. That they didn’t is a profound indictment of their level of preparation and seriousness and knowledge.”
I don’t call them adminimals* for nothing.
*Adminimal (n.) a. Pseudo-public school administrator known for a complete lack of critical thinking skills and for following educational malpractice mandates in an animal herd-like fashion. b. Pseudo-teacher certified to be an administrator who lords over true teachers demanding compliance with educational malpractice mandates. c. Cojonesless public school administrator who gives meaning to GAGA Good German behavior.
LCT-
Gates-funded SETDA should be dismantled. A former SETDA director said the association of public employees (state education tech directors) lobby government. The association’s goals are public-private partnerships, digital learning promotion,…
The failure to expose Gates who is cut from the same cloth as the anti-democracy libertarian Koch’s is a travesty owned by media, union leadership, public employees and elected officials, state and federal Congresses, celebrities like Ellen Degereres, Stephen Colbert, and David Letterman and t.v. writers like those at Big Bang.
One really has to question ed reformer’s critical thinking skills that they all swallowed this whole. This is how Summit marketing describes their product:
“Summit Learning is a personalized approach to teaching and learning.
It is a way for students to unlock the power within themselves to live fulfilled and successful lives.”
I mean, come on. That’s a crazily inflated claim. This Facebook product creates “fulfilled and successful lives”. No wonder people are disappointed when they realize it’s elaborate standardized test prep.
99% of ed tech is an attempt to create the benefits of small class sizes without hiring additional teachers. Sometimes they’re attempting to create a class size as small as 1/1, in other words, a tutor, but much, much cheaper and standardized. All the rest is puffery and marketing.
Their international efforts are just an extension of this thinking- in that case, they dispense with the teacher altogether, but they probably can’t get away with that in the US because we’re accustomed to having a teacher in each class.
I would have more respect for them as a business if they would just admit this. They know smaller groups are better for children, but they also know they aren’t willing to pay for that, so they attempt to mimic that with technology.
Kids aren’t stupid. They know how they best learn and they know when they’re being fed, um, malarky.
When I mention to my students the enormous push by the district in which I teach to use computers all day, every day, they are FURIOUS! They are incensed! They all start talking at once about how unfair that is, how boring the material is, how much better they learn hands-on (and not hands on a computer), how dumb the standardized tests are, how unfair it is to rank students, schools or teachers by standardized test scores, etc.
I teach grades 7-9. These kids know. And they don’t like it one bit.
WHY do school and district and state administrators NEVER listen to kids (let alone teachers)? Because if they got my students in a focus group and stated to them that they would be doing most of their work on computers, the students would TELL them what they need.
Exactly my experience with my own students. Having done a LOT of comparative market research on ed tech products before I returned to teaching, I knew these very, very well, probably better than most people in the country do. But my students were REALLY, REALLY WISE to the Ed Tech hype. They have excellent crap detectors. They hated the stuff based on a LOT of first-hand experience.
Students in classrooms across America should learn about the Herculean effort and heroism of Diane Ravitch.
There is nothing admirable about anti-democracy Bill and Melinda Gates and the Z-bergs.
Facebook won’t remove the fake video of Pelosi. The Gates Foundation President is on FB’s Board. What a surprise.