Technology in the classroom has become so ubiquitous that the use of papers and pencils or pens seems innovative.
The Wall Street Journal published a front-page story about the high-powered push to buy technology and the growing disillusionment of some parents and teachers.
When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that has become coveted around the country. Teaching apps and digital courses took the place of flashcards and notebooks.
Despite the investment, academic results have mostly slipped in the district of about 115,000 students.
Over the last decade, American schools embraced technology, spending millions of dollars on devices and apps, believing its disruptive power would help many children learn faster, stay in school and be more prepared for a competitive economy. Now many parents and teachers are starting to wonder if all the disruption was a good idea.
Technology has made it easier for students and teachers to communicate and collaborate. It engages many students and allows them to learn at their own pace. But early indications are that tech isn’t a panacea for education. Researchers at Rand Corp. and elsewhere say there is no clear evidence showing which new tech-related education offerings or approaches work in schools.
The uncertainty is feeding alarm among some parents already worried about the amount of time their children spend attached to digital devices. Some believe technology is not doing much to help their kids learn, setting up a clash with tech advocates who say technology is the future of education.
Across the country—in Boston, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Austin, Texas—parents are demanding proof technology works as an educational tool, and insisting on limits. They’re pushing schools to offer low- or screen-free classrooms, picketing board meetings to protest all the online classes and demanding more information about what data is collected on students.
In April, a report from the National Education Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found the rapid adoption of the mostly proprietary technology in education to be rife with “questionable educational assumptions . . . self-interested advocacy by the technology industry, serious threats to student privacy and a lack of research support…”
Baltimore County said earlier this year it would scale back the ratio of laptops in first and second grades to one for every five students. A few miles away, in Montgomery County, a new curriculum this fall will return textbooks, paper and pencils to the classroom to supplement laptops.
In both cases, school officials say they were responding, in part, to parents and teachers. Baltimore County’s early-learning teachers said they didn’t need so many laptops. Parents wanted their children to “have a mixed media experience touching paper and reading books and down on the carpet without a device in their hands,” said Ryan Imbriale, who heads the school district’s department of innovative learning
Diane Ravitch's blog 
While I’m certainly happy to hear about the push-back against digital “learning”, the cynic in me wonders what WSJ’s angle is here. What profit is to be made in scaling back electronics use in school? Is there going to be a whole new breed of “innovative” edupreneurs pushing their “cutting edge” curriculum that will be good old fashioned textbooks and worksheets, only for a lot more money? Or is there something even more sinister going on here.
There is a sharp division at the WSJ between news and editorial.
The editorials are very business-friendly, very hostile to regulation, anti-government.
The news reporters write newsworthy articles. They are seldom ideological.
When the Morlock Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal of Corporate Apologetics, there was much talk about whether the paper would maintain its credibility as the US business/financial newspaper of record. Certainly, on the opinion side, it hasn’t. It has become indistinguishable, there, from any other extreme right-wing propaganda outlet like not-so-Breitbart or the Daily Caller or the latest loony tune right-wing rag, the Epoch Times. If you want to read a piece touting craziness like the offer to buy Greenland, bashing immigrants, accusing Democratic candidates of putting us on a slippery slope to Stalinism, defending the Trump misadministration attacks on the environment and MAGAt-ism generally, then the WSJ-CA has become a definite go-to.
saddest truth: over and over we applaud one action while another even more organized invasion is being planned in the wings
I think anyone watching this unfold could have predicted this. The sales and marketing of this stuff was over the top and relentless- ESPECIALLY pushing online classes into low and middle income schools.
My local public school has already pulled some it back – they dropped all the online language classes because they were a disaster. It started with the better-off parents who pulled their kids out of the online science section classes and insisted on placement in a class with live instructors and now my sense is the online classes are considered lower quality. It wasn’t the parents who complained first about the “blended learning’ science classes though- it was the kids. They said it was all watching videos and then taking tests. It is. It’s a short video or reading passage and then a short test. Over and over and over. They need a 70 or better on the test to move to the next lesson so they just watch/read the same material over and over until they get a 70.
It’s interesting how the people who blew the whistle on both excessive testing and excessive use of ed tech were not “experts” but instead students and parents in public schools.
Remember this? Where they had superintendents sign “pledges” to jam more of this stuff into public schools?
“Future Ready District Pledge
Superintendents from districts across the country have signed the pledge, demonstrating their commitment to work collaboratively with key district stakeholders to set a vision for digital learning, to empower educators through personalized professional learning, and to mentor other district leaders in their own transition to digital learning.”
That was Obama but Jeb Bush is just as bad or worse. He sold this crap all over the country for a decade. He somehow managed to persuade the entire state of Maine to buy his product promotions. They have since dramatically walked it back.
The Future Ready Pledge is at the following website.
https://futureready.org/thenetwork/take-the-pledge/
Future Ready Schools® is a project of the Alliance for Excellent Education (all4ed)
Future Ready Schools has 5 founding partners and 49 “national partners,” among these both teacher unions AFT and NEA. Future Ready manages to funnel money to a “Working Group “of instructional coaches, librarians, principals, district leaders and technology specialists–about 15 to 17 in each category in various states.
One of the side effects of pushing tech in schools is that some politicians are saying it is no longer necessary to teach cursive handwriting. I remember reading a story about a mother who had to teach her son how to sign his name. Learning the keyboard is not a substitute for knowing how to read handwritten notes.
What about writing checks? How about signing for a new mortgage or borrowing money for a car? What happens if you get a handwritten thank you note? Not learning to read and write manually is just stupid. Indiana passed a law that said it was not mandatory to teach cursive in 2011. I don’t know whether or not that is still the law.
……
Cursive comeback? Why script lessons are returning to some schools
Sept. 8, 2015, 11:10 AM CDT / Source: TODAY
As the new school year begins, all those little hands in elementary school are once again at the center of a fierce debate: Is cursive writing a skill that’s still worth teaching, or an out-of-date concept when most of life requires tapping on keyboards?
Corinne Schmitt is firmly in the pro-cursive corner. The Stafford, Virginia, mom was shocked when she learned her 8-year-old daughter would not be learning cursive in school.
“All of my daughter’s homework was done in print and she never had any handwriting homework. I asked her teacher about it at the parent/teacher conference and she informed me that cursive was no longer part of the curriculum,” Schmitt told TODAY Parents.
“I was told that it’s an obsolete skill.”…
https://www.today.com/parents/cursive-comeback-handwriting-lessons-return-some-schools-t41081
My students have always used pens and paper. I insisted. They have always written in print, though, not in cursive. I have had to stop writing in cursive, as I used to in my youth, because no one could read it. Yesterday, I was reading and grading essays, and two brilliant papers by students from England were in cursive. I excitedly wrote notes on their papers in cursive. It had been so long, however, my writing was hardly as legible as it one was. It’s important to practice. It’s important to practice the old academic ways and ignore the false hype of the digerati.
I have a 15 yo son who cannot write OR read cursive. I informed the MS 5yrs ago when he started that this whole class of children had absolutely no handwriting, cursive skills in elementary school. 100% of the parents in that meeting didn’t realize it and were shocked. The Principal and AP didn’t realize it…..this was 3 days before school started. Every teacher in that MS had to be told that they were not allowed to write in cursive or to have the kids read in cursive. My son has a signature that takes him forever to write and he still can’t read cursive handwriting……it’s a problem!
I know so many people who wrongly believe keyboarding is the only skill of the fuuuuture, and that Google Docs is the only useful medium for writing. I even used to work with a few who believed all future communication would be done by making videos for YouTube.
In most elementary schools, cursive has been jettisoned –along with learning to read an analog clock, history, science, and all factual knowledge in general –in order to make way for “literacy”, math, problem-solving and critical thinking. So kids are becoming super-literate, numerate and excellent at problem-solving and critical thinking, right? Ha! Schools are perpetrating (unwittingly) a giant fraud on America.
When it was time to remodel their high school, the library died. It was reborn as the “Student Success Center.” The amount of shelves holding real books was reduced by close to 80 percent to make room for booths alongside the windowed wall, which looks out into the cafeteria. Of course, there are computer stations. Sad.
The high school is located in downstate Illinois. Sorry, somehow the first sentence was delete while editing.
Eleanor: Children need to read books. It is sad that what is happening to education in this country is downgrading. There is massive lack of funding for K-12 and the reliance on technology to ‘solve all the problems’.
Glad I no longer have to personally deal with this. It’s bad enough to understand what is happening.
I will never forget the day when my math-loving son tried to do some on-line math homework. An hour later, he hadn’t finished and looked really frustrated, and this is a kid who doesn’t frustrate easily and who is very good at math. He said every time he got close to getting the correct number of problems to advance, the program would trick him by moving the number of decimal places needed for the correct answer. So, say 9 problems out to 2 decimal places, then the 10th was the trick question with the answer out to 3 places. If he got the 10th problem wrong, then he had to start over. And over. And over. This isn’t mastery. It’s insanity. And who decides what “mastery” is, anyway? And why are we subjecting our kids to this kind of stress-induced punishment masquerading as education? It’s nothing more than lousy education on the cheap for the great unwashed, and a surefire way to make kids hate math.
In science, when you confront a contradiction, that’s when things get exciting. Some result contradicts a well-established theory, and so the theory has to be revisited. In other words, as Isaac Asimov wrote, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny!’” Here’s a contradiction that I’ve noticed with regard to tech-based learning:
–In schools, new tech-based learning programs INEVITABLY follow the hype curve described in the post above. They are introduced with great fanfare. Extraordinary claims are made for them. Everyone gets a “training.” There’s a period of confusion while teachers and students struggle to get the stuff to work. The kids are interested for an hour or maybe even a couple of days because it’s something new. Then, a day or two in, they are begging not to have to do the stuff anymore, and after a week, they make it clear that they would rather have all their hairs pulled out, one by one, with tweezers than to have to open to application once more.
–Kids will routinely become interested in some topic like Electronic Dance Music (EDM), shredding on the guitar using pentatonic scales, making smoothies, building castles in Minecraft, variations in gender roles, or, frighteningly, guns or some system of belief that horrifies their elders, and go online and rapidly develop considerable knowledge, for good or ill, based on message boards, how-to videos on YouTube, and so on.
Clearly, it is possible for young people to learn a lot, again, for good or ill, using technology, but equally clearly, online courses have very low completion rates and so-called “personalized education software” fails over and over and over again.
So, how does one account for the discrepancy? The answer, I think, lies in a couple key facts about human motivation: for cognitive tasks, the primary motivators are internal, or intrinsic; and external, extrinsic motivators are actually DISINCENTIVES for cognitive tasks. Autonomy REALLY matters to people of all ages. When you offer an external reward, you are signaling that the task is not valuable or interesting enough to pursue on its own but requires an external punishment or reward to get you to do it. The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Now, this is a disturbing finding for neoliberal economists, who like to think that everything is driven by financial incentive—the invisible hand of the market—and this is, perhaps, why Ed Deform depersonalized software edupreneurs, who tend to be neoliberal types, have been so slow on the uptake regarding their repeated failures. Exactly how many educational software companies and programs have to squander their multi-million-dollar investments and go belly up before these people learn that this crap simply doesn’t work?
Consider, for example, Khan Academy. When it consisted simply of these quirky instructional videos by Sal Khan, people who were already intrinsically motivated to learn what Khan was teaching (algebra or introductory statistics or calculus or whatever), including people around the world with very little else in the way of educational resources, would go onto the Khan site and learn like crazy. But then Khan, perhaps under pressure from his donors, added quizzes and tests and assignment reports and other extrinsic motivators and pretty much ruined the site. My students were, for a time, required by our administrators to use the site, and they HATED IT, as they soon learned to HATE WITH THE BITTERNESS WITH WHICH ONLY A TEENAGER CAN HATE EVERY OTHER PIECE OF EDUCATIONAL SOFTWARE FOISTED UPON THEM.
Ed Tech people like to think of themselves as scientifically oriented. They need to learn something about what science tells us about motivation.
Why has it taken the ed tech people so long to learn these lessons? Well, they’ve put a lot of effort and time and energy into neoliberal economic thinking and into developing their plans and products, and all that stuff is quite personal to them. They are intrinsically motivated not to pay attention to the abundant evidence that they are full of it.
You make an important point here: YouTube teaches effectively –for good and ill. It teaches more than many teachers because we are told not to teach. We’re told to be the “guide at the side” and let students “discover” and “construct their own” knowledge. But research shows most discover nothing with these methods. They’re just jumping through hoops and filling out worksheets. This method of teaching has been discredited by fifty-years’ worth of research, but the education experts are willfully ignorant of this research (see: http://www.cogtech.usc.edu/publications/kirschner_Sweller_Clark.pdf). By embracing methods that do not produce learning, we leave a vacuum in kids’ heads. This vacuum is filled with YouTube.
This is a scandal. We need a revolution in the Schools of Education. They are beholden to ideology and lack intellectual integrity.
My key point–that depersonalized education software is demotivating to kids after the initial novelty wears off–is a costly truth that the ed tech industry has failed to learn. And yes, educators need to learn to respect imparting knowledge in the classroom. From as long has there have been people, older ones who knew stuff about matters they considered important passed what they knew on to younger ones. It’s complete lunacy to throw this out. Unfortunately, I have seen a LOT of supposedly model lessons, often in “teacher trainings,” in which kids left the room with no new knowledge that they didn’t have when they came in.
In the past year, I have used YouTube to
a. Learn how to make phyllo dough from scratch from a Greek grandmother
b. Find and compare plans for building an Anglo-Saxon lute
c. Listen to all the brilliant lectures in Christine Hayes’s magnificent course, Introduction to the Old Testament, from Open Yale Courses
d. Learn how to play a number of different standard rhythms and strumming patterns used by flamenco guitarists
And much, much else. It’s an AMAZING resource. And Wikipedia has become my go-to or initial lookup of information about a topic I’m unfamiliar with. A couple of studies have shown that Wikipedia articles are as reliable, in terms of number of errors, as ones in the Encyclopedia Britannica, which I suppose is attributable to the fact that errors in these articles are rapidly fixed by knowledgeable members of the community. Of particular value in Wikipedia articles are the references and external links at the bottoms of them, which often point to highly reputable sources of detailed information. For someone like me, who works outside a university and doesn’t have access to scholarly databases like JUSTOR, Youtube, Wikipedia, etc., are godsends, as is Google Scholar.
Thanks for the article, Ponderosa. It’s interesting how powerful social sanction is. People can buy into really crazy ideas if they are common in the tribe, and the notions that a) knowledge doesn’t matter and b) kids need to discover everything on their own are just about the craziest of crazy ideas. I recently spoke with a bright young woman who is now finishing up at the Chicago Law School. She said to me, “It was such a relief when I got to college and people who actually knew stuff would tell it to me. I was used to sitting around in high-school classes listening to other people, kids, who knew as little as I did spouting off.” That’s not verbatim, but it captures her gist and the emotion with which she said it.
Ponderosa,
I think you go too far in your indictment of colleges of education.
Throughout my career in academia, I have been employed in an ed school.
My field is history of education. I earned my doctorate (Ph.D., not Ed.D.) from Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences but did my coursework at Teachers College, Columbia University. My mentor and dissertation advisor was Lawrence Cremin, an intellectual giant.
Initially, I wanted to enroll for my degree at Columbia, not TC, but was told bluntly by a member of the History Department that there was zero interest there in my proposed field of study. At TC,I found historians, economists, sociologists, and other specialists in the rigorous study of education.
For someone like me, who wanted to earn an advanced degree in the study of the history of education—a rich and complex field—TC was the right place.
I once debated a topic of education with a corporate reformy teacher and I cited Wikipedia. When I went to Wikipedia to double check my source the next day, I saw that the teacher had edited the page to support her argument instead of mine. That’s how reliable Wikipedia is. Look, the Greek grandmother from whom you learned to make phyllo dough on YouTube is actually an actor hired by a powerful Russian oligarch with links to Putin. The actor’s name is Boris. He makes gateway videos to conspiracy theories about Illuminati chem trails. Don’t eat that flaky bread! The YouTube plans for making an Anglo-Saxon lute were made by Amazon, trying to put your local musical instrument makers out of business by selling lute strings online. The everything store. Everything. Google donated to Yale through Jeffrey Epstein — too soon? what — to pressure the university to put Christine Hayes’ magnificent course, Introduction to the Old Testament, on the web for free. Yale laid her off, now that her classes are free and her teaching is no longer necessary. She’s now an adjunct at Big Party Tech. And the flamenco guitar lessons are part of a series of videos produced by Bill Gates. Anyone who clicks on them has the data, including their entire browser history sold to ICE, whose agents assume anyone who views videos about Spanish music must be here illegally from Honduras. They’re coming to deport you tomorrow, Bob. — What. Too soon? LOLROFLMAOXYZPDQ.
Wikipedia can be dangerous, although I use it for basic information (last night I read a bio there of Kaiser Wilhelm II, as I was watching a movie about him).
Years ago, I was invited to speak at the University of North Carolina in a lecture series named for Frank Porter Graham, a prominent political figure in the state’s history. He had been a progressive who helped to modernize the state. On Wikipedia, he was described as a Communist. A lie. I just checked, and that smear has been removed. Crowd sourcing can be dangerous.
Diane,
It’s illuminating to hear about your own experiences with Teachers College. It’s obviously not all bad. But, as your Left Back chronicles, a lot of nonsense has emanated from TC over the past century. I infer that Schools of Ed in general are not doing a good job because
I rarely meet a trained teacher who knows his history of education, who knows the Great Debates in education and the arguments on each side, who has emerged from the program with sound, practical ideas about classroom management and pedagogy rather than the cloud-cuckoo-land party line ideology of the School of Education (e.g. inquiry learning trumps direct instruction, even though 50 years of research shows the opposite). . I’m sick and tired of the hacks and their reckless toying with teachers’ minds and our students’ education. There are definitely some respectable ed professors, like you, of course, and Richard E. Clark at USC,, but they’re the exception it seems to me.
I would favor the ideas of the faculty of any school of education over the disruptive and damaging ideas of Gates, Waltons, and Broad.
What happens with Wikipedia is that errors are soon corrected by the community, and when disputes arise, these are adjudicated by editors in a community forum. Yes, at any given moment, a particular article might have an error. But you shouldn’t use a single source anyway.
I’m sick of the Wikipedia bashing. Since ancient times, people have dreamed if a universal encyclopedia–a repository for all knowledge. This is the closest thing we’ve come to it yet, and it has been built with free contributions of time and energy by people who do this simply because they are passionate about . . . whatever–about permaculture or dirigibles or modal logic or Mycenaean maritime technology.
It’s a breathtaking resource, and, as I mentioned above, several studies have shown that it is on a par with the Encyclopedia Britannica for percentage of errors per unit text. Furthermore, most Wikipedia articles are accompanied by external links and references. It’s up to the reader to look more deeply. And to be aware of how the thing is constructed–via crowd sourcing–and of the inherent issues with that model–that something totally loony can sneak in and last for a short while.
I had a friend who worked for Britannica. They went to press once with a volume containing an entry on Gremlins, sneaked in by some editor. The article treated Gremlins as real creatures and described their natural history and habitats (e.g., airplane wings, bibliographies).
Wikipedia is invaluable for gaining a quick understanding of a subject. It’s also an object lesson for the value of scrutinizing evidence. I would never, EVER cite Wikipedia for anything. Read the entry. Check the footnotes and follow the links. Weigh the authority of those links, and if you’re lucky, you can cite them. Otherwise, see where those links lead you. Consider what other sources might support or refute the claims. This is life.
But I love Wikipedia, and I continue to marvel that it’s as good as it is and that it’s persisted as long as it has. It’s one of those rare things that can make me conclude the Internet is, on balance, a good thing.
It’s also an object lesson for the value of scrutinizing evidence.
Exactly. Well said, FLERP!
I was also a big fan of encyclopedias as a kid. My parents had an absolutely ancient Book of Knowledge set from 1938. I used to love to read the entries on Nazi Germany. In grade school I used whatever state-of-the-art encyclopedias were in the library. I wonder what it would have been like if I had been able to drill immediately down into the actual sourcing for the articles in those books, as one can do with Wikipedia.
I wonder what it would have been like if I had been able to drill immediately down into the actual sourcing for the articles in those books, as one can do with Wikipedia.
YES!!!
I say, use Wikipedia, but verify in other sources. And I would say this of ANY source. I’ve long since stopped imagining that when, for example, I read an account in a history text that this was chiseled by G-D on tablets and carried down the mountain by Moses.
I can go onto Wikipedia right now and put something into the George Washington bio about his role in creating the digital watch and his love of The Simpsons. But that stuff will last about a nanosecond before it is corrected.
Sorry Bob, hate to disagree with you about anything because I respect you so much, but you won’t catch me giving praise to very many websites. This blog, Diane’s friends’ blogs, the Guardian, The New Yorker, the Onion, and maybe a few others seem free from corporate meddling. The rest will be bashed with glee. Try looking up something neoliberal, like education reform, Bill Gates, or charter schools on Wikipedia. You’ll see which crowd is in firm control of the sourcing. Companies and billionaires hire people to control the web-based narratives that affect their profits. Wikipedia is not in control of its content and neither are the 99%.
Bob,
I’m glad you read the Kirschner article.
One of its most earthshaking revelations, IMHO, is the new science showing that long-term memory is the real powerhouse of the brain. For a long time people thought it was peripheral, and most teachers still think this. Hitherto teachers have seemed to vaguely imagine some problem-solving/critical thinking region of the brain that got better by giving kids exercises. It turns out that this is bunk; this “place” in the brain doesn’t exist. Problem-solving prowess comes from lightning fast deliveries of discrete memories and schema from the long-term memory. The implication of this is that stocking long-term memory with critical knowledge is the central function of schools. This means that our approach to math, for example, is a disaster. We MUST have kids memorize the times tables and standard algorithms. This is the only way to free up limited working memory to do higher-level problem solving. China and other less benighted countries do exactly this. They teach slowly and simply at first to really ingrain basic knowledge. Once that’s ingrained, then the kids really take off and can go faster. We flit around in a way that prevents the basics from sticking and so kids flounder at the higher levels. We’re making the same mistake in literacy. Reading comprehension is about recognizing words. The words’ meaning must be in long term memory for this recognition to happen. Ergo school should stock kids’ brains with word knowledge which is best acquired by slow, patient study of topical units. But our ubiquitous “literacy blocks” instead have kids waste their time doing mental exercises on random texts that don’t build knowledge –in the vain hope that they’re strengthening some non-existent “literacy muscles” in the brain. The long term memory IS the literacy muscle, this new science shows, and it must be stocked. The most efficient way of stocking it is direct instruction. Yet almost no one grasps this. Teachers are operating on a false model of how the brain learns. Schools of education are failing to correct this error.
And don’t forget about the data collection. If Wikipedia isn’t selling your preferences, and that’s an ‘if’, your browser and your service provider are. If you look something up in a book, it’s just between you and the paper. Libraries and librarians rock my socks! My utopian fantasy is a good library instead of a Starbucks on every corner, not a World Wide Web.
If anyone here knows of a child who needs a laptop, but their family cannot afford one, please contact
http://www.laptopsforkidz.org/
And the organization will assist.
Parents have good reason to be concerned about on-line instruction, particularly if it supplants the traditional classroom. Students that spend more time in front of screens are more prone to depression, particularly adolescents. Nobody knows what the long term effects are on the developing brain, and student privacy remains an unsettled issue.
Computer instruction is often tedious, boring and repetitive. Students learn better in social settings, and they learn from each other. Computerized instruction is socially and emotionally isolating. Young people need to learn social skills as well as academic content, and those subjects are best taught in a social setting. Computer instruction views the world in terms of binary options, but the real world is a lot more complex and nuanced. Computers cannot deliver thoughtful or interpretive content. That is why many students are rejecting computer driven instruction. They know they are being shortchanged.
Right. Computer instruction is mostly designed to benefit digital entrepreneurs, not students. Also, tech moguls had fantasies about AI being more intelligent than humans, so they designed systems to support AI instead of students. Ridiculous nonsense.
Computer instruction TAKES AWAY another mode of learning … KINESTHETIC. Good gawd … this is just about PROFITS … GREED.
Diane, there also continues to be push back on technology in Kanas. Please find my recent Insight Kansa op ed which was distributed to 25 Kansas newspapers through IK last week. https://www.hutchnews.com/opinion/20190902/sharon-hartin-iorio-kansas-school-redesign-outcomes-for-future
The public employees of SETDA (Gates funded) promote digital learning and public private partnerships while picking up paychecks written by taxpayers.
This is how a public/private partnership words. You take from the public to give to private individuals.
‘Personalized Learning’ has failed but Gates and others won’t admit it…not yet
Gates has no incentive to admit it.
Gates has poured billions into trying to effect a computer revolution in PreK-12 education. That’s why he paid for the development of the Common [sic] Core [sic]–so that there would be one national bullet list to key computer exercises to and software could be marketed “at scale,” like Microsoft software. I sometimes think that perhaps he is fully aware of how much this crap has failed, over and over and over again, but just doesn’t care because it’s good enough for obedience training for the children of Proles, whereas his kids, and other kids of the oligarchy, can go to real schools with real teachers.
Perhaps he is aware that this effort will eventually fail as parents become aware of the pitfalls. That might explain why Microsoft has changed its Office software to “Office 365,” so that one has to annually renew the license, or have your documents held hostage. Gates has to make money somehow.
My daughter’s school just issued every student with a chrome book. The rationale–to prevent students from bringing cell phones to class. (For some reason someone claims students need access to the internet in classes.) Students are expected to leave cell phones in a bin at the front of the classrooms. Teachers caught not complying(I.e. not confiscating contraband phones) will be punished. I realize that the cell phone epidemic is out of hand, but surely chrome books are not the solution. Fortunately,my daughter is a senior and her teachers are planning on little or no use of the chrome book. It will spend the majority of the year with her cell phone–in her locker, where all cell phones and chrome books belong.
We are trying to talk our school into purchasing Youndr pouches for students. Cell phones go into the zippered pouch, which stays with the student. The pouches can only be “unlocked” with a device once the student is in a cell-phone permissible zone. Outreach to parents and guardians to become accustomed to calling the actual school in an emergency would also have to be implemented.
My son goes to private school and there are 1,280 students(not a small school). They have strict rules on cell phone usage and they enforce those rules. No cell phone use inside the school from 7:35-4:15….if they are outside and it’s a free period, they can use their phone. If they get caught using their phone inside, they get 6 days of after school detention, the cell phone is confiscated until the parents come in to reclaim it and have a discussion with admin. The kids abide by the rules….and they actually spend more of their free periods in groups talking with one another or doing homework/projects together. Schools need to make the rules and Admin and teachers need to enforce those rules. No special pouches needed.
Are taxpayers funding your son’s school?
Linda…no taxpayer funding of this school. We pay for our child to go there. Public school has not been good for #2. Any public school can set rules and sanctions for students….especially on the use of cell phones. It’s a matter of enforcement. If public schools have dress codes that they enforce, then they can certainly add in a cell phone policy.
We went one to one his year, or sort of. We are each given a set of laptop computers to begin to integrate into our instruction. What did not happen is a smaller teaching load. All the things I want to use the computers for would require very small groups of children, and a lot of help from someone to teach me how to do what I want to do. This would mean hiring extra staffing to assist me in learning how to use these complex tools. Since none of this is forthcoming, I fear we have just wasted our money. How many expensive
learning aids have I discovered in a box in the storeroom over the last forty years
Any tool is good only if it does one of two things: either it does an existing job quicker or better than previous methods, or it makes a previously impossible job possible. A good example of this first category is the word processor. Whereas we used to have to re-type an entire sheet type if we made a mistake, we now can backspace. Big help. Indespensible. An example of the job that was previously impossible might be the invention of the atmospheric steam engine built by Thomas Newcomen in the early 1700s to pump dry the coal mines. Previously, these mines had to be abandoned, for no other way existed to pump the water out. Tools that are effective work this way.
Often in modern times, we use tools just because we are in love with the tool itself. This can be the case in education. Often when I was a boy, a teacher spent time working on a movie projector while we all talked among ourselves. When computers came around, some teachers fell in love with these tools, becoming blind to whether they had chosen the teaching method because it conformed to the use of their beloved toy. It reminded me of a farmer I knew who bought a new tractor and over tilled his land because it got the work done so quickly.
I am an 18 year veteran educator and an edtech entrepreneur. So I am not biased against technology and change. Like any other tool, technology has been overused and misused. We need to properly use technology as A resource of many. Technology should help teachers teach…not do the teaching!
Technology should be used as a tool that helps teachers with their daily workload. It should not be used to replace teachers or totally replace older tools such as textbooks, pencils, actual manipulatives, and etc.
The current over-reliance on technology highlights a fundamental flaw in education. We educators want to educate all children as efficiently as possible creating the desire for a silver bullet. So we search high and low for the illusive unicorn that does not exist. It does not exist because students are truly different and constantly change. So when technology with its shiny newness and excellent benefits show up many see a silver bullet and the answer to all of our problems. To be sure, devices answer many of our problems but many are mesmerized and throw out old strategies. There goes the proverbial baby with the bath water.
But now what do we do? Throw out the new baby with the new bathwater. We shouldn’t and can’t. With the world in the grips of a tech revolution, this new baby is here to stay.
Let’s use technology correctly. Instead of focusing technology on teaching students, we should use technology to help teachers teach students. Ask teachers what would help you to teach students? We want better activities, easier ways to grade students, but we want things to lighten our workload like behavior management, RTI, and parental engagement and much more.
https://teachersintouch1.carrd.co/
Wise comment!!! I agree completely.
Here some suggestions i add about most influential tech in 2020
https://thisvstht.com/most-influential-tech-in-2020/
Investing in tech for the administration side has been great. As for the classroom, jury is still out. But I doubt that all the money spent has moved the needle that much.
Idaho still believes that giving bonuses to highest performing veteran teachers will make a difference. Idaho is one of the lowest funding states in the nation for education. What a crock!!!
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STATE BOARD APPROVES DOZENS OF ADDITIONAL MASTER EDUCATOR PREMIUMS
Clark Corbin 01/27/2020
The State Board of Education has approved additional financial bonuses for dozens of teachers, thanks to an appeals process tied to Idaho’s master educator premium program.
Nearly 200 teachers were denied premiums last fall, after the State Board considered around 1,400 applicants, each hoping to receive a $4,000 bonus.
During the appeals process, officials reconsidered 109 applications and approved 83, State Board spokesman Mike Keckler told EdNews.
All 83 educators will receive the full $4,000 financial incentive this year. Created by the Legislature, the master educator premium program sought to reward Idaho’s highest performing veteran teachers.
Teachers who meet the criteria can have their premiums renewed for three years, bringing the total to $12,000.
Final numbers show the state approved about 94 percent of all applications. The state considered 1,397 applications and approved 1,307, Keckler said.
The State Board considered two types of appeals, chief planning and policy officer Tracie Bent said. In most cases, teachers appealed reviewers’ initial decisions. In the other case, state officials discovered an Idaho System for Educational Excellence database reporting error that incorrectly disqualified about a dozen applications, even though the teachers met the service requirement of eight years of teaching experience.
In order to earn a premium, teachers had to meet basic eligibility requirements and submit a detailed portfolio demonstrating teaching mastery. Some 260 state-trained portfolio reviewers, including teachers, evaluated the portfolios. At least two different reviewers evaluated each portfolio, Keckler said. If evaluators disagreed, a third reviewer provided an evaluation.
Awarding the premiums was based on two reviewers scoring a portfolio high enough to earn a premium.
“It’s not as simple of a process as dealing with just hard numbers,” Bent said.
The conclusion of the appeals process appears to close the book on the first year of the premiums.
The process was sometimes awkward and delayed.
Several educators said the portfolio application requirement was too burdensome and often took 80 to 120 hours to complete.
Boise business leader Bill Gilbert, who co-chairs Gov. Brad Little’s K-12 education task force, questioned the program during hearings this summer. High-performing organizations would not require their best employees to jump through hoops to earn a bonus, Gilbert said.
Several of Idaho’s most decorated teachers also did not apply for the premiums, including 2019 Teacher of the Year Marc Beitia and Sonia Galaviz, who teaches at Boise’s Garfield Elementary and won the National Education Association’s Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence in 2017.
The Legislature approved $7.2 million for the first year of the bonuses. Approving 83 additional premiums adds $322,000 to the cost, bringing the total to about $5.2 million. Additionally, the state will pay evaluators $100 for each portfolio reviewed during the appeals process. Evaluators earned $50 per review during the original review. Keckler said the state doubled the stipend during the appeals window because evaluators faced a much tighter deadline and an additional assignment to provide the reasoning and justification for each rating.
State Board officials have apologized for some of the errors and glitches throughout the rollout, and Keckler said they will use lessons from this experience to make a better, smoother process next year.