I don’t know why, but I find it fascinating to read about entrepreneurial ventures in education that launch with dazzling publicity, then quietly disappear. For some reason, entrepreneurs with no education experience think it should be easy to revolutionize schooling. Bill Gates has been reinventing American education for about 20 years. Laurene Powell Jobs started the Emerson Collective and the XQ Initiative to reinvent the high school and put on a show on all three networks to launch. SamuelAbrams wrote an excellent book about the high-flying adventures of Chris Whittle and the Edison Project, called Education and the Commercial Mindset. Joel Klein persuaded Rupert Murdoch to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in his plan to revolutionize American education with a program called Amplify, which Murdoch unloaded in a fire sale to Laurene Powell Jobs (Klein now works for an online health insurance company called OSCAR, founded by Jared Kushner’s brother). Jonathan Knee wrote a book called Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.
And here is a new entry about the dangers of amateurs reinventing education.
Peter Greene tells the story of the glorious rise and inglorious descent of AltSchool.
It was founded by alumni of Google. They raised large sums of money from investors. What could go wrong?
Greene begins:
You remember AltSchool, the miraculous Silicon Valley technoschool that was going to Change the Game. We’ve checked in on them from time to time, and it’s time to see what has happened since the Altschool ship ran aground on the shores of reality a while ago.
After two years of tinkering and tweaking, AltSchool burst on the scene with a flurry of PR in 2015. Founded by Max Ventilla, formerly of Google, and Bharat Mediratta, also a Googlite, it was going to bring technology and personalization to new heights. Like a wired-up free school, it would let students and teachers just sort of amble through the forest of education. Teachers would capture moments of demonstrated learning on video, students would do work on modules on computer, and it would all be crunched in a back room full of IT whizzes who would churn out personalized learning stuff for the students. The school set up some branch schools, lab schools, hither and yon. All the big names wanted to invest– Zuckerberg, Powell Jobs, etc.
They had money. They had ideas. All they were lacking was knowledge and experience.
You will want to read the rest. It’s a cautionary tale for other entrepreneurs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just think they should find some people who are familiar with public schools.
It isn’t true that public schools are like “prisons” with students grimly and joylessly following a zombie teacher. It’s like a rich person’s stereotype of a public school and they ALL repeat it like a mantra.
I think it comes out of their ideological opposition to anything that is “public” but it isn’t reality and they should stop insisting it is. They can’t “reinvent” public schools because they don’t know the first thing about public schools.
Even the “one size fits” all slogan is nonsense. In a bigger comprehensive public high school students follow all sorts of tracks and have varied schedules. I don’t think they should take the negative stereotypes about public schools they all learned in their private schools INTO our schools. We don’t need that. It isn’t helpful.
Obviously there are bad public schools but ed reform’s belief that all public school students are miserable and all public school teachers are zombies is just nonsense.
I feel as if public schools are really vulnerable to ed reform fads and gimmicks because ed reformers have created an atmosphere where any questioning of any of their ideas is characterized as “defending the status quo”.
I wish public school leaders were more confident and better at looking critically at some of this stuff whether it comes with the magical “Google” brand or not.
Your parents and students will thank you for it. Don’t subject us to every passing fancy these people have- you’re allowed to say “no”.
Chiara, read my book. I make the point that the ed deformers, the disrupters, ARE the Status Quo. They have controlled the federal government at the highest levels for at least 20 years; add in the Clinton administration and the George H.W. Bush administration and before that the Reagan administration, and that is a long run of presidents who wanted to push competition, testing, and accountability into the schools. Add to that the billionaires–there is a long list of them–the Waltons, the Gates, Eli Broad, Reed Hastings, Michael Bloomberg, on and on. By the time you read my chapter on “the status quo,” you will no longer even repeat that canard.
AltSchool like so many tech initiatives starts with a “carpet bombing” ad campaign that makes bold promises. Unfortunately, the product fails to deliver on these promises. They promise to “reinvent education,” but all they really do is bore students to tears and disrupt real classroom learning.
A companion piece to this post is Nancy Bailey’s post about the superintendents’ conference. What she describes is deeply disturbing. It is a festival of tech products that are presumed to have great value. The prevailing theme is that tech products will “modernize” instruction. These products are a back door form of privatization designed to replace traditional instruction. We know that cash strapped districts are looking for ways to lower the cost of instruction. We already know that some administrators are vulnerable to all the hype, spin and advertising. https://nancyebailey.com/2020/02/24/whos-behind-americas-superintendents-and-school-transformation/#comments
so right, retired teachers. The selling of ed tech has become a carnival of empty promises but sure delivery of profits.
TECH: an always morphing product means always new profits to be attained
“No one questioned the dearth of research to show digital is better than teacher instruction. No one questioned the health concerns of young children when they face screens for long periods of time, or teens who face problematic tech addiction. No one asked who’s benefiting by placing students in front of screens for all of their schooling.”
Because they’re afraid to ask. Question any of this stuff, even slightly, and you’ll receive a stern reprimand from the ed reform echo chamber.
We must swallow whatever they churn out whole or we’re opposed to “innovation”.
The Obama Administration had them signing “pledges” like some kind of insane tech cheerleaders.
They have to stand up for themselves! If we wanted Jeb Bush running public schools we would have hired him. We hire them to use their own judgment, not to follow whatever ed reform fad comes down the pike.
There’s so much money behind tech, Tech moguls proceed as though they have all the answers, and they flood the market like Bloomberg who is trying to buy the election. They normalize acceptance of tech under the guise of “innovation.” What’s next? Teachers marching through cities chanting, “Tech will not replace us.”
It’s groupthink. A young hire at one of these Manhattan reform outfits would be crazy to buck the orthodoxy. “Public school teachers: bad, stupid and lazy. Reformies: woke, sharp and energetic!” How can we make reality rudely intrude into their tasteful office suites, their afterwork chit chat at the Hell’s Kitchen tapas bar?
Hahaha, what a telling letter to parents announcing closure of their schools: ““We know this is tough news that will have a big impact on your family. But the moves are needed, given AltSchool’s strategy, path to growth and finances.” Misplaced enthusiasm indeed. Reminds me of the breathless joy w/which a clueless cousin announced to the clan—via xeroxed letter—that she had dumped our dear cousin-in-law of 25 yrs for some other guy. This is a letter that could be written by any disrupted schsys to the hapless families of closed neighborhood schools.