On Thursday, the board of the Los Angeles Unified School District will hear a presentation by Margaret Roza about innovative ways to cut costs. Roza was for many years a fellow at the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, a pro-school choice think tank. Now she is director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, offering advice and analyses about school finance. The Lab has many high-profile funders, including the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
Roza has been critical in her writings of class size reduction and has recommended saving money by cutting teachers’ pensions and benefits (which she called “Frozen Assets” in a 2007 paper of that name).
A decade ago, Leonie Haimson debated Roza on these topics and took issue with her view of saving money.
Roza and her associate Katherine Silberstein will address the Innovations Committee of the LAUSD board on Thursday.
They will warn the board to Beware of adding recurring costs!
Consider one-time expenses:
Stipends(e.g. for tutoring, summer school
Contractors(e.g. nurses, tutors)
One-time hazard pay
One-time summer school
Temporarily added weeks of school
Pay for family efforts
Instead of recurring expenses:
•New hires (e.g. nurses, counselors, VP, teachers, tutors)
•Base pay raises: Across-the-board % raises, COLAs
•Increased benefits
•Permanent calendar changes
•Changes to class sizes
©2021 Edunomics Lab, Georgetown University
So, Rosa is still promoting the idea that teachers should not get increased benefits or across-the-board raises or cost-of-living expenses. She is still critical of reducing class sizes.
Is any of this innovative? It may mean saving money, but how will it improve teacher professionalism or education?
Download the pdf here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“The Lab has many high-profile funders, including the John and Laura Arnold Foundation, the Gates Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.”
Of course it does.
Yeah, I’m sorry but under any reasonable definition ed reform is an echo chamber.
They all sound the same because they all are the same. Which is fine! Obviously they sincererly believe that this agenda is “what kids need”.
But it’s an echo chamber. It’s ONE market-driven and ideologically informed approach to public education and it really should not be the only one, if we’re having a “debate”. If we’re not having a debate and all these decisions have already been made then let’s just admit that.
The fact is these foundations select for a certain approach in what they fund and who they hire. That’s their right- it’s their money. But that is reflected in what ed reformers promote and what they denigrate. No one has to take my word for it. Anyone can read them. Read across the incredibly narrow ed reform spectrum and tell me this isn’t an echo chamber. They say it themselves – it has two parts – 1. choice and 2. accountability, in that order.
Edunomics Advisory Board- Matt Chingos- PhD in government from harvard, currently at the Urban Institute, which was in the past considered a liberal think tank. A few years ago, Arnold was reportedly funding the Institute’s public pension research.
“two parts”- “accountability” – policy that singles out public schools for scrutiny but, not private schools?
“Obviously they sincerely believe that this agenda is ‘what kids need’.” Hard to believe they sincerely have ‘what kids need’ in mind when their proposed agenda is to slash public education budgets…
The Lab has many wealthy funders. So does the majority of the LAUSD School Board. How about that. Neither body cares about education. They’re scum.
It doesn’t have to be nefarious or a bad faith effort. The ed reform “movement” could sincerely agree with everything that comes out of Walton and Gates and John and Laura Arnold. I assume they do. But it’s still an echo chamber, which makes real analysis and criticism of their work more important.
Ohio is an ed reform echo chamber state. Some of their “innovations” in this state should have been questioned before they were adopted. There’s an opportunity cost here- adopting the ed reform agenda means Ohio didn’t invest in anything else. We’re paying for that now, with a decade of little or no investment or support of the public schools 90% of the kids in this state attend. Our public schools are stagnant or declining while our state government plows more and more and more into privatization experiments. They abandoned an entire generation of public school students in this state, because they were captured by this “movement” and its lobbyists and ideological proponents.
As a resident in a state that is utterly dominated by this approach to public education I would urge California to cast a wider net. Learn from our mistakes.
It doesn’t have to be nefarious but it is. UTLA and LAUSD are about to go into contract negotiations with an influx of billions of relief dollars coming. So, a coalition called Communities for Los Angeles Student Success, led by United Way of Greater Los Angeles did a recent push poll of students and published a report claiming the students said spending on salaries during a drastic teacher shortage and school nurse shortage, and on keeping class sizes in check was “non-negotiable” — in negotiations. Ridiculous. Now, this group called Edunomics — edunomics, seriously? — is claiming that we need to spend the funds on private contractors. The over-privileged want to pocket the relief funds instead of helping the students. Pretty nefarious: dirty, underhanded, manipulative, deceptive, and entirely greedy.
Private contractors? What do you mean?
“They will warn the board to Beware of adding recurring costs!
Consider one-time expenses:
Stipends(e.g. for tutoring, summer school
Contractors(e.g. nurses, tutors)”
“Private contractors? What do you mean?”
It’s like “just in time” inventory that has helped to create the backlog at the ports. People went without for so long and now they are buying big time; there is no warehoused inventory, which would be an ongoing cost.
So, hire a private contractor/tutor/janitorial service/engineers/… and you eliminate all the associated costs of permanent staff. Teaching conditions are so bad in many places that they can’t get any qualified people. Teach for America, basically a private contractor, was touted as a way to get teachers on the cheap. Hah! And you can keep your horrendous class sizes! No union messing with your cost cutting.
I don’t have a degree in economics, but I can see how Rosa’s recommendations would save money if a community wants to strip mine its public education in order to deliver the cheapest possible service. BTW. the cheapest service is on a computer at home, but the big problem is it is flawed, a lot less effective, highly impractical and socially, emotionally dangerous. If a community wants its schools to do quality work, they have to invest in them and the professionals that serve in them..
Who needs professional police and fire fighters? We could save a lot of money by sponsoring volunteer squads. Kyle Rittenhouse could be the police chief.
Who needs a military? The Proud Boys can do it for less.
Who needs economists? Nobody! Ignore them.
Thanks for pointing out the absurdity in the economists “expertise”.
Schools could save a lot of money by having far fewer teachers. Instead each incoming grade would be given a standardized test the first day of school and the highest scoring students would be designated teachers for that grade. Kindergarten children who come in already reading would give reading lessons to other students while the 5 year olds who have a basic understanding of addition would be designated to give math lessons to the other students.
This model will work throughout the grades. For example, in 4th grade, the students who have picked up the most history knowledge from reading books at home, watching historical movies and tv shows or even playing video games with historical content can be easily identified on the first day of school through a standardized test, and they would be assigned to teach history to other students.
There would be no need to pay these “student teachers” who take over from the far too expensive professional educators. Instead they would have the honor of their name listed on the hallway bulletin board with extra gold stars. And given the generous reward of a special ice cream party only for them the last Friday of each month.
Maybe the LA school board will pay me to give a presentation about my new and brilliant ideas of saving money.
I take your satire, nycpsp, & it’s funny. But—maybe OT, & strange as it may seem– I benefited greatly from students with advanced academic prowess in my ‘50s one-room rural 1st-3rdgr schoolhouse, & also in the 3-classroom 6-gr schoolhouse we villagers proceeded to in 4th grade [next biggest village]. It wasn’t about having no teachers, but there was only one teacher for each 2 or 3 grades, all in one classroom—with a small number of kids in each grade. So in that early school you might have 1 grade-group getting direct teacher instruction, the 2nd grade-group doing exercises at their desk on direct instruction just given (or perhaps paired up doing flash-card quizzing), and the 3rd grade-group divided into reading & math circles led by the best reading/ math student in that grade. We got a good education, & 50+% went on to college [higher than the nat’l norm at that time]… Just food for thought.
especially so many actual economists who say one thing and then act surprised and shocked after the fact when reality moves us in a different direction
Economists are out of their depth when they appoint themselves as experts in everything. If they are not trained as educators, why should we listen to their opinions? VAM is a perfect example of economists’ tone deaf ineptitude. Claiming to have the skill and insight to retool education is another example of arrogant economist overreach..
You are right. Raj Chetty, Harvard economist, made stupendous claims for the efficacy of VAM, but VAM has not panned out.
I remember an interview on NPR with an economist who thought that “maybe” students who major in economics should take history courses…
All economists can do is crunch numbers. They have their place. Like: CBO. Congress gives them proposed legislation, including both planned expenditures and legislative measures by which they plan to pay for the expenditures. The legislation has an agenda: spend x in order to address y issue. CBO crunches the numbers to see if it adds up.
The “number-crunching” done by Roza et al differs only in the agenda, & in its paltry scope. Not about improving ed service. The agenda is simply cut x services to save z amount of $$. Ed delivered will by definition be diminished. No plan for addressing y issue; no issue is addressed except ‘saving $$.’ No analysis as to the impact of cutting services.
How did economists get dragged into this?
Folks might also be interested in Dr. Roza’s presentation on the real cost of professional development: https://blog.sibme.com/blog/webinar-replay/marguerite-roza/
The group is called Edunomics, that’s how. LOL.
leftcoastteacher,
Dr. Roza has reports no degree in economics. She has an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Duke and a PhD in education from a left coast university Why would any educated person think that she is an economist? LOL.
Don’t think I can bear to listen to her, but Roza may have a point as to $$ wasted on PD…
She also thinks it is wasted on pensions and COLAS and reducing class size.
The splash page for this webinar asks this question:
Schools spend an average of $18,000 per teacher on professional development every year, according to The New Teacher Project. But what return do you get for that investment?
In my experience, they get ALMOST NOTHING. It’s breathtaking what drivel I have sat through in PD over the years. On rare occasion, someone will provide some pointers for using some bit of software–a quiz-making program or multiple-choice grading program. But this could be given in a handout or posted online. But usually, it’s some edubabble from which there is NO SUBSTATIVE TAKEAWAY. I am deadly serious about this. I have attended hundreds of these over the years, and I don’t remember a single instance in which I walked away from one knowing something that I didn’t before, except that the presenter was a babbling idiot.
Help your students master their homework with the POS study method! PREPARE your workspace. Do an OVERVIEW of the material. Then STUDY the material. OK. Now, let’s all divide into groups and practice this technique!
That kind of crap.
Or there are the Classes in the Obvious. Sometimes, there is bad stuff on the Internet! Some kids join gangs out of fear or because they want to belong! Grass is usually green.
Every hour I spent in PD was stolen from me.
The shocking thing about this is that there is plenty of News Teachers Can Use that could be shared in PD. But such actually takeaways are rare–very, very rare.
The $18k/ teacher/ yr is kind of crazy. This is just googling, but it looks like teachers spend something like 1.5hrs/ wk max in PD so the salary hrs would be a tiny fraction of that, wonder what all that $ is spent on (or is the webinar’s Q based on false info?]. But anyway. Just taking that 1.5hrs/wk… Wouldn’t that be a nice little chunk of time to spend on mentoring/ collaboration among teachers?
Asking those with the in-the-trenches experience. My recent decades’ experience was different [free-lance visiting specialist to PreK’s], but I did have a few yrs early on as a FT hisch French teacher– in a private school where there was no PD. But I got about 2.5hrs/wk in mentoring/ collaboration with our small WL dept, & that was a key part of a good teaching experience.
cx: Roza not Rosa
Readers who care about kids, good schools, democracy, etc., should realize that all these “reformers” care about is money (for themselves). Or expanding capitalism, etc. They either don’t know anything about actual public schools and their actual problems or they don’t care, or both. Unfortunately, there is not much to counterbalance them on the side of non-profit-good-for-kids & society schools. Their money buys media (almost all of which is for-profit), politicians, attention, etc. Our unions (AFT/NEA) are divided and lack the resources to go toe-to-toe with the big money behind the privateers. Lots of folks don’t know what’s wrong, if anything. Actually, the schools were doing a really good job, given the huge task of educating America’s youth, and the relative under-funding. But teachers’ unions were strengthening America’s labor movement, and kids were being taught to think. Public schools made a handy scapegoat for America’s many social problems and for our declining economy under Carter-Reagan economics and corporate bail out of America. They also made a target for anti-humanist education. I’ll stop: Thanks for reading this far.
You are wrong, Jack. “All”, do not care just about money. Once again an entire comment thread fails to identify conservative religious motivation, despite the Lab’s location at a Catholic University located in Wash. D.C.
People would be better informed if they read, “An Insider’s Look…” April 22, 2021, Southwestern Indiana Catholic Community Newspaper”, written to commemorate the 10th anniversary of school choice legislation in Ind. and, if they read, “The new official contents of sex education in Mexico: laicism in the crosshairs”, 3-3-2021 at the Scielo site. The issues discussed are much broader in scope than the tile indicates.
Couldn’t figure out how to access the article from that description, Linda. However, I would venture to guess that those who have non-mercenary, spiritual interest that leads them to support xyz govtl policy— especially if connected to a large organization with similar goals—will always attract deep-pocketed sources with other political agendas.
Thank you for being willing to read the articles, Bethree.
The article about Indiana can be found by searching Southwestern Indiana’s Catholic Community Newspaper. At the site’s search prompt, type in school choice. Articles will appear, click on, “An Insider’s Look at the Evolution of the School Choice Scholarship Program”.
Regards, Linda
Bethree
I sent the magic words for your access but, the comment is in moderation.
The IN article shows long devpt/ planning of the school choice movement there, spearheaded by Indiana Non-Public Ed Assoc’s (founded ’74), a group of 12 associations: 5 RC, 4 Christian [2 “Christian,” 2 Lutheran], 1 Mormon, 1 Jewish, 1 non-sectarian privsch– representing 400 schools with about 100k enrollment. IN is a good place to look into this, as it’s among the highest participation in “ed choice” programs (right after AZ, FL & WI).
Bethree-
Did you miss the background info that the Non-public ed director used to describe himself and the background info about his mentor?
Did you miss the part about how the two men were “the voice” when the legislation was crafted?
Would like to see the retention benefits offered for her position. I am quite sure she negotiated quite an enormous salary and health benefits only comparable to those offered Superintendents in Texas— golden parachutes, stipends for cell phones, extra retirement benefits. All of these come at a cost to nurses, counselors, and teachers who appear less likely to remain in public education.
Where is her analysis of the cost of thousands of teacher vacancies going forward since her model does not include massive vacancies?
She certainly did not include class size as a driver of teacher vacancies even though it is a primary driver. How would a model based on the reality of the current teacher marketplace differ from her model based on her elitist view of her entitlements compared to the labor force necessary for public education to occur?
I would guess that her salary is far greater than the nation’s highest paid teachers.
As a university faculty member I am sure she has a defined contribution retirement account, typically TIAA-CREF but there are others.
The organization she works for has funding from multiple foundations. I seriously doubt that she has the salary of a regular faculty member.
Dr. Ravitch,
As I am sure you noticed my post said nothing about Dr. Roza’s salary. It did address her retirement benefits. Do you doubt that she has a defined contribution retirement account? That is what both you and I have, and the overwhelming majority of post secondary instructors have.
I don’t know her salary or her benefits.
I assume she is paid double or triple or quadruple the average teacher’s salary.
If teachers’ pensions are cut, you will see an exodus from the classroom.
How will they be replaced? Signing bonuses? Higher salaries?
(1) If Dr. Margaret Rosa was employed by a public university, her salary and benefits would be information readily available to the public.
(2) Grants that are received through a public university must conform to public information protocols.
I speculate that libertarian funders of university research prefer a lack of transparency which makes religious and other private schools an ideal place to generate the type of research that, for example, supports reduction in tax funding, that facilitates the advantages of private K-12, etc.
IMO, no governmental decision making group should accept testimony about education from private universities.
Fortunately for her (as Chiara often points out), ed-reformers are never held accountable for education results of their policies. That’s because the people that fund them are not interested in improving delivery of ed services, only in minimizing them, so as to lower school taxes.
Rose Parker– good call. The ‘accountability’ Roza speaks of is laughable since it has zero relationship to educational goals—what’s the mission? Even her supposed mission of cutting taxes spent on schools is a farce, since the primary method involved is farming tax-paid work out to private for-profits. We’ve all seen how that works out in other public-goods arenas. The only difference with education is that we have few parallel analyses of just how much extra $$ that actually costs taxpayers– while it is busy depleting the quality of the service.
It will be interesting to see how Roza is introduced tomorrow and if any of the 3 board committee members question any of the data she’s presenting. As always, the devil is in the details. The data is more than questionable.
Margaret Roza is apparently a shill paid by greedy billionaires that want more and see the only way they can increase their great fortunes and the power that comes with it is to take it from working-class Americans in the middle class such as teachers.
A puddle of puke has more honor.
Any possibility, given the Georgetown location, that conservative religious goals for privatization play a role along with money?
Isn’t the real auestion, How do these old ideas benefit America as a whole?
When will the Association of Independent Schools be inviting Margaret Roza to speak?
I am certain that the private schools that educate the children of the billionaires who fund her should immediately begin implementing her excellent suggestions on how to cut costs.
Imagine if the question to Margaret Roza was always how many of the schools her funders send their kids to are implementing her great ideas. And if not, will she go on record criticizing those schools wasteful and useless expenditures?
The billionaires should be asked this, too. They must be asked whether they have been pressuring their own kids’ school to follow Margaret Roza’s supposedly excellent ideas.
NYC- You posed questions in a thread to the 11-15 post, “Racism: Reader Explains the Youngkin Victory in Va.” Late last night, I took a great deal of time to write answers. Paul Bonner, a commenter added corroboration for the points I made. In my final paragraph, I asked you a question. Would you please respond in that thread, even if it is to state that you disagree with the points made.
Linda,
I just read this, but I did already reply to your excellent comment. I’m sorry it took so long. I always learn something when reading your long and comprehensive replies, and I appreciate when you take the time to inform.
(Plus, unlike certain other people here, you always simply argue your points when we disagree instead of throwing personal insults and attacks. Thank you for that.)
NYC-
I appreciate what you wrote.
Chiara’s repeat of the message about the Echo chamber is important.
And, your repeat of the point that Democrats should not give voice to Republican talking points (because, on occasion, the left doesn’t recognize them as such) is also important.
NYC-
A commenter recommended I pander to the religious. I can’t do that because I view it as an endorsement that the activities of the religious have had greater virtue than harm. I don’t know if that’s true or untrue.
If there are those who erroneously attribute to me prejudice in my warnings about church politicking and power and about it’s members who drive a right wing religious agenda, it’s a cost I’m willing to pay to get out an important message while preserving my integrity.
It’s not balanced and fair to say that all churches, synagogues, mosques, etc. engage in highly effective politicking with substantial success for the GOP’s libertarians.
Linda,
You should definitely not pander to the religious! Thank you for continuing to remind us of what is going on. It’s not going to stop until these actions are brought out into the light.
NYC
You may want to read about Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Associate Director of the Law School (until 2018) at the largest University in Oklahoma. The article is about Brian McCall (OU Daily,
10-1-2018). McCall continues as a law professor.
Georgetown, a religious school located in Wash. D.C. that has a particularly appalling history relative to slavery and a school that has never had a female president.
Thirty percent of the secondary schools established by the same faith as Georgetown are single-sex.
“Get Out Now: Why you should pull your child from public schools before it’s too late”, hard cover 2018. The author is Mary Rice Hasson, a fellow in Catholic Studies at EPPC, located in D.C. Hasson testifies to state governments, Parliaments,… At the EPPC site, readers can learn her views.
The LAUSD School Board’s Innovation Committee used to be called the Charters and Innovation Committee. Do we see the connections clearly enough?
Just watched a panel discussion with Dr. Roza called “How the Education Market Will KIll Your Innovation”
What became clear really quickly is that what the panelists think “innovation” in education means is computers.
And one mentioned that education people don’t want to hear that they can downsize the number of math teachers by using math teaching software.
Oh gee. I wonder why this Edunomics outfit (which deals with the economics of education but is somehow not economics, TE suggests; that’s a mystery to me, like the Trinity) is receiving funding from the Gates Foundation! So odd!
Look, education wrecking crew at the Gates Foundation, if having a communications medium to convey information meant that one could dispense with teachers, then we could have done that after the invention of moveable type.
“Edunomics” sounds like the economics of education. TE says the director is not an economist. I don’t get it.
It is fairly simple. The director does not have any degree in economics. It is similar to saying that someone is not a physician because they do not have a medical degree even though they may run a hospital.
I do see your argument, TE. But what her organization studies and reports on is educational economics, and she is the author of a book with that title.
And besides, TE, she gets money from the Gates Foundation, so she is automatically, by virtue of that, an expert in everything, like Bill.
I need to clarify that bit of sarcasm. Dr. Roza does not claim to be an expert in everything. It’s just that a lot of folks who are funded by Gates become InstaPundits.
Often, public “expertise” is a function of the person’s associations.
In 2019, AEI held a session, “Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck”. It even had a hashtag #Bang for EdBuck.
Opening remarks were made by Frederick Hess. Included in one panel, Marguerite Roza (Georgetown), Amber Northam (Fordham), Michael McShane (Ed Choice) and Scott Milam (Afton Partners).
McShane is author of the books, Hybrid Homeschool and co-authored with Hess a book about Educational Entrepreneurship. He is noted as the editor of “New and Better Schools: The supply side of school choice.” Page 140, Chap. 7 of the supply side book, in the chapter titled, “”Operator Incentive Lessons from Notre Dame ACE Academies”, there is the following, “As a Catholic University, we believe that we are in the business of not just educating citizens but also forming human beings into future saints.”
The McShane supply book’s contributors include Anna Egalite, post doc at harvard and University of Ark. grad. At U of A, she worked with Patrick J. Wolfe on research characterized by the U of A press as , “Louisiana Program helps desegregate schools, study finds”. The John Locke Foundation based in N.C. which Souurcewatch describes as a right wing pressure group has a webpage with Dr. Egalite’s bio.
Also a contributor to McShane’s book, Christian Dallavis, Assistant Superintendent at Partnership Schools. At his Linked In page, he has 3 likes. Two are, “Thank you school leaders ACE at Notre Dame and, Tax Credit Scholarships are good for kids and family. Dallavis was at Notre Dame for 11 years. The right hand column of his Linked In page cites “people who also view him.” A common thread appears.
IMO, “Laicism in the crosshairs” is the unreported story about school choice.
Linda, I hope you recalled that Patrick Wolf used to be chosen by Congress as “independent evaluator” of vouchers in DC and had the same role in evaluating Milwaukee’s voucher program. To his credit, he admitted that the students saw no academic gains, but managed to overlook or minimize the huge attrition rates. Now that he has a position at the University of Arkansas’s Department of Educational Reform (choice), he is no longer perceived as independent
Degenerate Schools. LMAO! Now there’s a new one (or new to me)! LOL. And instead of calling students “scholars” as so many charters do, we can call them saints.
Why send your child to a Degenerate School when he or she can earn a halo at Bob’s School for Saints? LOL.
Diane-
Thank you for reading what I write.
I read every comment.
Bob– another priceless gem falls from your keyboard: “if having a communications medium to convey information meant that one could dispense with teachers, then we could have done that after the invention of moveable type.” 😀
Thanks, Ginny!
Yep, she’s all about blended learning…https://www.crpe.org/publications/ch-4-innovating-toward-sustainability-how-computer-labs-can-enable-new-staffing
Info. about the Cristo Rey religious school chain, which received funding from Gates and Walton (located in inner cities of 17 states), describes use of a blended learning type model. The Christiansen Institute (it’s founder originated the biz speak use of “disruption”) reported about a Cristo Rey prototype in Calf. that had 60 students in a classroom.
Jefferson-
In every country, in every age, the priest aligns with the despot.
From that report:
The precise mix of labor in schools does not need to be fixed in stone, which some innovative schooling networks have shown. With financial sustainability a critical issue, school designs that rely less on high-cost labor and more on technological innovations might prove more viable in the long run. The recent explosion of technology-based options in schooling—combined with the falling price of technology—suggest that the timing is ripe for more innovations that rethink staffing.
There you are, teachers. You are being “rethought.”
Lots of innovative ideas, mostly involving cutting teachers’ pensions, salaries, and jobs.
Bill Gates became the wealthiest man in the world by peddling computer software. Then, he had an idea. Billions of billions of dollars could be saved (uh, made) if schools became more computer based. He gave a talk many years ago in which he laid out his grand vision. The costs in K-12 schooling are almost all in facilities and staff. By using computers, you could cut both enormously. That’s the idea. That’s why he paid, for example, for the creation of the puerile Common Core State Standards, which were not created in common, do not belong to the commons, are not core, were not created by the states, and are so poorly constructed that to call them “standards” is laughable. But it really didn’t matter how dreadful these were. The whole point was to have ONE set of standards nationally so that computer moguls could roll out edu-software “at scale,” keyed to that set of standards.
Well, a lot has gone wrong in his big plan. People figured out that completion rates for online courses were abysmally low. Studies of the amount of learning taken away from these was far below that taken away from conventional classes. Many K-12 virtual learning companies have been utter disasters. Most educational technology startups follow a lot of initial hype with utter failure. And people weren’t willing to buy into Gates’s attempt to monopolize the education market by creating inBloom to serve as the de facto national gradebook and educational materials gatekeeper (because it would decide who got to pay to play). And it turns out that kids HATE computerized “learning.”
But the dream is still alive. Replace teachers with computers. Instead of having rooms with a couple dozen students in them and one teacher, have ones with 400 hundred students working and computers and one person there to keep them online. Good enough
training for Prole children.
https://www.crpe.org/publications/ch-4-innovating-toward-sustainability-how-computer-labs-can-enable-new-staffing
It’s interesting that inBloom went belly up over the student data privacy issue. No one seemed in the least concerned that by acting as the nation’s gradebook. this company would have been the de facto gatekeeper for the nation’s educational materials, able to decide what companies and products could interface with the gradebook–would be allowed in. As a business plan, does that sound familiar?
I posted about this issue here on Diane’s blog many times, and the general reaction to it was no reaction, as though it didn’t matter at all who was deciding what educational materials would be able to link to the company’s database and thus to the state reporting systems that were also to be linked to that database and thus what ones would have any chance at all in the market.
If you decide who gets to play and people have to pay you to make that decision, you rule.
Another quotation from that paper:
In addition, the learning lab software removes the need
for some tasks, such as assigning and grading basic mathematics problems and individualized literacy work. In this manner, a single teacher reaches one third more students, whereas noncertified instructors, computers, and the students themselves take on a portion of the previous responsibilities—and costs—of the teacher.
In the 1970s, there was a lot of hype about “learning labs” being the future of education. Schools all across the United States installed these. I, as a high-school student, sat in one for a time. They were initially used primarily for foreign language instruction and used a programmed learning model.
And here’s what happened: they were an utter educational failure and a huge financial boondoggle. Kids didn’t learn the Spanish or French or whatever that they would have learned in a traditional language classroom, and school districts were out tons of money on the useless equipment.
Here we are again. Some vinegar in wine bottles with pretty new labels. Now with customizable student avatars! Personalize learning!
Hype. B.S.
same old vinegar in new wine bottles
Bob, I remember checking out the results for computer-sw for-lang-learning programs early in internet days (I recall eric was the place to find ed studies). Then as now, overall results were terrible. The small % who benefited from them were “highly-motivated adults,” and even among them, those with good results were the already bi[or more]lingual. It was also pointed out that the successful program in use for govt employees [spies et al] were supplemented with weekly intensive small-group (in-person) practice sessions.
Lang labs weren’t around yet for me in hisch, but I used them extensively in a couple of those crash [8-cred] 101 courses in college. If I remember correctly, the 8 credits included 6 IRL classes plus 2 sessions in the lab—which were for drilling yourself on class material. When I was teaching hisch, we used them as part of the ALM curriculum for I & II levels, but just as weekly practice—with teacher onboard helping 1-on-1. Like most “tech,” they are strictly a supplemental tool. Even for autodidacts, self-drilling is strictly a supplement for review/ memorization. For obvious reasons, intro/devpt of content learning needs IRL direct teaching/ guided discussion.
LOL. Oh, the days of roaming Eric! Is that thing still around?
strangely it just popped up for me yesterday when I was trying to find out where “affinity spaces” for K12 came from. Haven’t answered my Q yet, but learned they’ve been around since at least 2012.
In the pre-web days, I used something called Dialogue, I think it was, which was an academic database that used the pre-web internet or ARPANET as I think it might have been called then.
Cycles…
Kamloops Residential School in Canada …. the government abdicated the care of students to the decisions of the conservative religious.
Roza does raise another interesting issue. There is a problem with procurement of educational materials in this country that stifles innovation in curricula and pedagogy by raising barriers to entry for small publishers. If decisions about purchasing of print and online educational materials were made at the building level, then a publisher with a truly innovative pedagogical idea could create a product and go school by school to sell it. Instead, under the current systems, and their are several, smaller publishers have almost no chance against the educational publishing behemoths, who can afford to meet state and district demands and to marshal the incredibly expensive resources to do that. As a result, true pedagogical and curricular innovation is extremely rare. It costs tens of millions of dollars to bring a 6-12 literature textbook anthology series to market, and most of this cost is driven by the scale built into educational materials adoption requirements.
Gates said that creating a single set of national standards would “drive innovation” by enabling products to be sold “at scale.” Exactly the opposite is the case, of course. The reasons behind this should be obvious.
Suppose that you are an educational publisher, and a developer comes to you with the following argument: Writing encodes speech. Kids from underprivileged backgrounds are not exposed to the rich linguistic environments (rich in vocabulary and syntactic forms) that kids from privileged backgrounds are. This puts them at an enormous disadvantage in learning to read because of their smaller SPOKEN vocabularies and the smaller and nonstandard SPOKEN language grammars they have acquired. So, an important part of an early reading program would be to create a compensatory spoken language environment for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.
A small publisher of educational materials might make the investment necessary to instantiate this pedagogical innovation in a new reading program for, say, K-3 IF it could sell the program school by school. But a publisher that is going to spend 100 million to develop and market to states and districts a new reading program is not going to do this. It’s going to stick with what people are used to seeing, whether it works or not.
In other words, if all people know are horses and even if cars exist in theory or even in prototype, it is going to continue to market horses. We have cars because INDIVIDUALS could say, gee, I think I’ll get a car instead of another horse.
cx: and there are several
I really need to start proofing before hitting the Send button!
And that’s the way it used to be many decades ago. Individual schools could decide what textbooks and the like they wanted to buy with the dollars handed to them. And at that time, there were MANY competing educational publishers with sizable market share. When that changed, only the big guys could play. Result? The death of innovation.
Scale is the enemy of innovation.
Real pedagogical and curricular innovation, not what is called innovation by the ed reform echo chamber, which is simply discredited old behaviorist programmed learning dressed up with graphics and sound and marketed as educational software. Old vinegar in new wine bottles.
Bob-
You make good points about venture philanthropy’s duplicity.
The defense of the free market economic theory is supply side competitive access to the market which has never been associated with Bill Gates.
The connection between Adam Smith’s theory and right wing economic practice is, divorce, full stop.
Yeah, the term “free market” is meaningless when only the few have genuine access to the market. We have a “free market” in luxury yachts. Free for the Gateses and Bezoses of the world. Hey, poor person, there is a “free market” in organic vegetables at Rich White People Foods! Come try our organic avocados, only $104 lb!
This is why Social Democratic systems work. They have steeply progressive taxes, and they squash monopolies, and so they keep Scale in check and the scales more balanced while enjoying the fruits of actual competition.
As the quote goes, libertarians want people to die like feral dogs in the gutter.
Let me give a concrete example of this. Back in the 1960s and ’70s, grammar and composition textbook programs in the United States consisted of textbooks with hundreds of pages of traditional grammar exercises and three chapters tacked on at the end: one on outlining, one on writing the paragraph, and one on writing the composition. A tiny company called McDougal, Littell, which consisted of a few people, did a new grammar and comp program that incorporated the writing process, put the writing chapters up front, and vastly expanded the space given to writing instruction. At the time, a small company like that one could do a small print run, hand the thing to sales people, and have them work school by school. So, a major pedagogical innovation like introduction of the Writing Process approach to writing instruction could actually get to market. It didn’t face state and district requirements that grammar and composition textbooks look just like the ones that I described at the beginning of this note, and it didn’t need the vast resources required to market effectively at those levels in the hierarchy.
Sorry, Mr. Gates. Scale kills innovation.
The idea that the more monolithic something is, the more actual innovation you are going to get is oxymoronic. It’s up there with “congressional ethics” and “Nationalist Freedom Caucus” on the oxymoronic scale (emphasis on the moronic).
Someone’s got a sense of humor
#Bang for Ed Buck
Edunomics Lab meet Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection (ICAP) at Georgetown Law which is working with the NAACP in the Bishop of Charleston v Adams case, “to defend against the erosion of public school funding in South Carolina.”