Leonie Haimson has watched the development of CZI’s Summit Learning, a tech-based platform. She is a leader of Student Privacy Matters and the Parents’ Coalition for Student Privacy.
Here are recommended readings:
There seems to be no shortage of money to create new corporate reformer organizations, and they seem to open faster than anyone can keep track of them.
Here is a new one: Results for America.
You will recognize the names of some prominent figures in the Obama and George W. Bush administrations.
Notable among them is Jim Shelton, who worked for Gates, Arne Duncan, and then led the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Let’s hope they pay attention to the scandals now afflicting the charter industry and don’t use their money and weight to promote more of what has already proven to be a failure.
The website cites the federal Every Student Succeeds Act as one of its successes:
Strengthening Public Education
RFA helped develop the evidence provisions in the bipartisan Every Student Succeeds Act which could help states and district shift up to $2 billion annually toward evidence-based solutions in FYs 2017-2020.
Considering that ESSA retained NCLB’s mandated annual testing, it is hard to see where the evidence is for its “success.” If the measure is test scores, then ESSA has not moved the needle. ESSA maintains the Bush-Obama failures, with the sole exception being the removal of the insane 2014 deadline by which every student would be proficient. What part of ESSA has succeeded? What evidence is there to believe that “every student” will succeed because of this pointless law?
Three teachers at Summit Public Schools (privately managed charter schools calling themselves ”public”) were terminated without cause. The three were trying to organize a union to improve working conditions and had been offered contracts for next year when they were suddenly informed that they were no longer wanted. No teachers other than these three were fired.
The Summit charter schools are funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and are noted for their infusion of computer instruction into classrooms.
This is the teachers’ website.
This is their petition on Change.org.
In January, teachers at Summit Public Schools, a group of charter schools in the Bay Area, formed a union, Unite Summit, in order to promote teacher retention, improve student support services, and increase teacher voice in important decisions.
On June 7, the last day of the school year, three Summit teachers and union leaders were fired without cause. We believe this action is unlawful, unethical, and harmful to our students.
In each case, employees were not provided any rationale for their termination beyond “business reasons.” The removal of such outstanding teachers from our school communities not only impacts the quality of education provided to our students, it also shows that Summit is not respecting teachers’ democratic decision to form a union.
Unite Summit has worked to promote the retention of high-quality educators who are invested in our students’ success. Educators have the right to speak out about how to improve their schools without fearing retaliation. The California Educational Employment Relations Act, Section 3543.5.a, states that it is unlawful for an employer to “impose or threaten to impose reprisals on employees, to discriminate or threaten to discriminate against employees, or otherwise to interfere with, restrain, or coerce employees because of their exercise of rights guaranteed by this chapter.”
We are therefore calling on SPS leadership to respect Summit teachers’ legal rights to unionize, to own their responsibility to refrain from intimidation, harassment, threats or retaliation, and to immediately reinstate the three fired teachers — Aaron Calvert, Evelyn DeFelice, and Andrew Stevenson.
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat reports that the Chan-Zuckerberg tech-based schools called Summit have been underreporting the percent of schools that quit their program every year.
After multiple news reports of high school students walking out in protest against the Summit tech platform, Summit responded by saying that only 10% of schools leave every year. That figure, writes Barnum, was widely reported.
Summit has led the “movement” for “personalized learning,” which is in fact “depersonalized learning.” To be personalized, there must be interaction between at least two persons, not interaction between a computer and a student.
Barnum writes:
When nearly 100 students walked out of their Brooklyn high school in protest last year, saying they were spending too much of their days in front of a computer, the story took off.
The students were complaining about their school’s use of Summit Learning, a curriculum and online learning system backed byFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. But the organizations behind Summit pushed back, saying the issues raised by the Brooklyn students weren’t representative of what was happening at the nearly 400 schools using the program.
One piece of evidence they offered: just 10% of schools quit using the platform each year, a number that ended up in multiple newsstories.
New data obtained by Chalkbeat — from Summit itself, in response to a public records request — shows that figure is misleading. Since the platform was made available, 18% of schools using it in a given year had quit using it a year later.
Asked about the discrepancy, a Summit spokesperson explained that its 10% figure comes from averaging the dropoff rates for each of the first three years. The number of schools adopting the platform was 19 in the first year and 338 in the third year, so Summit’s approach is skewed heavily in favor of the first year’s low attrition number.
Looking just at schools that signed on to the platform last school year, a quarter of them are no longer using Summit this year.
The Brooklyn walkout was one among many and a bellwether for the future. Students want human teachers.
Remember when Laurene Powell Jobs announced that she was running a competition for ideas to reinvent the high school? She was offering $10 million to each winning proposal, which she called “Super Schools.”
Nearly 700 proposals were entered, but only 10 were chosen.
One of the winners was in Oakland, California, a district that has been subject to nonstop disruption, charters, and and constant meddling by the Eli Broad foundation. For years, the district has been led by Broadies, who have run it into a ditch and failed to revive its fortunes.
The Oakland winner planned to open a Super School that incorporated Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning online platform.
But things went poorly after Oakland’s Broadie superintendent Antwan Wilson was lured to the District of Columbia to be its chancellor (where he was soon ousted after it was revealed that he pulled strings to get his daughter into one of the best public schools, a practice that Wilson had forbidden for others. Wilson is now running an education consulting business.)
Two years ago, the Oakland Super School was abandoned before it opened.
The turmoil in the district, which has been a near constant for years, made it impossible to open.
Summit Public Schools, which operates a chain of charter schools, with support from the Oakland school district and Mayor Libby Schaaf’s office, submitted a winning proposal for a charter school focusing on personal learning and real-world experiences. The goal was to open the new school at the California College of the Arts on Broadway in Rockridge in fall 2018.
But the effort started to fall apart over the last several months and was ultimately abandoned in recent weeks, The Chronicle has learned. Now, Summit leaders will use the money for one of their existing charter schools in Daly City.
“There are just better ways for us to help kids in the Bay Area,” said Jason Solomon, senior director of advocacy and engagement at Summit Public Schools, which operates eight charter schools in the Bay Area and three in Washington state.
Solomon noted that the team’s entry to build the new school included the support of former Oakland Superintendent Antwan Wilson, who resigned this year to lead the Washington, D.C., schools. On top of the turnover in leadership, the district is grappling with the need to close or consolidate schools given declining enrollment while juggling a $30 million budget shortfall over the next year.
Community groups were unhappy that the proposed charter would be sited very close to an existing Oakland public school that had not yet been disrupted and destroyed.
With Antwan Wilson gone, Summit charters was not sure they would have a champion so they shifted the funding to one of their schools in Daly City.
Summit substitutes computer-based instruction for real teachers, and it has driven out in places as distant as Connecticut and Kansas, by parents and students.
Today, the New York Times posted a story about a rebellion in Kansas against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning platform.
They said NO to Facebook’s “personalized learning,” which replaces teachers with Chromebooks.
Good for the students of Kansas!
WELLINGTON, Kan. — The seed of rebellion was planted in classrooms. It grew in kitchens and living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents.
It culminated when Collin Winter, 14, an eighth grader in McPherson, Kan., joined a classroom walkout in January. In the nearby town of Wellington, high schoolers staged a sit-in. Their parents organized in living rooms, at churches and in the back of machine repair shops. They showed up en masse to school board meetings. In neighborhoods with no political yard signs, homemade signs with dark red slash marks suddenly popped up.
Silicon Valley had come to small-town Kansas schools — and it was not going well.
“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.
Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.
Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit’s program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.
Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad’s hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone.
“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son’s fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.
In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform…
The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit’s platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017.
Hello, Mark Zuckerberg! Students want teachers, not interfacing with computers!
“Personalized learning” means human interaction, not interfacing.
Summit, go away!
Mark Zuckerberg and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funded the Summit learning program, which is computer-based online instruction. not personalized learning.
Students in Kansas sent a message to Zuckerberg:
Another student #walkout vs #SummitLearning – this time at McPherson MS in Kansas. Like earlier one in Brooklyn, protest was sparked by students’ frustrations about inadequacies of the online Learning program http://midkansasonline.com/news/?id=23280
https://www.mcphersonsentinel.com/news/20190130/mms-students-stage-walkout-to-protest-summit
Waving signs and chanting “No Summit, No Summit, No Summit,” the students spent their afternoon out of class venting their frustration with the changes in their curriculum…. “It’s a learning program that is supposed to be a better way, but you are just on a computer,” said Drake Madden, a seventh grader. “Every time I get home, my head starts hurting.” he said.
The city supervisor of San Francisco wants to take Mark Zuckerberg’s name off the city’s only public hospital. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan made a gift of $75 million to the hospital, where Dr. Chan once worked. Maybe they could just rename it the Dr. Priscilla Chan Hospital.
Citing Facebook’s mishandling of user privacy and its use of an opposition research firm to discredit critics, San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin is pushing to remove Mark Zuckerberg’s name from the city’s public hospital.
The hospital was renamed Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital in 2015 after the Facebook CEO and his wife contributed $75 million to the hospital’s foundation.
Peskin on Tuesday asked the city attorney to outline a procedure for removing Zuckerberg’s name from the hospital. (Though it formally bears Chan’s name, the hospital often calls itself just “Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center” in signage.) In his remarks, Peskin cited the Cambridge Analytica scandal — in which the political data firm obtained the personal information of as many as 87 million Facebook users without their consent — and revelations in a recent New York Times article about Facebook’s hiring of a political consulting firm to discredit activists critical of the company. The social network, according to the Times, sought to cast some criticism of Facebook as anti-Semitic, while Facebook’s consulting firm was also accused of tactics tainted with anti-Semitism.
“It is not normal for private entities to use that information to spread, and in this case anti-Semitic, conspiracy theories on platforms they control,” Peskin said at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. “It is not normal for Mark Zuckerberg and (Facebook chief operating officer) Sheryl Sandberg to refuse to accept responsibility and to publicly distance themselves from acts that they have personally instigated. … This is about the integrity of institutions and spaces that are overwhelmingly funded by public money and taxpayer dollars.”
A spokesman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the office has received the request to look into the matter and does not have a policy position on the issue.
The city has moved to rename some public structures before, such as Justin Herman Plaza on the Embarcadero, but removing Zuckerberg’s name from the hospital may trigger a dispute because of a naming agreement Zuckerberg and Chan reached with the hospital, which is owned and operated by the San Francisco Department of Public Health. The agreement, adopted by the Board of Supervisors in 2015, says the hospital is to be named the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center for 50 years. The $75 million gift is believed to be the single largest contribution by private individuals in support of a public hospital in the United States.
“It is customary in hospital capital campaigns to provide naming opportunities in honor of major philanthropic gifts, as a critical strategy for raising awareness for the project within the community and for garnering action from other community members and philanthropists,” the resolution said.
The resolution does not explicitly address what would happen if the naming were revoked. When asked whether the hospital, if the city were to seek to remove Zuckerberg’s name, would have to give the money back, a hospital spokesman said he “couldn’t offer an opinion on that.”
Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital is the only public acute-care hospital in the city, serving about 108,000 people each year. Chan, Zuckerberg’s wife, previously worked there as a pediatrician.
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment.
In a written statement, hospital CEO Susan Ehrlich said Zuckerberg and Chan’s contributions have helped the hospital acquire new technology to serve patients, renovate the building and improve patient care.
“In acknowledgment and appreciation of that gift, our hospital now carries their names,” Ehrlich said. “Naming is an important convention in philanthropy that encourages additional donors. … We are honored that Dr. Chan and Mr. Zuckerberg thought highly enough of our hospital and staff, and the health of San Franciscans, to donate their resources to our mission.”
Students at the Secondary School for Journalism walked out to protest the Chan-Zuckerberg Summit depersonalized learning program, but thought Mark Zuckerberg might not have noticed. So they wrote him a letter to explain why they don’t like interacting for hours a day with a computer. They wrote and told him that they were learning little or nothing, and they complained about the collection of their personally identifiable data. They asked why Summit (and CZI) was collecting all this data without their knowledge or consent. Great points!
The article appears in EdSurge, a tech journal that is partially underwritten by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. I bet Mark and Priscilla see it.
They had tried before to address their concerns with the program, says Kelly Hernandez, one of the organizers of the protest. But no matter how many times they talked to their principal, or how many calls their parents made to the school to complain, nothing changed.
“We wanted to fight back with a walkout,” Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior, tells EdSurge, “because when we tried to voice our concerns, they just disregarded us.”
The Secondary School for Journalism is one of about 380 schools nationwide using Summit Learning, a personalized learning program that involves the use of an online instructional software, called the Summit Platform. This program grew out of Summit Public Schools, a network of 11 charter schools based in California and Washington, and soon caught the eye of Facebook, which lent engineers to help build the software. The platform was later supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Earlier this year, Summit Public Schools announced it would be spinning the program out as an independent nonprofit in the 2019-2020 school year.
This is not the first time that the Summit software has attracted questions and protests. Around this time last year, a Connecticut school suspended its use of the software just months after implementing it.
For Hernandez and her classmates, the breaking point came the week of Halloween, when students got their report cards, she says. Some weren’t showing any credit for the courses they’d taken and passed—courses that were necessary to graduate. Others had significant scheduling errors. “It was just so disorganized,” Hernandez recalls.
So she and her friend, senior Akila Robinson, began asking around to see who might participate in a walkout. A few days later, on Nov. 5, nearly 100 students left the school to protest Summit.
“We didn’t necessarily want attention,” Hernandez says, even though they got plenty from the media. “We wanted the changes we felt we needed.”
Some changes have come. The school dropped the learning program for 11th and 12th grade students, because teachers of those grades didn’t receive any professional development for Summit. It is still using it with 9th and 10th graders, which Hernandez wants to change.
She believes a lot of the problems with Summit fall on her teachers and administrators, who were not properly trained in using it. Summit Learning officials, in an email to Education Week, also attributed the problems described by the students to poor implementation and a lack of professional development for teachers.
But fundamental issues with the learning system, as well as concerns over the data Summit collects and shares about its students, must be addressed with the people behind Summit, Hernandez feels. That’s why she and Robinson drafted and sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Thursday.
Below is the full text of the email the students sent to Facebook’s chief executive. Diane Tavenner, CEO of Summit Public Schools, is also copied on the note.
[Please open the link to read the students’ letter.]
Disclosure: EdSurge has received grant support from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
New York Magazine takes notice of the rebellion against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Program, Which puts students on computers for hours a day.
It is important when the world beyond education takes notice of really bad ideas. Zuckerberg can ignore parents in Connecticut and students in Brooklyn, but when the bad news seeps into the mainstream media, he notices.
It begins:
The revolt over the Summit Learning Program, an online learning system partially bankrolled by Mark Zuckerberg and implemented in schools nationwide, has come to Brooklyn. Last week, a group of high-schoolers at Park Slope’s Secondary School for Journalism staged a walkout in the middle of the school day to have the “personalized learning” regimen removed from their classrooms.
Summit’s leaders say the school’s administrators botched the rollout, introducing it to all the grades at once and not putting all of their teachers through training. But this isn’t the first time Summit has earned the enmity of the communities it’s meant to help. Parents in many other districts throughout the country have also complained, generally with mixed success; in one Connecticut district, parents of middle-schoolers were able to get the program jettisoned after a months-long campaign. (You can read more about the Cheshire revolt against Summit here.) But Brooklyn’s student-led charge is a new phenomenon — perhaps because the program has been concentrated until now in middle schools, not high schools. As it continues expanding to higher grades, more teens may well become the faces of their local opposition.
Summit was designed roughly six years ago by a network of West Coast Charter schools, and developed later with software help from Facebook engineers. It’s now funded by Zuckerberg and several other billionaires and foundations. The idea is to help kids take charge of their own education, in part by working independently on the software instead of listening to teachers lecture. Some families love it, and the leadership says the dissenters make up a small minority, magnified by their presence on social media. It’s impossible to get an objective overall picture, because there are no empirical studies on satisfaction rates, and the data on outcomes is limited.
At SSJ in Park Slope, some of the students’ complaints echo those that have arisen in Cheshire and elsewhere. “I didn’t like that it was a more self-taught kind of thing,” said Akila Robinson, a senior who helped organize the protest last week. “A lot of kids are more comfortable learning the more traditional way.” Other students have said it leaves them feeling stranded and requires an uncomfortable amount of screen time.
One teacher, who asked to have her name withheld, said most kids using Summit clearly haven’t been able to concentrate. “I’m walking around thinking, This is absolutely insane. They’re not learning,” she said. “I tell the kids to come off that Walkman, tell them to come off the phone, tell them to come off the website they’re on and go back to their modules.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 