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“Dear Mr. Zuckerberg.” Students Take Their Grievances about Summit Platform to Mark Z.

By dianeravitch
November 16, 2018 //
33

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.

Categories Accountability, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privacy, Students, Technology

Leonie Haimson: Why Brooklyn Students Protested Against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Platform

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2018 //
15

Leonie Haimson provides a comprehensive report on the context for the Brooklyn high school protest against the Chan-Zuckerberg tech program called Summit. As she says, this is a David-Goliath situation. The students are powerful!


Last week, on November 5, about 100 students at the Secondary School of Journalism in Brooklyn walked out of their schools to protest the Summit online program. This digital instruction program, funded by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates, forces students to spend hours staring at computers, left at sea with little human interaction or help from their teachers, all in the name of “personalized learning.”

As one of the students, Mitchel Storman, said to Sue Edelman who reported on the protest in the NY Post, “I have seen lots of students playing games instead of working….Students can easily cheat on quizzes since they can just copy and paste the question into Google.”

Zenaiah Bonsu, Kelly Hernandez and Akila Robinson credit: Helayne Seidman
Senior Akila Robinson said she couldn’t even log onto Summit for nearly two months, while other classmates can’t or won’t use it. “The whole day, all we do is sit there.” A teacher said, “It’s a lot of reading on the computer, and that’s not good for the eyes. Kids complain. Some kids refuse to do it.”

Since Norm Scott wrote about the walkout on his blog, and Sue Edelman’s reporting in the NY Post, the story has been picked up elsewhere including Fast Company and Business Insider. The online program, which originated in the Summit chain of charter schools in California, and was further developed and expanded with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, Facebook and nowthe Chan Zuckerberg LLC, has now invaded up to 300 or so public schools, and is collecting a huge amount of personal data from thousands of students without their knowledge or consent or that of their parents.

I have been writing and questioning Summit for the past two years, and last year, met with Diane Tavenner, asked her all sorts of questions she never responded to, and toured her flagship charter school in Redwood City. My description of this visit is here.

Since then, parents in 15 states have reached out to me in huge distress about the negative impact of this program on their children. Many report that their children, who had previously done well in school, now say that they aren’t learning, that they feel constantly stressed, are beginning to hate school and want to drop out. Some parents have told me that they are now homeschooling their kids or have decided to sell their homes and move out of the district

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, New York City, Privacy, Resistance, Students

New York City: Education Department Restricts Summit Learning in Response to Student Protest

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2018 //
3

Norm Scott, retired teacher, blogger, videographer and resistance leader, reports on the success of the Brooklyn student protest against the Chan-Zuckerberg Summit Learning Program.

Norm begins:

Here is today’s ed notes post on the situation at SSJ on the John Jay Campus.

How amazing are the students? At the SLT meeting, at first I could see some of the parents rolling their eyes at some of the things we were saying as the principal is so smooth. But when Leonie hit them with the data being collected, the mood shifted and so did the principal who had at first refused to talk about it but then backed off and there was an at times intense debate. Sue Edelman was there too.

I think the way the meeting played out itself is a story – maybe a play. So much better than the Del Assembly.

Norm

Categories Education Reform, New York City, Resistance, Students, Technology

New York City: High School Students Walkout to Protest Zuckerberg “Summit Learning” Program

By dianeravitch
November 12, 2018 //
42

The high-tech learning “platform” called Summit has been controversial, but nowhere more than in Brooklyn, where high school students walked out of school to protest the amount of time they spend online.

Susan Edelman writes in the New York Post:

Brooklyn teens are protesting their high school’s adoption of an online program spawned by Facebook, saying it forces them to stare at computers for hours and “teach ourselves.”

Nearly 100 students walked out of classes at the Secondary School for Journalism in Park Slope last week in revolt against “Summit Learning,” a web-based curriculum designed by Facebook engineers, and bankrolled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

It’s annoying to just sit there staring at one screen for so long,” said freshman Mitchel Storman, 14, who spends close to five hours a day on Summit classes in algebra, biology, English, world history, and physics. “You have to teach yourself.”

Listen to the students. They make more sense than the adults. Not always

Summit stresses “personalized learning” and “self-direction.” Students work at their own pace. Teachers “facilitate.” Each kid is supposed to get 10 to 15 minutes of one-on-one “mentoring” each week.

Mitchel said his teachers sometimes give brief lessons, but then students have to work on laptops connected to the Internet.

“The distractions are very tempting,” he said. “I have seen lots of students playing games instead of working.”

Kids can re-take tests until they pass — and look up the answers, he added: “Students can easily cheat on quizzes since they can just copy and paste the question into Google.”

Listen to the students.

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, New York City, Rhee, Michelle, Students, Technology

The Progressive: Will the “Save Our Schools” Movement Determine the Election Results?

By dianeravitch
October 26, 2018 //
41

Ruth Conniff, editor of “The Progressive,” suggests that the Save Our Schools Movement could be the determining factor in the midterm elections.

She writes:

The “education spring” protests, in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina, won increases in teacher pay and education budgets, launched hundreds of teachers into campaigns for political office, and showed massive support for public schools this year. In Wisconsin and other states, education is a key issue in the 2018 governor’s race. Public opinion has turned against budget cuts, school vouchers, and the whole “test and punish” regime.

“The corporate education reform movement is dying,” Diane Ravitch, the Network’s founder declared. “We are the resistance, and we are winning!”

As the Save Our Schools movement swept the nation this year, blaming “bad teachers” for struggling schools also appears to have gone out of style.

A Time Magazine cover story on teachers who are underpaid, overworked, and have to donate their plasma to pay the bills painted a sympathetic portrait.

“As states tightened the reins on teacher benefits, many also enacted new benchmarks for student achievement, with corresponding standardized tests, curricula changes and evaluations of teacher performance,” Time reported. “The loss of control over their classrooms combined with the direct hit to their pocketbooks was too much for many teachers to bear.”

That’s a very different message from Time’s December 2008 cover featuring Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, standing in a classroom and holding a broom: “her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education,” Time declared.

The idea that bad teachers were ruining schools, and that their pay, benefits, and job security should be reduced or revoked, spread across the country over the last decade. Doing away with teachers’ collective bargaining rights propelled Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to political prominence in 2011. In October 2014, Time’s “Rotten Apples,” cover declared “It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires have found a way to change that.”

But today, demoralized teachers, overtested students, and the lack of improvement from these draconian policies have pushed public opinion in the opposite direction.

Charter schools, it turns out, perform no better than regular public schools. School-voucher schemes that drain money from public education to cover private-school students tuition yield even worse results—and are unpopular with voters. And testing kids a lot has not made them any smarter.

The bold walkouts and strikes of teachers and the determined resistance of parents and students are making a difference.

The public is getting “woke.”

Billionaires have poured many millions into demonizing teachers, attacking their rights, and privatizing public schools, but they have spent not a penny to increase the funding of our nation’s public schools, not even in the most distressed districts. All they have to offer are tests, charter schools, and vouchers.

It’s a hoax, intended to cut taxes, not to help children or to improve education.

We are no longer fooled.

Categories Charter Schools, Network for Public Education, Networkfor Public Education Action Fund, Parents, Privatization, Resistance, Students, Supporting public schools, Teachers

News! The Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy: How to Protect Personal Data

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2018 //
7

The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy and the BadAss Teachers Association collaborated to create this useful information.


We’re excited to let you know that today we released the Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy: A Practical Guide for Protecting Personal Data with the Badass Teachers Association (BATs).

The toolkit is a user-friendly guide to help educators make informed decisions about the use of ed tech and social media in schools to help them protect their students’ privacy and their own.

There is also a good article about the Toolkit in today’s Ed Week.

We hope you’ll download a copy and share it with the educators in your life.

Also please tune in this Saturday, October 20th at 10:50 AM Eastern on the NPE Action Facebook page for a livecast discussion from the Network for Public Education’s annual conference in Indianapolis, led by Leonie on Outsourcing the Classroom to Ed Tech & Machine-Learning: Why Parents & Teachers Should Resist, with panelists Audrey Watters and Peter Greene.

Later that day, at 2:40 pm Eastern, you’re invited to join both of us along with Marla Kilfoyle and Melissa Tomlinson of the BATS, when we will presenting our new Educator Toolkit to the public for the first time. To view the event on the BATs open Facebook page, click here.

For more information about the toolkit, please see our press release below.
Thanks!

Rachael Stickland and Leonie Haimson

Co-chairs, Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

http://www.studentprivacymatters.org

info@studentprivacymatters.org

@parents4privacy

Categories Privacy, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students, Teachers

New York Releases Tests, Six Months After Students Took Them

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2018 //
34

The New York Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department remain firmly committed to the testing regime that has aroused so much parent rebellion and produced no gains on NAEP for 20 years. The state always finds good news in the test scores, but NAEP has been consistently flat.

Opt outs declined by a percentage point, but still nearly one of every five eligible students did not take the tests.

Long Island continues to be the epicenter of the opt out movement. About 50% of the students in Nassau and Suffolk counties did not take the tests.

Federal law (the “Every Student Succeeds Act”) says that parents have the right to opt out if their state permits it, but at the same time requires that every school must have a 95% participation rate or face sanctions–a flat contradiction.

New York has not yet clarified how it intends to punish the high-performing schools on Long Island where half the students didn’t take the tests.

This article appeared in Newsday, the main newspaper on Long Island.

The number of students boycotting state tests has declined slightly statewide, but Long Island remains a stronghold of the opt-out movement, state officials announced Wednesday.

The state Education Department, in a media advisory, said the percentage of students in grades three through eight opting out of exams last spring dipped to 18 percent, down from 19 percent in 2017 and 21 percent in 2016. Tests, which are mandated by federal law, cover English Language Arts and mathematics.

The advisory provided no specific percentage for Nassau and Suffolk counties, but did note that the bicounty region “remains the geographic area with the highest percentage of test refusals in both mathematics and ELA.” Newsday’s own surveys of Island districts last spring found boycott rates of nearly 50 percent.

Among students who took the tests statewide, 45.2 percent scored at the proficient level in English, and 44.5 percent in math, the education department reported. Agency officials said results could not be compared with those from prior years because the format of last spring’s tests was sharply revised.

Total testing days in the spring were reduced to four, down from six in prior years, in an effort to provide some relief for parents and teachers who had complained the assessments were too stressful.

New York’s opt-out movement has proved the biggest and most enduring in the nation. The movement first appeared on Long Island in 2013, then exploded statewide two years later, and has remained especially strong in Nassau and Suffolk, and in some suburbs of Westchester County and the Buffalo area.

On the Island, more than 90,000 students in grades three through eight refused to take the state English Language Arts exam in April, representing nearly 50 percent of those eligible, according to Newsday’s survey of Island districts at the time.

Across New York, the number of students boycotting the state tests from 2015 through 2017 has hovered near 200,000 of 1 million eligible pupils in each of the past three years.

Categories Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students

New York: Commissioner Elia’s Misleading Description of State Tests

By dianeravitch
September 14, 2018 //
17

New York State Commissioner of Educatuon MaryEllen Elia defended the state tests in a letter to the editor of an upstate newspaper.

What was interesting was what she did not say.

She wrote:

Your recent editorial “Benefits of Regents testing still unclear” (“Another View,” Adirondack Daily Enterprise, Aug. 28) is riddled with inaccurate information about New York’s student testing requirements. For the benefit of your readers, I am writing to set the record straight.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education approved New York’s Every Student Succeeds Act plan. It reflects more than a year of collaboration with a comprehensive group of stakeholders throughout the state. Approval of our plan by USDE ensures that New York will continue to receive about $1.6 billion annually in federal funding to support elementary and secondary education in New York’s schools. Had we not received federal approval, that money would have been left on the table, to the great detriment of our students and teachers.

Over the past three years, I have communicated frequently with the USDE about test participation rates and the importance of not penalizing schools, students or anyone else when a district’s participation rate falls below the federally required level.

The editorial states that in June the Board of Regents adopted regulations to implement the state’s ESSA plan — leading your readers to believe, erroneously, that these regulations are now final. In fact, the implementing regulations are temporary. We continue to make changes to the regulations based on the many public comments received.

We anticipate the Board of Regents will discuss these comments and proposed modifications to the draft regulations at its September meeting. The revised regulations will again go out for comment before they are permanently adopted. We hope your readers will participate in this ongoing public comment process.

Your editorial also is misleading in its claim that releasing state test results in September “makes the testing data nearly useless for school districts.” Here are the facts. In early June, schools and school districts were able to access instructional reports for the 2018 state assessments. At the same time, the department released about 75 percent of the test questions that contribute to student scores. The instructional reports, together with the released test questions, are used by schools and districts for summer curriculum-writing and professional development activities. Additionally, while statewide test results are not yet publicly available, we have already provided districts with their students’ score information. Districts can — and should — use this information to help inform instructional decisions for the upcoming school year.

The state Education Department’s stance remains unchanged: There should be no financial penalties for schools with high opt out rates. We continue to review the public comments on this and other proposed regulations, and those comments will be carefully considered as we finalize the state’s ESSA regulations.

Ultimately, it is for parents to decide whether their child should participate in the state assessments. In making that decision, though, they should have accurate information. I hope this letter gives them a better understanding of the facts.

MaryEllen Elia
Albany
The writer is state commissioner of education.

I checked with teachers, and this is what they said.

The test scores are released long after the student has left his or her teacher and moved to a different teacher.

Most of the questions are released, but the teacher never learns which questions individual students got right or wrong.

The tests have NO DIAGNOSTIC VALUE.

The tests have NO INSTRUCTIONAL VALUE.

Apparently, it means a lot to Commissioner Elia to compare the scores of different districts, but that comparison is of no value to teachers, principals, or parents.

One middle school teacher said this to me:

“…the whole exercise is meaningless at the classroom level. Admins might look at the data when it comes to certain skills/content areas, but without looking at the questions/answers, it is not helpful for us in the trenches.”

Another teacher told me:

“…we do not get student-specific results for each question, we are supposed to look at statewide results and then somehow extrapolate that back to our classrooms, the following year, with different kids. So this is a BLUNT tool at best and students get no individual diagnostic benefit.”

The state tests are pointless and meaningless. They have no diagnostic value whatever for individual students.

Every parent in New York should understand that their children are subjected to hours of testing for no reason, other than to allow the Commissioner to compare districts. Their children receive no benefit from the testing. No teacher learns anything about their students, other than their scores.

The state tests are pointless and meaningless. They have no diagnostic value for students—or teachers.

OPT OUT.

OPT OUT.

OPT OUT.

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, New York, Opt Out, Parents, Standardized Testing, Students, Testing

Sacramento: Principal of Rhee-Johnson Charter School Quits in Protest

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2018 //
9

The principal of Sacramento Charter High School resigned in protest, siding with the students who were demonstrating against teacher turnover, a change in the dress code, and other arbitrary rules.

The school is part of the St. Hope Charter Chain, founded by former Sacramento Mayor (and basketball star) Kevin Johnson, and managed by him and his wife Michelle Rhee.

“Sacramento Charter High School’s top administrator has resigned just days after students left classes in protest and she blasted St. Hope administrators for what she said was the school’s “sustained history of neglect from above” and their “reactionary finger-pointing” in their handling of the student walkout.

“Christina Smith in a strongly worded one-page letter dated Monday and obtained Wednesday by The Sacramento Bee, threw her support behind the students, saying the demonstrations and the blame laid at Smith’s feet in its wake by leaders of St. Hope Public Schools, which runs the charter high school, were among the tipping points that led to her resignation as the school’s site lead…

“Some 100 students staged four days of walkouts frustrated that student-led changes to the campus’ handbook approved at the end of the 2017-2018 school year were set aside by St. Hope officials and that students were ordered by the officials to wear costly school-mandated uniforms.

“We feel like we’re being stripped of our voices,” said senior Keishay Swygert during Friday’s demonstration, part of four days of protest against St. Hope administrators. “We want our school back.”

“Other students on Wednesday bemoaned a high teacher turnover rate, a lack of textbooks, arbitrary rule-making by school leaders and an environment that does not properly prepare its students for college.”

Read more here: https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article218292925.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Principals, Privatization, Students

Students Walk Out at Sacramento Charter High School to Protest Teacher Firings and Arbitrary Policies

By dianeravitch
September 9, 2018 //
23

Students protested at Sacramento Charter High School, operated by St. Hope’s Charter chain, led by former mayor Kevin Johnson and his wife Michelle Rhee. They were angry about Teacher firings over the summer and arbitrary rules, like requiring students to wear long pants when the temperature reached 100.

Charter operators can’t push high school students around as easily as little kids.

Here’s some history about Sacramento Charter High School.

“Founded in 1856, Sacramento High School moved several times. In 1922, construction began at its current location on 34th Street. It opened at this location in 1924 and continuously served the growing neighborhoods of Downtown Sacramento, Midtown, East Sacramento, River Park, College Greens, Tahoe Park and Oak Park until 2003.

“The school was closed by the SCUSD School Board in June 2003, over the objections of many students, parents and teachers. The new charter high school, which opened in September 2003, kept the same school colors, purple and white, and the dragon mascot but not the Visual and Performing Arts Center (VAPAC) which had been one of the school’s unique features for many years. Sacramento Charter High School is governed by a private Board of Directors from St. Hope Public Schools.”

Categories Accountability, California, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Discipline, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Resistance, Rhee, Michelle, Students
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