Archives for category: Technology, Computers
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Michael R. Bloomberg: Kids Are Spending Too Much Time on Laptops

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2025 //
11

Michael R. Bloomberg is a billionaire who made his fortune in technology. He produced a computer with a double screen that is called “the Bloomberg,” with each screen focused on different topics. I don’t know enough about technology to explain why this machine was a big success but it was. Bloomberg is now the most generous of the billionaire set, with the likely exception of McKenzie Scott, who has dedicated her time to giving away the fortune she got when she divorced Jeff Bezos.

Bloomberg was mayor of New York City for 12 years. When he was first elected, I was very enthusiastic about his prospects for reforming the city’s sclerotic school system but became disenchanted when I saw him adopt the “move fast and break things” mode of the tech industry and disrupt the system.

Although I was critical of his disruptive changes, I always liked the man, with whom I had several delightful conversations.

Thus it was a great surprise and delight to encounter the following article, in which he warns about the overuse of technology in the classroom:

Over the past two decades, school districts have spent billions of taxpayer dollars equipping classrooms with laptops and other devices in hopes of preparing kids for a digital future. The result? Students have fallen further behind on the skills they most need to succeed in careers: the three R’s plus a fourth — relationships.

Today, about 90% of schools provide laptops or tablets to their students. Yet as students spend more time than ever on screens, social skills are deteriorating and test scores are near historic lows. 

Just 28% of eighth graders are proficient in math and 30% in reading. For 12th graders, the numbers are similarly dismal (24% in math and 37% in reading, according to the most recently available scores). And US students have also fallen further behind their peers in other countries.

The push for laptops in classrooms came from technologists, think tanks and government officials, who imagined that the devices would allow for curricula to be tailored around student needs, empowering them to learn at their own pace and raising achievement levels. It hasn’t worked.

The push also came from another source: computer manufacturers. However well-intentioned they may be, they have a financial interest in promoting laptops in classrooms and have profited handsomely from it. 

When Google released its inexpensive, utilitarian Chromebook in 2011, the company quickly capitalized on schools’ new emphasis on computer use. Why should children learn the quadratic equation, a Google executive asked, when they can just Google the answer? Today, the same executive might ask: Why should children learn to write an essay — or even a sentence — when they can ask a chatbot to do it for them?

The answer to both questions is that mastering the three R’s is the first step toward the true goal of education: critical thinking and problem-solving.

As someone who built a company by developing a computer at the dawn of the digital age, I never believed that computers in the classroom were the cure to what ails schools. Some of the most powerful educational interactions occur when a caring, well-trained teacher can look into a student’s eyes and help them see and understand new ideas. Machines often don’t have that power.

Think back on your own education. Most of us can remember teachers who challenged and inspired us. Now imagine that you had spent less time listening to those teachers and more time staring at a screen. Would you be better or worse off today?

While moderate use of computer devices can have academic benefits, especially when they are used at home, intensive use is often correlated with diminishing performance. 

For example: A post-pandemic survey found that more than a quarter of students spend five hours of class time daily on screens, often practicing skills on games that rarely lead to mastery. At the same time, some traditionally interactive classes — art, music, foreign languages — have moved increasingly online.

Studies have found that time-tested methods of learning — such as reading and writing on a page— are superior to screen-based approaches. One reason is simply a matter of time management. As a review of two decades of academic research concluded, children using laptops are easily distracted — and distracting to their peers. As kids might say: Well, duh.

One study found it can take students up to 20 minutes to refocus after engaging in a nonacademic activity. Put another way: Playing one video game three times a day costs an hour of learning.

Some of the online diversions that students find involve disturbing and inappropriate content that slips through schools’ filters, warping developing minds. Making matters worse: Downtime in classrooms — which might have been spent reading, drawing, imagining or playing with classmates, thereby building crucial social skills — is now frittered away on screens.

By reorienting so much class time around screens, schools have unwittingly been promoting an increasingly isolated childhood experience, which has been correlated with rising anxiety and depression — and can come with tragic and even deadly consequences. 

As some school districts finally awake to the benefits of banning smartphones during school hours, they should also reconsider their policies around in-class computers, which can be as problematic as phones. For instance: Storing laptops in locked classroom carts would enable more limited, purposeful use. Schools should also provide parents more transparency about the amount of time their children are spending on devices. 

The soaring promise of technology in the classroom has failed to deliver results while imposing great costs on children and taxpayers. Superintendents, principals and teachers ought to lead the way in adopting what has become a radical idea: having students spend more classroom time picking up books and pens than powering up laptops and tablets.

Categories Billionaires, Bloomberg, Michael, Creativity, Education Reform, Teachers, Technology, Computers

Forbes: It’s Easy to Crack Your Passwords

By dianeravitch
August 3, 2024 //
5

Davey Winder, senior contributor to Forbes, writes about how to keep your passwords safe.

With just a few dollars, a little time, and a smart brute-force guessing algorithm, most passwords can be cracked in much less time than you might imagine. According to a new analysis from the experts at Kaspersky, 59% of 193 million actual passwords were cracked in less than 60 minutes, and 45% were cracked in less than 60 seconds.

The basis of a brute-force attack is where the perpetrator iterates all possible combinations in order to find a match for the password in question. However, Antonov explained, “smart guessing algorithms are trained on a passwords data-set to calculate the frequency of various character combinations and make selections first from the most common combinations and down to the rarest ones.”

Brute Force And Smart-Guessing Combine To Quickly Crack Passwords

Although very popular due to the point-and-fire simplicity of a brute-force attack, it remains suboptimal as far as password-cracking algorithms are concerned. When you consider that the vast majority of passwords in daily use contain similar characteristics involving the combination of dates, names, dictionary words and keyboard sequences, adding these to the guessing-game mix speeds things up considerably.

The Kaspersky study revealed that when it comes to the percentage of passwords crackable in any timeframe using each method, while 10% of the password list analyzed was broken in under a minute by brute force, that increased to 45% when smart-guessing was added to the algorithm. Allowing for between a minute and an hour, the difference was 20% compared to 59%.

The Smart-Guessing Algorithm Advantage Explained

Because humans are creatures of habit, we make for very poor password creators. The truth is that the passwords we choose for ourselves are rarely, if ever, truly random. We rely upon all the things that smart-guessing algorithms are designed to detect: common names and phrases, important dates both personal and historical, and patterns, lots of patterns. To give you an idea of how predictable we are, one YouTube channel took a sample of more than 200,000 people and asked them to choose a ‘random’ number between 1 and 100. Most people gravitated towards the same relatively small set: 7, 37, 42, 69, 73, and 77. Even when trying to be random with character strings, we fail as most people will favor the center of the keyboard for their selection, according to Kaspersky.

“Smart algorithms make short work of most passwords that contain dictionary sequences,” Antonov said, “and they even catch character substitutions.” In other words, using p@ssw0rd instead of password won’t slow the algorithm down that much at all.

How To Strengthen Your Accounts Against Smart-Guessing Algorithm Attack

Kaspersky recommends the following password usage strategy:

Generate strong and truly random passwords using a password manager.

Don’t reuse passwords across sites and services or hacking one basket will enable access to many more eggs.

If you don’t, or won’t, use a password manager, then use mnemonic passphrases rather than dictionary words and numeric combinations.

Don’t save passwords in web browsers.

Use a password manager protected by a strong master password.

Use two-factor authentication for all accounts that support it.

Categories Fraud, Safety, Technology, Computers

West Virginia: Board Approves 2 For-Profit Online Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
November 23, 2021 //
23

West Virginia recently passed a charter school law, breaking its promise to the state’s teachers. A new board was created to authorize charters. That board just approved two for-profit online charter schools. One is run by K12 Inc., which changed its name to Stride. The other will be run by Ron Packard’s Accel, which operates low-performing charters in Ohio. Packard was the first CEO of K12 Inc., where he was paid $5 million a year.

Online charters are known for low academic performance, low graduation rates, and high attrition. A study by CREDO found that students in online charter schools learn almost nothing.

While findings vary for each student, the results in CREDO’s report show that the majority of online charter students had far weaker academic growth in both math and reading compared to their traditional public school peers. To conceptualize this shortfall, it would equate to a student losing 72 days of learning in reading and 180 days of learning in math, based on a 180-day school year. This pattern of weaker growth remained consistent across racial-ethnic subpopulations and students in poverty.

Categories Education Industry, K12 Inc., On-Line Education, Technology, Computers, Virtual Charter Schools, West Virginia

FBI Warns of Cyberattacks on Technology-Based Schools: The Downside of Digital Learning

By dianeravitch
July 19, 2019 //
21

 

As more and more schools adopt computer-based digital learning, the risk of cyberattacks on schools grows.

Recently a school in Avon, Connecticut, was targeted by hackers.

AVON, Conn. — Over six weeks, the vandals kept coming, knocking the school system’s network offline several times a day.

There was no breach of sensitive data files, but the attacks in which somebody deliberately overwhelmed the Avon Public Schools system in Connecticut still proved costly. Classroom lesson plans built around access to the internet had come to a halt.

“The first time I called the FBI, their first question was, ‘Well, what did it cost you?’” said Robert Vojtek, the district’s technology director. “It’s like, ‘Well, we were down for three-quarters of a day, we have 4,000 students, we have almost 500 adults, and teaching and learning stopped for an entire day.’ So how do you put a price tag on that?”

The kind of attacks more commonly reserved for banks and other institutions holding sensitive data are increasingly targeting school systems around the country. The widespread adoption of education technology, which generates data that officials say can make schools more of a target for hackers, also worsens an attack’s effects when instructional tools are rendered useless by internet outages.

Schools are attractive targets because they hold sensitive data and provide critical public services, according to the FBI, which said in a written statement that perpetrators include criminals motivated by profit, juvenile pranksters and possibly foreign governments. Attacks against schools have become common, the FBI said, but it is impossible to know how frequently they occur because many go unreported to law enforcement when data is not compromised.

Attacks often have forced districts to pull the plug on smart boards, student laptops and other internet-powered tools.

Schools in the Florida Keys took themselves offline for several days last September after a district employee discovered a malware attack. Monroe County schools Superintendent Mark Porter said teachers had to do things differently but adapted quickly…

The 2,000-student Coventry Local School District in Ohio had to close schools in May as staff worked to fight a virus of that had infected the network. The FBI helped to guide the district through the recovery and offered assistance on best practices…

In North Dakota, where a third of schools statewide were hit with a malware attack last year, it was traced to North Korea, although it’s unclear if that country was the origin of the attack or just the location of a device that was used as a stepping stone, according to Sean Wiese, the state’s chief information security officer.

Categories Education Reform, Technology, Computers

Ed Johnson: My Personal Fight with Cyberattacks and Competition: A Horror Story

By dianeravitch
June 27, 2019 //
12

Ed Johnson lives in Atlanta and fights daily against the malignant competition and punishment inflicted on the children of Atlanta by the school board and superintendent. He shares the philosophy of W. Edwards Deming, who taught the importance of collaboration and teamwork.

He wrote this post and sent it to the school board:

 

Cyberattacks and competition
I have been under cyberattack for nearly a year, now.
First, it was attempted blackmail to “expose” me by making public an old username and password I used once to visit an “unsavory” website some 25 years ago.  I hear this blackmail tactic is quite common, and successful.
 
Well, blackmail didn’t work on me, so then came invading my computer and encrypting all personal files and holding the encrypted files hostage pending my paying the one bitcoin (~680 USD) ransom demand before I would be given the decryption key.
 
Well, holding my personal files hostage for ransom didn’t work on me, so then on 18 Dec 2018, there suddenly came a great flood of email notifications from subscription and online services all over the globe thanking me for having signed up.  Fraudulent signups continue to occur at the rate of around six or so per day.  The aim of the bountiful fraudulent signups seems to be the gamble that, in the fog of hurriedly unsubscribing the many services, one is bound to click on a Trojan Horse disguised as an “Unsubscribe” link.
 
Well, fraudulent subscriptions haven’t worked on me, so two days ago, this happened: My receiving notifications of Diane Ravitch blog posts had been blocked at wordpress.com, for crying out loud!
 
For the first time, I felt panicky.  No Diane Ravitch blog posts?!!  No, that can’t be!
 
But in the end that didn’t work on me, either.  Not for long, anyway.
 
So I remain a happy camper.
 
Even so, I guess we will always have some folk who have been taught and deeply conditioned to compete “by any means necessary” to win at the expense of others.
 
Atlanta Public Schools Leadership (APSL; school board and superintendent) are pretty good at teaching and conditioning people, even young children, to win at the expense of others, when winning and losing is not at all necessary, as with their Race2Read competition, for example.
 
Just think, the many children innocently and trustingly pour themselves into reading, wanting to do their best, to be helpful, to contribute, only to have the APSL adults turn on them and declare ten reading winner kids (“Top Student Readers”) and to tell the thousands of other children they are the reading loser kids, even if that is not the reality, at all.  Because they show they utterly fail to understand variation, the APSL adults create reading winners and reading losers out of the children, arbitrarily and capriciously, and ignorantly.
 
The currently serving APSL have always shown that everybody cooperating to achieve a common goal is an extremely foreign concept to them.  As their Race2Read competition exemplifies, the APSL would rather have children, students, schools, parents and community members, and even school bus drivers, competing than cooperating and collaborating.
 
How unfortunate, here in the twenty-first century, some among the APSL keep practicing the regressive belief that competition motivates people and boosts morale and improves quality, as does, for example, school board member Cynthia Briscoe Brown opining in a school board meeting here (at 1:22:30 thru 1:24:56) that the new “Elite Bus Driver” program is a way of “boosting morale” among school bus drivers.
 
Now, tell me, what parents would want an inferior, second-rate school bus driver at the wheel of the school bus transporting their children?  Or an inferior, second-rate mechanic having worked on the school bus?  What might parents think or do if they knew the majority of both school bus drivers and school bus mechanics have been told, and have come to believe, they are the inferior, second-rate ones?
 
Intentions hold no water, here.  Again, we are in the twenty-first century and the APSL should be progressing into it, not regressing back out of it, by way of behaviorism and Taylorism.
 
One dimension along which the APSL should have already progressed further into this century is that of recognizing the unethical and immoral nature of arbitrary and capricious competition—such as the Race2Read competition and the Elite Bus Driver program—and simply not do it.
 
So, how many children made Race2Read competition losers will grow up to transfer, unconsciously, their learned reading loser position in life into a selfish coding and hacking practice of “winning” by cyberattacking others?
 
What?  Did someone just say such a matter can’t be measured so therefore can’t happen?
 
Really?

 
Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com
 

Categories Accountability, Atlanta, Competition, Education Industry, Education Reform, Technology, Computers, Testing

North Carolina: State Superintendent Ignores Professionals and Chooses Tech Tool to Assess Youngest Children

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2019 //
14

 

Justin Parmenter, NBCT in North Carolina, writes here about the educational malpractice inflicted on the state’s youngest readers by order of State Superintendent Mark Johnson. A TFA alum, Johnson overruled the recommendations of expert professionals in the state and decided to assess and diagnose children’s reading skill with technology instead of a teacher.

As the 2019-20 school year wound down and teachers began their well-earned summer breaks, Superintendent Mark Johnson dropped an unexpected bombshell: North Carolina schools would be scrapping the mClass reading assessment system and replacing it with the computer-based Istation program.

North Carolina schools have used mClass as the diagnostic reading assessment tool in grades K-3 since the Read to Achieve legislative initiative was implemented in 2013.

Johnson’s announcement of the change referred with no apparent irony to “an unprecedented level of external stakeholder engagement and input” which had gone into making the decision.  He neglected to mention that he had completely ignored the recommendations of those stakeholders.

When the Request for Purchase (RFP) for a Read to Achieve diagnostic reading assessment first went out in the fall of 2018, a statewide committee of experts in curriculum and reading instruction was assembled largely under the direction of Dr. Amy Jablonski, then-Division Director of Integrated Academic and Behavior Services at the Department of Public Instruction, to inform the process.

This team included specialists in general education, special education, and English language learner services, school psychologists, representatives of Institutions for Higher Education, dyslexia experts, and school and district leaders. They reviewed the four vendors that were passed through to the team, including mClass and Istation, working extensively through detailed demonstrations with all four products before determining which would best serve the needs of North Carolina’s children.

The committee presented its recommendation to Superintendent Mark Johnson in December of 2018.  They noted that students and teachers needed a tool which could accurately assess risk in all domains of reading.  They noted the crucial importance of having a teacher actually listen to a child read and sound out words. They noted the legislative requirement of an effective dyslexia screener.  And they recommended that schools continue using the mClass diagnostic tool, which they believed best accomplished all of those things.

Six months later, Superintendent Johnson completely disregarded the recommendations of those professional educators in announcing his unilateral selection of the computer-based Istation diagnostic tool.  

Parmenter goes on to explain why this was a terrible decision.

Superintendent Johnson has all the earmarks of TFA. Uninformed, inexperienced, sure of himself.

Here is hoping he gets tossed out of office and replaced by someone who respects professionalism.

 

Categories Accountability, North Carolina, Teach for America, Technology, Computers

Tennessee Testing SNAFU: There Was No Cyberattack

By dianeravitch
June 23, 2018 //
25

An investigation of the meltdown in the Tennessee computerized testing this past spring determined that there was no cyberattack, as the state education department originally claimed. Instead, the vendor made errors.

Questar’s unauthorized change of an online testing tool — not a possible cyber attack, as earlier reported by the company — was responsible for shutting down Tennessee’s computerized exams on their second day this spring, the state’s chief investigator reported Wednesday.

An independent probe determined that “there was no cyber attack,” nor was any student data compromised, when thousands of students could not log onto the online exam known as TNReady on April 17.

Instead, investigators said, Questar was mostly responsible for this year’s testing miscues. The main culprit was a combination of “bugs in the software” and the slowness of a computerized tool designed to let students turn text into speech if they need audible instructions.

Comptroller Justin P. Wilson reviewed early findings of his office’s internal review and the external investigation by a company hired by the Education Department during a legislative hearing in Nashville.

Education Commissioner Candice McQueen also told lawmakers that Tennessee is docking Questar about $2.5 million this year out of its $30 million contract because of the online problems that plagued many students and schools during the three-week testing window.

Payments being withheld are punitive, as well as to cover the state’s costs to address the problems, she said, adding that other discounts could follow.

Last week, McQueen announced that the state plans to launch a new search this fall for one or more testing companies to take over TNReady beginning in the 2019-20 school year. She said a track record of successful online testing is a must.

Will states ever figure out that online testing is less reliable than paper-and-pencil testing, and that teacher-made tests are more valuable than any standardized tests?

Categories Accountability, Technology, Computers, Tennessee, Testing

Dumbest Idea of the Month: Massachusetts May Have Computers Grade Student Essays

By dianeravitch
May 23, 2018 //
60

There are two ways to go wrong in scoring student essays. One is to have them graded by computers. The other is to have them graded by the low-wage slackers hired by testing corporations.

There is only one way to go right in scoring student essays. That is to have them read by teachers in the building or district where the student is enrolled.

Massachusetts is pondering turning over the grading of student essays to computers. Les Perelman, a retired professor of writing at MIT, has demonstrated how dumb the computers are when it comes to understanding what students have written. The computers like long sentences; big words; and long essays. But the computers have a serious defect: They can’t tell truth from falsehood. He told a New York Times writer, Michael Winerip, that a computer would not care if a student wrote that the War of 1812 began in 1945. Computers are not fact-checkers. That is why they can score thousands of essays in less than a minute. If you happen to think that knowledge matters, don’t have essays scored by computers.

If you think that it is better to ask Pearson or ETS or any of the other testing companies to have essays graded by humans, think again. Read Todd Farley’s book “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry,” where he describes himself as a scorer who was in it for the hourly wage, surrounded by others with little or no interest in the quality of writing or the fate of students. In recent years, we have heard of ads placed on Craigslist, seeking essay readers at $11 an hour, no experience needed. Read the last paragraph of Farley’s book to know why mass-grading of student writing doesn’t work, why parents should fight it with every fibre of their being.

Who should read and assess student work? Teachers who work in the building or the district. At least then one can be certain that teachers are doing the grading, not unemployed and inexperienced college graduates who are expected to read and grade 100 essays an hour or more.

Categories Education Reform, Massachusetts, Technology, Computers, Testing

Tennessee: Is a Computer a Teacher? Does a Student Have a Right to a Teacher?

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2017 //
39

A Tennessee court might rule on whether a student has a right to a teacher, and whether computers count as teachers. The district wants the case dismissed.

Do the rights of Tennessee students to a public education extend into the right to have a teacher, and if so, does a computer program count?

Those questions were posed to a state appeals court Tuesday during oral arguments in a case involving a Nashville student, Toni Jones, that could set a statewide framework defining school districts’ obligations to their students.

Jones was a freshman at Pearl-Cohn High School who was pulled out of an algebra class before an end-of-course test and placed into a computer-based credit recovery program, Jones’ lawyer, Gary Blackburn, said. He said the student was struggling in the algebra class but had a passing grade.

The appeal stems from a lawsuit Blackburn filed in 2015, alleging the district was padding test scores by moving Jones and others to the other program. Several teachers who spoke out about the testing practices are suing the district in a separate case, saying they were inappropriately reprimanded by the district.

He said precedent set in Tennessee court cases entitled Jones to a teacher, and that due process protections were violated when she was moved into the other class without notice to Jones or her family.

“The slippery slope so to speak is that if a teacher is not essential, then a school system can be offered entirely by computers,” he said. “Students can be placed in a gymnasium and put a computer on a desk, and say, here is your teacher. And we’re going to have a hall monitor to keep you from acting up. That is basically what happened to Toni Jones. That’s not teaching.”

Does a computer count as a teacher? Is a corporation a person? What do you think?

Categories Teachers and Teaching, Technology, Computers, Tennessee

Peter Greene: “Personalized Learning” and the Great Bait-and-Switch

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2017 //
45

Peter Greene explains the hoax at the heart of “personalized learning.”

The appeal is that it is customized just for you. The reality is that it is a standardized algorithm that adjusts to your responses but doesn’t you from Adam or Eve.

The Brand X that we’re supposed to be escaping, the view of education that Personalized Learning is supposed to alter, the toxin for which Personalized Learning is the alleged antidote is an education model in which all students get on the same car of the same train and ride the same tracks to the same destination at the same time. That’s not what’s actually going on in public schools these days, but let’s set that aside for the moment.

Real personalized learning would tear up the tracks, park the train, offer every student a good pair of hiking shoes or maybe a four-wheeler, maybe even a hoverboard, plus a map of the territory (probably in the form of an actual teacher), then let the student pick a destination and a path and manner of traveling.

But techno-personalized learning keeps the track and the train. In the most basic version, we keep one train and one track and the “personalization” is that students get on at different station. Maybe they occasionally get to catch a helicopter that zips them ahead a couple of stops.

But personalized? No.

Categories For-Profit, Hoax, Technology, Computers
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