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Wrench in the Gears on the Corporate Takeover of Sesame Street

By dianeravitch
September 24, 2019 //
24

The blogger Wrench in the Gears worries here (in a 2018 post) about the MacArthur Foundation’s Grant of $100 Million to Sesame Street, intended to help the children of Syrian refugees. The “help” these children get will be delivered by technology, she says, not by humans.

As it happens, I was one of a large number of judges in this competition, though I did not review the Sesame Street proposal. The proposals I read were about developing and distributing sustainable crops, or bringing medical care to vast numbers of people. I was very impressed with the quality of the proposals I read.

She writes:

Sesame Street is an iconic brand that embodies humor, acceptance, and humanity. Who doesn’t love a muppet? So, on December 20 when the MacArthur Foundationannounced they were giving Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee $100 million to educate young children from displaced Syrian families and help them deal with “toxic stress,” most people were thrilled. While the optics were great, I’m here to tell you these muppets are definitely not the type of “friends” Syrian refugee children need.

How will Sesame Workshop and the IRC spend the MacArthur award money? Much of it will be spent on educational technology:

  • Sesame-branded educational content delivered on televisions, phones and digital platforms
  • home visits reinforced by digital content and parenting resources provided via mobile devices
  • child development centers equipped with video-clips pre-recorded on projectors and activity sheets…

Governments all over the world are now adopting policies that employ “innovative finance” to outsource education and other critical public services to private profit-extracting partnerships. These public-private partnerships are often supported by “philanthropic” partners who are now free to make “mission related” for-profit investments.  Enormous and expensive data-collection is linked to their outcomes-based contracts. For more information see this post, Gambling On Our Futures: Big Data, Global Finance and Digital Life. When one hears “pay for success,” “social impact bonds,” and “what works,” realize that this is what is actually meant.

Sesame Workshop’s program with Syrian refugees is an example of how foundations are paving the way for education to be reinvented as an exercise in data-driven, behavior modification. Over the course of this five-year project, traumatized families will be used to refine scaleable online education and behavioral treatment models that generate data and profit for private interests. These efforts will be subsidized by foundations and made possible with assistance from complicit non-profit actors. The products developed from the digital labor of these children will be deployed not only in future “humanitarian” efforts, but also among the growing ranks of children living in poverty in the United States and other countries. The $100 million was not a charitable award; it was a business investment.

These muppets are not our friends. They are merely puppets whose strings are being pulled by predatory impact investors and Silicon Valley executives. This is not a “feel-good” story. The MacArthur Foundation should be ashamed of their treatment of these children and for using plush characters to provide cover for a repugnant agenda.

In this era of US imperialism and late-stage capitalism it seems the monster at the end of this book is in fact the non-profit that opens a door and allows venture capitalists to harm a million and a half vulnerable children. I hope Sesame Workshop will reconsider their direction, disavow their ties to education technology, and instead use MacArthur’s $100 million to provide the non-digital human services Syria’s refugee children so desperately need. I have to believe Jim Henson would want that.

 

Categories International, Technology

Audrey Watters: The Iron Rule of Silicon Valley: Thou Shalt Not Criticize a Start-Up

By dianeravitch
September 19, 2019 //
61

 

Audrey Watters writes a brilliant blog about Ed-tech and its misadventures. It is called HEWN, or Hack Education Weekly Newsletter.

She wrote a post recently about what happened when a tech investor tweeted that he refused to invest in AltSchool because it was a truly bad idea. AltSchool raised $174 million to demonstrate that the solutions to the problems of education were embedded in technology. Investors included Mark Zuckerberg, Laurene Powell  Jobs, Peter Thiel, Pierre Omidyar, and other big players in the “reinvent school” sector.

Watters commented on an article in The New York Times written by Nellie Bowles, one of the most insightful journalists at the Times. Bowles wrote about the shunning of Jason Palmer, a venture capitalist., because of a tweet criticizing AltSchool. 

Palmer tweeted:

$174M lessons here. We passed on @Altschool multiple times, mainly because disrupting school was a terrible strategy, but also b/c founders didn’t understand is all about partnering w/existing districts, schools and educators (not just “product”) https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/AltSchool-s-out-Zuckerberg-backed-startup-that-14058785.php …

I would say that Jason Palmer is one smart guy. He understands that disrupting an institution you know nothing about is inherently a dumb idea.

AltSchool was created by Max Ventilla, a Google techie, and it was a failure, despite a plethora of positive articles in the national media predicting that it would “reinvent” school as we know it.

As Bowles wrote, Silicon Valley was outraged by Palmer’s tweet. How dare he criticize a failed start-up! She says that he eventually made amends for daring to speak truth.

Audrey Watters thinks the problem in the Ed-tech world runs deeper than enforced conformity and silence cling of dissent.

She writes:

To a certain extent, I think Bowles misses the point of the whole dust-up. The danger isn’t only that many people are afraid to challenge the orthodoxy. The danger is that many do not really think all that differently. Many in Silicon Valley (and more broadly those working in science and tech and in elite university labs) believe they’re all The Very Smartest Men, and if nothing else, they’ve convinced themselves to that end. Sugar Daddy Science.

There’s a whole other set of truths that Bowles never touches upon in her quest to talk about the demand for good Silicon Valley manners in order to get to be in good Silicon Valley company. See, Sugar Daddy Science is bad science. And Jason Palmer was absolutely right. AltSchool was a terrible idea. It was obviously a bad investment. Its founder had no idea how to design or run a school. He had no experience in education — just connections to a powerful network of investors who similarly had no damn clue and wouldn’t have known the right questions to ask if someone printed them out in cheery, bubble-balloon lettering. It’s offensive that AltSchool raised almost $175 million. It’s offensive that so many ed-tech journalists carried the company’s water, touting its innovative and disruptive potential. I care much less that we were all supposed to be nice about the startup. I care that this was a startup — like far too many in ed-tech — that, with its normalizing of surveillance, was poised to hurt kids…Without a grounding in theory or knowledge or ethics or care, the Silicon Valley machine rewards stupid and dangerous ideas, propping up and propped up by ridiculous, self-serving men. There won’t ever be a reckoning if we’re nice.

You do have to wonder why Silicon Valley is so quick to shout from the rooftops about any perceived failures in education yet resist any honest accounting of their own failures. Remember the infamous TIME magazine cover called “Rotten Apples,”  which declared that Silicon Valley had found the answer to “fixing” schools? Firing teachers whose students don’t get high test scores. That was about the Vergara lawsuit in California, funded by a tech billionaire to eliminate teacher tenure on the absurd theory that poor kids have low test scores because their teachers have tenure. “Absurd” because teachers in high-performing districts are more likely to have tenure than those in low-performing districts,where teacher turnover is higher. Fortunately, the Vergara case was thrown out, along with copycat suits in other states.

 

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Education Reform, Privatization, Technology

Mineola, N.Y.: A Third-Grade Classroom Where Students Spend 75% of The Day on Their iPads

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2019 //
33

Four years ago, the Hechinger Report described a third-grade class in an affluent suburb of New York City where children spend 75% of the day on their iPads.

Is this the future?

It is not a cost-saver, since there is still one teacher and a class of 20+ students. In most tech-infused projections, this is called “personalized learning,” and it is pitched as a way to cut costs by increasing class sizes.

At Governor Cuomo’s urging, New York passed a $2 billion bond issue to pay for new technology in the classroom. Districts on Long Island, pride themselves on their adoption of the latest technology. Technology and STEM are the rage.

Read, then use your iPad or computer to write a comment.

Categories New York, Technology

Wall Street Journal: Schools Invest Zillions in Technology, Parents Push Back

By dianeravitch
September 8, 2019 //
56

Technology in the classroom has become so ubiquitous that the use of papers and pencils or pens seems innovative.

The Wall Street Journal published a front-page story about the high-powered push to buy technology and the growing disillusionment of some parents and teachers.

When Baltimore County, Md., public schools began going digital five years ago, textbooks disappeared from classrooms and paper and pencils were no longer encouraged. All students from kindergarten to 12th grade would eventually get a laptop, helping the district reach the “one-to-one” ratio of one for each child that has become coveted around the country. Teaching apps and digital courses took the place of flashcards and notebooks.

Despite the investment, academic results have mostly slipped in the district of about 115,000 students.

Over the last decade, American schools embraced technology, spending millions of dollars on devices and apps, believing its disruptive power would help many children learn faster, stay in school and be more prepared for a competitive economy. Now many parents and teachers are starting to wonder if all the disruption was a good idea.

Technology has made it easier for students and teachers to communicate and collaborate. It engages many students and allows them to learn at their own pace. But early indications are that tech isn’t a panacea for education. Researchers at Rand Corp. and elsewhere say there is no clear evidence showing which new tech-related education offerings or approaches work in schools.

The uncertainty is feeding alarm among some parents already worried about the amount of time their children spend attached to digital devices. Some believe technology is not doing much to help their kids learn, setting up a clash with tech advocates who say technology is the future of education.

Across the country—in Boston, Fort Wayne, Ind., and Austin, Texas—parents are demanding proof technology works as an educational tool, and insisting on limits. They’re pushing schools to offer low- or screen-free classrooms, picketing board meetings to protest all the online classes and demanding more information about what data is collected on students.

In April, a report from the National Education Policy Center, a nonpartisan research group at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found the rapid adoption of the mostly proprietary technology in education to be rife with “questionable educational assumptions . . . self-interested advocacy by the technology industry, serious threats to student privacy and a lack of research support…”

Baltimore County said earlier this year it would scale back the ratio of laptops in first and second grades to one for every five students. A few miles away, in Montgomery County, a new curriculum this fall will return textbooks, paper and pencils to the classroom to supplement laptops.

In both cases, school officials say they were responding, in part, to parents and teachers. Baltimore County’s early-learning teachers said they didn’t need so many laptops. Parents wanted their children to “have a mixed media experience touching paper and reading books and down on the carpet without a device in their hands,” said Ryan Imbriale, who heads the school district’s department of innovative learning

Categories Billionaires, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Technology

Stephen Singer: Top 7 Ways Technology Interferes with Learning in Classroom

By dianeravitch
August 1, 2019 //
54

 

Stephen Singer explains the ways that technology impedes learning. He is not opposed to technology. He is opposed to its overuse and misuse.

Way #1:

1) It Stops Kids from Reading

 

I’m a language arts teacher. I want my students to read.

 

I could simply assign readings and hope students do them, but that’s not practical in today’s fast-paced world. When kids are bombarded by untold promises of instant gratification, a ream of paper bordered by cardboard doesn’t hold much of a claim on their attentions.

 

So like many teachers, I bring reading into the classroom, itself. I usually set aside class time every other day for students to read self-selected books for about 15 minutes. Students have access to the school library and a classroom library filled with books usually popular with kids their age or popular with my previous students. They can pick something from outside these boundaries, but if they haven’t already done so, I have them covered.

 

In the days before every student had an iPad, this worked fairly well. Students often had books with them they wanted to read or would quickly select one from my collection and give it a try.

 

Sometimes when there was down time in class, when they had finished assignments or tests early, they would even pick up their self-selected books and read a little.

 

What a different world it was!

 

Now that every student has an omnipresent technological device, this has become increasingly impossible. I still set aside 15 minutes, but students often waste the time looking for an eBook on-line and end up reading just the first chapter or two since they’re free. Others read nothing but the digital equivalent of magazine articles or look up disparate facts. And still others try to hide that they’re not reading at all but playing video games or watching YouTube videos.

 

Even under the best of circumstances, the act of reading on a device is different than reading a printed page.

 

The act of reading traditional books is slower, closer and more linear. It’s the way teachers really want kids to read and which will most increase comprehension.

 

Reading on a screen is a product of social media. We scroll or scan through, seeking specific information and clicking on hyperlinks.

 

The old style of reading was transformative, absorbing and a much deeper and richer experience. The newer style is more superficial, mechanical and extrinsic. (And, Yes, I’m aware of which style of reading you’re engaged in now!)

 

To be fair, some students actually prefer reading eBooks on devices and may even experience the richness of the original style. But they are few and far between. Usually students use the devices to escape from the deeper kind of reading because they’ve never really done it before and don’t understand what it really is. And when they have this choice, they may never find out.

Categories Education Reform, Real Education, Technology

Leonie Haimson: The Other Side of New York State Commissioner Elia’s Resignation

By dianeravitch
July 16, 2019 //
5

Leonie Haimson expresses her view of the tenure of New York Commissioner MaryEllen Elia. 

Her conclusion: The state needs a fresh start with a commissioner who is willing to listen to parents and who is not in love with testing and Big Tech.

I attended the meeting with Elia that she describes, held a few weeks after she arrived in New York. When members of NYSAPE expressed their opposition to the state’s Common Core tests, Elia responded that the day would come when there was no more annual testing because the tests would be online and students would be continuously assessed, every hour,  every day, whenever they logged on.

That was not a comforting thought!

Categories Accountability, Administrators, superintendents, New York, Technology, Testing

Larry Cuban: AltSchool Collapses, Reborn as a “Learning Platform”

By dianeravitch
July 12, 2019 //
13

 

Larry Cuban recounts the short history of AltSchool, which was intended to be a progressive moneymaker but flamed out  and has been replaced by another company called Altitude Learning.

Another chapter is added to the annals of the for-profit education history.

Cuban writes:

Begun by wealthy high-tech entrepreneur (and ex-Google executive) Max Ventilla in 2013, AltSchool made a splash with its string of private “micro-schools” in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area (tuition was $26,000)–see here, here, and here. Ventilla saw AltSchool as a string of lab schools where progressive ideas could be put into practice and the individualized software that staff designed and used in the “micro-schools” could be bought and used in public schools.

AltSchool “micro-schools’ were ungraded, used project-based learning complete with individually designed “playlists,” small classes, and experienced young teachers. Were John and Evelyn Dewey alive, they would have enrolled their six children in AltSchool.

I stopped here to wonder what the socialist John Dewey, the philosopher of democracy and the common good, would have thought about for-profit schools.

Ventilla’s dream collapsed when he realized that he was spending $40 million a year and taking in revenues of $7 million.

So AltSchool is now evolving into Altitude Learning, a “platform” that will be sold to charters, public schools, and other customers.

Ventilla passes the torch:

In a blog post six months earlier, Ventilla signaled readers that AltSchool would be changing.

In 2017 we were fortunate to attract a number of world-class career educators and administrators to our team, to guide everything we do. Moving forward, I am pleased to announce Ben Kornell will become President of AltSchool. Ben joined our team back in 2017 as VP of Growth. He’s dedicated his life to reducing educational inequity; he started as a Teach for America middle school teacher and later went to Stanford Business School to learn how to cultivate educational change broadly. As COO of Envision, he helped lead a network of charter schools and scaled a performance assessment system to public schools across the country. Since joining AltSchool, Ben’s led our company’s transition to partnering with public and private schools nationwide. As we continue to integrate the platform into existing school systems, it is essential to have education leaders like Ben at the helm.

Another entry into the annals of Corporate Reform.

My suggestion to corporate reformers hoping to get rich by investing in the education industry.

Read Jonathan A. Knee, Class Clowns: How the Smartest Investors Lost Billions in Education.  

And Samuel Abrams’ illuminating account of the rise and fall of the Edison Project, in Education and the Commercial Mindset.

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, For-Profit, Technology

Leonie Haimson: What You Need to Know About CZI’s Summit Learning and Student Privacy

By dianeravitch
July 6, 2019 //
1

 

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:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2018/12/20/why-parents-students-are-protesting-an-online-learning-program-backed-by-mark-zuckerberg-facebook/
https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Summit-fact-sheet-4.22.19-1.pdf
https://dianeravitch.net/2018/11/15/nellie-bowles-in-americas-schools-the-rich-get-teachers-the-poor-get-computers/
Any questions, write info@studentprivacymatters.org
Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Education Reform, Privacy, Technology

Matt Barnum: Summit Learning Misleads About Percent of Schools That Quit Every Year

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2019 //
30

 

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.

 

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Technology

Chris Hughes: It’s Time to Break Up Facebook

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2019 //
15

Chris Hughes co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg. He is no longer part of the company but left with a considerable fortune. For a time, he was publisher of The New Republic. In this essay, which appeared in The New York Times, he says again and again that he really likes his old friend Mark. Great guy. A good, kind person. But dear friend Mark has too much power, and no one should have that much power.

Here is an excerpt.

America was built on the idea that power should not be concentrated in any one person, because we are all fallible. That’s why the founders created a system of checks and balances. They didn’t need to foresee the rise of Facebook to understand the threat that gargantuan companies would pose to democracy. Jefferson and Madison were voracious readers of Adam Smith, who believed that monopolies prevent the competition that spurs innovation and leads to economic growth.

A century later, in response to the rise of the oil, railroad and banking trusts of the Gilded Age, the Ohio Republican John Sherman said on the floor of Congress: “If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over the production, transportation and sale of any of the necessities of life. If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed monopolies. More legislation followed in the 20th century, creating legal and regulatory structures to promote competition and hold the biggest companies accountable. The Department of Justice broke up monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T.

For many people today, it’s hard to imagine government doing much of anything right, let alone breaking up a company like Facebook. This isn’t by coincidence.

Starting in the 1970s, a small but dedicated group of economists, lawyers and policymakers sowed the seeds of our cynicism. Over the next 40 years, they financed a network of think tanks, journals, social clubs, academic centers and media outlets to teach an emerging generation that private interests should take precedence over public ones. Their gospel was simple: “Free” markets are dynamic and productive, while government is bureaucratic and ineffective. By the mid-1980s, they had largely managed to relegate energetic antitrust enforcement to the history books.

This shift, combined with business-friendly tax and regulatory policy, ushered in a period of mergers and acquisitions that created megacorporations. In the past 20 years, more than 75 percent of American industries, from airlines to pharmaceuticals, have experienced increased concentration, and the average size of public companies has tripled. The results are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

The same thing is happening in social media and digital communications. Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability. This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation….

Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category. This explains why, even during the annus horribilis of 2018, Facebook’s earnings per share increased by an astounding 40 percent compared with the year before. (I liquidated my Facebook shares in 2012, and I don’t invest directly in any social media companies.)…

The vibrant marketplace that once drove Facebook and other social media companies to compete to come up with better products has virtually disappeared. This means there’s less chance of start-ups developing healthier, less exploitative social media platforms. It also means less accountability on issues like privacy.

Just last month, Facebook seemingly tried to bury news that it had stored tens of millions of user passwords in plain text format, which thousands of Facebook employees could see. Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms….

Hughes is especially concerned about Zuckerberg’s “unilateral” power over the speech and expression of two billion people. A fine of $5 Billion is a slap on the wrist. When facing a threat of a fine that large, Facebook’s stock value went up by $30 billion.

Hughes has two recommendations:

First, that Facebook be broken up by compelling it to divest itself of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Second, that the federal government create a regulatory agency to oversee tech companies and assure consumer privacy.

In normal times, policymakers in D.C. might listen and consider such a bold proposal. But these days, given a federal administration dedicated to deregulating everything, Hughes’ ideas will have to wait for new leadership.

 

Categories Accountability, Competition, Deregulation, Education Reform, Media, Technology
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