Archives for category: Technology
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Forbes: Can AltSchool “Save Itself from Failure”?

By dianeravitch
February 5, 2019 //
31

Susan Adams, an editor at Forbes, took a close look at AltSchool, a billionaire-funded effort to reinvent American education by putting kids on computers. 

Max Ventillaleft Google tolaunch his startup. He’s raised plenty of dough from the billionaires, but success is thus far out of reach. Successmeans making money.

“We’re two intense hours into an interview in a stuffy, glass-paned meeting room in a former 24 Hour Fitness that is now home to one of AltSchool’s two small private schools in San Francisco for grades pre-K through 8. Ventilla, who left Google to launch AltSchool in 2013, has spent $30 million annually over the last several years while trying to find steady footing for his for-profit education startup, which runs four schools; the other two are in New York City.

“AltSchool’s 240 students, including two of Ventilla’s children—Leonardo, 5, and Sabine, 7—are guinea pigs for a software platform that AltSchool is attempting to sell to hundreds of schools both private and public. So far it has 28 customers. Revenue in 2018 was $7 million. “Our whole strategy is to spend more than we make,” he says. Since software is expensive to develop and cheap to distribute, the losses, he believes, will turn into steep profits once AltSchool refines its product and lands enough customers.

Max Ventilla, CEO and cofounder of AltSchool.

Max Ventilla, CEO and cofounder of AltSchool.TIMOTHY ARCHIBALD

“But as Ventilla admits when he lets his guard down, reaching profitability will be quite a stretch. The story of how AltSchool arrived at this point—burning cash in a failed attempt to create a profitable private-school network and fighting to sell an expensive edtech product in a crowded field—shows that the best intentions, an impressive career in tech and an excess of Silicon Valley money and enthusiasm don’t easily translate into success in a tradition-bound marketplace where budgets are tight.

“Ventilla, wearing jeans, scuffed black leather slip-ons, a faded polo shirt with AltSchool’s logo and a black fleece jacket, has been able to hemorrhage cash because, as he has it, “I’m good at telling AltSchool’s story and I’m good at raising money early.” So good that he has raised $174 million in venture capital at a $440 million valuation, according to PitchBook, more than almost any other startup working on K-12 education. That sum includes a personal investment of more than $15 million from Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg initiated two hours-long one-on-one meetings with Ventilla in late 2014, when AltSchool was only 18 months old. “He’s very detail-oriented, and he likes to drill down,” Ventilla says of Zuckerberg.”

The article has little vignettes of a few of the billionaires reinventing education.

 

Categories Billionaires, Technology

Kansas: Students Walk Out to Protest Tech-Based Summit Learning Program

By dianeravitch
January 31, 2019 //
29

 

 

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.

Video here: https://www.ksn.com/news/local/mcpherson-students-protest-against-summit-learning-platform-tuesday-afternoon/1738023228

https://www.kwch.com/content/news/Students-at-McPherson-Middle-School-walk-out-to-protest-new-curriculum-505062721.htm

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Resistance, Students, Technology

Audrey Watters: Fables of School Reform

By dianeravitch
January 25, 2019 //
36

Audrey Watters writes here about the promises and realities of EdTech.

Why the boom in education technology? Is it the pursuit of the total transformation of schooling? Is it marketing, competition and the pursuit of profits? Is it an effort to cut costs by replacing humans with machines?

Watters writes:

OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, more than $13 billion in venture capital has been sunk into education technology startups. But in spite of all the money and political capital pouring into the sprawling ed-tech sector, there’s precious little evidence suggesting that its trademark innovations have done anything to improve teaching and learning.

Perhaps, though, that’s never really been the point. Rather, it may be that all the interest in education technology has been an extension of a long-running campaign to make over American schools into the image of corporate endeavor—to transform education into a marketplace for buzzword-friendly apps and instruction plans, while steadily privatizing public institutions of learning for the sake of enhancing the bottom lines of the business interests promoting investment-friendly school “reforms.”

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

Welcome to China’s Coming Digital Dictatorship

By dianeravitch
December 29, 2018 //
31

China is perfecting a system of digitized observation that will track every person every day and monitor every movement they make. Citizens will get “social credit” for good behavior and preferential treatment.

There is no dark corner in which to hide.

This is frightening.

The system is supposed to be ready by 2020.

The death of privacy.

You better be good because they are always watching.

Categories Privacy, Technology

Leonie Haimson Blasts Chalkbeat for Its Biased Coverage of Ed-Tech and “Personalized Learning”

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
49

Leonie Haimson is one of the nation’s sharpest critic of scams, especially in the area of ed-tech and online learning.

She is outraged that Chalkbeat posted an uncritical article about the scams now sold to schools. He clearly wanted to lump together the critics of Common Core (those “right wingers” [like me]) and the critics of “personalized learning,” who have the retrograde belief that children should be taught by teachers, not computers.

Pay attention to the funders of Chalkbeat (Gates; Walton; Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and others who are pushing online learning and “personalized learning.”) They are listed at the end of this post. Don’t overlook the Anschutz Foundation. He is an evangelical Christian who produced “Waiting for ‘Superman,'” that anti-public school, anti-union propaganda film.

She writes:

Matt Barnum has posted an article at Chalkbeat on the controversy over online learning. I spent nearly an hour talking to him about its myriad problems, including the negative experiences of parents and students in schools where online learning predominates, serious privacy concerns because of all the data-mining by vendors that is involved, and a serious lack of research evidence — but the only quote he used from our conversation is one sentence: that the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy which I co-chair. has worked with allies in right-wing groups on the privacy issue.
Instead, when I spoke to him about this, I emphasized that the concerns about the expansion of online learning and its impact on privacy was shared by groups and individuals of all political persuasion, left right and center, and many parents with little interest in politics at all. That’s why our campaign against inBloom was so successful, and that’s why in NY State and elsewhere, parents and teachers in all nine states and districts that were participating were able to force them from dropping out of the program to share their children’s personal data and make it more accessible to vendors without parental consent. But he left that part out of my quote and his story as a whole, because it did not fit into his pre-ordained narrative.

Indeed, Barnum seemed eager to mischaracterize the opposition to so-called personalized learning as led by conservatives. He is also quick to frame the pushback vs Common Core in a similar fashion –as driven by many of the same right-wing groups — when one of the most successful protests against the standards occurred here in NY state, led by NY State Allies for Public Education, a coalition of mostly left-wing and politically moderate parents and teachers who also oppose the expansion of ed tech.

Barnum didn’t mention any of the other progressive groups, medical associations, and researchers across the country who are very concerned about the expansion of online learning in schools, including Screens and Kids, Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, the ACLU, Commonsense Media, National Education Policy Center, Parents Across America, the Badass Teachers Association and many others.
Nor did he bother to interview any of the many prominent progressive critics of ed tech like Diane Ravitch, Peter Greene or Audrey Watters. Nor did he acknowledge that Silicon Valley parents themselves are increasingly rejecting computerized learning, as reported in the terrific NY Times series by Nellie Bowles.

Instead, he quotes only one non-right wing critic of online learning by name– Merrie Najimy, the President of the Massachusetts teachers – while featuring many paragraphs of rosy spin from defenders of ed tech, like Diane Tavenner of Summit and Bethany Gross of CRPE, both funded by Gates and Zuckerberg.

Barnum cites a CRPE report also paid for by Gates that apparently says, oh yeah, teachers really like personalized learning – while ignoring the survey results in our Educator Toolkit for Teacher and Student Privacy, which showed widespread concern among teachers and administrators alike about the expansion of digital apps and online programs in our schools. He also quotes Randi Weingarten who, surprisingly, has nothing but kind words about the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which has done absolutely nothing that I can think of to earn her confidence.

Amazingly, Barnum also manages to write an entire piece about edtech and personalized learning, Summit, Gates and Zuckerberg without once mentioning the issue of data privacy, the widespread occurrence of breaches, the potential misuse of algorithms, and the over-reach of student surveillance in schools. The only mention of the word “privacy” is in the one sentence that quotes me about working with conservative allies on the issue.

Quite an achievement and yet more evidence of a serious blind spot in Chalkbeat’s education coverage, reminiscent of their failure to cover the parent opposition against inBloom that started here in New York and led to such a firestorm across the country that more than 120 state student privacy laws have been passed as a result of the inBloom controversy since 2013.

There is more to read, and you should open the link to see her many links to other articles and reports.

Chalkbeat should be ashamed. Its sponsors are showing their hands.

Here is a list of Chalkbeat funders.

Ann & Hal Logan via The Denver Foundation*
Anna and John J. Sie Foundation*
Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation
Awesome Without Borders
Azita Raji and Gary Syman
Ben & Lucy Ana Walton*
Better Education Institute, Inc.
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Brett Family Foundation
Brooke Brown via the Carson Foundation*
Buell Foundation
Carnegie Corporation of New York
Carson Foundation
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Charles H. Revson Foundation
Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation
Christopher Gabrieli
CME Group
COGEN Co-working
Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Community Foundation of New Jersey
Democracy Fund
Donnell-Kay Foundation
Doug and Wendy Kreeger
EdChoice
EDU21C Foundation
Elaine Berman
Eli Lilly and Company Foundation, Inc.
Elizabeth Aybar Conti
Elizabeth Haas Edersheim (In Kind)
Emma Bloomberg
Ford Foundation
Fry Foundation
Fund for Nonprofit News at The Miami Foundation
Gail Klapper
Gates Family Foundation
GEM Foundation
George T. Cameron Education Foundation
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation partnership with the Knight Foundation
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (In Kind)
J.R. Hyde III Family Foundation Donor Advised Fund of the Community Foundation of Greater Memphis
Jim and Marsha McCormick
Kate Kennedy Reinemund and Jim Kennedy
Ken Hirsh
Kresge Foundation
La Vida Feliz Foundation
Lenfest Community Listening and Engagement Fund
Lilly Endowment Inc.
Maher Foundation
Margulf Foundation
Mark Zurack
Memphis Education Fund
Naomi and Michael Rosenfeld
Overdeck Family Foundation
Debra and Paul Appelbaum
Peter and Carmen L. Buck Foundation
Polk Bros. Foundation
Quinn Family Foundation
Ralph C. Wilson, Jr. Foundation
Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, Inc.
Rick Smith
Rob Gary and Chris Watney
Rob Gary via the Piton Foundation*
Robert J. Yamartino and Maxine Sclar
Robert R. McCormick Foundation
Rose Community Foundation
Scott Gleason of O’Melveny & Myers (In Kind)
Scott Pearl
Silicon Valley Community Foundation
Skift (In Kind)
Spencer Foundation
Steans Family Foundation
Sue Lehmann
Susan Sawyers
Thalla-Marie and Heeten Choxi
The Assisi Foundation
The Anschutz Foundation
The Barton Family Foundation, a donor-advised fund of The Denver Foundation*
The Caswell Jin Foundation
The Colorado Health Foundation
The Colorado Trust
The Crown Family
The Denver Foundation
The Durst Organization (In Kind)
The Glick Fund, a fund of the Central Indiana Community Foundation
The Indianapolis Foundation, a CICF affiliate
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
The Joyce Foundation
The McGregor Fund
The Moriah Fund
The Skillman Foundation
The Walton Family Foundation
Victoria Foundation
Walentas Foundation Ltd.
Washington Square Legal Services/NYU Business Transactions Clinic (In Kind)
Wend Ventures
Widmeyer, A FinnPartners Company (In Kind)
Will and Christina McConathy*
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
Yoobi (In Kind)

Categories Accountability, Education Industry, Media, Technology

Peter Greene: When Artificial Intelligence in the Classroom is Stupid

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2018 //
20

Peter Greene describes here why teachers are way smarter than “artificial intelligence” and why real personalized learning beats depersonalized learning every time.

His bottom line:

“In a real classroom, teachers can gauge student reaction because the teacher is the one the students are reacting to. But if students are busy reacting to algorithm-directed mass customized delivered to their own screen, the teacher is at a disadvantage– particular if the teacher is not an actual teacher, but just a tech there to monitor for student compliance and time on task. Having cut the person out of personalized [sic] learning, the tech wizards have to find ways to put some of the functions of a human back, like, say, paying attention to the student to see how she’s doing.

“The scenario depicted in the video is ridiculous, but then, it’s not the actual goal here. This algorithmic software masquerading as artificial intelligence is just another part of the “solution” to the “problem” of getting rid of teachers without losing some of the utility they provide.

“Intel, like others, insists on repeating a talking point about how great teachers will be aided by tech, not replaced by it, but there is not a single great teacher on the planet who needs what this software claims to provide, let alone what it can actually do. This is some terrible dystopian junk.”

Categories Teachers, Technology

Larry Cuban: Does Technological Monitoring Invade Student Privacy?

By dianeravitch
December 3, 2018 //
23

Larry Cuban was asked this question by a reporter. His answer was no, because part of the job of a teacher is to conduct surveillance of students and to monitor their work.

“..Maintaining order and constant surveillance of students has been, historically, what teachers have to do in order for students to learn. Before there were computer devices and monitoring software, teachers walked up and down aisles of desks and around the perimeter of the classroom inspecting what students were doing.

“It was the job of the teacher to know that students were working on what the teacher asked them to do.

“In my judgment, when a teacher looks at student screens while a lesson is underway, there is no invasion of student privacy. It is simply what teachers do as part of their role in guiding student learning.”

He does not engage in the issues that most concerns readers here: the mining of student data collected by the software corporation as students work and the relentless drive by tech companies not only to monetize personally identically information, gathered without the knowledge or consent of students, but the effort by those corporations to replace expert teachers with technology.

Categories Accountability, Data and Data Mining, Education Reform, Teaching, Technology

Idaho: A Teacher Writes About the School That Ivanka Trump and Tim Cook Visited

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2018 //
31

There was widespread publicity when First Daughter Ivanka Trump and Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the Wilder Elementary School in Idaho. Some of the local media were less than enthusiastic, mentioning high school student protests and low test scores. Some even pointed out that the district bought the iPads with funding from a program created during the Obama administration.

A teacher wrote to the blog to explain the back story. I won’t use her name, but you can find it on her comment that appears on the blog.

Just like every story on the internet, there is a different side to this. The iPads aren’t the enemy here. The real issue is a small district with no checks or balances allowing one person to be in power. If you want an inside look at what this district is going through, please continue reading otherwise please understand the iPads started out and were intended to offer amazing opportunities for the students. I’m not here to sell iPads but what they did for this community was very positive until one man with all the power decided to jump on a band wagon without doing his due diligence and researching the affects.

These iPads were granted to the district through the ConnectEd grant. The way the grant was written the iPads were going to help the students connect with the local community doing real life projects and helping in the community. They came with a complete overhaul of the infastructure, and the ability for students to be connected to the internet at home, while traveling for sports or their long FFA trips. Teachers were trained through a certified teacher trained on Apple product to teach the teachers how to take their lessons and add a new level of thought and creativity using technology.

Then the superintendent who has complete power in the district wanted to run for state superintendent and the Idaho State Department of Education began a personalized learning initiative. He thought if he could be the best in the state and get this started first and be ahead of the game then that would be really all he would need to get the win and become state superintendent. He expected the teachers to completely drop what they were doing and begin teaching this way over night. Teachers were being asked to completely compromise their curriculum and drop standards to make it easier for students to just focus on the “big rocks”. Students were getting Spanish credits in the high school for using DuoLingos app. At the end the students still couldn’t speak or write simple Spanish. If teachers questioned the methods they would receive poor evaluations, have to change classrooms for no reason or be asked to complete tasks that weren’t necessary or that no other teacher was asked to do.

Student and parent frustrations are through the roof. Parents and teachers were being denied the ability to talk to the board. In the high school wing all but two teachers left last year along with the IT guy, the secretary, the migrant/homeless liasion, the ELL teacher, and some sped staff all left. This is a very small district that graduates between 25-30 kids each year. That is a lot of staff turnover. The stress in the building is unhealthy because one man has all the control and he can’t/won’t change now or all that he has been hyping up will look like he is lying. A huge majority of the staff couldn’t stand seeing students having to use the iPads this way. But suggestions, ideas or possible improvements are deemed as insubordination.

I believe it is the superintendent’s connections through the Apple grant that brought Trump and Cook out there. Cook needs Trump to be onboard to continue the “ConnectEd” type initiatives and to stop the tariffs on the company and the local superintendent needs the media to confirm how good he is to the Idaho public as a “I told you we were good but you (public) didn’t listen” . He lost the election by a very large margin.

Not only was I a teacher that left, I was one of the tree people that wrote the middle-high school Apple grant. This isn’t how any of us intended for the iPads to be used, ever. I can’t begin to tell you how proud I am of the students that spoke up. I miss them terribly and felt like I am weak because I’m not mentally strong enough to stay and fight for them and protect their education. Suggestions on ways to fight are greatly appreciated!! These are absolutely amazing students they deserve much better.

Categories Education Reform, Idaho, Technology

Students at Wilder High School in Idaho: Learning on iPads is a Hoax!

By dianeravitch
November 29, 2018 //
40

Ivanka Trump and Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, visited Wilder Elementary School to learn about the future of workforce preparation, which of course involves selling iPads to children in a K-6 school!

However, they did not speak to high school students in Wilder, Idaho, who are thoroughly disgusted with (de)personalized learning. Several protested the fraud that Wilder officials were selling to Ivanka and said they were not allowed to speak up.

So instead, they walked outside, stood in the cold for hours and told members of the local media they are concerned about Wilder’s reliance on technology, worry about the district’s low test scores and fear the education they are receiving in Wilder won’t prepare them for college or life after high school.

Nadia, a Wilder sophomore, wanted to make sure the public heard both sides of the iPad story.

“We came out to tell you guys what’s really going on with our school,” Nadia said. “We are not really learning anything. The teachers are not allowed to teach anything. We are learning on iPads all day and we have to wait at least a week or so to get a test unlocked. And a lot of kids have been falling behind and then they cover that up and say everyone’s on target.”

Thomas, a Wilder 11thgrader, agreed with Nadia.

“There are a lot of things going wrong at this school and every time we try to speak out about it we are shut down and kept quiet,” he said.

Thomas and Nadia said they walked out of class once they realized the school was about to be locked down for the visit. They said they were unsure if they would be allowed to return to school.

Student achievement data shows that Wilder lags behind the state average in several academic indicators. This fall, the State Department of Education identified Wilder Middle School as one of the lowest-performing schools in Idaho. At Wilder Elementary, where Trump and Cook checked in Tuesday, just 26.7 percent of students scored “proficient” on math Idaho Standards Achievement Test in 2017-18. At Wilder High School, the go-on rate in 2017 was 25 percent, well below the state average of 45 percent, according to Idaho EdTrends.

Categories Hoax, Idaho, Technology

“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
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »