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Kevin Welner: Can the New Gates Initiative Make a Difference in Closing Opportunity Gaps?

By dianeravitch
December 13, 2017 //
13

Kevin Welner of the National Education Policy Center has written a thoughtful (and optimistic) commentary on the Gates Foundation’s latest big bet on reforming education. The new one will invest $1.7 billion in networks of schools in big cities, in the hopes that they can work together to solve common problems.

Welner, K. (2017). Might the New Gates Education Initiative Close Opportunity Gaps? Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved [date] from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/bmgf.

Welner notes that the previous big initiatives of the Gates Foundation failed, although he believes that Gates was too quick to pull the plug on the small schools initiative in 2008, into which he had poured $2 billion. Gates bet another $2 billion on the Common Core, and that was sunk by backlash from right and left and in any case, has made no notable difference. Gates poured untold millions into his plan for teacher evaluation (MET), but it failed because it relied too much on test scores.

Welner says that Bill Gates and the foundation he owns suffer from certain blind spots: First, he believes in free markets and choice, and he ends up pouring hundreds of millions into charters with little to show for it; second, he believes in data, and that belief has been costly without producing better schools; third, he believes in the transformative power of technology, forgetting that technology is only a tool, whose value is determined by how wisely it is used.

Last, Welner worries that Gates does not pay enough attention to the out of school factors that have a far greater impact on student learning that teachers and schools, including poverty and racism. These are the factors that mediate opportunity to learn. Without addressing those factors, none of the others will make much difference.

Welner is cautiously optimistic that the new initiative might pay more attention to opportunity to learn issues than any of Gates’ other investments.

But he notes with concern that Gates continues to fund charters, data, technology, and testing. He continues to believe that somewhere over the rainbow is a magical key to innovation. He continues to believe in standardization.

It seems to me that Kevin Welner bends over backwards to give Gates the benefit of the doubt. With his well-established track record of failure, it is hard to believe he has learned anything. But let’s keep hoping for the best.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Common Core, Corporate Reformers, Data and Data Mining, Education Industry, Education Reform, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Innovation, Poverty, Privatization, Racism, Standardized Testing, Technology, Testing, VAM

Leonie Haimson Visits a Summit Charter School, Funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2017 //
11

A few days ago, I posted an article by Kristina Rizga about Summit charter schools and their online lessons. On the whole, it seemed to me, the article was admiring.

Leonie Haimson has a different view of Summit.

Haimson has played a leading role in the movement to stop data mining of students and to protect student privacy. After writing a column in The Answer Sheet Blog expressing her concerns about the Summit charter schools and their online platform, Haimson was contacted by the founder of Summit and invited to visit one of their schools.

Haimson writes here about her experience when she visited the flagship Summit Charter School in Redwood City, California.

“Summit charter schools and their online platform, now used in over 300 schools across the country, both public and charter, have received millions of dollars from Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg; Zuckerberg has pledged to support the continued expansion of the online platform through his LLC, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

“Shortly after my Washington Post piece appeared, I was contacted by Diane Tavenner, the CEO of Summit charter schools, who asked if we could meet when she was visiting NYC. I agreed. We had lunch on Sept. 15, and I handed her a list of questions, mostly about Summit’s privacy policy, most of which my associate, Rachael Stickland, had already sent to Summit staff that she had met at SXSW Edu the previous March, and to which she’d never received a response….

“During the lunch, I mentioned that I was going to be in Oakland the weekend of Oct. 14- 15 for the Network for Public Education conference, and that I would be interested in visiting some schools after that are using the Summit platform. I said I was especially eager to visit public schools, since I’d heard from many public school parents in five states who told me their children had negative experiences with the program. These parents were upset that Summit had withdrawn the right of parents to consent to the system shortly after CZI took over, and they were concerned about how their children’s personal data was being shared with Summit and then redisclosed with unspecified other third “partners” for unclear purposes.

“Diane later emailed me and said that I could visit Summit Prep charter school on Oct. 16, in Redwood City, their flagship school. An Uber would come and pick me up at my Oakland hotel, she said, and the drive would take about an hour each way…

“At Summit Prep, I was met by two school leaders, and we talked in an empty office for about a half hour, where they explained to me about the platform and how it was designed. Then we briefly toured two classrooms. In the first classroom, there were about thirty students engaged in “Personalized Learning Time”, gazing at computer screens and working on their individual “playlists.” These playlists include content in different “focus areas” delivered via various mediums, including online texts and videos. When students have learned these materials, they’re supposed to take multiple choice online tests to show they’ve “mastered” the area. In addition, in each of their courses, there are projects they are supposed to complete…

“I visited another classroom where 12th graders were engaged in peer-reviewing essays they had written at the beginning of the class, grading them according to the Summit’s complex rubric of cognitive skills. When I asked why the essays were written on paper rather than on computers, the school leaders told me that this was because they were practicing for the California state exam in which students are asked to write essays on paper.

“I noted that I had seen no classroom or small group discussions. The Summit leaders said that was because none were occurring during my brief visit. It is true that the amount of time I spent in classrooms wasn’t sufficient to make an informed judgment either way, but what I saw did not encourage me.

“When we returned to the office, I questioned why delivering content primarily online was an effective method of teaching. Shouldn’t learning happen in a more interactive fashion, with the material presented in person and then discussed, debated, and explored? Why did they have this comparatively flat, one-dimensional attitude towards content? And how could math be taught this way, given that math requires helping students learn how to solve problems in a more interactive fashion?

“They told me math is taught differently, and indeed had to be taught through teacher-student interaction, but that this isn’t true of any of the other subjects, whether it be English, social sciences or physical sciences.”

Leonie reviewed the many complaints that she has heard from parents at Summit charter schools, especially regarding privacy of student data and long hours in front of a computer.

She writes,

“Yet the juggernaut that is Summit will be difficult to stop. The Silicon Valley Community Foundation gave $20 million to Summit in 2016. The Gates Foundation awarded Summit $10 million in June 2017, “to support implementation of the Summit Learning program in targeted geographies.” In September, the day before I met with Diane Tavenner, Summit was one of the ten winners of the XQ Super High School prize, receiving another $10 million from Laurene Powell Jobs’ LLC, the Emerson Collective, to create a new high school in Oakland.”

Besides, Betsy DeVos loves Summit.

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Charter Schools, Education Reform, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Students, Technology

Kristina Rizga: Should Silicon Valley Redesign American Education?

By dianeravitch
December 4, 2017 //
92

Kristina Rizga, who writes about education for “Mother Jones,” dug deep into the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiatives’s plan to redesign American education and produced this article.

It is titled “Inside Silicon Valley’s Big Money Push to Remake American Education.”

The title led me to expect that Rizga, a sharp journalist, would bring a skeptical eye to the very concept that Silicon Valley whould take charge of remaking education.

Although she drops in a few cautionary comments by outsiders, the overall tone of the article is wide-eyed adulation for the CZI effort to bring personalized learning to every school in the nation.

As one of those who continues to believe that the most important factor in the classroom is human interaction, I was disappointed by what is virtually a puff piece for “personalized learning.” I expected skepticism about the chutzpah of a callow billionaire who decides he wants to remake American education. Who elected Mark Z?

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Technology

Do You Want Your Child to be a Guinea Pig for the Tech Industry?

By dianeravitch
November 28, 2017 //
10

The AltSchool idea was founded by a Google executive, who decided he could redesign American education. It operates for profit, but it is not making a profit.

Max Ventilla, a Google executive who left the search giant to launch AltSchool in 2013, wooed parents with his vision to bring traditional models of elementary education into the digital age.

AltSchool has raised $175 million from Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and others, and the startup is closing a Series C round of funding. But now some parents are bailing out of the school because they say AltSchool put its ambitions as a tech company above its responsibility to teach their children.

The startup, which launched in 2013, develops educational software and runs a network of small schools with four locations, in California and New York; two others closed their doors in the past year, and three more will close in the spring of 2018. These schools serve as testing grounds for an in-house team of technologists to work on tools for the modern classroom.

Since August, 12 parents spoke with Business Insider on the condition of anonymity, some because they worried that speaking out against AltSchool could hurt their children’s chances of being enrolled elsewhere. Six parents have withdrawn their children from AltSchool in the past year, and two others said they planned to do so as soon as they found a transfer spot at a different school. AltSchool enrolls between 30 and 100 students at each campus.

“We kind of came to the conclusion that, really, AltSchool as a school was kind of a front for what Max really wants to do, which is develop software that he’s selling,” a parent of a former AltSchool student told Business Insider.

In New York City, where private schools may cost $50,000 or more, the for-profit school sector is growing. BASIS, the high-flying charter chain in Arizona, has opened two private schools in the city, undercutting the traditional private schools with lower tuition costs.

Unlike most of New York’s private schools, these newcomers are all for-profit businesses.

Matt Greenfield, a managing partner of ReThink Education, a venture capital firm focused on education technology, said that this group of new schools seemed to reflect a mix of passion projects, started by parents frustrated with the available options who want to create their dream school, and cold-eyed business ventures.

“Schools are not an inherently bad business,” he said. “New York has a scarily high real estate cost, and other costs are high, too,” but the tuition a school can charge in New York is high, as well, he said. “So I think those are not implausible businesses.”

Not everyone is convinced of the value or long-term viability of the new for-profits:

Some observers are skeptical of the new crop of schools. Amanda Uhry, the founder and owner of Manhattan Private School Advisors, which helps families with the admissions process, said she discourages parents from applying to for-profit schools, because she doesn’t have confidence in the long-term stability of those schools.

“There are people who these schools obviously attract and obviously go there,” she said, but only because they don’t get into the more prestigious nonprofit schools. In her experience, she added, many families “would rather go to public school than go to a privately owned new school that has no history.”

As long as parents don’t expect the state or the federal government to pay for their tuition with vouchers, the choice is theirs to make.

Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, Technology

Baltimore County Officials Failed to Report Income from Tech Vendors

By dianeravitch
November 9, 2017 //
11

A few days ago, the New York Times ran a first-page story about the big push by tech companies to get their software and hardware adopted by public schools. The market is huge, and the vendors are pulling out all the stops to woo District officials by inviting them to conferences, giving them awards, and showering them with attention. The district that was featured by the Times was Baltimore County, which had committed to spend $300 million on high tech, while basic physical needs of the schools were ignored. The BC Superintendent Dallas Dance had recently resigned, and he was replaced on an interim basis by his deputy Verletta White, who shared his passion for going high tech.

The big story was that the district bought equipment that was soon discontinued and that ranked third of four choices in an independent evaluation. No, the big story was how cleverly and insidiously the tech industry sold their stuff to school officials.

But now we learn that Dallas Dance and Verletta White both were paid fees by the tech industry and didn’t report the payments on their income disclosure. In relation to the size of the contracts, the payments were relatively small. Which does not excuse the payments but demonstrates how easy it is to buy influence.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/k-12/bs-md-verletta-white-dallas-dance-ethics-20171106-story.html

Categories Accountability, Baltimore, Education Industry, Ethics, For-Profit, Technology

John Merrow: Greed (Tech + Profits + Schools) = FIASCO

By dianeravitch
November 8, 2017 //
15

John Merrow here recounts the sad story of how Baltimore County got snookered by the tech industry, sinking hundreds of millions into a soon-to-be obsolete tech tablet while ignoring the basic needs of the sistrict’s schools.

He writes:

“It’s a breathtaking story of greed, but what’s only hinted at around the edges in the Times story is the harsh truth that this would never happen if educators, politicians and policy makers were not worshipping at the altar of standardized test scores. Tech is selling–and educators are willing buyers–a fantasy: “Buy our fancy software and hardware packages, and your test scores will soar.”

“The reporters use Baltimore County (MD) public schools as their poster child, and surely (now former) Superintendent Darryl Dance has a lot of ‘splaining to do, given the coziness of his relationship with HP and other providers. Under Dance’s leadership, his system signed a $200 MILLION contract with HP in 2014 and was also on the hook for many millions more in related contracts. In the district’s own evaluations, the HP device scored third out of the four devices tested, with only 27 points out of a possible 46, but the County signed with HP anyway.

“(The device, the Elitebook Revolve, has been plagued with problems and has been discontinued by HP, and Superintendent Dance abruptly resigned in April, no reason cited.)

“While the reporters for The Times do not come right out and call the public school people in Baltimore County and elsewhere ‘crooks’ or ‘prostitutes,’ they come pretty close…

“Sadly, this isn’t a new story. Apple sold an expensive bill of goods to Los Angeles County Public Schools years ago, and Joel Klein’s Amplify signed some lucrative contracts, deals that went south when some of the machines burst into flames. I write about those deals and other stupidities in my new book, “Addicted to Reform: A 12-Step Program to Rescue Public Education.” (The New Press, 2017)”

Dallas Dance has moved on. Baltimore County is out nearly $300 Million in total for Dance’s tech deals. The County has obsolete hardware.

Where is the accountability.

Categories Accountability, Baltimore, Education Industry, For-Profit, Technology

Tom Ultican: Personalized and Blended Learning Are a Money Grab by the Tech Industry

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2017 //
28

Tom Ultican left the high-tech industry to teach math and physics in high school in California.

He reports with outrage that the 2015 education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act is larded with millions of dollars for the tech industry.

He reviews the evidence and can’t find support for this massive investment in digital learning. The tech lobby prevailed in Washington, D.C.

He writes:

“Bad Education Philosophy is the Source of “Personalized Learning” Failure

“The behaviorist ideology of B.F. Skinner informs “competency based education.” CBE is the computer based approach that replaces the failed 1990’s behaviorist learning method called Outcome Based Education. Outcome Based Education is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery education” theory. Mastery education’s failure was so complete that it had to be renamed. It was quickly derided by educators as “seats and sheets.” These schemes all posit that drilling small skills and mastering them is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.

“Today’s proponents of behaviorist education hope that technology including artificial intelligence backed by micro-credentials and badges will finally make behaviorism a winner. It will not because little humans are not linear learners. Non-alignment with human nature is a fundamental flaw in this approach. In addition, behaviorism is not known as a path to creativity or original thinking. Those paths are created between teachers and students through human contact; paths undermined by “digital education.”

“Artificial intelligence is more science fiction than reality. Computer scientist Roger Schank, a pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence notes,

“The AI [artificial intelligence] problem is very very hard. It requires people who work in AI understanding the nature of knowledge; how conversation works; how to have an original thought; how to predict the actions of others; how to understand why people do what they do; and a few thousand things like that. In case no one has noticed, scientists aren’t very good at telling you how all that stuff works in people. And until they can there will be no machines that can do any of it.”

“With no unbiased positive proof of concept, hundreds of billions of taxpayers’ dollars which were earmarked for education are being spent on technology. It is likely that much of this spending will cause harm and that schemes like “personalized learning” will not deliver benefit to anyone who is not in a hi-tech industry.

“These dollars could have been spent on better facilities, smaller classes, and better teacher education. Instead, the money is wasted on dubious theories propounded by leaders in hi-tech industries.”

Categories Education Reform, Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), Technology

Disgrace in Baltimore County: $200 Million for Technology Amid Claims of Payoffs, Payola, Pay to Play, and Neglected Facilities

By dianeravitch
November 5, 2017 //
44

The New York Times published a front-page story yesterday about the huge commitment that Baltimore County has made to technology in the classroom.

The story begins slowly, as a conventional account of a district that wants to prepare its students for the new world of technology.

Baltimore County is one of the nation’s most ambitious classroom technology makeovers. In 2014, the district committed more than $200 million for HP laptops, and it is spending millions of dollars on math, science and language software. Its vendors visit classrooms. Some schoolchildren have been featured in tech-company promotional videos.

Tech companies are salivating over the school market, which is supposed to reach $21 billion in spending by 2020.

School leaders have become so central to sales that a few private firms will now, for fees that can climb into the tens of thousands of dollars, arrange meetings for vendors with school officials, on some occasions paying superintendents as consultants. Tech-backed organizations have also flown superintendents to conferences at resorts. And school leaders have evangelized company products to other districts.

These marketing approaches are legal. But there is little rigorous evidence so far to indicate that using computers in class improves educational results. Even so, schools nationwide are convinced enough to have adopted them in hopes of preparing students for the new economy.

But then as we read on, we learn about covert payoffs, payola, lavish expenses, cozy deals between vendors and school officials, and the mysterious resignation of the superintendent who started this expensive initiative. We see a district committed to spending hundreds of millions on technology while some children are in trailers for classrooms, and water fountains are spouting brown water. In other words, basic needs have been neglected to pay for the shiny new machines. One parent, a physician, says that the relationships between school officials and the industry reminds her of Big Pharma and its cultivation of medical professionals.

Then we learn, almost as a throw away line, that the machine that the district settled on, was not the one with the highest evaluation.

The district wanted a device that would work both for youngsters who couldn’t yet type and for high schoolers. In early 2014, it chose a particularly complex machine, an HP laptop that converts to a tablet. That device ranked third out of four devices the district considered, according to the district’s hardware evaluation forms, which The Times obtained. Over all, the HP device scored 27 on a 46-point scale. A Dell device ranked first at 34.

The superintendent appeared in an HP video, promoting the company. The HP product ran Microsoft software, and Microsoft honored the district as a Microsoft Showcase. The district’s tech leader was honored as an “Intel Education Visionary.”

Worse, we learn that the company that makes the machine has discontinued it.

Recently, parents and teachers have reported problems with the HP devices, including batteries falling out and keyboard tiles becoming detached. HP has discontinued the Elitebook Revolve.

Mr. Dickerson, the district spokesman, said there was not “a widespread issue with damaged devices.”

An HP spokesman said: “While the Revolve is no longer on the market, it would be factually inaccurate to suggest that’s related to product quality.”

No, of course not.

While the superintendent has resigned, the interim superintendent is as deeply engaged with the tech companies as her predecessor.

Question for Baltimore County residents? Do you know or care where your tax money is going?

The article says:

Baltimore County’s 173 schools span a 600-square-mile horseshoe around the city of Baltimore, which has a separate school system. Like many districts, the school system struggles to keep facilities up-to-date. Some of its 113,000 students attend spacious new schools. Some older schools, though, are overcrowded, requiring trailers as overflow classrooms. In some, tap water runs brown. And, in budget documents, the district said it lacked the “dedicated resources” for students with disabilities.

Parents, what are your priorities? How about prohibiting school officials from consorting with or taking favors of any kind from vendors?

Categories Baltimore, Technology

Sad! High-Tech, For-Profit AltSchool is Closing Down Two of Its Schools!

By dianeravitch
November 4, 2017 //
8

Business Insider reports that the latest new thing, AltSchool, is not making it.

Backed by Mark Zuckerberg and tech entrepreneur-Trump acolyte Peter Thiel, started by a former Google executive, AltSchool was lauded lavishly when it opened. It was supposed to revolutionize education.

AltSchool, an educational software developer and network of “micro-schools” with four locations in California and New York, is shuttering another outpost.

The startup’s schoolhouse in Manhattan’s East Village will close its doors at the end of the academic year, according to an email obtained by Business Insider from vice president of schools at AltSchool, Sam Franklin, to parents of AltSchool students on Thursday night.

It’s the second closure that AltSchool has announced in two days, after the buzzy ed-tech startup revealed it’s closing its location in Silicon Valley. AltSchool appears to be refocusing its energy on licensing its educational software to existing schools, rather than creating new ones.

In an email to parents, Franklin apologized to parents who may have learned about the school closures “in the news rather than hearing it from us.”

AltSchool counted the Oxycontin billionaire family, the Sacklers, among its investors. Also Laurene Powell Jobs. All the really smart and very rich folks.

Sad. Very sad. Just a tax write-off.

Categories Education Reform, Failure, For-Profit, Technology

Correction: Indiana Virtual School Is the Worst School in the Nation, NOT Indiana Virtual Academy

By dianeravitch
November 2, 2017 //
2

I wrote a post yesterday about the “worst school in the nation.”

The school described in the post is INDIANA VIRTUAL SCHOOL, not Indiana Virtual Academy.

Indiana Virtual School is a Charter School that operates for profit. It graduates fewer than 10% of its students. Its teachers are assigned virtual classes of more than 200 students.

Indiana Virtual Academy is run by public school superintendents. It is not for-profit. It is not a charter school. It is a supplemental program, not a school. It partners with schools to provide virtual courses taught by certified teachers to schools that have difficulty finding teachers and to individual students who have scheduling conflicts.

Indiana Virtual Academy works for public schools to meet the needs of schools and students.

Indiana Virtual School is a for-profit charter. It may well be the Worst School in the Nation.

I mixed up their names because they look so similar.

I apologize for the error.

Categories Indiana, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools
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