The writer of this story Colin Woodard won the George Polk Award for exposing the for-profit scheme that Governor Paul LePage tried to impose on the children of Maine. Jeb Bush pulled the strings.
Archives for category: Technology
The surveillance state is a reality. Someone is watching you. They see you on hidden cameras as you move around the city. They see your emails.
When your child goes to school, someone is watching his or her eye movements, measuring their responses.
I have been writing about this for a while (see here and here), prodded on by my friend Leonie Haimson, who was one of the activist parents who brought down inBloom, the data mining business funded by Bill Gates with $100 million.
We must guard our children’s privacy. Someone wants their data. They want it to enable them to design new products to sell to them and their school.
Don’t let them have your child’s data. Resist.
This is one of my favorite news articles.
It answers the question, where do the tech leaders of Silicon Valley send their own children to school?
While they are pushing computers into public schools, they send their own children to a Waldorf School that does not permit any screen time at school and discourages its use at home. Learn why.
Why don’t they want Other People’s Children to have what they know is best?
If you are as sick of reading about the brilliance of the young hotshots of Silicon Valley as I am, you will enjoy this article.
It appeared in “Wired,” the journal of the tech world. Summary: The bloom is off the rose.
“As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. It feels ugly and rotten. Facebook, the greatest startup success story of this era, isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising…
”When Bodega, a startup making “smart” vending machines, announced its launch in September, it encountered an angry mob on Twitter. Bodega’s co-opted name, along with its founders’ stated plan to make corner stores obsolete, fit perfectly with the stereotype—arrogant, elite tech bros trying to get rich by disrupting a lovable local icon. “Let’s see your shitty glass box make me a bacon, egg and cheese with jalepenos on a roll you sick, capitalist scum,” the rapper El-P tweeted. The company’s founder issued an apology, which was subsequently mocked.
“Bro-dega,” as it’s since been named, was just one catalyst of the anti-tech sentiment rippling beneath our collective surface. After Skedaddle, an “Uber for Buses” startup, was featured on Business Insider, a screenshot of the four young male cofounders, smiling atop an article describing an unsavory-sounding mission, ricocheted across Twitter. “What a nightmare,” the writer Lisa McIntire tweeted, adding, “Silicon Valley is run by complete sociopaths.”
“A trend story about startups riding the trend of “co-living” emerged; Twitter screamed, “YOU INVENTED ROOMMATES!” When Bloomberg revealed that fruit packs made by Juicero, a well-funded startup selling expensive juicing appliances, could be squeezed with bare hands, commentators howled with schadenfreude. Juicero wasn’t just a preposterous company: It was “a symbol of the Silicon Valley class designing for its own, insular problems,” and “an absurd avatar of Silicon Valley hubris.” When a study showed that a “brain-hacking” supplement created by a venture-backed startup called HVMN was no more effective than a cup of coffee, mockery ensued.
“This week, when Netflix tweeted a joke about some of its customers’ viewing choices—a marketing ploy that, just a few years ago, would have felt like a clever insight gleaned from the wonders of big data—the press and tweeting masses immediately attacked it as creepy and a violation of privacy. These rifts have solidified the feeling that techies and their moneymen are painfully out of touch…
”In 2008, it was Wall Street bankers. In 2017, tech workers are the world’s villain. “It’s the exact same story of too many people with too much money. That breeds arrogance, bad behavior, and jealousy, and society just loves to take it down,” the investor said. As a result, investors are avoiding anything that feels risky. Hunter Walk, a partner with venture capital firm Homebrew, which invested in Bodega, attributes the backlash to a broader response to power. Tech is now a powerful institution, he says. “We no longer get the benefit of the doubt 100 percent of the time, and that’s okay.”
But is it okay to let these spoiled, arrogant brats take control of our lives and disrupt the institutions that meet other people’s needs? I think not.
A former Facebook executive has taken the extraordinary step of apologizing for the damage the social media giant has done to society.
A former Facebook executive is making waves after he spoke out about his “tremendous guilt” over growing the social network, which he feels has eroded “the core foundations of how people behave by and between each other.”
Chamath Palihapitiya began working for Facebook in 2007 and left in 2011 as its vice president for user growth. When he started, he said, there was not much thought given to the long-term negative consequences of developing such a platform.
“I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of our minds, we kind of knew something bad could happen,” said Palihapitiya, 41. “But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”
That changed as Facebook’s popularity exploded, he said. To date, the social network has more than 2 billion monthly users around the world and continues to grow.
But the ability to connect and share information so quickly — as well as the instant gratification people give and receive over their posts — has resulted in some negative consequences, according to Palihapitiya.
“It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works. That is truly where we are,” he said. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works: no civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem. This is not about Russian ads. This is a global problem.”
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.
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.
“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.
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?
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.
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.
Diane Ravitch's blog 