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Coming Soon to a School Near You: A Biometric Device to Measure Students’ Brainwaves

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2017 //
32

They said it couldn’t or shouldn’t be done, but here it comes: a biometric headset that measures students’ level of “engagement.”

EdSurge reports that a start-up called BrainCo has invented a headset to measure brain activity. This information can be transmitted instantly to the teacher so she knows which students are engaged and which are not. Apparently, just looking at their faces and their expressions is no longer adequate. (Be sure to see the video that is included in the link.)

A few years back, Bill Gates invested in a biometric bracelet. In 2013, I posted several times about the Gates-funded galvanic response monitor. That didn’t seem to go anywhere, to my knowledge.

But the idea didn’t die. Now it appears to be arriving as a headset, not a bracelet.

If Blade Runner had a classroom scene, it might look something like the promotional video by BrainCo, Inc. Students sit at desks wearing electronic headbands that report EEG data back to a teacher’s dashboard, and that information purports to measure students’ attention levels. The video’s narrator explains: “School administrators can use big data analysis to determine when students are better able to concentrate.”

BrainCo just scored $15 million in venture funding from Chinese investors, and has welcomed a prominent Harvard education dean, who will serve as an adviser. The company says it has a working prototype and is in conversations with a Long Island school to pilot the headset.

The headband raises questions from neuroscientists and psychologists, who say little evidence exists to support what device-and-dashboard combination aims to do. It also raises legal questions, like what BrainCo will do with students’ biometric data.

BrainCo has some big ideas. The company’s CEO has said that BrainCo aims to develop a tool that can translate thoughts directly into text, or “brain typing.” To support that work, the company plans to use data collected from students using its headsets to compile “the world’s largest brainwave database.”

Theodore Zanto, a professor of neurology at the University of California at San Francisco, had two words when he first read through the company’s website: “Holy shit.”

The brains behind BrainCo

The founder and CEO of BrainCo is Bicheng Han, a PhD candidate at the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. In 2015, his Somerville, Mass.-based startup was incubated in the Harvard Innovation Lab, and last year the company received $5.5 million in seed funding in a round led by the Boston Angel Club, with participation from Han Tan Capital and Wandai Capital, to develop BrainCo’s first product: Focus 1.

Teachers have an innate ability to know when their students are engaged, but we want to give them a superpower so they can track and quantify that over time.

Focus 1 is a headband that aims to detect and report brain activity through EEG, or electroencephalography, which measures in the brain. To advertise the device to schools, BrainCo packages the headset as Focus EDU, which essentially is the headset plus a dashboard where teachers can view all of their students’ EEG data. According to the video, a high numerical score for the EEG signal suggests that a student is paying attention; a low score is interpreted as a distracted or unfocused student.

Max Newlon, a research scientist at BrainCo, adds the company is also studying if the headset could help students and families “train their brain” to improve attention skills.

BrainCo is hardly the first company to sell so-called “brain-training”—or even EEG headsets. Similar devices include Muse, a “personal meditation” headband intended to guide relaxation based on real-time EEG readings. There’s also Neurocore Brain Performance Centers, clinics that “empower you to train your brain” also using EEG readings. (Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is among Neurocore’s investors.)

Focus EDU, by contrast, is among the first EEG products that will be marketed directly to teachers and schools.

“We are trying to be the first company to quantify this invisible metric” of student engagement, says Newlon. “Teachers have an innate ability to know when their students are engaged, but we want to give them a superpower so they can track and quantify that over time.”

The idea was enough for BrainCo to win awards including “Most Innovative” at a pitchfest during the 2017 International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) national conference.

But the company has also faced less enthusiastic reviews. At the 2016 CES conference, an electronics and consumer tech tradeshow, BrainCo’s Focus 1 device flopped in a live demo, which attempted to use human brainwaves detected by the headband to control a robotic hand. The Daily Dot called it the most “cringeworthy demonstration” at the event. “That’s a mishap that calls into question the overall function of the device,” the reporter wrote. “Was it ever actually reading the brainwaves at all?”

When BrainCo returned to CES in 2017, the company arrived with an even bigger robot—which the site WearableZone reported was a success—along with a strategic “pivot” towards education.

More recently, BrainCo has chalked up some big wins: It signed education superstar, James Ryan, Harvard’s dean of education, as an adviser. And now it’s closed a $15 million Series A funding round, bringing the the company’s total funding to nearly $20.5 million. The funding was led by Chinese investors Decent Capital and the China Electronics Corporation, which on its website describes itself as “one of the key state-owned conglomerates directly under the administration of central government, and the largest state-owned IT company in China.”

My reaction: The same as Theodore Zanto, quoted above.

Categories Education Reform, Privacy, Technology

Ben Tarnoff: What’s Behind The Rage to Teach Coding?

By dianeravitch
October 15, 2017 //
55

Ben Tarnoff writes about technology and Silicon Valley. In this article, he notes that many districts plan to teach coding as a basic skill, one that is necessary in the new global economy. He believes that the push for more coders is not about helping young people find jobs, but about enabling the computer industry to lower wages.

This month, millions of children returned to school. This year, an unprecedented number of them will learn to code.

Computer science courses for children have proliferated rapidly in the past few years. A 2016 Gallup report found that 40% of American schools now offer coding classes – up from only 25% a few years ago. New York, with the largest public school system in the country, has pledged to offer computer science to all 1.1 million students by 2025. Los Angeles, with the second largest, plans to do the same by 2020. And Chicago, the fourth largest, has gone further, promising to make computer science a high school graduation requirement by 2018.

The rationale for this rapid curricular renovation is economic. Teaching kids how to code will help them land good jobs, the argument goes. In an era of flat and falling incomes, programming provides a new path to the middle class – a skill so widely demanded that anyone who acquires it can command a livable, even lucrative, wage.

Forget Wall Street – Silicon Valley is the new political power in Washington

This narrative pervades policymaking at every level, from school boards to the government. Yet it rests on a fundamentally flawed premise. Contrary to public perception, the economy doesn’t actually need that many more programmers. As a result, teaching millions of kids to code won’t make them all middle-class. Rather, it will proletarianize the profession by flooding the market and forcing wages down – and that’s precisely the point.

At its root, the campaign for code education isn’t about giving the next generation a shot at earning the salary of a Facebook engineer. It’s about ensuring those salaries no longer exist, by creating a source of cheap labor for the tech industry.

As software mediates more of our lives, and the power of Silicon Valley grows, it’s tempting to imagine that demand for developers is soaring. The media contributes to this impression by spotlighting the genuinely inspiring stories of those who have ascended the class ladder through code. You may have heard of Bit Source, a company in eastern Kentucky that retrains coalminers as coders. They’ve been featured by Wired, Forbes, FastCompany, The Guardian, NPR and NBC News, among others.

A former coalminer who becomes a successful developer deserves our respect and admiration. But the data suggests that relatively few will be able to follow their example. Our educational system has long been producing more programmers than the labor market can absorb. A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that the supply of American college graduates with computer science degrees is 50% greater than the number hired into the tech industry each year. For all the talk of a tech worker shortage, many qualified graduates simply can’t find jobs.

More tellingly, wage levels in the tech industry have remained flat since the late 1990s. Adjusting for inflation, the average programmer earns about as much today as in 1998. If demand were soaring, you’d expect wages to rise sharply in response. Instead, salaries have stagnated.

Still, those salaries are stagnating at a fairly high level. The Department of Labor estimates that the median annual wage for computer and information technology occupations is $82,860 – more than twice the national average. And from the perspective of the people who own the tech industry, this presents a problem. High wages threaten profits. To maximize profitability, one must always be finding ways to pay workers less.

Tech executives have pursued this goal in a variety of ways. One is collusion – companies conspiring to prevent their employees from earning more by switching jobs. The prevalence of this practice in Silicon Valley triggered a justice department antitrust complaint in 2010, along with a class action suit that culminated in a $415m settlement. Another, more sophisticated method is importing large numbers of skilled guest workers from other countries through the H1-B visa program. These workers earn less than their American counterparts, and possess little bargaining power because they must remain employed to keep their status.

Guest workers and wage-fixing are useful tools for restraining labor costs. But nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers. And where better to develop this workforce than America’s schools? It’s no coincidence, then, that the campaign for code education is being orchestrated by the tech industry itself. Its primary instrument is Code.org, a nonprofit funded by Facebook, Microsoft, Google and others. In 2016, the organization spent nearly $20m on training teachers, developing curricula, and lobbying policymakers.

Categories Economy, Technology

Teacher Tom: I Will Not Permit the Children, My Friends, to Be Turned Over to a Machine!

By dianeravitch
October 9, 2017 //
19

Tom Hobson teaches preschool in Seattle, Washington. He is also a blogger.

He wrote here about the machinations of the greedy profiteers who want children to be taught by machines. He will not permit it. The children are his friends. The profiteers don’t give a damn about the children he teaches.

He begins like this:

I typically wait by the door or gate to greet the children as they arrive, “Hi Sarah! I’m happy to see you!” I say it because it’s how I would like to be greeted. In a way, I guess, you could consider it my version of shouting, “Norm!” the way the Cheers regulars did each time their beloved friend walked through the door.

I also say it because it’s true. I am happy to see each child walk through the door. I’m grateful they’ve come back. I’m grateful that their parents continue to trust me with their baby. I’m grateful that we are going to now spend hours together, just farting around, making stuff, imagining stuff, thinking about stuff and generally just goofing off. I’m even grateful for the times we get sad or angry, because those conflicts are a part of our friendship.

And that’s the thing, that’s the part that people who don’t do this job will never understand: the friendship. These kids are my friends, especially those who are back for a second or third year with me. We’re not even two weeks into the new school year and we’re already finishing each other’s sentences and cracking inside jokes. This is what I will remember from the too short time we spend together. It is also what they will remember. And we’ve got nine months of that ahead of us. Norm!

He adds:

Are we that stupid. People need other people, not just for procreation or telling stories or being happy or forming a team, but also for learning anything worth learning. We will figure out how to read and write and cipher as we always have: virally, by hanging out with other people, which is a system that has worked for most people throughout history. It’s been a largely successful system so why the hell would we mess with it? And that’s also, not incidentally, how we learn everything else: virally, by hanging out with other people. And that requires friendship, deep down real friendship. That, ultimately, is the source of extraordinary motivation.

Read their own documents, and you’ll see that they are planning to turn live, face-to-face teaching into a “premium service.” . . . Meaning that they know face-to-face instruction is a better way to learn, and they have no intention of having their own children learn from machines.

I am not laughing about this academic’s predictions. I’m girding myself because billionaires are behind this and they, despite their philanthropic BS, care primarily about making a killing at the expense of our kids. I will not permit children, my friends, to be turned over to machines. I want them to come to a place where everybody knows their name and where they’re always glad they came.

Friends don’t turn their friends over to machines. People need other people. Children need humans, not machines, to teach them.

Categories Accountability, Childhood, Pre-K, K, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Oh, No! Ivanka Put in Charge of Ed Tech, Plus: How She and Donald Trump Jr. Avoided Criminal Indictment

By dianeravitch
October 5, 2017 //
7

The New Yorker broke a story about how Ivanka and Don Jr. managed to avoid a criminal indictment. The very next day, the New York Post (owned by Rupert Murdoch) published an article “by” Ivanka offering advopice about the importance of technology in education. It seems that advocacy for ed tech is now part of her portfolio, as Middle East peace is a small part of husband Jared’s portfolio. The article was banal; the comments on it are hilarious.

The backstory: The New Yorker published a blockbuster revelation of a curious episode in the checkered history of the Trump family.

In 2012, Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. were under investigation by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office for inflating the sales at the Trump Organization’s new Trump Soho condo-hotel. Sales were going poorlyand apparently they claimed that the condos were selling fast. In New York, that is not Legal. Trump senior’s personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz made a $25,000 campaign contribution to the District Attorney Cyrus Vance. Kasowitz had a private meeting with Vance. The investigation was closed. Vance returned the money.

“Ultimately, Vance overruled his own prosecutors. Three months after the meeting, he told them to drop the case. Kasowitz subsequently boasted to colleagues about representing the Trump children, according to two people. He said that the case was “really dangerous,” one person said, and that it was “amazing I got them off.” (Kasowitz denied making such a statement.)

“Vance defended his decision. “I did not at the time believe beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime had been committed,” he told us. “I had to make a call and I made the call, and I think I made the right call.”
Just before the 2012 meeting, Vance’s campaign had returned Kasowitz’s twenty-five-thousand-dollar contribution, in keeping with what Vance describes as standard practice when a donor has a case before his office. Kasowitz “had no influence, and his contributions had no influence whatsoever on my decision-making in the case,” Vance said.

“But, less than six months after the D.A.’s office dropped the case, Kasowitz made an even larger donation to Vance’s campaign, and helped raise more from others—eventually, a total of more than fifty thousand dollars. After being asked about these donations as part of the reporting for this article—more than four years after the fact—Vance said he now plans to give back Kasowitz’s second contribution, too. “I don’t want the money to be a millstone around anybody’s neck, including the office’s,” he said.

“Kasowitz told us that his donations to Vance were unrelated to the case. “I donated to Cy Vance’s campaign because I was and remain extremely impressed by him as a person of impeccable integrity, as a brilliant lawyer and as a public servant with creative ideas and tremendous ability,” Kasowitz wrote in an e-mailed statement. “I have never made a contribution to anyone’s campaign, including Cy Vance’s, as a ‘quid-pro-quo’ for anything.”

“Last year, the Times reported the existence of the criminal investigation into the Trump SoHo project. But the prosecutor’s focus on Ivanka and Donald, Jr., and the e-mail evidence against them, as well as Kasowitz’s involvement, and Vance’s decision to overrule his prosecutors, had not previously been made public. This account is based on interviews with twenty sources familiar with the investigation, court records, and other public documents. We were not able to review copies of the e-mails that were the focal point of the inquiry. We are relying on the accounts of multiple individuals who have seen them.”

Grifters.

Categories Education Reform, Technology, Trump

A Teacher in Baltimore County Describes How the Deep Dive into Technology Affected Her Classroom

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2017 //
15

A teacher in Baltimore County public schools described her experience on this blog with the promotion of technology in every classroom. The former superintendent, Dallas Dance, resigned a few months ago, after committing measly $300 million to new technology, and is under criminal investigation.

The frenzied pushing of laptops for every elementary student 1-5 in Baltimore County had some big ripples beyond the obvious. It was also tied to purchasing brand new reading and math curricula. Both were horrible, for various reasons. The reading program package came without sufficient quantities of required resources–I had 6 hard-copies of books that 2 reading groups (with 8 students in each) needed to use simultaneously. There were about 6 different titles of books for each of the 6 units, each with only 6 copies. We were supposed to access the texts on the laptops, rather than use the paperbacks. Super! Except that on any given day, our local server would crash from overload, or the county server would crash due to overload, or the power in our building would go down, or some glitch in the program would keep throwing kids out of the program or eating their work… These issues were in addition to a crazy, difficult-to-access, error-riddled, age-inappropriate, never-piloted (!) county-written curriculum that SORT OF followed the Pearson curriculum. There was no writing curriculum until teacher complaints led them to try to stuff one into the reading curriculum. There were no samples of how the kids’ work product should look. The rubrics were vague. Nobody in the county language arts department could reliably answer any of our questions because it was a revolving door there. Oh, and the head of the department when I left was none other than Verletta White. Prior to that she was an area supe for my part of the county.

And that is just some of how crazy language arts was. There were similar issues with the new math curriculum and Pearson program.

In addition to all of these overnight curriculum, software, and hardware changes there were drastic changes in HOW we were expected to teach, interact with, and assess our students. On top of that, we were saddled with the idiotic, easy-to-abuse Charlotte Danielson evaluation system. Anyone who principals or area supes felt couldn’t hack it was forced out. You know–teachers with many years of experience. Some teachers, like a colleague of mine–who were eligible to retire, but wanted to keep teaching–promptly decided retirement looked great all of a sudden.

Others, like me (21 years in!), were not eligible to retire and had to simply resign. I lost my salary which was half my family income. I lost my health benefits, including those that would have followed me into retirement. My pension is frozen. Getting hired in another district would likely be dicey, as I am sure I would be asked why I resigned after 21 years–at the same school, no less!–instead of asking for a transfer. All districts in Maryland were on a similar track with PARCC, so using curricular and methods changes as a reason would not be helpful. (I am still searching for a job in some other field, but employers are not interested in 50+ year old entry level employees.)

This happened at schools all over the county. The school communities–children, parents, neighbors, and colleagues–lost our teaching expertise; our experience working with diverse learners, colleagues, and stakeholders; and our contribution to the continuity of our schools’ institutional culture. The amount of taxpayers’ money wasted for such a rotten outcome is criminal. The only good outcome was for Pearson and Hewlitt Packard. They are still counting their money.

Categories Baltimore, Technology

Tom Ultican: The Profit-Driven Motive Behind Some of the Greatest Frauds of Our Times

By dianeravitch
September 30, 2017 //
19

Tom Ultican left a career in Silicon Valley to become a high school teacher of physics and mathematics. He is one of our most perceptive critics of the role of technology in schools, having lived in both worlds: high-tech and high-school.

In this important post, he lays waste some of the most pernicious frauds of our times.

There is a great deal of optimism about the tech market in schools, but none of it is about making schools better. It is about making money for investors.

He begins:

Last year, IBIS Capital produced a report for EdTechXGlobal stating, “Education technology is becoming a global phenomenon, … the market is projected to grow at 17.0% per annum, to $252bn by 2020.” Governments in Europe and Asia have joined the US in promoting what Dr. Nicholas Kardaras called a “$60 billion hoax.” He was referring specifically to the one to one initiatives.

An amazing paper from New Zealand, “Sell, sell, sell or learn, learn, learn? The EdTech market in New Zealand’s education system – privatisation by stealth?” exposes the promoters of EdTech there as being even more bullish on EdTech. “The New Zealand business organisation (they spell funny) EDTechNZ, indicates on its website that educational technology is the fastest growing sector of a global smart education market worth US$100 billion, forecast to grow to US$394 by 2019.”

These initiatives are fraud based agendas because they focus on advancing an industry but are sold as improving schools. Unfortunately, good education is not the driver; money is.

He writes:

The trumpeting of a “STEM shortage crisis in America” is and always was a hoax. This same con is deforming public education. The new Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards were motivated respectively by Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Louis Gerstner (IBM). As a result they devalue humanities and glorify science and engineering based on this same fraudulent STEM claim. There must be a thousand charter schools that advertise themselves as STEM academies.

Here in California this same lie is being used to promote yet another attack on local control of public schools. In July, Raul Bocanegra (D-San Fernando) announced new legislation that would create a State authorized STEM school for 800 students. It would be privately managed and sited in Los Angeles county.

The news organization Capital and Main stated, “For a district that is already the largest charter school authorizer in the nation and is still gun-shy after recently fending off a takeover attempt by billionaire school choice philanthropist Eli Broad, any scheme that promises further stratification is an existential threat.”

Eli Broad wanted a STEM school to call his own but paid for with public money, and the state’s two major newspapers thought it was a grand idea to let a billionaire get a school just because…he is a billionaire:

It seems the fourth estate no longer ferrets out fraud and corruption but is instead complicit in these nefarious plots.

In the age of Trump, investigative reporting doesn’t matter. Nor does principle. Money matters.

Of course, technology can be well used, but what is happening today is that technology is being used to replace human contact. That is a mistake and a fraud.

Hi-Tech and digital initiatives are careening down a dark road. Because of the extreme power of hi-tech corporations like Apple, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and many others, the development of education technology is being driven by their needs and not the needs of students. Students have become their guinea pigs as they release one untested technology after another into America’s classrooms.

Technology has a potential to enhance education but it also has the potential to cause great damage.

A century ago, there were people taking correspondence courses and getting great value from them. Today, the modern equivalent of the correspondence course is the online class.

However, students at screens like correspondence students will never achieve equal benefit to students with a teacher, because the teacher-student relationship is the most important aspect in education.

Teacher-student relationships are different than those with friends, parents or siblings. My personal experience was that I felt a genuine selfless lover for my students and we communicated about many things; often personal but mostly academic. I also felt a need to protect them. In America’s public schools, a student might have that kind of close relationship with more than 40 adults during their 12 years in school. This is where the great spark of creativity and learning leaps from teacher to student.

I have put students at screens in my career, but I never found great benefit in the exercise. On the hand, I have found technologies like graphing utilities to be highly beneficial, but it was the interaction with my students that was of most value for deep learning, enhancing creativity and developing a love for learning. If technologies destroy these relationships then they become a net evil.

Here is his ominous conclusion. We ignore it at our peril, and the peril of our youth:

A faculty colleague of mine said, “the last thing 21st century students need is more screen time.” I believe Jean M. Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and the author of Generation Me and iGen would enthusiastically agree. She recently wrote an article for Atlantic magazine describing the dangers of screen time to the current teen generation she calls the iGen. Based on her research she said,

“Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.)”

“The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.”

“There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness.”

“In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.”

Obviously, many of our institutions have been corrupted by the immense power of concentrated wealth and especially by hi-tech industries. The money being chased is enormous, but there are more of us. If we educate ourselves, our families and our neighbors we can reform these greed driven forces into forces for good, but we need to pay attention.

Categories Education Reform, For-Profit, Fraud, STEM, Technology

Baltimore County: Former Superintendent Dallas Dance is Under Criminal Investigation

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2017 //
32

A group of parents in Baltimore County was very unhappy with their high-flying Superintendent, Dallas Dance. Dance planned a huge investment in technology, and the parents didn’t see the evidence for it. They worried that the schools were investing in a pipe dream…or worse. Dance planned to spend at least $272 million so that every student would have his or her own laptop. Where he saw technological salvation, the parents saw expensive snake oil.

Dance wanted to become a national leader in introducing “personalized” (depersonalized) learning in his schools, and he spent freely for technology to make his dream come true.

Some parents in the county saw what was happening and they criticized it, again and again, in their own blog, as a massive waste of taxpayers’ money and a waste of students’ instructional time.

Dance abruptly resigned last spring, and he is now former superintendent of Baltimore County public schools. He is now under criminal investigation by the Maryland State Prosecutor’s Office.

The parent blog, written in this instance by Joanne C. Simpson, reports on Dance’s problems:

Among issues apparently under review: Dance’s “involvement with SUPES Academy,” which did business with BCPS and for which Dance consulted at the time. “In 2014, school system ethics officials ruled that Dance had violated ethics rules by taking a part time job with SUPES after the company got an $875,000 contract with the school system,” the Sun noted. For other info on SUPES and various linkages to Dance, read also this post.

Dance offered no comment to news of a current state prosecutor investigation, but this very recent video by the resigned superintendent speaks volumes.

Other details: The investigative news story on SUPES, which revealed Dance’s consulting job, was first broken in 2013 by The Chicago Reporter and then followed by the Sun. Dance agreed to drop the outside job.

Former chief of Chicago Public Schools Barbara Byrd-Bennett, once named as a favorite mentor by Dance, was among those embroiled in the SUPES scandal and convicted this year of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks and sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison.

Dance, who promised not to consult again after the ethics finding on SUPES, has been cited for other ethics violations and criticized for various “appearances of conflict of interest,” as well as costly taxpayer-funded travel to numerous edtech conferences and events, among other issues. His limited liability corporation Deliberate Excellence Consulting LLC was listed as Active and “Not In Good Standing” a few months ago, as also reported in this blog—a status which remains.

Many related concerns–including promotional videos Dance did for school system vendors, such as Hewlett-Packard–were first brought up in this op-ed in April 2016.

According to revised financial disclosure forms filed “under penalty of perjury” after the last ethics findings, Dance reported no personal income from his LLC, which according to charter records was formed “to consult and partner with school systems, businesses and organizations around best practices to obtain maximum organizational outcomes.”

Dance unexpectedly announced his resignation in April, partly saying he wanted to spend more time with family. Meanwhile, a few of his post-BCPS consulting positions are no longer listed on those firms’ sites nor on Dance’s LinkedIn profile page, including “Partner, Strategos Group,” and a full-time senior vice president position he announced with MGT Consulting Group when he left the superintendent position on June 30.

Parents who watched carefully were concerned about student privacy, data mining, and balanced use of technology. They worried that Dance had gone overboard. They were right to worry.

More:

“Despite Dance’s departure, STAT [Dance’s program] is still being pursued and expanded under current Interim Superintendent Verletta White, who pressed for a nearly $4 million expansion of just two software contracts, iReady and DreamBox Math, this year (see postscript below), despite questions by school board members about the programs’ high costs and lack of objective evidence of benefits. Via the software programs, elementary school children as young as 6 watch math or English language videos, and do gaming-style lessons, or play video games as “rewards” on the devices during the school day.”

The spending on technology with no evidence of its value goes forward:

“As first reported here in The Baltimore Post: The company e.Republic (which backs the Center for Digital Education) works with over 700 companies – from “Fortune 500s to startups” – to help executives ‘power their public sector sales and marketing success.’ Among those listed: Intel, IBM, Blackboard, Microsoft, Aerohive, Apple, Samsung, Dell and Google.” Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies are familiar entities at BCPS.

“Also, among a litany of mostly no-bid digital curricula contracts recently implemented at the county’s public school district: the reading/English language software program iReady, which had a $1.2 million BCPS contract spending authority expanded in July to $3.2 million for fewer than 5 years, as approved by the Board of Education and requested by interim superintendent White.
—–
iReady by Curriculum Associates:

Click to access 061317%20JMI-618-14%20Modification%20-%20Teaching%20Resource%20for%20English%20Language%20Arts.pdf

—–
https://www.bcps.org/apps/bcpscontracts/contractFiles/012015_JMI-618-14%208%20Mod%20Teach%20Resource%20English%20Language.docx
——
“DreamBox Math, meanwhile, jumped nearly $2 million more to $3.2 million for just three more years.
If contacts don’t link, can copy and paste this lengthy link: http://www.boarddocs.com/mabe/bcps/Board.nsf/files/AMQQTE6AD435/$file/061317%20JNI-778-14%20Modification%20and%20Extension%20-%20Mathematics%20Supplemental%20Resources.pdf
——–
“Such price tags total a whopping more than $6 million for two software programs alone in a cash-strapped school system with many pressing needs.

“In the end, many would agree digital technology has a place as a modern tool of learning. But analyses are required when children’s minds and futures are involved. Consider this objective 2017 National Education Policy Center report on “blended and virtual learning,” and a recent Business Insider story on DreamBox, which also questions the tenets of the “personalized-learning” computer-based approach, and points out just how many data points are collected on children–50,000 per hour per student just by DreamBox. There’s also the widespread industry marketing campaigns and venture capitalist profit-margins behind it all.”

There is a moral to this story: Pay attention to ethics rules. Don’t seek or accept outside money from corporations who want to sell stuff or services to your district. Be satisfied with your salary or look for a different job.

There is another moral: the tech companies view the schools as a market, and they are taking taxpayers’ money because they can.

Every school board, every superintendent has a duty to review these contracts carefully and reject those that are unproven. Don’t take the word of the salesmen.

Categories Accountability, Baltimore, Education Industry, Technology

Leader of Delaware XQ Super School Ousted by Charter School Board After Winning $10 Million Compeition

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2017 //
9

The board of the Delaware Design-Lab High School sent out a notice to parents that the Head of School Joseph Mock was out, and the search was on for his replacement. Last year, the school won $10 million in Laurene Powell Jobs’ XQ Super School competition.

Blogger Kevin Ohlandt was stunned to hear the news and assumed that Mock resigned but it appears, says Ohlandt, but it appears that he was ousted.

Here is the beginning of the email to parents. Get a load of the titles:

“From: Design-Lab High School

“Sent: Friday, September 15, 5:20 PM

“Subject: Important Message from the DDLHS Board

“Dear DDLHS Families,

“On behalf of the Board of Directors, we would like to bring you up to date on changes inside school administration as we prepare for the next phase in the process of becoming an XQ Super School in August 2018.

“The Board will begin interviews next week for the position of XQ Project Manager and, shortly thereafter, will begin the search for the school’s XQ Dean of Academic Intensity. These leaders, together with a Dean of Engagement and Dean of College and Career Readiness, will guide us through the XQ process and prepare us for the opening of our XQ Super School next fall.

“As we shift our administrative structure to help us succeed as a Super School, the Board has decided to eliminate the position of Head of School effective Friday, September 15, 2017. As a result of these changes, we are sad to announce that Mr. Mock will be pursuing other opportunities at this time. Mr. Mock has been an invaluable asset to our school since he joined us as Vice Principal/Special Education Coordinator in 2015. Through his tenure as Principal and Head of School, he has navigated some of the most challenging waters a school can face with grace and commitment. We thank Mr. Mock for all he’s done preparing DDLHS to move into this next phase in our school’s history, and wish him well in his new endeavors.”

Translation: Mock is out immediately. His temporary replacement is a member of the board. Something’s rotten in Denmark (er, Delaware).

Lesson #1 for Mrs. Jobs: Schools are about people, not tools. They are not corporations where the personnel are interchangeable. Human interactions create a culture, and the culture supports the people in it and the work they do–or it doesn’t. A school is more than the sum of its parts. Great tools do not a great school make. Commitment, dedication, compassion, and teamwork matter most.

Perhaps that’s what the XQ project will demonstrate.

Categories Charter Schools, Delaware, Technology

Los Angeles County Investigates Enrollment of Catholic School Students in Online Academy

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2017 //
21

This is a new kind of charter school scandal. A virtual school enrolled students already enrolled in Catholic schools and claimed full state tuition. The virtual school gave the Catholic school cash and laptops. Meanwhile, the parents paid tuition to the Catholic school. In effect, the students attended two schools.

Bizarre new world of profit-taking.

http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-edu-lennox-virtual-academy-20170920-story.html

Categories Accountability, Catholic Schools, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Funding, Los Angeles, Privatization, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools

Emily Talmadge: Be Like Lisa

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2017 //
22

Emily Talmadge salutes Lisa Haver, who wrote an article in a Philadelphia newspaper asking why the billionaires who play with public schools are never held accountable. She recommends that all of us should “be like Lisa,” speak up, stand up, demand that billionaires keep their hands off our public schools with their half-baked ideas.

Emily has the advantage of having gone to school with Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe she can answer a question that has bothered me whenever I see a picture of him. Does he own any shirts that are not solid color T-shirts? Is he pretending to be Steve Jobs? Does he own a shirt with buttons? Has he ever worn a tie? None of these are necessary, but I imagine him at a black-tie dinner wearing a T-shirt. Just because he is richer than everyone else.

Anyway…

Emily writes:

Sixteen years ago, Mark Zuckerberg and I sat across from each other in Latin class at Phillips Exeter Academy.

A few years after Exeter, I began teaching public school.

Mark, meanwhile, invented Facebook and became a billionaire.

Now, the one who never worked a day in his life in a public school (Mark) is crusading nationwide to “remake” public schools.

Without bothering to hear from those who actually work in those schools (I wrote Mark an open letter a couple of years ago that was picked up by a number of popular media outlets, but never heard back), Mark and his wife are striving to build a public school system that in no way resembles the intimate, discussion-based, mostly tech-free education (with no more than twelve students per class) that we got at Exeter.

Chan and Zuckerberg – along with a long list of other billionaires like Reed Hastings, Laurene Powell Jobs, Eli Broad, and the Waltons – are currently pushing an education agenda that puts an electronic device at the hands of each student, tracking their every move with “personalized learning plans” that will warn you in big red letters if at any time you fall off-track and aren’t meeting the standards as you should be.

There’s a giant profit motive behind this frighteningly technocratic vision, and anyone who cares about public schools should be fighting tooth and nail against it.

Unfortunately, based on the speed at which schools are adopting Mark’s “Summit Personalized Learning” program and the amount of money his LLC is throwing at public policy initiatives, Mark and his billionaire buddies are currently winning this war.

Most of the billionaires who want to reshape education want to make it completely reliant on technology, even though they don’t send their own children to schools like that. They prefer the kind where an experienced teacher sits at a seminar table with a dozen students and discusses what they are learning. The Waltons are different; they are not in the tech sector. They want to bust unions, and they have found that funding charters is the best way to achieve that goal.

Be like Lisa, she writes. Blow the whistle. Call foul. Speak up. Now.

Categories For-Profit, Philanthropy, Technology
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