A new player in this realm is Lauren Powell Jobs, who has “an M.B.A. from Stanford University‘s Graduate School of Business and experience as a fixed income trading strategist at Goldman Sachs, she is the founder and chair of the Emerson Collective. The collective, which does not maintain a website, focuses on using entrepreneurship to advance social reform and find solutions to help under-resourced students in America’s public schools, according to one description. She also serves on the boards of the New America Foundation and Teach for America.”

Powell Jobs is tied to the New America Foundation (funded by the Gates and Walton Foundations) and Teach for America (funded by a host of conservative foundations and big banks). She has helped to fund a “network of small private schools” that has extensive staff ties to Teach for America, and she helped to finance the purchase of Amplify from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It appears that Powell Jobs’ conception of “reform” is really not very different from that of Whitney Tilson, or Wendy Kopp, or the other ed “reformers.”

The network of schools Powell Jobs is helping to fund seeks to apply a “reform” formula “… to private, public, and charter schools across the country. Of course, they’re also money-making operations.”

See, for example: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/altschool/

About 10,000 public schools have applied for the Powell Jobs’ XQ Super Schools grants. I know of one in central Virginia that is under consideration for $2 million a year for five years, $10 million total. This school system touts itself as “visionary,” and has had strong, undisclosed connections to the tech company SchoolNet, which was purchased by Pearson. The school division has thrown millions at technology, and recently converted all of its high schools to STEM “academies,” never mind that there is a nation-wide glut of STEM workers. And people in the community don’t bat an eye.

The top executive at Powell Job’s “reform” entity is Russlyn Ali, a former top aide to Arne Duncan, who is also ensconced as a “senior partner” with Powell Jobs.

Ali formerly worked for the Education Trust and the Broad Foundation. She supported No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. She wrote that California should not suspend Common Core assessments because “The Common Core provides the promise and the opportunity for California to again lead the country in education.” Otherwise, she asked, “Will America be ready to compete?”

It’s pure nonsense. But many in public education have responded enthusiastically to it. They respond even more enthusiastically – it seems – when the STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) bogeyman is invoked. Go figure.

Powell Jobs also heads up College Track, which “provides tutoring, SAT and ACT preparation and college counseling” to low-income students, Interestingly, according to its tax filings, College Track “qualifies as a publicly supported organization.” It receives money from the Emerson Collective – another Powell Jobs education enterprise, which is organized as a LLC and does not have to publicly report its donations – and from JP Morgan Chase, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Summit 54, a Colorado organization conceived in the wake of ‘Waiting for Superman’ and dedicated to the proposition that “Our education system is not preparing our students for jobs of the future” and “this is having a detrimental effect on our economy.”

Holy Mother of God. Why does anyone believe these people?

This is what education “reform” – especially technology-oriented “reform – has shaped up to be.

As some have noted, technology is a valuable tool. The problem is that it’s too often misused, and not necessarily for the better–– think texting and selfie-taking while driving, political and corporate hacking, nanosecond stock trading.

Anyone who’s become relatively adept at using technology knows something about becoming involved in multi-tasking.

Consider the following, reported in 2008 by Christine Rosen:

“Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, ‘Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.’ The psychologist who led the study called this new ‘infomania’ a serious threat to workplace productivity.”

The threat to workplace productivity is not made lightly. Rosen added:

“One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.”

Public schools are not exempt from this cautionary information.

In his 2003 book, The Flickering Mind, Todd Oppenheimer wrote that
technology was a “false promise.” That is, all too often technology is no
panacea to improving learning and often undermines funding that might have
gone to reducing class sizes, and improving teacher salaries and facilities.
Based on his many classroom observations, Oppenheimer said that “more often
than not” classroom use of computers encouraged “everybody in the room to go
off task.” He noted that a UCLA research team investigating results from
the Third International Math and Sciences Study (TIMSS) reviewed video from
8th grade math and science classes in seven different countries. One
difference stood out: while American teachers use overhead projectors (and
increasingly now LCDs), teachers in other countries still use blackboards,
which maintain “a complete record of the entire lesson.”

A recent Texas study found that “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.” And the New York Times reported recently on classroom use of technology in Arizona, where “The digital push aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom.” As the Times reported, “schools are spending billions on technology,even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”

Could we teach an avatar to . . .

play the trumpet?

paint in watercolor?

read a map?

write a poem?

complete a geometric proof?

conduct an experiment?

follow a volleyball rotation?

understand democracy?

love reading?

balance a chemical equation?

use a microscope?

collect weather data?

take theatre direction?

work cooperatively in a group?

construct a line graph?

follow a recipe?

play chess?

plant a garden?

clean up after themselves?

be nice to others?

wait their turn?

ask good questions?

build a robot or birdhouse?

sew a stuffed animal?

find their niche in life?

become better people?

speak another language?

use conversion formulas?

research a technical topic?

see the beauty in mathematics?

believe in themselves?

describe the causes of the Civil War?

understand supply and demand?

personal responsibility?