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This Shouldn’t Bother Me, But It Does: The Education Marketplace

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2016 //
43

I have trouble thinking of K-12 education as a marketplace. But that’s just me. I know that the textbook and testing industries have their marketplaces. Now there is a new marketplace where investors hope to profit on edtech.

Apparently, Education Week now has a regular feature that showcases the latest entrepreneurial ventures, where equity investors jump in with a million here, a million there.

I suppose I should not be surprised. Edtech is the next big thing, or maybe it is the Big Thing right now, where investors see the chance of a killing.

Which reminds me that several commenters on the blog have pointed out that the most innovative education today is hands-on, doing things, making things, creating things without the aid of a computer. Low-tech is now innovative. That is sort of a hopeful sign that our children will not turn into avatars.

Categories Education Industry, For-Profit, Technology

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras on the $60 Billion Hoax

By dianeravitch
September 5, 2016 //
82

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras is a licensed psychotherapist and a specialist on children’s screen addiction. In this article in TIME magazine, he asserts that the schools’ investment of $60 billion in new technology benefits the tech entrepreneurs, not the students. He calls it a hoax driven by the pursuit of profit.

He writes:

As the dog days of summer wane, most parents are preparing to send their kids back to school. In years past, this has meant buying notebooks and pencils, perhaps even a new backpack. But over the past decade or so, the back-to-school checklist has for many also included an array of screen devices that many parents dutifully stuff into their children’s bag.

The screen revolution has seen pedagogy undergo a seismic shift as technology now dominates the educational landscape. In almost every classroom in America today, you will find some type of screen—smartboards, Chromebooks, tablets, smartphones. From inner-city schools to those in rural and remote towns, we have accepted tech in the classroom as a necessary and beneficial evolution in education.

This is a lie.

Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids, which I will explain shortly, it can also clinically hurt them. I’ve worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus, but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion. Indeed, over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.

Why have we allowed this educational “Trojan Horse” into the schools, he asks. Answer: Follow the money.

The education tech marketplace represents a $60 billion market. Everyone in the industry wants to get a piece of the market. The salmon are working overtime to convince your school and school board that you must have the latest thing.

But Dr. Kardaras says: Wait. Look at the evidence of the harm that screen addiction does to children.

Apparently, leaders of the tech industry know this. We read five years ago about the hottest school in Silicon Valley where tech entrepreneurs send their own children. It is a Waldorf school in Los Altos that does not allow children to use technology in school. Instead they learn with their all their senses and bypass technology until they leave school.

The chief technology officer of eBay sends his children to a nine-classroom school here. So do employees of Silicon Valley giants like Google, Apple, Yahoo and Hewlett-Packard.

But the school’s chief teaching tools are anything but high-tech: pens and paper, knitting needles and, occasionally, mud. Not a computer to be found. No screens at all. They are not allowed in the classroom, and the school even frowns on their use at home.

Schools nationwide have rushed to supply their classrooms with computers, and many policy makers say it is foolish to do otherwise. But the contrarian point of view can be found at the epicenter of the tech economy, where some parents and educators have a message: computers and schools don’t mix.

This is the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, one of around 160 Waldorf schools in the country that subscribe to a teaching philosophy focused on physical activity and learning through creative, hands-on tasks. Those who endorse this approach say computers inhibit creative thinking, movement, human interaction and attention spans.

Categories Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, Technology

Peter Greene: Lab Rats for America, A Kafkaesque Version of Our Future

By dianeravitch
August 22, 2016 //
36

Peter Greene writes here about a polished (and terrifying) video released by the ACT Foundation that portrays the programmed education of the future.

He begins:

Oh my God. Oh my effing God.

If you want to see where Competency Based Education, data mining, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society all intersect– boy, have I got a video for you. Spoiler alert: this is also one way that public education dies.

I’m going to walk you through the video, embed it for your own viewing, and tell you about the people behind this. Hang on. This is stunning. And I’ll warn you right up front– this is not some hack job that looks like amateur hour video production (like, say, an in house USED video). This is slick and well-produced. Which somehow makes it more horrifying.

The video is a little SF film taking us ten years into the future. Imagine you are one of the one billion people using a new technology called The Ledger. And our slogan…?

Learning is earning.

Peter patiently walks you through this dystopian vision of the future of training, disguised as “education.”

He writes:

Exactly what task will certify that you have acquired one hour’s worth of critical thinking?

And how do we even begin to discuss the notion that it doesn’t really matter whether you learn quantum physics from a PhD in the field or from a person who once sat in one class taught by that PhD?

And does anybody think that this is how the children of the wealthy will be educated? Will they accept this sort of “education”? Will they accept this total violation of data privacy?

This is not education. This is training. This is operant conditioning for the servant class that also provides the upper class with tools that let them trickle even fewer benefits down to the working class.

In fact, I would say that this is just training rats to run a maze, but it’s even worse than that, because ultimately even if we were to accept the premise that simply giving some job-ish training for the underclass is good enough, and even if I were to accept the racist, classist bullshit that somehow ignores the immoral and unethical foundations of such a system, the fact remains that this would be a lousy training system. To reduce any job of any level of complexity to this kind of checklist-of-tasks training provides the worst possible type of training.

So, no, this isn’t even sending rats into a maze to earn a pellet of food. This is carrying the pellet dispenser with you as an app. This is saying, “Well, the maze just involves twelve left turns and seven right turns.” Then I hand the rat a tiny phone with an app that measures his ability to turn corners, and once the rat has turned twelve left corners and seven right ones, the app spits out a food pellet.

This is also, not incidentally, the death of public education for any but the wealthy. In the world of the Ledger, there are no teachers, no schools, and no education for any purpose other than to satisfy the requirements of the people with power and money. In the world of the Ledger, education training exists only to help workers better react to the demands of employers. There is no benefit to education training except to trade for money. The Ledger is the wet dream of every corporate boss who said, “Why are they wasting time teaching these kids all this extra stuff. I’m not gonna pay them for that.”

It is important to know what the futuristic thinkers have in mind for us and our children, whether their vision will expand our ideals or contract them. This is most certainly the latter.

Categories Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Technology

William Doyle: The Post-Technology Classroom

By dianeravitch
July 29, 2016 //
20

William Doyle describes an emerging international consensus about the appropriate and limited use of technology in the classroom.

Doyle starts from the proposition that “Technology in the classroom has so far had little positive effect on childhood learning.”

That’s the stunning finding of the OECDs September 2015 report “Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection.” The report found that despite billions of dollars of frantic government spending, where ICTs [information and communications technologies] are used, their impact on student performance has been “mixed, at best,” in the words of the OECD’s Andreas Schleicher. “In most countries, the current use of technology is already past the point of optimal use in schools,” said Schleicher. “We’re at a point where computers are actually hurting learning.”

This supports a growing body of other research indicating that, with some exceptions like distance and special needs learning, there is little evidence that digital tools are inherently superior to analog tools in the hands of qualified teachers in teaching children the fundamentals of learning, especially in the early years.

For policy-makers, educators and parents, the implications of this research are enormous, and critical. The OECD report suggested that teachers need to be better trained in ICT. But it also found that children may learn best with analog tools first before later adding digital platforms, and that a few hours a week of classroom screen time may be optimal for children, beyond which learning benefits drop off to diminishing, or even negative, returns.

This argues not for the 100% screen-based classroom proposed by some enthusiasts, but for a far more strategic and cost-and-learning-effective model. In this vision of the “school of tomorrow,” teachers will use the analog and digital methods of their choice, including a few hours of student screen time per week – with a significant portion of school time being a “digital oasis,” where students learn through proven analog methods like paper, pencil, manipulatives and physical objects, crayons and paint, physical books, play, physical activity, nature, and face-to-face and over-the-shoulder interactions – not with digital simulations, but with the ultimate “personalized learning platform” – highly-qualified, flesh-and-blood teachers.

This kind of approach is already blossoming in many classrooms around the world, as teachers and students harness and control the power of technology, properly applied and integrated.

Hands-on learning and learning by play are staging a comeback:

In the global headquarters city of LEGO itself, inside the three-year-old International School of Billund in western Denmark, the concept of learning through play is being taken to the ultimate extreme. The LEGO Foundation-supported school offers children aged 3 to 16 an International Baccalaureate program through a curriculum based on creative play, delivered through a rich variety of analog and digital tools, including, naturally, LEGO education kits and programs.

“We want pupils to use their hands,” said the ISB’s head of school Camilla Uhre Fog to a journalist from the Times Educational Supplement. “We’re very hands-on. When hands are involved in learning, children really remember. If you’re in the middle of the creative process there is nothing worse than clearing up – if you cease the flow then you lose the dream, you lose everything.”

Categories International, Play, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Tennessee: How State Officials Contributed to Testing Disaster

By dianeravitch
June 30, 2016 //
8

Chalkbeat Tennessee has an excellent report on Tennessee’s testing fiasco. State officials knew that the testing company was in deep trouble before the testing began, yet they plunged ahead, wasting millions of dollars.

Grace Tatter describes Tennessee’s “worst case scenario”:

Tennessee education officials allowed students and teachers to go ahead with a new online testing system that had failed repeatedly in classrooms across the state, according to emails obtained by Chalkbeat.

After local districts spent millions of dollars on new computers, iPads, and upgraded internet service, teachers and students practiced for months taking the tests using MIST, an online testing system run by North Carolina-based test maker Measurement Inc.
They encountered myriad problems: Sometimes, the test questions took three minutes each to load, or wouldn’t load at all. At other times, the test wouldn’t work on iPads. And in some cases, the system even saved the wrong answers.

When students in McMinnville, a town southeast of Nashville, logged on to take their practice tests, they found some questions already filled in — incorrectly — and that they couldn’t change the answers. The unsettling implication: Even if students could take the exam, the scores would not reflect their skills.

“That is a HUGE issue to me,” Warren County High School assistant principal Penny Shockley wrote to Measurement Inc.

Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen speaks with reporters in February about technical problems with the state’s new online assessment.

Tennessee Education Commissioner Candice McQueen speaks with reporters in February about technical problems with the state’s new online assessment.

The emails contain numerous alarming reports about practice tests gone awry. They also show that miscommunication between officials with the Tennessee Department of Education and Measurement Inc. made it difficult to fix problems in time for launch.

And they suggest that even as problems continued to emerge as the test date neared, state officials either failed to understand or downplayed the widespread nature of the problems to schools. As a result, district leaders who could have chosen to have students take the test on paper instead moved forward with the online system.

The messages span from October until Feb. 10, two days after the online test’s debut and cancellation hours later. Together, they offer a peek into how Tennessee wound up with a worst-case scenario: countless hours wasted by teachers and students preparing for tests that could not be taken.

Categories Failure, Technology, Tennessee, Testing

Steven Singer: Pennsylvania Legislature Provides Online Courses to Compensate for Budget Cuts

By dianeravitch
June 26, 2016 //
5

Steven Singer writes here on the theme: Online courses for the poor, teachers for the rich kids. (This is familiar to me; I discussed this subject near the end of The Death and Life of the Great American School System, recalling an article by the technology editor of Forbes, who predicted this development more than 30 years ago.)

Singer writes:

Pennsylvania has a long history of under-resourcing its public schools.

State Rep. Jason Ortitay has a solution.

The Republican representing Washington and Allegheny Counties envisions a world where poor kids learn from computers and rich kids learn from flesh-and-blood teachers.
It’s all in his proposed legislation, H.B. 1915, passed by the state House on Monday. It now moves on to the Senate.

The legislation would assign the Department of Education the task of organizing a collection of online courses for use by students in grades 6-12. Some classes might be created by the state and others would be made by third parties with approval for state use. If anyone so desired, the courses could be utilized by anyone in public school, private school, homeschool and beyond. The online learning clearinghouse thus created would be called the “Supplemental Online Course Initiative.”

The purpose of the bill is to help financially stressed districts, not by funding them but by giving them a cheap alternative.

This bill provides an alternative for schools where the local tax base isn’t enough to fund traditional classes presided over by living, breathing teachers.

In the distant past, the state used to made up some of the slack to level the playing field for students born into poverty. However, for the last five years, the legislature has forced the poor to make due with almost $1 billion less in annual state education funds. This has resulted in narrowing the curriculum, the loss of extra-curriculars, increased class size, and plummeting academic achievement.

While the majority of voters are crying out for the legislature to fix this blatant inequality and disregard for students’ civil rights, Ortitay’s proposed bill lets lawmakers off the hook. It allows legislators to provide a low quality alternative for the poor without necessitating any substantial influx of funds.

Where is the curriculum coming from?

Internet-based classwork – like that which would be collected in the clearinghouse – makes up the curriculum at cyber charter schools. Moreover, these online schools have a proven track record of failure and fraud.

A recent nationwide study found that cyber charters provide 180 days less of math instruction than traditional public schools and 72 days less of reading instruction.
In addition, researchers found that 88 percent of cyber charter schools have weaker academic growth than similar brick and mortar schools.

They have an “overwhelming negative impact” on students, according to researchers.

And THAT kind of curriculum is what the state House voted to increase using public money!

Singer reminds readers that Pennsylvania cybercharters have experienced major frauds, and two cybercharter leaders are currently under indictment. Cybercharters have a sorry track record in Pennsylvania and everyone else.

That makes them just right for children who live in financially distressed districts. No one in the legislature cares about educating THEM.

Categories Budget Cuts, Education Industry, Online Education, Pennsylvania, Privatization, Technology

For Sale: An App That Pays Children Cash for Learning Online

By dianeravitch
June 8, 2016 //
30

Just when you thought that educational entrepreneurs had gone as low as they could go, along comes an app to pay children to study and respond to prompts. Patrick Leddy, the developer of the cash-for-grades app, has previously developed apps for selling custom tailored clothing, financial services, medical devices and cosmetics.

Launching first in the U.S. in December, the cash-for-grades e-learning app Incentify is based on the premise that children will be willing to study or do homework chores they don’t want to do in return for cash or other rewards.

“All of our technology is based on Harvard University studies, which have determined … whether kids responded to incentives and did better in school or not,” said Incentify’s CEO and founder Patrick Leddy. “And sure enough, conclusively, they do respond better to incentives.”

Leddy argues that before engaging with teachers and educational content at school, children need to be motivated to study instead of day dreaming or playing games.

“The classrooms are not at the speed of the children,” he told Techtonics. “The children are the Google generation. So how is it that we expect the kids to run at light speed outside of the school, but when they get in the school, they’ve got to slow down to horse and buggy?”

The Google generation – young people with “instant gratification” at their fingertips – can benefit more from e-learning than a traditional classroom, said Leddy. “We know for a fact that e-learning all by itself teaches a kid faster than teacher, pencil, paper and book.”

Dangling “a carrot” in front of kids to entice them to study is a model Leddy intends to take to other parts of the world to empower girls, in particular, who often are married off at an early age.

Whatever the reason for early marriages, Leddy argued children who earn money while learning are unlikely to be sold off for a dowry.

There are at least two things wrong with this app.

First, the app is based on the work of Harvard economist Roland Fryer, Jr., who has long sought the economic incentive that would lead to higher grades and test scores. His efforts have been funded with millions of dollars. He has paid children for getting higher grades or test scores, and he has paid them to read books. His efforts have come to naught, although children did read more books for pay but they did not get higher test scores or grades. So, the basic claim–that this incentive is effective–has no evidentiary basis.

Second, modern cognitive psychology rejects the belief that rewards will promote better outcomes. The work of Edward Deci, Dan Ariely, and other cognitive psychologists have shown that extrinsic rewards may get short-term results, but they do not last and they eventually undermine motivation. Daniel Pink has written about the importance of their studies (Drive) and why the real spurs to motivation are intrinsic, not extrinsic. It turns out that people are paid to do something that matters, they will stop doing it when the money stops.

Categories Accountability, For-Profit, Students, Technology

Myra Blackmon: Test Abuse in Georgia

By dianeravitch
May 27, 2016 //
7

Myra Blackmon is a columnist for he Athens Banner-Herald, where this column appeared.

 

 

She writes:
It happened last year. They said problems were corrected. It happened again this year.

 

Once again, administration of the Georgia Milestones – those hideous tests that purport to measure student achievement and teacher effectiveness – was plagued with computer problems.

 

 

Only someone who has been asleep for the last three years should be surprised at this. Computer servers couldn’t handle the traffic, systems crashed, teachers wrung their hands, students wept in frustration.

 
As a result, test scores will not be used for retention or promotion decisions for students in grades 3, 5 and 8.

 

This isn’t accountability, friends – this is abuse. The Georgia Milestones abuse the money Georgia taxpayers spend on education.

 

Let’s put this waste and abuse into perspective. According to the state Department of Education, there are about 401,000 students in third-, fifth- and eighth-grade classes in Georgia public schools. Let’s assume their teachers spend 10 hours of test preparation, practicing and reviewing with each of these students. That’s four million hours of time that could have been spent building projects, reading books for fun, doing science experiments – in other words, actually learning.

 
Yep, four million hours of wasted time, all before the testing begins. And that’s in just three grades.

 

In those same three grades, there are about 15,000 classrooms across the state, (assuming an overall average class size of about 26) spending millions of student hours on unproductive, speculative practices. It isn’t the schools deciding to waste all this time and money, it’s the state legislature and the U.S. Department of Education.

 

When you translate that into teacher pay for that wasted time, we are quickly pushing $1 billion annually. If that money was being spent to pay teachers to do what they do best, instead of what federal and state mandates insist they do, we could be making huge gains in education. But we are so driven by the mandated metrics and extraneous requirements that we completely lose sight of what real learning looks like.

 

What are we thinking, allowing this nonsense in our schools?…

 

Georgia Milestones provide zero diagnostic data. There are no reports that Johnny does well with long division, but needs to work on reading comprehension, while Tamekia is really strong in earth science, but still needs to work on her understanding of the three branches of government. No, all we get is aggregate data – and it’s not available until several months into the next school year, far too late to do anything about problems in any given class.

 

The Georgia Milestones have become the Georgia Millstones, huge weights that break the backs of our children and their teachers. We must stop it. And we must stop it soon, lest we lose another generation to corporate profits and political junk science.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Technology, Testing

US Corporations Sheltering Billions Offshore to Avoid Taxes

By dianeravitch
May 24, 2016 //
11

From Bill Moyers report:

 

 

 

“Jill Treanor at The Guardian writes that a report from the ratings agency Moody’s calculates, “Some of the biggest US companies have accumulated cash piles worth almost $1.7tn (£1.1tn) – more than two thirds of it overseas… The five companies hoarding the most cash – Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and Oracle – between them held $504bn by the end of last year. The tech sector held 46% of the total… “The figures will add to the controversy about companies sitting on cash as the data shows they are parking it offshore to avoid the tax bill that would be due on returning ito the US.”

 

About two trillion in untaxed earnings have been parked overseas.

 

So the tech companies want to sell their stuff to schools but avoid the taxes that pay for schooling. No wonder “the money is all gone.” It is hidden from the tax collector.

 

Shame on them!

Categories Accountability, Technology

John Richard Schrock: Virtual Reality is not as Good as Reality

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2016 //
7

John Richard Schrock is a professor at Emporia State University in Kansas, where he teaches science and prepares science teachers.

 
———————————————————————————————————————————————-
Virtual Unreality

 
Headlines have declared that this spring has seen the breakthrough in “virtual reality” (VR) media. Facebook released the Oculus Rift headset on March 28. Right behind it was the HTC Vive and the SONY PlayStation VR.
The hype behind VR is that it creates an “immersive environment” similar to the real world. First pitched in the 1990s—VR was poor quality and an immediate failure. But this new technology has Goldman Sachs predicting the VR industry will become bigger than television in the next ten years.

 
The new VR systems provide goggles with high definition resolution and a flicker speed far beyond what the human eye can detect. This is combined with movement sensors that detect head tilt and give the wearer the impression that they are in a real visual environment. Stereo headphones provide directional sound. A person wearing this head mounted display can “look around” and believe that they are in an artificial world.

 
More advanced “haptic” systems add the senses of smell and touch, the later through wired gloves or other devices. The goal is to convince the user of their “telexistence” or “telepresence.” So far, all of these expensive headsets also require expensive and specialized personal computers.

 
The industry hype that these “virtual worlds” possess all of the qualities of real world interactions has not been lost on the educational futurists who can hardly wait to have the first school on their block to brag about having this advanced technology.
Unfortunately, this simulation technology is worse than useless. Besides being orders of magnitude more expensive than genuine learning experiences, it lacks three important properties that real experiences have: true interaction, test-truthfulness, and real consequences. We know this because computer simulations invaded our classrooms as soon as personal computers became commonplace.

 
They all claim to be “interactive.” This was printed on the label of every simulation from 8-inch floppy discs to current thumb drives and cloud-based media. But the “interaction” of typing a keyboard or clicking a mouse to crossbreed fruit flies is nothing like actually handling the real flies (and having most of them drown in banana culture). And while we may lift our kids into the “seat” of a video-arcade “racing car,” we certainly know not to accept this performance as readiness to drive a real car.

 
Only the real world provides “test truthfulness.” Cross a hundred generations of fruit flies with dominant and recessive traits in simulation and the 3-to-1 ratio comes out textbook perfect. Not so in the real world. The value of real labs and other real experiences is that there is variation from the norm. Sure you can “program in” the variation; but the students’ know that variation was scripted as well. The real world is not scripted.

 
“Real consequences” are vital to learning in the real world. Even the student who flunks out of high school is careful to drive on the right side of the road. Why? To not stay in the lane is to face the real consequences of crashing. Get “killed” in a videogame or VR simulation and you just quit and walk away.

 
We can blindfold students for a day and tell them that this is what it is like to be blind. But it is not! At the end of the day the student can remove the blindfold. The blind person cannot.
Woody Allen once said: “I hate reality, but it’s still the best place to get a good steak.”

 
Reality is also be best place to get a good education.

Categories Education Reform, Teachers and Teaching, Technology
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