“Beware of all educational enterprises that require billionaire entrepreneurs.” Henry David Thoreau wrote that, or almost wrote that. His actual words were, “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.” I just updated it a bit.
Bill Gates has put many hundreds of millions of dollars into education improvement schemes, with minimal success. Now he’s joining his billions with Mark Zuckerberg’s billions to push personalized learning, which means more computers, more educational software and less interference from those unpredictable, unreliable humans known as teachers. Sounds like a sure-fire road to success, doesn’t it?
Case in point. Max Ventilla is a serious-but-not-too-serious Yale grad in his thirties who favors jeans and t-shirts—the very picture of the modern major tech guru. He founded AltSchool in 2013, with the help of about $175 million in venture capital. Mark Zuckerberg was one of the venturers. Ventilla opened seven schools where he could try out the educational technology he’s creating. His plan is to use “big data” to help schools tailor education to each student’s individual needs. That means cameras monitoring every student down to facial expressions, infrared cameras keeping track of everything students touch, and, of course, microphones recording every word they say. It also means lots of screen time, monitored down to the keystroke, of course. Amass all the data, Ventilla believes, and the result will be vast reservoirs of information which can be sliced and diced to help us understand how students act and learn at the most intimate level. The Big Brother-like surveillance also means an immense treasure trove of data which can be used to tailor commercial pitches to students and their parents in the short and the long term, but that’s not the purpose of the data collection—not the stated purpose anyway.
To send a student to one of the schools costs parents over $25,000 a year, which isn’t much problem for a select group of folks in Palo Alto, San Francisco and New York where the schools are located. These students are on everyone’s “most likely to succeed” list, so it’s hard to understand what Ventilla thinks he’ll learn about educating the other 99.9 percent of the population from this rarified collection of children.
Four years after opening, Ventilla is closing one school and consolidating others. Why? Not because the schools aren’t working, according to AltSchool, or because it’s running short of cash. It’s a business decision. Ventilla says he wants to devote more of the company’s energy to tapping into the growing demand for software promoting personalized learning.
“We’re being realistic,” Ventilla said. “In a few years time, when we raise our next round [of venture capital], we will have to show not only great success in the schools we run, but real progress in extending our platform to other schools.”
Parents are upset about the sudden closures and the effects the dislocation will have on their children, but business is the business of business, not the negative impact of business decisions on former customers.
Education Week has put together a special report, Personalized Learning: Vision Vs. Reality. It concludes the evidence supporting the value of personalized learning is weak. Results have been lackluster. The few successes show minor upticks in student achievement, at best.
But money is pouring in from entrepreneurs who believe in the power of software to change the educational world and to increase their share of the billions of education dollars spent every year across the U.S. They have the clout to buy their way into schools and educational conferences, to create a successful buzz for products which haven’t proven successful, hoping for massive sales and profits down the road.
Our entrepreneurial tech wizards have demonstrated that their narrow focus is on eyeballs and ad sales, and they doesn’t consider the possibility of dramatic unintended consequences. “Who knew our products could be weaponized into mass market propaganda machines?” the people behind Facebook, Twitter and Google ask. “We had no idea.” Yet they want parents and educators to allow them to fill data storage centers with detailed, intimate information which would make them the envy of every autocrat in history, all on the off chance it might make the children slightly better students, with little concern about how that data can be used to manipulate or harm today’s children in the future.
This article appears in Nov 9-15, 2017.
Please, to the usual chorus of commenters on David’s posts who often chime in about how much TUSD would be improved by such a strategy because of how awful (they think) it is, put your child where your mouth is. Whether intended or unintended (I tend to think the former: I don’t care what political party the tech giants belong to) this is just the latest idea to break teachers’ unions, privatize our schools and turn our kids into one giant pool of future consumers for the vultures to take advantage of. Such use of our public school kids should be called what it is: information age child abuse.
Mhmm … thats right! Careful how you do these things folks. There are thousands of FB police taking reports of inappropriate behavior in live feeds. Which is handy for ferreting out the perverts that troll the live feeds on the #metoo march. Its kind of brilliant on the one hand and creepy on the other. Limit your time on the computer. Go outside and play too!! Experience humans up front and personal… touch the actual world first hand. #robotsinthemaking
Sorry Betts, but we trusted the so called education experts and the radical teachers union with our kids education, and we have all been ripped off.
And quite honestly, for your vultures to take advantage of future consumers, they must have productive employment with spendable income. Something Tucson government and public education struggles to produce.
I will take my kids and my chances elsewhere.
The intention of the ALT platform seems to be supporting students in becoming self actualized and critically informed through a thoughtful approach of personalized education and real world learning experiences that are enhanced by student driven data – not sure where the hidden agenda of breaking up teacher unions, exploiting information for consumerism and designing zombie robots is coming from…better resize that aluminum hat and do a little more research.
The sale of the platform is a “no brainer” – last time a checked our government was not handing out bushels of cash to revolutionize the education system. You can only subvert a dominant paradigm by offering an articulate and compelling vision of the future and steps to reach that reality. I will digress momentarily to create an analogy even those that are ill-informed can understand. The average salary for a pro football player is 1.9 million annually. This monetary abundance has lead to helmet technology that has revolutionized the game and enhanced the player experience. I am not contending that throwing gobs of money at a problem is the ultimate fix nor did I ever imagine using shmootball to emphasize a point related to education. However, the monetary discrepancy and cultural priorities must be addressed. The average salary for a starting educator is 35 k with five preps, one plan and no bathroom break. Do you see my point? If education evolution means raising venture capital, selling tech that elevates the student experience and testing out new ideas and opportunities then so be it. We may just end up with something that becomes a “game changer” No one is making you subscribe to this model this is simply one of the attempts being made that is more public.
The fascinating thing about these on-line conversations and articles is that no one stops to examine the steps being made to elevate the student experience…remember it is ultimately about them not the underpaid teachers, the crippling bureaucracy or the wealthy technocrats, its about kids! Everyone wants to throw rocks, yell and scream because that gets attention. This is the least common denominator with regard to intellectual banter that signals arrested development from around age 12. (Seems like I might have a little)
It may be valuable to consider that we are all searching for the solution to an outdated industrialized model of education. Each attempt, initiative and lesson plan that gets us closer to this is a success. Rather than throwing rocks you may find it valuable to investigate the multiple agencies and organizations that are trying to support better education and see what can be lifted, hacked, reimplemented and employed.
Bill Gates has put many hundreds of millions of dollars into education improvement schemes, with minimal success.”
Wrong, absolutely, verifiably wrong.
In 2015, combined math and reading NAEP scores, under the overwhelming influence of “Race to the Top”, a Bill Gates brainchild, went down for the first time ever.
your quote should read:
“Bill Gates has put many hundreds of millions of dollars into education improvement schemes, with negative results for almost the entire country and especially for minorities.”
And, he still has not backed off from the policies that caused the downturn.
We also know the effect of computerization of schools. We have thousands of one to one schools, schools with a computer for every child. The effect is zero. The onus is on Gates to prove that his new approach is something that really works.
Gates should take a lesson from Plato’s Socrates – “I know one thing, I know nothing.”
Gate’s work defining problems is brilliant but he appears brain-dead at making the correct conclusions about his data and implementing solutions. For example, his hundreds of millions of dollars he spent analyzing classrooms came up with amazing data showing that even the very best teachers have a huge variance in the quality of their classroom performance. Even they stink in a large percentage of their classroom hours.
We are a society that knows a lot about reducing variance in performance. The logical outcome of Gate’s data would be a school district in which you very carefully pull random samples of classroom quality by wiring or wifi ing every classroom to a central point and providing teachers a positive feedback loop on quality.
Tucson Unified with their 40,000 or so hours of weekly teaching could be very accurately measured with a random sample of 300 hours. That’s the beauty of statistics.
Right now, we rely on physical observation in the classroom to provide feedback on quality, voila- the dog and pony show that seldom reveal the problems needed to be worked on and solved.
Deming’s rule number one for quality- get rid of inspection and go to random sampling.
And, you create a central support team whose job it is to support the hell out of those teachers to ensure that they are as prepared as possible every single hour.
We know what the consequences of such a system would be, a school district that improves 1 to 7 percent a year, depending on how effectively and positively you tied the system into performance pay.
Ten years from now, you would have a school district where over 90% of the interactions with students would be positive and teacher engagement would be over 90% and time on task would be over 90%. These are imminently achievable goals, not pie in the sky at all.
But, it can’t be achieved overnight, people don’t change quickly. But, with the right feedback loops, teachers will change and feel really good about being one of the very best if not the best.
You would have massive cultural resistance to this change unless you required the schools to volunteer. Then, very quickly teachers would be saying, why do they get to do it and not us?
Terrence Scott, a researcher in Kentucky, has done brilliant work showing that the typical classroom teacher operates in the failure zone with both low levels of teacher engagement and toxic levels of negativity in that relationship. David Garcia did similar studies showing incredibly low levels of time on task in Chicago Public schools for his post-graduate work in Chicago.
But, in traditional public education, nothing ever changes and you can be sure, Tucson Unified will lose another 500+ students this year.
Nobody talks about the scattering, divisive effect of giving every kid a machine and an IEP. Everyone learns what they want. Finally there’s no common inheritance, no common knowledge that every American should know. I think this is the secret goal. Subversion is its name.
Bruce Deitrick Price