Matt Barnum has posted
an article at Chalkbeat on the controversy over online learning.
I spent nearly an hour talking to him about its myriad problems, including the negative experiences of parents and students in schools where online learning predominates, serious privacy concerns because of all the data-mining by vendors that is involved, and a serious lack of research evidence
-- but the only quote he used from our conversation is one sentence: that the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy which I co-chair. has worked with allies in right-wing groups on the privacy issue.
Instead, when I spoke to him about this, I emphasized that the concerns about the expansion of online learning and its impact on privacy was shared by groups and individuals of all political persuasion, left right and center, and many parents with little interest in politics at all. That's why our campaign against inBloom was so successful, and that's why in NY State and elsewhere, parents and teachers in all nine states and districts that were participating were able to force them from dropping out of the program to share their children's personal data and make it more accessible to vendors without parental consent. But he left that part out of my quote and his story as a whole, because it did not fit into his pre-ordained narrative.
Indeed, Barnum seemed eager to mischaracterize the opposition to so-called personalized learning as led by conservatives. He is also quick to frame the pushback vs Common Core in a similar fashion --as driven by many of the same right-wing groups -- when one of the most successful protests against the standards occurred here in NY state, led by NY State Allies for Public Education, a coalition of mostly left-wing and politically moderate parents and teachers who also oppose the expansion of ed tech.
Barnum didn't mention any of the other progressive groups, medical associations, and researchers across the country who are very concerned about the expansion of online learning in schools, including Screens and Kids, Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, the ACLU, Commonsense Media, National Education Policy Center, Parents Across America, the Badass Teachers Association and many others.
Nor did he bother to interview any of the many prominent progressive critics of ed tech like Diane Ravitch, Peter Greene or Audrey Watters.
Nor did he acknowledge that Silicon Valley parents themselves are increasingly rejecting computerized learning,
as reported in the terrific
NY Times series by Nellie Bowles.
Or the presentations that the brilliant Audrey Watters, the inestimable Peter Greene and I gave at the NPE conference this fall in Indianapolis.
Or this terrific oped by Dipayan Ghosh and Jim Steyer in the NY Times last week, entitled Kids Shouldn't Have to Sacrifice Privacy for Education, or an excellent summary posted today by Ben Williamson, which concisely explores the many substantive problems with online learning, ignored in Barnum's superficial piece.
1 comment:
Great article!
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