McPherson Kansas students join the rebellion vs depersonalized learning and win the right to opt out of Summit

Cross posted from Parent Coalition for Student Privacy.

Yesterday, in a NY Times front page story, the reporter Nellie Bowles explored the many problems experienced by Kansas students and parents when the online Summit Learning program was imposed on their schools, including health problems, poor curriculum and lax privacy. "It sounded great, what they sold us,” said one parent. “It was the worst lemon car that we’ve ever bought.” Please read the article and if you're a Summit parent anywhere in the country, share your experiences in the online portal at the end of the article.  

I've written about growing resistance to the Summit platform since 2016, here, here, here  and here, including my visit to a Summit charter school here.  Though the NY Times article gives short shrift to the issue of privacy it does contain a quote from me about the tremendously intrusive wealth of personal data that Summit and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are collecting. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly broken every promise he’s made about keeping personal data private and neither CZI nor the new nonprofit that will take over Summit headed by Zuckerberg's wife have provided any reason that parents should trust them any more.

What's particularly moving about the article is that while Summit and its funders, including Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and  the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative claim Summit students are able to demonstrate " "greater ownership of their learning activities,” the McPherson Kansas students are actually taking ownership of their education by walking out of school and engaging in sit-ins are actually taking ownership of their education by walking out of school and engaging in sit-ins. Though of a very different demographic, they resemble the remarkable Brooklyn students who earlier this year walked out of the Secondary School of Journalism in protest against Summit, and followed up by writing an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, saying “We refuse to allow ourselves to be experimented on in this way.“


This is a growing phenomenon. Note the thousands of Ontario students who organized a mass walk-out earlier this month of schools throughout the province, against proposed staffing cuts, rising class sizes, and a requirement that all high school students take online courses. All of these students are showing courage and agency by resisting the narrow technocratic and ultimately dehumanizing policies that threaten to fatally damage their education.



It was just announced that at as a "compromise" at the McPherson middle school that the NY Times reported on, up to 225 students will be allowed to opt out of Summit next year.



Five years ago yesterday, inBloom closed its doors after parents rebelled against this Gates Foundation $100 project, designed to collect and share the personal student information of nine states and districts with for-profit ed tech companies. At that time I asked, does that mean government officials, corporations and foundations have learned their lesson? The continued invasion of ed tech into our classrooms, including the expansion of Summit, sadly shows not. But as parents are increasingly joined with students in rebellion against depersonalized learning, perhaps we have a chance to beat it, once and for all.

Our updated fact sheet on Summit, including questions that parents and students should ask before the program is implemented in their schools is here: Summit fact sheet 4.22.19 and below.

Brooklyn students fight against the Summit online platform and the Zuckerberg-Gates corporate machine

Students protesting at Secondary School of Journalism    credit: Edin Mejia

Update: this David vs. Goliath story with national implications was reported also on Fast Company , Business Insider; and NY Magazine.

Last week, on November 5, about 100 students at the Secondary School of Journalism in Brooklyn walked out of their schools to protest the Summit online program.  This digital instruction program, funded by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Bill Gates, forces students to spend hours staring at computers, left at sea with little human interaction or help from their teachers, all in the name of "personalized learning." 

As one of the students, Mitchel Storman, said to Sue Edelman who reported on the protest in the NY Post, "I have seen lots of students playing games instead of working....Students can easily cheat on quizzes since they can just copy and paste the question into Google.”

Z. Bonsu, Kelly Hernandez & Akila Robinson credit: Helayne Seidman

Senior Akila Robinson said she couldn’t even log onto Summit for nearly two months, while other classmates can’t or won’t use it. “The whole day, all we do is sit there.”  A teacher said, “It’s a lot of reading on the computer, and that’s not good for the eyes. Kids complain. Some kids refuse to do it.”

Since Norm Scott wrote about the walkout on his blog, and Sue Edelman's reporting in the NY Post, the story has been picked up elsewhere including Fast Company and Business Insider.  The online program, which originated in the Summit chain of charter schools in California, and was further developed and expanded with millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation, Facebook and nowthe Chan Zuckerberg LLC, has now invaded up to 300 or so public schools, and is collecting a huge amount of personal data from thousands of students without their knowledge or consent or that of their parents.

I have been writing and questioning Summit for the past two years, and last year, met with Diane Tavenner, asked her all sorts of questions she never responded to, and toured her flagship charter school in Redwood City.  My description of this visit is here.

Since then, parents in 15 states have reached out to me in huge distress about the negative impact of this program on their children. Many report that their children, who had previously done well in school,  now say that they aren't learning, that they feel constantly stressed, are beginning to hate school and want to drop out. Some parents have told me that they are now homeschooling their kids or have decided to sell their homes and move out of the district.

The student newspaper at SSJ

In response to the student protest last week in Brooklyn, the DOE now says they will eliminate the program for 11th and 12th graders - but not yet for 9th and 10th graders like Mitchel Storman. The NY Post article also revealed that the Bronx Writing Academy, which used Summit last year, has already dropped it.

Yet two other NYC schools are still implementing Summit, including M.S. 88 Peter Rouget in Park Slope and the Academy for College Preparation and Career Exploration in Flatbush; with the latter school just adopting it this year.  One wonders whether DOE  officials are performing any oversight or evaluation of Summit before allowing more and more NYC schools to subject kids to this harmful program, and to examine whether it actually complies with the NY student privacy law.

Recently Diane Tavenner revealed that next year, the online program would spin off to a  separate nonprofit corporation,  run by a board led by Priscilla Chan, Zuckerberg's wife and the CZI Chief Financial Officer.  She also said the new corporation "doesn’t plan to expand the program, but rather, the new nonprofit will focus on meeting current demand."  Yet a few days ago on Twitter , I saw that Summit is still entreating schools to apply .

Below is a fact sheet I have shared with parents and students at the Secondary School of Journalism, and those at Summit schools nationwide, along with some suggestions of questions they can ask their schools and districts about the instructional program, its data collection and privacy protections (or lack thereof).  Summit itself on its website states that parents and students have the right to demand the deletion of their personal data, and opt out of further collection of directory information, which includes their names, email addresses, and ID numbers, etc. and I suggest they do so immediately.  More on this below.  The fact sheet is also available as a pdf you can download here.

Bravo to the courageous students at SSJ, who have taken the lead to fight for their own education, vs Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and the other ed tech oligarchs, who are attempting to control their classrooms and their personal data.  As the recent NY Times series pointed out, Silicon Valley corporate leaders and engineers want one kind of education, largely screen-free, for their own kids, while imposing an experimental form of mechanized education on everyone else.

Zuckerberg and the parent pushback vs Summit online platform; Gates & inBloom reprised?

Update (2/12/18): The survey results of Indiana PA public school parents were released and they reveal even more negative views of the Summit learning platform (SLP) than expressed by their kids: "Parents/guardians generally agreed that SLP does not encourage or helps students learn. Additionally, most did not feel that SLP helps students be creative, prepares them for future education or future careers, helps them think critically or problem solve, helps them socialize or prepare them for future social situations, or strengthens the school community." More than 72% of parents do not want the Summit platform used at all at their schools next year or that it should be made fully optional. Also, Indiana PA parents have posted a new website about their concerns with the program.

Cross- posted from Parent Coalition for Student Privacy/Student Privacy Matters.

Mark Zuckerberg recently posted a letter called Lessons in Philanthropy 2017 in which he recounted what he had learned over the last few years, and explained which education initiatives his LLC, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) would focus upon in the future.

The letter evinced no awareness of how his reputation and that of Facebook have been seriously tarnished in recent months, involving ongoing violations of privacy, the practice of hosting racially discriminatory ads as well as political ads bought by  Russians in an apparent effort to undermine our elections. Increasingly, commentators have recognized how despite its name, Facebook is a faceless corporation, which operates through profit-making motivations and unaccountable algorithms, without the empathy or wisdom that only human agency can provide.

Nor did Zuckerberg’s words show any trace of humility, given how a large share of his earlier $100 million “investment’ in the Newark school system was diverted to politically-connected consultants and appears to have had few positive results for students. Instead, he focused on how his LLC will transform education through the “magic of technology.” Speaking of himself in the third person, he wrote:

The magic of technology is that it can help social change scale faster. And because of Mark’s experience building a world-class engineering organization at Facebook, we are in a unique position to build a philanthropy with a great engineering team to help our partners scale their social change faster as well.

One challenge we’ve seen in education is that there are many brilliant teachers and school leaders who create new kinds of schools based on new models of learning — but those schools usually only serve hundreds of students, while most children still do not have access to them. There are very few examples of new school models that expand to thousands of schools today.

Our hope is that technology can help with this scaling challenge. We’re seeing promising signs of early success, where our partnership with Summit Public Schools has helped encode their teaching philosophy in tools that will be used in more than 300 district, charter, and private schools this fall.

Zuckerberg went on to discuss the research of Benjamin Bloom – which “suggests we need an education system where all students receive the equivalent of an expert one-on-one tutor” but then assumed that online platforms can substitute for the close feedback of human tutors.

I have written about the Summit’s learning system before, in articles exploring the lack of data privacy afforded students in using the platform, their negative experiences  of spending hours per day on computers, and most recently, my disappointing visit to a Summit charter school and the lack of any research showing positive results.

According to a CREDO 2017 analysis , Summit charter students showed no significant gain in reading compared to similar students at public schools, and exhibited a small but significantly negative effect in math.  The most recent Gates-funded RAND analysis of Next Generation Learning schools, of which Summit is a prime example, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, and students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at public schools.  The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that  “the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point. ”

Yet Summit’s mediocre academic and survey responses have not dampened the enthusiasm of its promoters, including Zuckerberg or Bill Gates.  Gates continues to express support for Summit’s online platform, and in June, his foundation granted $10 million to Summit to “support implementation of the Summit Learning program in targeted geographies.”  Lauren Powell-Jobs awarded Summit another $10 million to create a new Oakland high school.  Finally, Betsy DeVos, the fourth member of this exclusive club, provided Diane Taverner, the founder of Summit, a prime speaking slot at her recent forum on “Rethinking schools.”

CZI’s education program is now headed by James Shelton, following stints at Exxon, McKinsey, various technology companies, the New Schools Venture Fund, the Gates Foundation, the US Department of Education, and most recently, a company called U2, for which he portrayed as “helping universities become better digital versions of themselves.” (In LinkedIn, he describes himself as a “Tri-sector Operator, Investor & Entrepreneur.”)

Last month in a blog post, Shelton wrote that his goal at CZI would be to provide disadvantaged children with the sort of personalized education that privileged children receive – the “kind of focus on individual needs and support that define privilege and make it available to all.”  Yet in a sort of shell game, CZI seems intent on promoting a mere simulacrum of individual attention for underserved children, rather than the sustained and concentrated human support afforded students in small classes at private or wealthy suburban schools.

Meanwhile, parents whose children have been subjected to the Summit platform are pushing back in at least seven states and have seen some success.  Parents in Cheshire, Connecticut posted a petition protesting the use of the program, criticized its low-quality at school board meetings, and finally persuaded the Superintendent last month to suspend the program midyear.  They cited the platform’s demoralizing effect on their children, the lack of teacher feedback, the risks to their privacy, and the haphazard quality of the online curriculum, including a reference to bestiality in one of the assignments.

Just days later, it was reported that the Indiana Area school board in Pennsylvania ordered “a rollback” of the Summit program mid-year because of similar complaints from parents about its negative impact on their kids.  The district announced it will immediately drop the platform in two core subjects, and next year will allow parents to opt their children out of it entirely.

A subsequent survey of middle school students in the Indiana Area district using the online platform found that 39 percent said the Summit learning platform (SLP) should not be used at all, and another 31 percent said that it should be made fully optional.  The largest percentages of students found the platform annoying, frustrating, stressful and boring.

As the researchers summarized the results, “most did not feel that SLP helps students be creative, prepares them for future education or future careers, helps them think critically or problem solve, helps them socialize or prepare them for future social situations, or strengthens the school community.”  They also found that students “expressed a desire to spend less time on screens, and critiques of screen time often overlapped with critiques of SLP as a platform and teacher.”

Petitions opposing the use of the Summit platform have now been posted by parents in Fairview Park City, Ohio and in New Egypt, New Jersey.

As others have noted, this pattern of events seems similar to what occurred on a larger scale in the inception and ultimate collapse of inBloom, the Gates-funded $100 million online data-collection corporation that closed its doors nearly four years ago, because of parent anger at the risk it posed to their children’s privacy and its lack of proven benefits.

Just as the Gates Foundation used its vast resources to pay for the travel of state and district administrators for briefings and promised financial incentives of various kinds, so has the Zuckerberg millions enabled Summit to fly “the Cheshire administrative team to Oakland, California, for training and provided the district with 130 Chromebook computers,” according to the Associated Press.  (See Natasha Singer’s series called “Education Disrupted” in the New York Times, about how Silicon Valley corporations have successfully infiltrated the classroom using similar strategies.)

Like Cheshire’s sudden suspension of Summit, Louisiana State Superintendent John White pulled student data out of inBloom’s cloud in mid-year, after parent protests broke out and the opposition of state school board members emerged, who had not been told in advance of its implementation.  A few months later, Jefferson County Superintendent Cyndy Stevenson in Colorado announced that inBloom’s data collection would be made optional for students, and that she would leave this decision in their parents’ hands, just as has now occurred in Indiana, PA.

Yet this concession didn’t work to quiet the storm.  As Rachael Stickland, a leader of the inBloom opposition in JeffCo recounts, “The board had hoped the promise of ‘opting out’ would calm down parents and relieve the pressure. It didn’t. We kept pushing. Ultimately, it became a political hot potato and they had to vote it out.”

But the greatest similarity to the inBloom controversy is how Summit has led to its supporters to express the same sort of condescension towards parents, claiming that their opposition is based on unwarranted fear and confusion.  The Cheshire Superintendent blamed disaffection with Summit on “a substantial degree of misunderstanding and misinformation within the community.” Monica Bulger, a researcher at the Microsoft-backed Data and Society Institute, explained the parent pushback this way: “”There’s a powerful fear narrative happening” and that “We don’t necessarily want school content by popular vote.”

Bulger was one of the co-authors of a report released last year on the failure of inBloom, in which the vast majority of those interviewed and quoted supported and/or worked for this massive data-mining project.  Several reviewers of the report, including Audrey Watters and Peter Greene, noted its evident bias and the way in which the authors assumed the unproven value of inBloom’s data-collection while dismissing legitimate parental concerns.

Bulger and her co-authors repeatedly suggested that parents’ rejection of inBloom was “irrational,” even as the project’s explicit purpose was to accelerate the collection and dispersal of their children’s personal information to a wide number of for-profit ed tech companies, and to encourage them to build their products around the data.  As Watters wrote,

This juxtaposition of parents as “emotional” and inBloom and the project’s supporters as “scientific” and “technical” runs throughout the report, which really serves to undermine and belittle the fears of inBloom opponents.  (This was also evident in many media reports at the time of inBloom’s demise that tended to describe parents as “hysterical” or that patronized them by contending the issues were “understandably obscure to the average PTA mom.”) The opposition to inBloom is described in the Data & Society report as a “visceral, fervently negative response to student data collection,” for example, while the data collection itself is repeatedly framed in terms of its “great promise.”

We see this strategy repeated once again among Summit’s defenders, who portray parental apprehensions as uninformed, even as they provide no independent evidence of the program’s benefits and growing evidence of its harm.  The ed tech industry and the insistence of its devotees on patronizing parents and depicting their desire to have a voice in how their children are educated lacks any acknowledgement about the way in which venture philanthropists have used their wealth to circumvent democracy, with the goal of privatizing, standardizing and mechanizing education and student data.

Last year Mark Zuckerberg wrote,  “We’ll build technology where it can help, and we believe in listening to and working closely with parents, teachers and students to understand the specific needs of the communities we’re working in.”  In 2018, perhaps Zuckerberg, Gates and the other data overlords and their vassals should start making a real effort to listen to parents and communities, rather than belittle their concerns and try to force-feed their autocratic and technocratic model of education on children.

But I’m not holding my breath.  In November, the Alt School, a Zuckerberg-funded chain of private schools using instructional technology announced it would close at least three of its seven schools.  Yet rather than learn the obvious lessons from the observations of disappointed parents who pulled their kids of these schools, the Alt School CEO now says he will focus on marketing their software to public schools.  Clearly, parents will have to continue their battle to preserve classrooms focused on human interaction, discussion and debate rather than machine-centered reductionist forms of education.

Lily Eskelson along with 2000 angry parents & teachers urge Zuckerberg not to hire Campbell Brown -- and to curtail the propagation of fake news

More than 2000 concerned parents and teachers signed our petition urging Mark Zuckerberg NOT to hire Campbell Brown to head his new “news team”.  They live throughout the country in 46 states and DC, and  in 10 different countries plus Puerto Rico.  Many commented that they would boycott Facebook unless Zuckerberg reversed his decision.The message they signed onto is below --- as well as the signers' names and outraged comments.

Now,  I just received a copy of an email sent to Zuckerberg from Lily Eskelsen Garcia, the President of the NEA as well -- which is below.

From: Lily Eskelsen <leskelsen@nea.org>
Date: Thursday, January 12, 2017 at 1:34 PM
To: Mark Zuckerberg ;
Subject: From the NEA President on how to change everything

To Mark Zuckerberg:

I’m reaching out to you, personally.  I’m sure you’ve seen the on-line petitions of educators denouncing the hiring of Campbell Brown by Facebook as its head of news partnerships.  It’s not hard to understand why.

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/30/campbell_brown_charter_evangelist_how_the_former_anchorwoman_became_the_face_of_education_reform_partner/

Here’s the thing.  At the National Education Association we’ve been trying to break through all the empty rhetoric of “failed public schools” and “the only solution is privatization” and “educator unions protect the status quo”… and, well, you get it.

No, we don’t have the billions that helped fund Campbell Brown’s crusade against public schools and organizations like mine, but we do have important answers to what we know will improve schools – if only someone would think to ask a teacher!

My years working with homeless children were my inspiration to run for an NEA office.  My union was the only organization that was going to see a leader in a 6^th grade teacher from Utah.  I represent millions of hard-working teachers who leave the classroom at the end of the day and go home to plan the next day’s lessons at the kitchen table; who call Mom about a problem we need to solve together; who pull out of our own pockets at the grocery store to buy what we need for our students’ Science Fair.

We don’t recognize ourselves in the words coming out of Campbell Brown’s mouth.  We know they are unfair and biased.  We know that she knows that much of what she repeats is untrue, not supported by research or evidence, and so we don’t trust her.

I’m not sure why she was chosen for the Facebook team.  I only know that she has done untold harm to our serious work to make every public school as good as our best public schools, and she’s insulted educators in a way that builds a false narrative that public education should be shut down and turned over to the corporate world.

We know the truth.  If you are interested in true research, experience and evidence, we would jump at the chance to show you what educators are inventing, creating, giving birth to… and any other metaphor that you can think of that shows that we’re not waiting for permission, let alone for a politician, to tell us what to do.  We’re already doing whatever it takes to give every student what he or she needs to live the lives they decide to live.  You won’t see it on the news.  This revolution is quiet and deep and changing the world.

We’re the ones who know the names of our kids.  We’re the ones who know what we’re talking about.  If you want to talk about how you can help with something real, please just let me know.  What we have to say will change everything, and we need friends of education and believers in our students to be our true partners.

Lily

Lily Eskelsen Garcia

President

___
Thank you Lily!!! Indeed, Campbell Brown has "insulted educators in a way that builds a false narrative that public education should be shut down and turned over to the corporate world."

The devastating impact of Facebook on the Presidential race through the dissemination of fake news has been widely reported.  More false or highly biased articles were read and shared in the last few weeks before the election than those published by legitimate news operations.   Yet Campbell Brown is the last person who should be enlisted in order to  improve the image of Facebook and its credibility -- "to help news organizations and journalists work more closely and more effectively with Facebook" as she described her new job on Facebook.

Not only does Brown has deep Republican connections -- her husband, Dan Senor, was an adviser to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney, and sits on the board of the pro-charter school organization started by Michelle Rhee, StudentsFirstNY  -- but she herself is a fierce propagandist for corporate reform and the privatization of public education through the expansion of charter schools and vouchers.

Brown's own news blog, The 74, has received funding from billionaire privateer Betsy DeVos, Trump's appointee to be the Secretary of Education, and Brown sits on the board of Devos' lobbying organization, American Federation for Children.  DeVos also sponsored Campbell Brown's GOP presidential candidate forum held in New Hampshire in 2015.

Rather than step back from the controversy over the DeVos nomination, Brown wrote the following in her defense:

The suggestion that Betsy’s work with children is ideologically or financially driven would be disputed, I’d guess, by just about everyone who has spent time alongside her during the past 30 years as she founded, helped run and advised education groups and initiatives that have helped improve education across the country — including thousands of teachers and poor families.

Part of the difference between the politician’s and practitioner’s view of her efforts stems from the fact that she understands what things are supposed to look like at the school level and has been single-minded in improving opportunities there for children.

Politically, that means she can be agile when she needs to be and dig in on core principles when she must. She is tenacious in defending the best interests of children rather than interest groups and their political patrons.

There are very few education advocates in DeVos' home state of Michigan that would agree with this -- as she has singlehandedly used her great wealth to pursue her free market ideology in favor of the untrammelled expansion of for-profit charters in the state, while draining millions from public schools and facilitating corruption and subjecting children to deficient learning conditions.  If DeVos gets her way, the federal government will fund vouchers to allow taxpayer money to flow to private and religious schools as well.   It was just reported that the DeVos family and the organizations they run have donated to 10 out of the 12 Republican  Senators on the HELP committee that will hold hearings on her nomination next week -- and nearly $1 billion to 28 Senators who will vote on her confirmation.

Campbell Brown has also launched a series of baseless lawsuits in several states, attacking teacher tenure as somehow illegal or unconstitutional, through an organization called Partnership for Educational Justice.  Before this, she started something called the Parent Transparency Project, which, like the Partnership for Educational Justice, ironically refused to divulge its donors.  She used this organization to charge that NYC public schools were overflowing with teachers who were sexual predators, and she fiercely advocated for the law to be changed so that teachers could be fired at will if accused of abuse --  without any hearings or due process necessary.  As Mother Jones reported,

Shortly after it was launched... PTP trained its sights on the New York mayoral race, asking the candidates to pledge to change the firing process for school employees accused of sexual misconduct. ... PTP spent $100,000 on a television attack ad questioning whether six candidates, including Republican Joe Lhota and Democrats Bill de Blasio and Anthony Weiner, had "the guts to stand up to the teachers' unions." 

Pro-charter, anti-union school billionaires already have an outside influence on education reporting via mainstream media outlets financed by their foundations.  The Gates and Walton Foundations not only fund the 74, but also National Public Radio, Education Week and Chalkbeat, to name a few.   The Gates Foundation also supports the awful Media Bullpen, run by the pro-charter group Center for Education Reform, which grades every education article according to how closely it adheres to the privatization anti-union ideology. Even the Education Writers Association receives money from the Gates and Walton Foundations, who sponsor workshops and seminars on topics relevant to their concerns.

While Education Week and NPR usually include disclaimers when running pieces about Gates or Walton initiatives, the same cannot be said of Chalkbeat or some of the others.  The NY Times itself  publishes a regular column by Tina Rosenberg, who co-founded and runs Solutions Journalism, an outfit also funded by Gates Foundation -- and Rosenberg often hypes Gates education projects in her columns without disclosing any conflict of interest, as I discussed here.

So we not only suffer from too many billionaires who use their wealth to influence education policy in this country, but try to control its reporting as well.  The addition of Facebook to this mix will only worsen the trend.  Sadly, despite the many articles discussing Zuckerberg's hiring of Campbell Brown, the only media outlets to explore the negative implications given her unrelenting campaign to privatize our schools were Vanity Fair  and Huffington Post.

Here is the petition and the names and comments of the more than 2000 angry parents and teachers who signed it.  If you'd like to add your name, you can do so here.

Zuckerberg Petition signers and comments as of 1.11.17 by Leonie Haimson on Scribd

Zuckerberg unbound: the impact of his new LLC on student privacy and real personalized learning

Zuckerberg's open letter to his daughter

 I'm quoted in Time magazine and Politico about what the Zuckerberg billions portends in terms ofstudent privacy and real personalized learning.  And check out this wonderful spoof of edtech balderdash from the Institute for Disruptive Innovation and Mark Vander Venal of the Parsimony Institute.  

Tuesday was a startling day for parents concerned about children’s data privacy and the outsourcing of instruction to education technology companies. First was the news that the V-tech breach had exposed the personal data of more than 6.3 million children – rather than the 200,000 that was first described.  

The information exposed for children includes names, gender and birthdates. Security experts who have reviewed the data say that it is possible to link children’s information with their parents’ data, thereby revealing the kids’ full addresses and other information.

Stolen data for the parents includes mailing and email addresses, security questions used for password resets, IP addresses, passwords and download histories…Chat logs between parents and children were also inappropriately accessed, as well as photos of children.

Then the Electronic Frontier Federation filed a FTC complaint against Google for violating the student privacy pledge the company signed the year before.  The complaint alleges that Google is collecting and data-mining the information of students while logged into their Google Apps for Education accounts at school:

While Google does not use student data for targeted advertising within a subset of Google sites, EFF found that Google’s “Sync” feature for the Chrome  browser is enabled by default on Chromebooks sold to schools. This allows Google to track, store on its servers, and data mine for non-advertising purposes, records of every Internet site students visit, every search term they use, the results they click on, videos they look for and watch on YouTube, and their saved passwords.

Google, it is alleged, is using children’s browsing history to improve their products, and not for any educational purposes, as the privacy pledge specifies.  A day later EFF added:

Google has promised not to build profiles on students or serve them ads only within Google Apps for Education services. When a student goes to a different Google service, however, and they’re still logged in under their educational account, Google associates their activity on that service with their educational account, and then serves them ads on at least some of those non-GAFE services based on that activity.

Finally, came the most horrifying news of all: Mark Zuckerberg announced that with the birth of his daughter Max, he and his wife Priscilla Chan would invest 99 percent of their stock in Facebook – worth potentially as much as a $45 billion -- in a new LLC to be spent on “personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities.”

Zuckerberg made it clear that he chose not to put his money into something as old-fashioned as a foundation, because that would be too restrictive.  As he wrote in his letter: “We must participate in policy and advocacy to shape debates. Many institutions are unwilling to do this, but progress must be supported by movements to be sustainable.”  See Bloomberg News for more on the differences between the allowable activities of a foundation and an LLC – including how LLCs are less constrained from engaging in advocacy and explicitly partisan and political activities.

Has the Gates Foundation really been prevented from exerting a huge influence over education policy over the last eight years? If that’s the case, I hate to think what Zuckerberg has in mind.  The mainstream media including the NY Times wrongly called Zuckerberg’s new venture a “charity”; but after witnessing the destruction wreaked on public education by fellow billionaires Bloomberg and Gates, some might call it vulture philanthropy instead. 

In the open letter on (where else) Facebook, Zuckerberg and his wife explained that their version of “personalized learning” is really instruction through computers and pre-packaged software:

“We’re starting to build this technology now, and the results are already promising. Not only do students perform better on tests, but they gain the skills and confidence to learn anything they want. And this journey is just beginning. The technology and teaching will rapidly improve every year you’re in school.”

A student at the Alt School

To explore a little further what this means, witness Zuckerberg’s current investments, including in a $100 million fund to create a for-profit chain of private schools called the Alt Schools, located in the Bay Area and NYC.  Here is a description of the Brooklyn school:  

Every pupil gets their own tablet or Chromebook; wall-mounted video cameras called “superpowers” record children’s learning moments and kiddie confessionals for teachers to review...kids sign in via an app on an iPad at the entry. It’s connected to an online platform called My.AltSchool that tracks everything from a child’s Personalized Learning Plan to allergies.

The schedule changes daily, but midmorning on a recent Wednesday, some 6- to 8-year-olds studied Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” on their Chromebooks in one corner, while others engaged in writing lessons. … AltSchool, which costs $27,500 a year, operates on the traditional school calendar, but parents are encouraged to take family vacations when it’s convenient for them — perfect for a jaunt to Kyota[sic], Japan, in time for cherry-blossom season or a family trip to Austin for South by Southwest.

Yet schools that operate through online or virtual learning have a very controversial track record. The Alt School model most closely resembles the technology-focused Kunskapsskolan charter school, later renamed Innovate Manhattan, that was established with much fanfare in NYC in the fall 2011,by a Swedish for-profit chain.  Rupert Murdoch, Klein’s future boss, was so enthralled by this model of education that he featured it in a speech to the G8 in May 2011, while rhapsodizing on its profit potential:

“In Sweden, I visited an innovative school known as the "IKEA school." Learning is supported by a "knowledge portal" that contains the entire syllabus. In this school, learning fits the individual student's pace and interests - and the teachers give students plenty of individual attention. This school is possible because of a system that encourages competition by letting parents use public money to choose what schools they think work best for their children. That includes schools that are privately-run and for-profit.” 

There was so much positive buzz about this school that Joel Klein, then Chancellor of the NYC public school system, offered it space in the DOE headquarters so his staff could “learn” from it. By September of 2012 Innovate Manhattan had relocated to Delancey Street on the Lower East Side. By March 2015, a decision had been made to close the school, because of mediocre results, financial problems and difficulty recruiting students. 

Indeed, many tech-focused schools initially promoted as having found the “secret sauce” to revolutionize education, have been followed by disappointment. First, the Rocketship charter schools were immensely praised, before the Dreambox software and learning lab model were exposed as ineffective.  Amplify tablets were publicized aggressively by Joel Klein and Rupert Murdoch until they turned out to be a failure; in September, Murdoch sold the company to a group of private investors, at a huge loss. 

Summit charters were highly regarded by Bill Gates and portrayed as transformational; only now these schools are introducing a whole new suite of software products designed with the help of Facebook engineers, because as it turns out, the previous “blended” technology did not work so well. Not to mention the iPAD disaster in Los Angeles, that led to Superintendent John Deasy’s downfall last year.  

A Rocketship charter "learning lab"

More and more teachers are saying, as this one has, “I gave my students iPads — then wished I could take them back.” As this Virginia educator points out, 

“…teachers of young children know that the chatter in a typical elementary classroom is what makes it a good place to learn. …. They need time to learn communication skills — how to hold your own and how to get along with others. They need to talk and listen and talk some more at school, both with peers and with adults who can model conversation skills. The iPads subtly undermined that important work. My lively little kids stopped talking and adopted the bent-neck, plugged-in posture of tap, tap, swipe.”

And the need to converse and discuss is not true merely of young students. Even the US Department of Education, a vigorous supporter of online learning, had to conclude in its meta-analysis that that “Few rigorous research studies of the effectiveness of online learning for K-12 12 students have been published.” A study released in September by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development concluded that “Students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics.” 

The truth is there are NO good studies that show that online or blended instruction helps kids learn, and the whole notion of “personalized” learning is a misnomer, as what it usually signifies is depersonalized machine-based learning.  All software can do is ask series of multiple choice questions and then wait for the right or the wrong answer.  It cannot read an essay or give feedback on how to improve an argument, or help extricate a child from a knotty math problem.  It cannot encourage students to confront all the various angles in a controversy, as happens through debate and discussion with teachers and classmates.  In fact, learning through computers reduces contextualization and conceptualization to stale pre-determined ideas, the opposite of the creative and critical thinking that we are supposed to be aiming for in the 21^st century. 

Moreover Zuckerberg makes additional unsupported claims relating online learning to enhanced equity: “Of course it will take more than technology to give everyone a fair start in life, but personalized learning can be one scalable way to give all children a better education and more equal opportunity,” he writes.   

Note the echoing flattery expressed on the Facebook page of Summit charter schools: “Max has been born into a moment of opportunity. In large part, because of Mark and Priscilla's vision and generosity, she and children around the world will have personalized learning experiences in re-imagined schools. Max's generation will create a more just and equitable society. “

Contrary to these statements, a growing number of studies suggest that a shift to more online learning will likely widen rather narrow the achievement gap – and those children without strong support or direction at home or fairly advanced skills will fall further behind.  As the class size research shows, while all kids benefit from lots of feedback from their teachers, disadvantaged students most need this support and interaction to thrive.   

So far, Zuckerberg appears to have learned little from his disastrous $100 million involvement in Newark schools.  Though he recently wrote he realizes that “It's very important to understand the desires of a community, to listen and learn from families, teachers, elected officials and other experts," he added, "We now better understand why it can take years to build the support to durably cement the changes needed to provide every student with a high quality education."  

Listen and learn from the community, or build support so that community members fall in line behind his vision of what is best for children? His conclusion suggests the latter: “In our ongoing focus on personalized learning, our goal is to work with everyone -- district schools, charters, private schools, teachers, parents, unions and other philanthropists. Everyone benefits from personalized learning and we'll serve students best if everyone is behind the effort.”

This doesn’t sound like a man who has humbly learned from his mistakes. In his letter on Tuesday, he comments, reassuringly: “it will take engaging with communities,” but it is not clear which community he means.  

Is he referring to public school parents, who are understandably apprehensive about having their children spend more time in front of screens,  and averse to ceding control of  their most personal information to data-mining companies? Or does he mean the community of other venture philanthropists and technology mavens with whom he usually socializes -- and who see the public education market as a huge opportunity, and public school parents as a mere annoyance, a potential interference to their grandiose plans?  

Zuckerberg ended his earlier letter,  referring to his own privileged education this way: 

“Change in education takes time and requires a long term focus. We are committed to working to improve public education for many years to come, and to improving our approach as we go. Priscilla and I have been fortunate to have great educations and supportive families and communities. We want to help make a real difference for all children, and we'll keep sharing more about what's ahead.”

Personalized Learning at an Exeter Harkness table

Zuckerberg attended high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite boarding school in New Hampshire, where class sizes are eight to twelve students per class to ensure they can all fit around a special oval table called the “Harkness table.”  Harkness was a philanthropist who gave generously to Exeter in the 1930’s to establish small classes, so that that each individual student had ample opportunity to participate in dialogue, discussion and debate.   

As the school still puts it, “The Harkness table places students at the center of the learning process and encourages them to learn from one another.”  

This is opposite to the computerized instruction that Zuckerberg now proselytizes for and intends to disseminate.  Too bad he didn’t take the right lessons from his Exeter education about what enlarging human potential through philanthropy and “personalized” learning really means.