In response to our legal challenge, DOE will now require parent consent before assigning students to online classes

In a big win for parents and students, the DOE significantly revised its guidance to schools about online learning after Class Size Matters and five parents launched our legal challenge three weeks ago. See the Daily News article here.

Originally, DOE had advised principals that they could assign students to online classes and keep them there until parents asked for their children to be removed, which violate the state regulations that require prior written parental consent.

But in response to our Commissioner's appeal filed on June 13, DOE emailed principals on July 1 and rewrote their instructions to align them with the regulations.  DOE sent the following email to principals:

Sure enough, the new DOE guidance makes it very clear that NO student can be assigned to an online class without prior parental consent.  See pp. 7-8:

 

 

See also p. 22:

We are not withdrawing our legal challenge,  in order to ensure that parents of children with disabilities receive IEP meetings before their children are placed in an online class, and so that DOE must validate that any student who assigned to an online class at home has adequate access to internet and the use of a laptop.  Finally, DOE should recognize the rights of parents to revoke their consent and have their children reassigned to a regular class if they are struggling. 

 

But forcing DOE officials to rewrite its guidance so emphatically is a significant victory and one that we hope will provide guardrails against what many parents believe is an unwise expansion of online learning -- which, as we witnessed during the pandemic, did not serve most students well academically or their need for social connection. 

Much thanks to our pro bono attorney, Laura Barbieri, and to the five parent plaintiffs, one from each borough: Amanda Vender, Tanesha Grant, Naila Rosario, Amy Ming Tsai, and Tia Schellstede.  As Tia put it,

 

"NYC parents will not accept the automation of our children’s education. Learning is a fundamentally human process. We are a community who cares about how policies affect our neighbors, and we work together to make sure that the city does not get away with breaking the law to deny vulnerable students of learning. We are vigilant and coordinated."

 

Parents & Class Size Matters file legal challenge to DOE plan to place students in online classes without parent consent

  On June 12, Class Size Matters and four parents launched a legal challenge to the DOE guidance on online learning.  See our press release, the legal papers, and articles in the Daily News and Politico.  Listen also to my interview on last night's Talk out of School, with attorney Laura Barbieri and two of the plaintiffs, teacher and parent Amanda Vender, and Tanesha Grant, parent and founder of Parents Supporting Parents NY.

While the state regulations approved by the Board of Regents on April 28, 2024 clearly require parent consent before a student can be assigned to an online class, the DOE guidance sent to school administrators two weeks later says that while schools should try to obtain parent consent, they can "program students for virtual/blended courses in STARS in anticipation of getting back Parent Opt-In Forms…. The student may remain in the virtual/blended course in accordance with the school’s existing add/drop policies or until the parent declines to have their student participate in the virtual/blended course, whichever occurs first."  

Clearly, this is not parent consent but parent opt-out, a much weaker procedure that is non-compliant with the regulations.  And as several parent plaintiffs pointed out in their affidavits, given how haphazard and inconsistent communication with families is at many schools, many parents may not even become aware to the  fact that their children have been assigned to online classes until it is too late to pull them out.

According to the UFT contract, teachers also have to consent to teaching a remote class before they can be assigned to one, but many are apparently unaware of this fact. Instead, at least some principals are making these decisions without conferring with either teachers or parents.  For example, a high school teacher told me that his principal  applied to DOE to  hold all classes remotely on Fridays, without polling him or other teachers first to see if they had agreed to this.

I urge all parents to immediately ask their principal if there is a plan to hold online classes next year, and if so, if they will obtain parental consent before assigning their children to these classes. Parents should also contact your School Leadership Team to see if they've discussed this matter, and if online learning is being adopted, ask if that is part of the school's Comprehensive Education Plan that all SLT members must consent to.  Teachers should also ask these questions, and  understand their right to refuse to teach online classes, according to the UFT contract.

As is obvious to nearly everyone, online learning during the pandemic seriously failed the great majority of students.  Many fell behind academically, became disengaged, and suffered mental health challenges as a result.  The fact that DOE has proposed to expand online learning as part of their plan to comply with the class size law rather than building enough additional classroom space is especially unacceptable - as remote classes will likely undermine any of the benefits that smaller classes would otherwise be expected to provide.

Yet during his campaign,  more than a year before the class size law was passed, Eric Adams proposed expanding online learning in February 2021, an idea which met with much controversy and even some ridicule.  While both he and the Chancellor now admit that no other large district in the nation is considering such a move, they point to this as a matter of pride, rather than acknowledging that perhaps others learned important lessons from the pandemic that they are resistant to learning for some reason.  

When Adams announced the new UFT contract in 2023 that allowed for the expansion of online learning, he said “Look, you all aren’t going to appreciate what I’m doing until I’m done. You are going to look back and say this guy was just ahead of what other people want. This is New York – we lead from the front...”   

Chancellor Banks proclaimed that this is "not just a reimagined experience for kids, it's a reimagined experience for teachers as well... when you want to really focus on how to make the profession respected at an even higher level, you have to engage in new and creative ways for teachers to even be able to teach. And I think that this is 21st-century thinking. We're the first major school district in the nation that is even taking this on."

If Adams and Banks are stubbornly resistant to understanding how virtual learning risks severely undermining the quality of teaching and learning in NYC schools, it must then be the responsibility of parents, educators and  advocates to do what we can to stop this runaway train.

CM Treyger urges the DOE to report class sizes on Nov. 15 as legally required, disaggregated this year according to the type of class

Update 11/16/2020: DOE just responded to CM Treyger’s October 15 letter to say they will delay the release of class size data that was due November 15 until Dec. 31, and any disaggregated data until Feb. 15.  More on this here.

Last week, Council Education Chair Mark Treyger wrote a letter to Chancellor Carranza urging him to report on school-specific and citywide class size averages as the law requires on Nov. 15, and also to disagregate the data bgy type of instruction used: either in-person learning, remote classes for blended learning students, and remote classes for full-time remote students.   His letter is here and below and here is a Chalkbeat article about this issue.

Disaggregating the data is critical, because as the letter points out, in-person classes have been extremely small for the purpose of social distancing, while some online learning classes have been reported by parents to be as large as 60-100 students or more.  See recent articles in NY Post, WSJ and Gothamist about this issue.

Randi Levine at Advocates for Children also testified to the fact that children with IEPs requiring class sizes of no more than 12 students per class have experienced class sizes twice or three times as large.

Averaging across all three types of classes would tend to obscure just how large the online classes really are.  Though we have little research showing how to make remote learning more successful and engaging, some educators have noted that “limiting class sizes may be even more important online than in the physical classroom...On Zoom, for example, it is helpful for a teacher to be able to see all of their students’ faces at once, instead of having to scroll through multiple screens.”

Two prominent researchers have written that it's important to "lower online-class sizes. Common sense suggests that smaller groups and lower student-adult ratios can help increase interactive opportunities.”

On Monday, at the Mayor's press conference, the Chancellor did say that schools have been reporting attendance data in "literally three buckets of attendance every single day": in-person classes, remote blended learning classes, and full-time remote classes.  So reporting the class size data in these three separate categories should not be difficult for them to do.

Do you know where your child's personal data is? Please fill out our survey on your school's use of digital apps -

Class Size Matters, NY Allies for Public Education, and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy would like to know which online apps or programs are being employed by schools throughout New York state, and whether they are sufficiently protective of children's privacy. We are asking parents and teachers to take our survey here, to let us know what apps or programs your schools are using.

Since the pandemic hit, districts across New York State have purchased many commercially-produced online apps and digital programs to implement remote learning. Even before last spring, schools had been using a large number of programs, many of which collect and use personal student information. In NYC alone, more than 75 commercially available online programs have been acquired for teachers to assign to their students, and "The DOE has informed schools that for SY 2020-21, they must have a shared, inclusive and digital curriculum in all core subject areas," according to the UFT.

Many of these digital apps collect and use personal student data in ways we do not understand. In some cases, the publicly available privacy policies of these vendors are NOT sufficiently protective and do not comply with the NY state student privacy law, Education Law 2D, which was passed in 2014.  

Among other things, this law and its regulations adopted in Jan. 2020 require that every contract with a vendor with access to personal student data must have a separate Parent Bill of Rights [PBOR], which specifies how the data will be protected and how parents can access the data and challenge it if necessary.

Each of these separate Parent Bill of Rights are supposed to be posted on the district website, along with other important information, including your district’s overall data privacy protection policy, and how you can contact the district data privacy officer in charge of ensuring these protections. Links to the Education Law 2D, the regulations, and a summary of some of the other most important provisions are here.

Please take a few minutes to fill out our online survey to let us know what online apps and/or digital programs are being used in your schools, and whether the district has provided the necessary information about the ways in which that data is being protected from breach and abuse.

Thanks!

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters and Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Lisa Rudley and Jeanette Deutermann, NY State Allies for Public Education

Today's "Talk out of School" on PreK reopening and how to improve online learning

This morning, on my “Talk out of School” podcast, I spoke to Alice Mulligan, director of a preschool in Brooklyn and head of CBOs for Equity, whose school reopened last week.  She described the changes and renovations she had to make to ensure proper safety precautions, without help or reimbursement from the DOE. 

Alice almost had to cancel the interview when right before the broadcast, one of her students developed a runny nose.  As she explained, she hurriedly put on PPE and waited outside for the parents to come to pick up and take the child home.  Luckily, Alice was able to return to her office right before 10 AM to speak on the show. Just one of the many unpredictable events that educators will have to deal with during this unpredictable year.

Then I interviewed Tom Liam Lynch, director of education policy for the Center for NYC affairs and editor in chief  of InsideSchools, who explained their new project, InsideSchools plus, an online community site for parents to share information about their schools and express their concerns.   

Tom also helped develop the iLearn learning platform when he worked for DOE several years ago.  iLearn was used during this past summer school with  inconsistent results. Tom explained how he believes remote learning could be strengthened from the version that was implemented over the summer and last year, that is, if teachers are properly supported. He has also developed a free online course for parents to let them know how to help their children succeed with learning remotely. 

As I made clear during our discussion, I’m not a fan of online learning, and strongly believe that at its best, learning is a collective, social endeavor and that most students need the steady in-person support of their teachers to thrive. And yet given the fact that most students will be relegated to remote instruction for much of their time, even if they opted into in-person learning, it is important to try to improve upon the method by analyzing the failures of the past .

Reopening schools amid funding cuts & how to minimize the harm of remote learning

On this week's "Talk out of School" I interviewed Jasmine Gripper, Executive Director of the Alliance for Quality Education, about Governor Cuomo’s damaging and inequitable budget cuts to public schools. 

Then Josh Golin, Executive Director of Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood, explained why schools need to minimize screen time and the use of ed tech apps and should protect student privacy during remote learning. He also explained how parents can advocate for this.  Resources below.

You can also subscribe to our weekly podcast and listen to past shows here.

More resources here:

Alliance for Quality Education report: Set Up to Fail: How Cuomo’s School Cuts Target New York’s Black & Brown Students 
For more information on AQE’s planned 9/12/20 actions on school funding, contact  Maria@aqeny.org  

News on Albany school cuts  and Schenectady layoffs 

Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood’s statement urging schools to minimize screen time and ed tech 

Also: CCFC petition on this issue and an article on the subject.

Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy from CCFC and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy 

 

Why has DOE cancelled all professional development when teachers need it now, more than ever?

The following was written by John Craven, Associate Professor at Fordham University.  I would add that NYC teachers need training in student data privacy as well, more than ever before, which is required by NY State law.  But I haven't heard of any who have gotten it.  Please comment below if you have. -- LH

In the past few days, the NYCDOE Chancellor cancelled all non-essential activities for teachers including professional development for staff (i.e. teachers) provided by vendors to DOE employees.  My position is that the policy is a huge mistake coming at the worst time.

As I write, teachers are struggling with profound questions such as “How do I teach mathematics through ZOOM?”, “How can I make digital materials accessible to all my students including my English Language Learners and students with special needs?”, “How can I integrate seemingly disparate streams of information into a coherent experience for students?” or “What do I do if I don’t have a my document camera or smartboard while teaching from home?”.  Owing to the Chancellor’s new policy, the struggle to answer these and many, many more questions are unnecessarily compounding the tremendous workload confronting teachers today. 

Indeed, teachers today are anxiously seeking the professional development and support systems from service providers such as instructional coaches and many are telling me that they are devastated by the loss of their supports.

I would encourage the Chancellor to reconsider the removal of critical investments for the teachers in New York City Public Schools.  Imagining how the largest school district in the nation can successfully transition from historical methods of teaching over 1.1 million children to entirely remote learning environments in less than two weeks without providing the most basic strategic support systems is inconceivable to me.  Furthermore, I would never characterize the critical relationships between teachers and their instructional coaches and other service providers as “non-essential.”


--John Craven

Important update on just-announced NYC school closings and other important developments

After several weeks of resistance, Mayor de Blasio just announced that starting tomorrow, Monday March 16, NYC public schools will be closed, and will remain closed until at least April 20, to stem the rapid spread of coronavirus.  For the next week, schools will be open only as a place for parents to pick up food if they need it for their families, and teachers will be trained in online learning starting Tuesday.

The following week, starting March 23, students will begin to engage in “remote learning”, and “Regional Enrichment centers” will be opened throughout the city to provide child care for first responders, health care and transit workers, and “our most vulnerable populations.”
Chancellor Carranza said that online devices will also be provided to the approximately 300,000 kids who don’t have them. A schedule of events is available on the DOE website here. The Chancellor strongly urged all parents to sign up for School Accounts to stay in the loop, if you haven’t already; instructions here.

• The Mayor delayed this necessary decision for weeks, even after most public health experts, parents, teachers, union officials, and other elected leaders had begged him to close the schools, as nearly every other large district and more than 15 states have already done. More on about this in a blog post I wrote on Thursday. With more than half a million kids in overcrowded schools, and more than 325,000 in classes of 30 or more, it would be simply impossible to prevent the rapid spread of the virus among our children, teachers and other staff, which currently is our best chance to prevent our health care system from becoming quickly overwhelmed.
  

• Yet I am also very skeptical as to the value of online learning even under the best of conditions; and there is growing consensus among independent researchers that it doesn’t work well, especially for kids who need help the most.  I and others also have many privacy concerns, some of which are outlined on our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy blog, where I also offer some alternative suggestions as to what might be better ways to keep your kids engaged, both physically and intellectually, during the weeks ahead.  

When online instruction begins in NYC, I will be eager to hear from all of you, including parents, teachers and students, as to what your experiences are with whatever programs are adopted by the DOE.

• Most importantly, it will be important for you to keep yourselves and your children safe by maintaining an acceptable “social distance” from others who may be unknowingly infected. I urge you to consult the most reliable information on how to do this best; for example, this site from the Harvard Medical School.

Though Mayor de Blasio has repeatedly claimed that asymptomatic individuals, including children, do not spread the disease, this is contrary to several recent scientific studies that show otherwise. In any event, much of the city will be shutting down in the coming days, including the City Council budget hearings that were due to start next week.

I wanted to get this update to you quickly and will try to keep you informed as events unfold. Meanwhile, I hope that whatever situation you find yourselves in, at work and at home, that you and your family remain healthy in the days ahead.

Yours, Leonie

What's really behind the city, state and national drop in NAEP scores

The results of the biennual national tests called NAEPs were released on October 30, showing stagnant or declining test scores in reading and math in nearly all states in the decade since 2009. 

“Over the past decade, there has been no progress in either mathematics or reading performance, and the lowest-performing students are doing worse,” said Peggy Carr, the associate commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP. “In fact, over the long term in reading, the lowest-performing students—those readers who struggle the most—have made no progress from the first NAEP administration almost 30 years ago.”

The poor results are most likely a consequence of several factors, including the damaging double whammy experienced by schools in 2009-2011 – when the great recession hit, which led to thousands of teacher jobs lost and class sizes increasing sharply, and the imposition of the Common Core standards.

Concerning the recession, see the chart below from the Economic Policy Institute, showing a current shortfall of more than 300,000 public education jobs starting in about 2010:

Many states and districts, including NYC, still have not recovered from the sharp increase in class size that occurred starting in 2008.   Just as class size reduction benefits students of color and from low income families the most, increases in class size hurt their opportunities to learn the most, helping to explain the widening achievement gap over this period.

In addition, the corporate-style policies that proponents claimed would help narrow the achievement gap, including the Common Core standards and state exams aligned with those standards, adopted in nearly all states starting in 2010, likely contributed to the decline in performance on the NAEPs as well.

The Common Core emphasizes informational text rather than literature, and  “close reading” strategies, with students assigned to analyze short passages, often excerpts from literature, in isolation from any larger context.

In essence, Common Core led to a curriculum designed for test prep, but devoid of engaging relevance and content for many students. To make things worse, the assigned texts are often two or three Lexile grade levels above the actual reading level of the students to whom the reading is assigned, in a misplaced intent to provide more “rigor.”

Close reading involves analyzing and re-analyzing individual passages, focusing on details and interpreting the author’s particular choice of words, structure, and intent, without any reference to anything in the student’s own experience or prior knowledge: “Students go deeper in the text, explore the author’s craft and word choices, analyze the text’s structure and implicit meaning” etc..  It is a process that is more suited to a graduate seminar in literary criticism than elementary or even high school English classrooms, and has been imposed upon classrooms throughout the United States in a misguided effort to sharpen their analytic “skills”.  It is hard to imagine anything more boring, and more likely to turn off a young reader.

Here are some recent tweets from teachers around the country, in discussing the Common Core in relation to the latest NAEP scores.

From a second grade teacher in Louisiana:

In Louisiana,we have to use only Chapters 16-18 of Charlotte’s Web, a 4th grade level book, in SECOND grade. So they start a book missing 15 chapters of getting to know that Charlotte is a spider, Wilbur is a pig, and Fern is a girl and loving the characters.

— Vicky Johnston (@VickyJohnston61) October 31, 2019

And a special ed teacher in New York:

Schools push 2-3 page passages in the name of "close reading" because that's IMO aligned to high-stakes testing. Kids are made to read and reread and "cite" "text evidence" to answer Qs, and from personal experience kids come out just hating reading. Kids need to read BOOKS! Ugh!

— Annie Tan (@AnnieTangent) October 31, 2019

Strangely enough, the NY Times story on the NAEPs mentioned neither the recession nor the Common Core in attempting to explain why there has been no  progress since 2009. In a Twitter exchange with one of the reporters, she said no one had mentioned Common Core to her in years.   

I don’t doubt that few if any of its original proponents now mention Common Core  – given its abysmal failure to improve results in our schools -- but that doesn’t mean that millions of students and teachers aren’t still wrestling with its flaws every day in classrooms throughout the nation, as evidenced by the above tweets.

In any case, the last quote in the Times article was from Jim Cowen, the executive director of the Collaborative for Student Success, an organization established to promote the Common Core standards, decrying how the state tests -- those explicitly aligned with the standards -- have become too easy and there was a need for "accountability" -- but not apparently for those who promoted the flawed standards themselves.

Moreover, the other experts quoted decried the emphasis on short passages rather than allowing students read longer books with richer meanings and larger contexts, without specifically mentioning the Common Core.

Peter Afflerbach, an expert on reading and testing at the University of Maryland, called the eighth-grade declines “troubling” and “precipitous,” especially for the lowest-achieving students saying that  "too many schools have assigned elementary students short passages instead of challenging them with longer, thematically rich texts and books.The new eighth-grade results show the students haven’t developed the reading comprehension to deal with text complexity."

Compounding the bad news was a just-released report from the ACT, showing that College Readiness levels in English, reading, math, and science have all decreased since 2015, with English and math seeing the largest decline.  

A recent study has provided further evidence for the negative impact of the Common Core. In those states whose original standards differed significantly from the Common Core, the adoption of the new standards had a significantly depressing impact on test scores which has grown over time, with the sharpest negative effect on fourth grade reading scores and especially on the achievement of students with disabilities, English Language learners, and Hispanic students.

Altogether, the falling NAEP scores, the ACT report, and this study represent a devastating indictment of the Gates/David Coleman/Arne Duncan reform agenda -- and yet despite all the evidence against them, and the fervent critiques from teachers, most states are sticking with the standards and the flawed pedagogy they impose.  As Susan DuFresne, a teacher in Washington state, proclaimed:

#CommonCore has done more damage to a generation of students than #NCLB did, by far. We predicted this well before implementation. @arneduncan and @BillGates didn’t listen. Neither did @BarackObama. Still we are stuck with Common Core. Why? pic.twitter.com/zUOjVjMdKd

— Susan DuFresne (@GetUpStandUp2) November 1, 2019

One more trend may have contributed to the decline in reading scores over the last few years. There has been a sharp increase in the use of digital reading programs across the country – with a survey from Common Sense Media revealing that 94 percent of English/language arts teachers say that they used them for core curriculum at least several times a month. This is despite a wealth of research that suggests that reading comprehension suffers when reading is done on screens. 

An Ed Week analysis of the just-released NAEP data found that in both grades 4 and 8, students who spent more time on digital devices in English class scored lower on these exams. Look at this astonishing graphic - showing that 65% of students who scored below basic on the NAEPs spent four hours or more of classroom time on screens per day.  Whether this association is due to correlation or causation, it is a highly disturbing trend:

As for NYC in particular, the much ballyhooed upward trend in state scores has now been proven to be illusory, as I argued last year, as was the Mayor's claim that the achievement of NYC students has  matched or surpassed average achievement in the rest of the state.  
  
According to the more reliably scaled NAEPs, in no subject or grade do the NYC scores come close to the average in the rest of the state – even though the state scores too have stagnated over the last decade.  Also confirmed was my prediction in 2016 that we have entered yet another era of state test score inflation.

And while in 2003, NYC students scored  above the large city average in all four NAEP exams, we have now slipped behind that level in three out of the four categories– and only equal it in one: fourth grade reading.  The same pattern exists with NY state’s NAEP scores, which were once ahead of curve nationally and have now fallen below it. 

What’s especially disconcerting, though, is how little seems to have been learned from the failures of the past.  A few days after the NAEPs were released, the NY State Education Department announced it was hiring Achieve.org to summarize the research and the public feedback on whether and how to revise the state’s high school graduation requirements, which rely on students passing five high-stakes exit exams.  Achieve.org has been one of leaders in the Gates-funded push for the Common Core,

In addition, the NYSED public engagement process, which will involve a Commission and multiple forums, will be funded by the Gates Foundation, which has spent more than $400 million since 2009 on financing and goading states to adopt the Common Core, with hundreds of millions more spent to encourage the expansion of online learning.   

Eleven states out of 27 have in recent years dropped their high school exit exams, and many of them now allow high school diplomas to be retroactively awarded.  This trend follows research showing that the practice of requiring students to pass these exams leads not to higher achievement or college readiness, but instead to higher drop-out and incarceration rates.    

And yet for some inconceivable reason, the NY State Education Department has chosen to work with the primary funder of the Common Core, as well as  one of the organizations that set our nation’s schools on the wrong path, to help guide their deliberations on this important issue. 

John Pane of RAND writes to correct my post on Teach to One and my response

About two weeks ago, I posted a history of the program Teach to One (TtO): how it had first been developed in NYC Department of Education as a blended learning math program called School of One, how after it had spun off from DOE as a separate company called New Classrooms, the developer Joel Rose had promised never to charge NYC schools a fee to use it, instead granting them with a “royalty free, perpetual, non-exclusive license”, but then how the company has continued to charge a license fee to NYC schools anyway. The main focus of the piece was to describe how the huge hype surrounding the Teach to One program and the suppression of the findings of negative or null evaluations of its results has allowed it to expand to more schools, despite disappointing  results and a 60 percent school attrition rate.

In a single paragraph towards the end of this rather lengthy post,  I summarized the findings of a RAND report on the Next Generation Learning Challenge (NGLC) schools, assuming that schools using Teach to One were part of the evaluation, since TtO is a grantee of the NGLC program.  Diane Ravitch subsequently ran excerpts of my blog on hers.

John Pane, the lead researcher on the Rand report, wrote to Diane that New Classrooms / Teach to One was not one of the programs included in this evaluation.  I have posted a correction on that matter on my original blog post.   

He also critiqued the way I reported his remarks to Education Week about “personalized learning” schools in general, that “the evidence base is very weak at this point,” and said that the paragraph in which I described the results of the Rand report had “numerous false and misleading statements,” including my summary of survey results that suggest that the students at NGLC schools “were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools.”

He has granted his permission to quote his letter in full below, which I have done, along with my response to the points in his letter.   

On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 12:17 PM Pane, John <jpane@rand.org> wrote:

Dear Diane, 

On March 4, 2018 you published this blog entry, “Leonie Haimson: Reality Vs. Hype in “Teach to One” Program,” excerpting from Leonie Haimson’s blog. Your excerpt included this paragraph about my own research (with colleagues) and my public statements:

“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar 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.’“

 This paragraph by Haimson has numerous false and misleading statements. Here I summarize my critique, excerpting the original paragraph: 

“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, …”

None of the schools in our sample reported using Teach to One (TtO) among the 194 education technology products they mentioned. Our sample includes schools in the Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) wave IIIa and wave IV programs, a subset of all the NGLC initiatives. Haimson points to blog posts by NGLC about Summit and TtO, but that does not mean our study included them.

“…included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, …”

Our conclusions were about the whole sample of schools, and did not single out any particular schools as is implied by juxtaposing “Summit and Teach to One” with “these schools.” Our concluding remarks related to achievement did not say “small and mostly insignificant.” What we actually said was, “Students in NGLC schools experienced positive achievement effects in mathematics and reading, although the effects were only statistically significant in mathematics. On average, students overcame gaps relative to national norms after two years in NGLC schools. Students at all levels of achievement relative to grade-level norms appeared to benefit. Results varied widely across schools and appeared strongest in the middle grades.” 

 “… and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools”

This was not a conclusion of our report. In a supplemental appendix we did compare results from our sample (again, the whole sample of schools in the study, none of which reported using TtO) to a national sample. Our method did not use “matched students at similar schools.” Given data limitations, we were able to make the student samples similar (through weighting) only on grade level, gender, and broad classifications of geographic locale (e.g., urban vs. suburban). Even after weighting, we suspect the high-minority, high-poverty schools in the NGLC sample may be located in more distressed communities than the national survey counterparts, and that this could be related to feelings of safety. Indeed, fewer NGLC students (78 vs. 82 percent) agreed that “I feel safe in this school,” but this small difference cannot be attributed to personalized learning and has no direct relevance to TtO. None of our survey items or reports used the word “alienated.” Possibly related, 77 percent of NGLC students agreed that “at least one adult in this school knows me well” and “I feel good about being in this school,” 76 percent agreed that “I care about this school” and 72 percent agreed “I am an important part of my school community.” 

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.’“ 

This EdWeek article clearly states that it is about “what K-12 educators and policymakers need to know about the research on personalized learning” broadly. Quoting accurately, “RAND has found some positive results, including modest achievement gains in some of the Gates-funded personalized-learning schools. But overall, ‘the evidence base is very weak at this point, Pane said.” There is no justification for Haimson to insert “[for these schools]” into my quoted remark. It appears as though Haimson is attempting to give a misleading impression that I was specifically talking about Summit and TtO rather than the entire body of personalized learning research. 

I find it very unfortunate that you accepted Haimson’s claims without fact checking, and increased their visibility and attention through your own platform. 

I am requesting that you please issue a correction in a way that previous readers of your March 4 post will likely notice. You may include this letter if you wish.

 With regards,

 John Pane, RAND Corporation

____

My response:  

I have now posted a correction on my blog post about the NGLC report – which  was only a small part of my post on TTO which is here .

 It is unfortunate that the names of the specific online program that were evaluated were left out of the RAND evaluation.  I had wrongly assumed that  TTO was included, since it is one of the most heavily funded and promoted by Gates and others of the Next Generation Learning Challenge “personalized learning” programs. 

I would also like to point out that the following survey statistics that John Pane includes in his letter about the NGLC schools omit the results from the comparison schools, as cited in the appendix of the Rand  report:

Possibly related, 77 percent of NGLC students agreed that “at least one adult in this school knows me well” [compared to 86% of the national sample] and “I feel good about being in this school,” [vs. 89% of the national sample] 76 percent agreed that “I care about this school” [vs. 87% of the national sample] and 72 percent agreed “I am an important part of my school community.” [compared to 79% of the national sample.]

In addition, the  students at the NGLC personalized learning schools were more likely to say that that “their classes do not keep their attention, and they get bored” compared to the national sample (30% to 23%). Only 35% of students at the NGLC schools said that “learning is enjoyable” compared to 45% of the national sample. With results like this it is difficult to see what was wrong with my statement that students at these schools were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe.

Now we know that TtO students aren’t included in these surveys, but there is no reason to assume that their responses would be significantly different until and unless New Classrooms releases their own survey results.  And we do know that from the survey of students at the Mountain View school, which used TtO, showed a 413% increase in the number of students who said they hated math as a result.

 Nor does John Pane’s response relate to the larger question which I discussed in my post, about how problematic it is to use MAP scores to evaluate these programs, especially scores from students  that aren’t disaggregated by race or economic status.  One might expect that with all the data that NWEA has by now they would have done that by now.

Finally, it is extremely unfortunate that Gates, Zuckerberg etc. haven’t bothered to commission any truly randomized  small-scale evaluation of Summit Learning, TtO or any of the other personalized learning programs that they so heavily fund and promote before expanding their reach and subjecting hundreds of thousands of students to them.   Summit has rejected  any independent evaluation of its results.  One can only speculate why.