wasting bandwidth since 1999
Following up on the previous rant…
If you dig deep into those expensive plans to “fix” schools, almost all have two things in common: a heavy emphasis on the magic of technology, and the promise of “personalized learning”.
Except that latter promise is a whole lot of marketing. And not at all new.
At the moment, one of the hot education terms is “personalized learning”. It sounds pretty good, maybe something that we should be doing in schools. As opposed to all that unpersonalized learning currently happening in classrooms.
The problem is that no one is clear about what “personalized” learning really is, a point clearly illustrated by a writer in The New Yorker1 who says the concept is messy.
Danusis [principal at the school profiled in the first part of the article] and her teaching staff practice personalized learning, an individual-comes-first approach, usually aided by laptops, that has become a reformist calling card in education.
Personalized learning argues that the entrepreneurial nature of the knowledge economy and the gaping need, diversity, and unmanageable size of a typical public-school classroom are ill-served by the usual arrangement of a teacher lecturing at a blackboard.
Advocates of personalized learning say that the approach has been unfairly conflated with teacherless, online-only education. They invoke Dewey and Freire and Montessori as guiding lights and take pains to emphasize, in almost liturgical unison, that personalized learning is not about tech—and that “tech is just a tool.”
No, it’s not about the tech. Which is interesting since much of the push for personalized learning is coming from edtech companies. Walk the vendor floor at ISTE or any of the other over-sized tech conferences and count the number products that promise to personalize learning for your kids.
Anyway, two other parts of the personalized learning hype that should raise concerns comes from it’s intersections with the charter business and the usual cast of tech billionaires who believe their software is the magic key to fixing schools.
Charter schools are the bluntest incarnation of education reform and have long enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year’s wave of teachers’ strikes, though, popularized the critique that charters divert funding from traditional public schools and undercut union standards. Personalized learning, meanwhile, is as ascendant a reform as ever, boosted by many of the same philanthropic entities that have promoted charters: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Intermediary funders and education-policy groups that depend on their grant dollars—including iNACOL, Excel in Ed, the Learning Accelerator, Big Picture Learning, and Jobs for the Future—have, in turn, made personalized learning a priority. Karla Phillips, a policy director at Excel in Ed, told me that both personalized learning and charter schools have “flexibility” as their aim.
Personalized learning systems have been adopted by many of the major charter companies as a way to reduce the number of teachers needed, often in the name of making them more “productive”, as well as flexible. Many of the Rhode Island schools visited by the writer were using personalization systems from Summit Learning, developed, in part, by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
None of those somewhat suspicious connections would matter if personalized learning actually “worked”. So, where’s the evidence?
Yet the academic and policy research behind it is thin. A few local pilot programs have been shown to slightly improve test scores and teacher satisfaction, but a 2017 study by RAND, commissioned by the Gates Foundation to study forty Gates-funded schools, reads like a shrug. “Although advocates and reformers have developed PL models,” the RAND authors observed, “many of the component practices are relatively common nationally, making it difficult to clearly identify what makes a school a PL school.”
Of course, this study (and the vast major of other education research) assumes that student scores on standardized tests is a valid measure of “learning”. And that the tests themselves are valid.
And that highlights one of the major problems with “personalized” learning systems.
The question of what kids should be learning in K12 should be the starting point. Instead developers at the tech companies like Summit, along with the school administrators who sign the contracts to buy their products, assume that the curriculum and assessments already in place are credible and will best serve student needs.
That hardware and software by itself will transform learning.
Image by Brad Flickinger, posted to Flickr and used under a Creative Commons license.
1. Trying to access the article can be a little messy in itself since the website really, REALLY wants you to register. I recommend saving it to a read-later service (like Instapaper), which makes it much easier to read.
2. The writer includes a disclaimer noting that the Gates and Hewlett Foundations and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are among the many funders of The Hechinger Report which partnered on this story.
Lately I seem to reading a lot about artificial intelligence. Between all the self-driving car projects and many, many predictions about robots coming for our jobs (and our children), the topic is rather hard to avoid. The topic is interesting but also somewhat scary since we’re talking about creating machines that attempt to replicate, and even improve upon, the human decision making process.
One of the better assessments of why we need to be cautious about allowing artificially-intelligent systems to take over from human judgement comes from MIT’s Technology Review, whose Senior Editor for AI says “no one really knows how the most advanced algorithms do what they do”.
If a person makes a decision, it’s possible (theoretically) to learn how they arrived at that choice by simply asking them. Of course it’s not as easy with children, but most adults are able to offer some kind of logical process explaining their actions. Even if that process is flawed and they arrive at the wrong conclusion.
It’s not so easy with machines.
There’s already an argument that being able to interrogate an AI system about how it reached its conclusions is a fundamental legal right. Starting in the summer of 2018, the European Union may require that companies be able to give users an explanation for decisions that automated systems reach. This might be impossible, even for systems that seem relatively simple on the surface, such as the apps and websites that use deep learning to serve ads or recommend songs. The computers that run those services have programmed themselves, and they have done it in ways we cannot understand. Even the engineers who build these apps cannot fully explain their behavior.
We’ve never before built machines that operate in ways their creators don’t understand. How well can we expect to communicate—and get along with—intelligent machines that could be unpredictable and inscrutable?
However, far below the level of television-ready robots and whatever Elon Musk is up to now, AI is a topic that educators should probably be watching.
More and more edtech companies are developing (and your school administrators are buying) “personalized” learning systems that include complex algorithms. These applications may fall short of being intelligent but will still collect huge amounts of data from students and then make “decisions” about the course of their educational life.
It’s unlikely the salespeople can offer any clear explanation of how the systems work. Even the engineers who wrote the software may not have a good understanding of the whole package. Or know if there are errors in the code that could result in incorrect results.
And it’s not like you can ask the computer to explain itself.
The image is the logo from Steven Spielberg’s 2001 film AI: Artificial Intelligence, a somewhat mediocre example of the genre. And a movie would have been far different if Stanley Kubrick had lived to direct it.
Once upon a time, like around three years ago, one of the hottest concepts in education reform was a collection of “micro schools”, called AltSchool. The brain child of a former Google executive, AltSchool mixed concepts from Montessori and other progressive educators with data-driven technology to produce a startup that attracted hundreds of millions in venture capital.
Today, not so much. AltSchool is now “pivoting” from operating a few expensive boutique private schools to marketing software for “personalizing” learning in regular public schools.
So, what magic is AltSchool selling in their algorithms?
The software allows educators to build curriculum, tailor assignments, set goals, offer feedback, and track a host of metrics from learners. Students using the platform can create customized “playlist” of assignments and monitor their progress with the hope that their learning will become self-directed.
In other words, this one-time darling of Silicon Valley is marketing a more advanced, maybe even more intelligent, version of the teaching machines we were promised in the 50’s. And the programmed learning software schools overpaid for in the 90’s.
Call this personalized learning if you like. Maybe individualized instruction. But this approach, where every part of the learning process is mapped out by adults, is in no way personal.
I’m repeating myself but it’s worth restating…
Personalized learning is something done TO students. Personal learning is something students do for themselves.
One can be automated, the other is uniquely individual.
The US Secretary of Education believes “personalized” learning is the future of schools.
At least she does based on the observational “snapshots” she’s collected in the past couple of years.
What I have observed and also read from others who are more deeply immersed in this, is that students that are in that setting are able to really pursue their learning and take charge and control of their own learning and to proceed at a rate that works for them.
I am optimistic that the places where this customized, personalized approach has been tested and shown to be successful for students, that there is going to be a broader embrace of it.
Those snapshots are more than enough evidence to create policy, right?
The vision of “personalized” learning on which DeVos is heaping praise comes largely from high-profile experiments funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, like the Summit program, largely backed by Mark Zuckerberg’s foundation, and Alt Schools, created by a former Google executive. All of these programs depend heavily on software to customize the educational program for each student, collecting a lot of data on each child along the way.
That educational program, however, is far from personal.
In most of these high tech schools, the curriculum and how it is presented is still determined by adults. Students may get to choose from a short menu of activities at each stage of the lessons, they have little to no choice in the topics they will study. Their data is used to “improve” the algorithms but their thoughts, ideas, and opinions are largely ignored.
Just like most “normal” schools.
But in the past few months, these techie education “experts” have been finding that personalizing the learning process is not as simple as they thought. Alt School has closed many of their boutique schools and some of their parents and educators are having second thoughts. Last year, sales of the Summit system to public districts was much slower than the company forecast.
Of course, “personalized” learning is the hot buzz term for hundreds of edtech companies at the moment and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. But, as responsible educators, we need to question the meaning of the word and how software vendors are applying it. Not to mention how their systems and algorithms are using data collected from students.
Because “personalized” (or “individualized”) is not the same as personal learning. The kind where students work with teachers and their peers to explore their interests and skills, as well as understanding the basic knowledge they will need as adults.
And are a fundamental part of planning their own learning process, not simply responding to software and curriculum designed by hired experts.
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