Archive | April, 2024

Hyped AI New Personalized Learning

25 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/25/2024

In education today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and personalized learning are the same thing. AI has been around for 70 years and is the technology that drove personalized learning. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 caused buzz and may be responsible for Edtech sales-forces switching to AI from personalized learning. The personalized learning scam was exposed and AI became the shiny new object.

ChatGPT is a new language model developed by OpenAI. The basis is a giant data base to retrieve query answers and its breakthrough uses human style essays to deliver the responses. This makes cheating easier, giving teachers new issues to confront. To this point, blogger and educator Mercedes Schneider says “AI and I are not friends”, noting:

“As a teacher for many decades, I find increasingly more of my time consumed with devising means to ensure students complete my assignments without the easy-cheat, sustain-my-own-ignorance that AI enables in today’s students– and, it seems, an increasing number of (especially remote) professionals who may be using the corner-chopping ability AI offers to even hold multiple full-time positions.”

Schneider tested ChatGPT typing in “Could you provide some background info on Mercedes Schneider? She resides in Louisiana.” The answer revealed a weakness… much of the information was correct, some wrong, with other information, old and irrelevant. She did not attend University of Southern Louisiana nor received her PhD from LSU. Mercedes took her red pencil to this chatbot answer, “According to her website, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in secondary education ‘(TRUE)’, a Master of Education in gifted education ‘(FALSE)’, and a PhD in curriculum and instruction ‘(FALSE)’, all from the University of Southern Mississippi ‘(FALSE).’”

These errors may be unusual but the chatbot is unreliable.

What is AI?

“Artificial Intelligence” was first coined by Professor John McCarthy for a conference on the subject at Dartmouth College in 1956. It was also founded as an academic discipline in 1956.

Mathematician, computer scientist, and cryptanalyst, Alan Turing, described a test for verifying computer intelligence in a 1956 paper. He proposed a three-player game in which the human “interrogator” is asked to communicate via text with another human and a machine. If the interrogator cannot reliably identify the human, then the machine is judged “intelligent.”

Coursera states, “AI is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of technologies, including machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP).” However, none pass the Turing test for machines manifesting intelligence.

Machine-learning has been part of AI since its 1950s beginning. Algorithms are created to allow a machine to improve its performance on a given task automatically. Netflix uses it to create personalized recommendations, based on previous viewing history.

Deep-learning is advancement in machine-learning, layering algorithms into computer units referred to as neurons. Google Translate uses it for translation from one language to another.

Neural Network Cartoon

Natural language processing (NLP) is used in many products and services. Most commonly, NLP is used for voice-activated digital assistants on smartphones, email spam-scanning programs, and translation apps, deciphering foreign languages. ChatGPT uses large language models, an advancement to NLPs enabling a dialog format, to generate text in response to questions or comments posed.

Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the UK’s Oxford University, said, “A lot of cutting edge AI has filtered into general applications, often without being called AI because once something becomes useful enough and common enough it’s not labeled AI anymore.”

No machine has passed the Turing test. To this point there is no intelligence associated with AI, just algorithms. Another problem with powerful AI systems is they use a lot of electricity: by 2027, one researcher suggests that collectively, they could consume each year as much as a small country.

Should We Be Afraid?

In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, who won the Turing award in 2018 for “deep learning”, a foundation to much of AI in use today, spectacularly quit Google. He said companies, like Google, had stopped being proper stewards for AI in face of competition to advance the technology.

That same month a Scientific American article stated:

“A 2023 survey of AI experts found that 36 percent fear that AI development may result in a “nuclear-level catastrophe.” Almost 28,000 people have signed on to an open letter written by the Future of Life Institute, including Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, the CEOs of several AI companies and many other prominent technologists, asking for a six-month pause or a moratorium on new advanced AI development.”

However other scientists in the field disagree.

The Guardian reported:

“Jürgen Schmidhuber, who has had a long-running dispute with Hinton and others in his industry over appropriate credit for AI research, says much of these fears are misplaced. He says the best counter to bad actors using AI will be developing good tools with AI.”

“And I would be much more worried about the old dangers of nuclear bombs than about the new little dangers of AI that we see now.”

Stanford professor, Andrew Ng, was a part of the Google brain project. He is not worried and in a recent interview stated:

“I can’t prove that AI won’t kill us all, which is akin to proving a negative, any more than I can prove that radio waves being emitted from Earth won’t allow aliens to find us and wipe us out. But I am not overly concerned about our radio waves leading to our extinction, and in a similar way I don’t see how AI could lead to human extinction.”

Meta’s chief AI scientist, Luan LeCun, scoffs at his peers dystopian attitudes, saying, “Some people are seeking attention, other people are naive about what’s really going on today.”

Hopefully dangers from AI are mitigated by the safety concerns addressed and development is not harmed by a flat-earth mentality.

Selling to Schools

Fast Company is a modern business news organization, tracking edtech sales and issues. Their April 16, 2024 article opened with,

“Between the pandemic and the rise of generative AI, the education sector has been in a permanent state of flux over the past few years. For a time, online learning platforms were ascendant, meeting the moment when workplaces and schools alike went remote (and later, hybrid). With the public debut of ChatGPT in 2022, edtech companies—such as edX, which was one of the first online learning giants to launch a ChatGPT plugin—jumped at the opportunity to integrate generative AI into their platforms, while teachers and administrators tried to understand what it could mean in the classroom.”

Generative AI is a tool that generates text, images, videos and other products.

I understand how K-12 students might want to become familiar with new AI tools but expecting them to be a boon to learning seems farfetched. Teachers need to find ways to stop students from misusing it. Clever as they are most students will not make good choices when realizing a chatbot can do homework.

Fast Company pointed out, schools are being inundated with new AI edtech products. George Veletsianos, Professor of learning technologies, University of Minnesota, recently gave purchasing guidance to school leaders in Conversation. Of his five points, point two seems especially relevant:

“Compelling evidence of the effect of GenAI products on educational outcomes does not yet exist. This leads some researchers to encourage education policymakers to put off buying products until such evidence arises. Others suggest relying on whether the product’s design is grounded in foundational research.”

“Unfortunately, a central source for product information and evaluation does not exist, which means that the onus of assessing products falls on the consumer. My recommendation is to consider a pre-GenAI recommendation: Ask vendors to provide independent and third-party studies of their products, but use multiple means for assessing the effectiveness of a product. This includes reports from peers and primary evidence.”

“Do not settle for reports that describe the potential benefits of GenAI – what you’re really after is what actually happens when the specific app or tool is used by teachers and students on the ground. Be on the lookout for unsubstantiated claims.”

Experience informs me that there will be many educational benefits from the overhyped AI but money hunger will be lurking. I am guessing AI currently will be of little use for teaching literature, mathematics or most sciences but will be a focus for computer science students.

Do not rush to implement AI tools in the K-12 environment.

Schools are more likely to be fleeced than left behind when the salesman calls. It may be the same person, who was selling “personalized learning” three or four years ago

…  but it is still BAD pedagogy.

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Defend the People’s Schools

19 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/19/2024

I am sure you’ll be shocked to your core but there are some really bad people out there trying to end publicly-financed free education.

Since the beginning to the 21st millennium, misguided wealthy people have been attacking public education. The reasons range from religion to hubris. Betsy DeVos thinks secular education is an insult to her Christian God. Bill Gates believes he knows more than anyone else and Charles Koch is opposed to all government-sponsored social action. That would all be fine if they were not billionaires, using immense wealth to impose their way.  

Truth-in-Funding (TiF) offers tools for opposing their propaganda with a webpage providing links to 25 organizations, working to protect public schools. Organizations such as National Education Policy Center, Network for Public Education and Education Law Center share links to their research along with toolkits for delivering the message.

The Truth-in-Funding Group

TiF’s homepage states:

“School voucher programs use public funds to pay for private education costs. These programs are spreading despite overwhelming evidence that they are harmful public policy.”

And their about page says:

“This website offers a wide range of tools from groups that oppose vouchers and other efforts to divert public funding in education. We work to protect the vital institution of public education and ensure all students have access to welcoming, well-resourced public schools.”

Highlighted Materials

Network for Public Education (NPE) was founded in 2013 by a middle-school teacher from Oakland, California, Anthony Cody and former Education Department official and education historian, Diane Ravitch. Soon after the founding, past New York principal of the year, Carol Burris, came on board as director. NPE has focused on uniting friends of public schools, researching the reality behind school choice and creating tools to protect public education.

Ravitch Introducing Keynote Speaker Gloria Ladson-Billings

At NPE Washington DC October 2023

One of NPE’s many “Toolkits”, which are concise two-page documents, is “Do charter schools and school vouchers “hurt” public schools?” The answer is:

“Yes.

“Charter schools, vouchers, and other “choice” options redirect public money to privately operated education enterprises, some of which operate for profit. That harms your public schools by siphoning off students, resources, and funding and reducing the ability of public schools to serve the full range of student needs and interests.”

This conclusion was justified with four paragraphs of explanation and eight examples from across America.

Policy Matters Ohio is a non-profit policy research institute. Funded by mostly small foundations and individual donations they claim to “create a more vibrant, equitable, sustainable and inclusive Ohio through research, strategic communications, coalition building and policy advocacy.”

Their 2023 Ohio voucher study concluded:

  • “Ohio is currently ranked 46th for per-pupil equitable distribution of funding. State funding that is allocated towards vouchers should be directed to public schools so that students can get the resources they need to thrive.
  • “Ohio public schools need funding, especially our largest urban school districts with high concentrations of Black, Brown, and Economically disadvantaged students (CCS example)
  • “Ohio is ranked 40th in starting teacher salaries, and falls below the national average. Funding allocated towards vouchers takes away from money that should be invested in our educators. Can help us to recruit and retain more teachers in the state
  • “Private schools can choose to kick back a child, but as of right now they would be able to keep the money that was awarded, this needs to be changed so that private schools are not benefiting from public dollars for a child they are not educating .
  • “With universal vouchers comes universal bussing costs for public-school districts who bear the cost of transporting all district voucher students to private schools. Property taxes will continue to rise as the public is forced to pay a billion dollars for private school tuition, which will strain lower income districts.”

With the advent of billionaire-financed attacks on public education, non-peer reviewed policy reports and education outcome studies have become prevalent. In response, a group of scholars created the National Education Policy Center (NEPC), housed at the University of Colorado to test the claims being made.

In 2023, there was a legislatively mandated report by the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts estimating costs and benefits of the state’s new Qualified Education Expense tax credit (QEEC). It is a tax credit school voucher scheme that provides families with “scholarships”. These programs can be controversial because they send taxpayer funding to private schools which serve primarily religious schools that regularly exclude students based on faith, sexual orientation or disability. The Georgia report concluded the state would save money with these vouchers.

David S. Knight, University of Washington, studied the report for NEPC and concluded:

“Taken together, little evidence or data supports the report’s main findings and conclusions. If more accurate parameters are used to generate cost estimates, particularly for the switcher rate and for the cost savings of declining enrollment, a different picture emerges. While the report concludes that the tax-credit scholarship program will have a positive fiscal impact, a far more likely scenario, and one that has already played out in other states, is that the tax credit will cost Georgia taxpayers millions of dollars, potentially requiring future cuts to public services, while providing a cash bonus to many wealthy families.”

A visitor to the TiF library page discovers 13 hyper-linked categories including “Graphics” where I found this:

A Big Concern

 At the bottom of TiF’s main page, below the 25 hyper-linked partners, is a link to Partnership for the Future of Learning (PFL) with an invitation to visit their website.

Learning Policy Institute is listed as a member of the PFL network, founded in 2015 with Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond in charge and offices in Palo Alto and Washington DC. San Francisco-based Sandler Foundation was the lead funder with Atlantic Philanthropies, S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation, Ford Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. Stuart Foundation also provided initial support.

The Ford, Bechtel and Hewlett foundations have often supported initiatives that undermine public schools. The Hewlett foundation joined Zuckerberg and Kellogg in funding PFL. Hewlett’s 2022 form 990-PF (EIN: 94-1655673) reports grants of $600,000 to NWEA, $533,336 to Education Trust and $1,935,000 to the Aspen Institute.

Learning Policy Institute’s 2022 tax report lists Darling-Hammond’s salary at over $500,000 (EIN: 47-2772048). She has a history of being both supportive of public education and a problem. My friend, Steven Singer, titled his 2018 post about Darling-Hammond, “Linda Darling-Hammond vs. Linda-Darling Hammond – How a Once Great Educator Got Lost Among the Corporate Stooges.” While often brilliant, she does not seem to value the importance of school governance.

Another PFL partner, WK Kellogg Foundation, is one of America’s largest grant-making organizations. A quick perusal of their 990-PF tax forms (EIN: 38-1359264) showed many grants to clearly worthwhile causes. Unfortunately they also give money to organizations like Teach For America, who pawns off fake temp-teachers on America’s students. Their 2021 form gives the most recent spending data available from Kellogg, with the following partial table of giving:

PFL cites Teach Plus as a network partner. It is a private company trying to monetize teacher-training, established in 2007 by Celine Coggins, a professor at Harvard Innovation Labs. Her Harvard resume says, “Under Celine’s leadership, Teach Plus grew to over 30,000 participating teachers and a $10M annual operating budget by offering groundbreaking programs in leadership development and advocacy.” The actual groundbreaking was the effort to replace teacher-leadership and -training by established public universities like UCLA, University of Texas and University of Illinois, with a for-profit company.

PFL may be a true friend of public education but some of the organizations they listed are not. Until they clean their house of organizations that harm public education, TiF should reconsider giving them a link on their otherwise pristine webpage.

I do not want to overemphasize TiF’s one questionable link but am sensitive about the issue. Every national education news source now receives funding from Bill Gates. In addition, other billionaire enemies of public schools also contribute to school news outlets like The 74, education week etc. There are few places for the public to get true un-slanted education news.  

So far Truth-in-Funding appears to be a valuable resource for fighting misinformation and saving universal free public education.

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Jobs’ Reading Scam

10 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/10/2024

Laurene Powell Jobs controls Amplify, a kids-at-screens education enterprise. In 2011, she became one of the wealthiest women in the world when her husband, Steve, died. This former Silicon Valley housewife displays the arrogance of wealth, infecting all billionaires. She is now a “philanthropist”, in pursuit of both her concerns and biases. Her care for the environment and climate change are admirable but her anti-public school thinking is a threat to America. Her company, Amplify, sells the antithesis of good education.

I am on Amplify’s mailing list. April third’s new message said,

“What if I told you there’s a way for 95% of your students to read at or near grade level? Maybe you’ve heard the term Science of Reading before, and have wondered what it is and why it matters.”

Spokesperson, Susan Lambert, goes on to disingenuously explain how the Science of Reading (SoR) “refers to the abundance of research illustrating the best way students learn to read.”

This whopper is followed by a bigger one, stating:

“A shift to a Science of Reading-based curriculum can help give every teacher and student what they need and guarantee literacy success in your school. Tennessee school districts did just that and they are seeing an abundant amount of success from their efforts.”

A shift to SoR-based curriculum is as likely to cause harm as it is to bring literacy success. This was just a used-car salesman style claim. On the other hand, the “abundance of success” in Tennessee is an unadulterated lie. National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tracks testing over time and is respected for education testing integrity. Tennessee’s NAEP data shows no success “from their efforts.” Their reading scores since 2013 have been down, not a lot but do not demonstrate an “abundance of success”.

NAEP Data Plot 2005 to 2022

Amplify’s Genesis

Larry Berger and Greg Dunn founded Wireless Generation in 2000 to create the software for lessons presented on screens. Ten years later, they sold it to Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation for $360 million. Berger pocketed $40 million and agreed to stay on as head of curriculum. Wireless Generation was rebranded Amplify and Joel Klein was hired to run it.

Murdoch proposed buying a million I-pads to deliver classroom instruction. However, the Apple operating system was not flexible enough to run the software. The android system developed at Google met their needs. They purchased the Taiwanese-made Asus Tablets, well regarded in the market place but not designed for the rigors of school use. Another issue was that Wireless Generation had not developed curriculum but Murdoch wanted to beat Pearson and Houghton Mifflin to the digital education market place … so they forged ahead.

In 2012, the corporate plan was rolling along until the wheels came off. In Guilford County, North Carolina, the school district won a Race to the Top grant of $30 million dollars which it used to experiment with digital learning. The district’s plan called for nearly 17,000 students in 20 middle schools to receive Amplify tablets. When a charger for one of the tablets overheated, the plan was halted. Only two months into the experiment, they found not only had a charger malfunctioned but another 175 chargers had issues and 1500 screens were kid-damaged.

This was the beginning of the end.

By August of 2015, News Corporation announced it was exiting the education business. The corporation took a $371 million dollar write-off. The next month, they announced selling Amplify to members of its staff. In the deal orchestrated by Joel Klein, who remained a board member, Larry Berger assumed leadership of the company.

Three months later, Reuters reported that the real buyer was Laurene Powell Jobs. She purchased Amplify through her LLC, the Emerson Collective. In typical Powell Jobs style, no information was available for how much of the company she would personally control.

Because Emerson Collective is an LLC, it can purchase private companies and is not required to make money details public. However, the Waverley Street Foundation, also known as the Emerson Collective Foundation, is a 501 C3 (EIN: 81-3242506) that must make money transactions public. Waverly Street received their tax exempt status November 9, 2016.

SoR A Sales Scam

The Amplify email gave me a link to two documents that were supposed to explain SoR: (Navigating the shift to evidence-based literacy instruction 6 takeaways from Amplify’s Science of Reading: The Symposium) and (Change Management Playbook Navigating and sustaining change when implementing a Science of Reading curriculum). Let’s call them Symposium and Navigating.

Navigating tells readers that it helps teachers move away from ineffective legacy practices and start making shifts to evidence-based practices. The claim that “legacy practices” are “ineffective” is not evidence-based. The other assertion that SoR is evidence-based has no peer-reviewed research backing it.

Sally Riordan is a Senior Research Fellow at the University College London. In Britain, they have many of the same issues with reading instruction. In her recent research, she noted:

“In 2023, however, researchers at the University of Warwick pointed out something that should have been obvious for some time but has been very much overlooked – that following the evidence is not resulting in the progress we might expect.

“A series of randomised controlled trials, including one looking at how to improve literacy through evidence, have suggested that schools that use methods based on research are not performing better than schools that do not.”

In Symposium, we see quotes from Kareem Weaver who co-founded Fulcrum in Oakland, California and is its executive director. Weaver also was managing director of the New School Venture Fund, where Powell Jobs served on the board. He works for mostly white billionaires to the detriment of his community. (Page 15)

Both Symposium and Navigating have the same quote, “Our friends at the Reading League say that instruction based on the Science of Reading ‘will elevate and transform every community, every nation, through the power of literacy.”’

Who is the Reading League and where did they come from?

Dr. Maria Murray is the founder and CEO of The Reading League. It seems to have been hatched at the University of Syracuse and State University of New York at Oswego by Murray and Professor Jorene Finn in 2017. That year, they took in $11,044 in contributions (EIN: 81-0820021) and in 2018, another $109,652. Then in 2019, their revenues jumped 20 times to $2,240,707!

Jorene Finn worked for Cambria Learning Group and was a LETRS facilitator at Lexia. That means the group had serious connections to the corporate SoR initiative before they began.

With Amplify’s multiple citations of The Reading League, I speculated that the source of that big money in 2019 might have been Powell Jobs. Her Waverly Street Foundation (AKA Emerson Collective Foundation) only shows one large donation of $95,000,000 in 2019. It went to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (EIN: 20-5205488), a donor-directed dark money fund.

There is no way of following that $95 million.

The Reading League Brain Scan Proving What?

Professor Paul Thomas of Furman University noted the League’s over-reliance on brain scans and shared:

“Many researchers in neurobiology (e.g., Elliott et al., 2020; Hickok, 2014; Lyon, 2017) have voiced alarming concerns about the validity and preciseness of brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect reliable biomarkers in processes such as reading and in the diagnosis of other mental activity….

“And Mark Seidenberg, a key neuroscientist cited by the “science of reading” movement, offers a serious caution about the value of brain research: “Our concern is that although reading science is highly relevant to learning in the classroom setting, it does not yet speak to what to teach, when, how, and for whom at a level that is useful for teachers.”

“Beware The Reading League because it is an advocacy movement that is too often little more than cherry-picking, oversimplification, and a thin veneer for commercial interests in the teaching of reading.”

The push to implement SoR is a new way to sell what Amplify originally called “personalized learning.” This corporate movement conned legislators, many are co-conspirators, into passing laws forcing schools and teachers to use the SoR-related programs, equipment and testing.

SoR is about economic gain for its purveyors and not science based.

When politicians and corporations control education, children and America lose.

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Fan of Standards-Based Grading?

2 Apr

By Thomas Ultican 4/2/2024

With the new century, public education encountered virulent standards, standards-based testing and a call for standards-based grading (SBG). While schools were inundated with standards and testing, SBG was not such a success. Since the pandemic, a renewed push for SBG rose. On March 16 2024, corporate education mouthpiece, The 74, published “Why is a Grading System Touted as More Accurate, Equitable So Hard to Implement?”

Answer: Maybe it is bad education policy?

Charter schools and vouchers claimed to save poor minority children from “failed” public schools. They wanted to bring fairness but instead brought segregation, no-excuses schools and discrimination. Similarly, SBG is neither about accuracy nor equity; it is about teaching to the test and implementing thoroughly debunked mastery learning.

What is SBG?

Common Goals Systems Inc. is typical of companies in the education business making it a good source to explain SBG and they share the following math report card example:

Their SBG definition states:

“In SBG, grading is based on demonstration of mastery. Students attempt standards-aligned activities (projects, worksheets, quizzes, essays, presentations, etc.). Teachers assess the student output and choose the appropriate mastery level that was demonstrated. In standards-based education, teaching is responsive to learning.” (Emphasis added.)

I never met a teacher who was not responsive to learning, no matter the grading system.

Power School sells school management programs that include grading tools. They state, “Since standards-based reporting is designed to only reflect true evidence of learning, parents get a clear picture of what the student has or hasn’t mastered without the influence of other factors, such as effort and attitude.”

Teachers and most parents believe effort and attitude have a lot to do with developing “true evidence of learning.”

Valerie L. Marsh, PhD from the University of Rochester, wrote a research brief about SBG:

“The emphasis in SBG is to promote teaching and learning that meet learning goals based on standards. Moreover, students are assessed on their level of mastery of specified standards rather than points accrued for individual assignments (Iamarino, 2014). Teachers then base course grades on students’ progress in meeting the standards (Lewis, 2022).” (Page 3)

When a group of Bay Area upper middle-class parents successfully reversed their districts move to SBG, EdSurge reported, “‘Standards-based grading’ treats homework as unscored practice, eliminates extra credit and focuses on proving mastery of material.” Dublin Unified School District’s parents were displeased with the new SBG pilot effort.

In July 2023, the school board voted 3-2 to end the experiment.

In the same article, Cody Whitehouse, a social studies teacher at Wilson College Prep high school in Phoenix, shared his experience with the district’s roll-out of SBG. At first, he was enthusiastic about allowing multiple opportunities to demonstrate learning but soon soured on it. Students quickly learned that homework was not being graded and stopped doing it!

Whitehouse said, “It’s teaching to the test — the assessment is all that matters.”

Grading Scale Comparison

Problem with Standards Based Education

In 2015, I wrote:

“The learning standards upon which high stakes testing is based come from a mistaken philosophy of pedagogy that posits: a standardized learning rate, standardized interests, linear learning progression, developmental alignment, etc. Humans are not standard. Some learn to speak at 16 months and some don’t acquire that skill until 72 months. Some are short, others are tall. Some are fast, other are not. A child from urban Chicago has different perceptions and interests than a child from Winnemucca, Nevada. A global curriculum will not meet the needs of an endlessly diverse population. One size truly does not fit all. Even if it did, it would still be a bad idea to have political entities in centers of power deciding what that curriculum should be.”

Reinforcing education standards by tying grades to them is a colossal error.

Arnold Toynbee (1889 – 1975) was perhaps the world’s most read, translated and discussed living scholar. His 10-volume masterpiece, “A Study of History”, was an enormous success and a 1-volume abridged version of the first 6 volumes by David Somervell sold more than 300,000 copies in 1947. Like most people, that was the version I read and found this quote:

“We must ask whether, as we look back over the ground we have traversed, we can discern any master tendency at work, and we do in fact unmistakably decry a tendency towards standardization and uniformity: a tendency which is correlative and opposite of the tendency towards differentiation and diversity which we have found to be the mark of the growth stage of civilizations.” (Page 555)

For politicians, oligarchs and many scholars, there is a powerful desire to control public education. They see teachers as inept and needing to be managed from Albany or Sacramento or Washington DC. Standards were seen as the path forward. They became more and more prescriptive with test and punish methods to enforce adherence. SBG is one more tool for developing faithfulness to standards.

Good schools in poor zip codes have been shuttered because they were not making adequate yearly progress based on testing results. There was no recognition that standardized testing results almost completely aligned with community wealth.

Since the pandemic, a new billionaire-financed movement has arisen to end the public education we know and replace it with a digital badging scheme. For this to work, mastery learning must be adopted and is likely the biggest reason SBG is being promoted.

In his 1916 book, Democracy and Education (page 122), John Dewey stated,

“An aim must, then, be flexible; it must be capable of alteration to meet circumstances. An end established externally to the process of action is always rigid.”

Mastery Learning violates Dewey’s warning.

In 1968, Benjamin Bloom published a small paper titled “Learning for Mastery”. This publication, Bloom’s Taxonomy and John Carroll’s work were combined to create “Mastery Learning”. 

Competency-based education (CBE) is the digital screen approach that replaced the failed 1990’s Outcome-based education. Outcome-based education is a renamed attempt to promote the 1970’s “mastery learning” theory. Mastery education’s failure was so complete that it had to be renamed. It was quickly derided by educators as “seats and sheets.” These schemes all posit that drilling small skills and mastering them is the best way to teach. It has not worked yet.

Summing it Up

Thomas R. Guskey, PhD University of Kentucky, is considered a world authority on grading practices and supports SBG. In 2001, he wrote the peer-reviewed article “Helping Standards Make the Grade”, responding to a widely held criticism of grades in K-12 schools. The curriculum expert, Robert Marzano, stated grades “are so imprecise that they are almost meaningless.”

I have a lot of respect for these scholars but it seems they were wrong.

Multiple studies have demonstrated that high school grades are more predictive of college success than standardized tests from ACT or SAT. The head of a 2020 University of Chicago study, Elaine M. Allensworth, reported “The bottom line is that high school grades are powerful tools for gauging students’ readiness for college, regardless of which high school a student attends, while ACT scores are not.”

I do not believe there is anything nefarious about either Marzano or Guskey. Their opposition to traditional grading is not well-supported and a grading scheme tied to standards promotes bad drill and skill education. Yet, their efforts were sincere.

There is something nefarious about Michael Moe and his company GSV Ventures. Several organizations fall under the main GSV group, including GSV Labs, GSV Asset Management and GSV Tomorrow, a commentary arm where investing trends and stories are disseminated. They link readers to the GSV landing page for the annual ASU+GSV Summit, claimed to be the “most impactful convening of leaders in education and talent tech” with over 5,000 attendees and 1,000 speakers from 45 different participating countries.

GSV appears to have convinced Tim Knowles and Carnegie Foundation to abandon the Carnegie Unit for CBE based badges.

Edtech leaders are creating a dystopian system of education and career tracking, making Orwell look optimistic. With this, every American’s history will be held in an unalterable blockchain which needs CBE as the education method to function.

It will be a goldmine for tech companies…

the big reason tech billionaires push Standards-Based Grading…

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