Tag Archives: AFT

One to One Initiative Threatens Public Education

27 Mar

By Thomas Ultican 3/27/2017

One to one classroom agendas have a dark side that includes the destruction of public schools as we know them; where teachers and students interact. It’s a dystopian ideology that posits students earning education badges while working in isolation at a digital screen.

This month, the entire staff at my high school received an email from a colleague who recently volunteered to be on our district’s technology committee. The message said in Part:

“In doing research for next year’s Technology Plan I came across some interesting data collected by the Speak Up 2015 Research Project.

“Although this particular data is from 2015 it still makes a lot of great points! Click on the links below, I promise it is a quick read.  Enjoy!”

The email message included three links to infographics provided by tomorrow.org.

What do Parents Really Think about Digital Learning

Looking Inside Today’s Digital Classroom

10 Things Everyone Should Know About K12 Students’ Digital Learning

These infographics claim that to be the result of authentic unfiltered data from respectively; 38,613 K-12 parents nationwide, 38,157 K-12 educators nationwide and 505,676 K-12 students, parents and educators nationwide. Ever since my Viet Nam war experience, I have been less trusting. I seek verification for all claims. I want to know the research methodology and who is paying.

Project tomorrow’s research is based on volunteers who engage with their web site answering survey questions. The web site is mostly an advertisement for implementing digital learning and a guide for how to lobby local schools to implement it. It has an agenda and a profound bias.

There are more than 90 corporations and non-profits listed as supporters of tomorrow.org, the cyber-space marketing address for this group. Many other organizations are lavishly financed by corporations to promote competency based education CBE including Future Ready. In addition to the eighteen largest contributors pictured below, both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are contributors to tomorrow.org.

Corporations Sponsoring Project Tommorrow

My School District’s technology committee is being influenced by the corporate sponsors of tomorrow.org. Last time the district technology plan was updated (2014) the technology committee was swayed by Project Red which is supported by many of the same corporations as Project Tomorrow and Future Ready. All three organizations promote one-to-one education at a computer screen.

A fellow teacher presciently commented, “The last thing 21st century students need is to be put in front of another screen.”

Last year when writing about this same issue, I wrote, “When congress passed the new education law (ESSA), the United States Department of Education (USED) became the nation’s leading education technology sales force.” USED works to sell “blended learning”; “competency based education”; “personalized learning”; “linked learning”; etc. These initiatives have at least four things in common; they all profit technology companies; they all are unproven; they all promote unhealthy education practices; and they overturn a student’s right to privacy.

Competency Based Education (CBE) Updates a Failed Strategy from the 1990’s

Obama’s Education Department was an unabashed supporter of CBE and the new federal education law ESSA provides money to encourage CBE. On the Department of Education web-site, it defines CBE:

“Competency-based strategies provide flexibility in the way that credit can be earned or awarded, and provide students with personalized learning opportunities. These strategies include online and blended learning, dual enrollment and early college high schools, project-based and community-based learning, and credit recovery, among others.”

“By enabling students to master skills at their own pace, competency-based learning systems help to save both time and money. Depending on the strategy pursued, competency-based systems also create multiple pathways to graduation, make better use of technology, support new staffing patterns that utilize teacher skills and interests differently, take advantage of learning opportunities outside of school hours and walls, and help identify opportunities to target interventions to meet the specific learning needs of students.”

This all sounds great except CBE is basically outcome based education moved to digital space. Outcome based education was the new 1990’s name given to a previously failed strategy known as mastery education (AKA “seats and sheets”). Outcome based education failed miserably around the world. The big advantage for CBE is that giant profits are possible for corporate providers, especially technology companies.

I never expected to quote Phyllis Schlafly but she wrote a prescient report in 1993, “What’s Wrong With Outcome-Based Education?” She said:

“Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the famous Russian author and former political prisoner in Soviet Gulags, said in a speech in the mid-1970s: ‘Coexistence on this tightly knit earth should be viewed as an existence not only without wars . . . but also without [government] telling us how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know, and what not to know.’”

“Unfortunately, that’s what Outcome-Based Education is — a process for government telling our children how to live, what to say, what to think, what to know, and what not to know. What the children say, think and know must conform to the liberal Politically Correct ideology, attitudes and behaviour.”

Maybe you dismiss Phyllis Schlafly as a paranoid right wing cook, but this video about how the Chinese are gamifying good citizenship should give you the creeps. Teachers hated outcome-based education, but it was the extreme right that delivered the death blow.

Emily Talmage teaches public school in Maine, where CBE is being piloted. She describes what she’s learned:

‘“By collecting skill-based badges, the record of achievement begun in secondary school becomes the foundation upon which workers build their capabilities and tell their stories to employers,’ explains the infamous testing-behemoth, Pearson Education.

“Knowledgeworks recently described the new learning system as an ‘ecosystem,’ in which the role of the traditional teacher will soon be obsolete.

“With major investments from Wall Street, leaders in the online learning, ed-tech, and student loan industries, and even celebrity billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Reed Hastings of Netflix, the transformation has recently been picking up speed. Meanwhile, political groups on both the left and right are moving the system forward by lobbying for ‘personalized,’ competency-based policies and ‘innovative’ assessment systems.”

The educator known by his wonderful blog, Curmudgucation, Peter Greene, recently wrote:

“Personalized learning, whether we’re talking about a tailored-for-you learning program on your computer screen or a choose the school you’d like to go to with your voucher, is not about actual personalization. It’s about another path for marketing, a way of personalizing the marketing of the product, the edu-commodity that someone is already trying to make money from.”

There is presently a Tennessee court case asking the provocative question, “does a student have a right to a teacher or is a computer enough?”

What is the Proper Place for Digital Education?

The one-to-one initiative being marketed as personalized learning makes little sense. Having tax payers provide a tablet or laptop computer to every student is crazy. It is obviously not personalized learning any more than correspondence school was personalized learning in the middle 20th century. Some student with unique situations may succeed with cheap on-line learning but as a strategy for most students, there is no reason to think it will work.

Our spending for public education needs to be submitted to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. As much fun as it may be to give every child a digital learning device, the quality of learning would likely be more improved if the school district used that money to reduce class sizes by one or two students. The one to one digital initiative is an unproven theory for improved education but class size reduction is a proven theory.

However, having sufficient computer resources available for students to use makes sense. It might be a good idea to make classes like keyboarding (typing) available and highly encouraged. My students are amazed when they see me typing without looking at the keyboard. That is a skill that has served me well and I think our students should have that opportunity.

Even cyber-course work could be valuable, if it is not mainly about maximizing profits. In his book, Teaching Minds, the cognitive scientist and pioneer in online learning, Roger Schank, makes the point that good online education costs as much as good classroom education. Class size still matters and the learning project designs must be well thought-out and relative to the particular class of students. However, today’s K-12 cyber-schools are really cyber-frauds.

The bottom line with technology spending and use in the classroom is that very aggressive well financed corporate sales teams see schools as a huge market. In addition, federal dollars are getting earmarked by corporate friendly politicians for technology spending. Therefore, it is prudent to look at how valuable this technology really is and not be swayed by the hype.

It is unlikely that good use of technology in education is going to come from the Bill Gates funded Kahn Academy or Tom Vander Ark. It is much more likely that most of the excellent thinking on use of technology in education will come from America’s classroom teachers. Let’s not be bamboozled or intimidated. It is classroom teachers that know what is valuable for learning.

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“Say it Ain’t So” NEA and AFT

6 Jan

By Thomas Ultican 1/6/2017

In 1919, the biggest baseball star in Chicago and possibly all of America was “Shoeless Joe” Jackson. After “Shoeless Joe” and seven other members of the Chicago White Sox were convicted of fixing the 1919 World Series, the Chicago Daily News headline – “Say it ain’t so, Joe” – was the anguished plea from fans and especially hero-worshipping boys. Today, when I look at America’s teachers’ unions, I feel similar emotions to the ones those disappointed boys must have felt.

The leadership of both the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) are not protecting educators and public schools. They campaigned for and support the new education law ESSA. They lend their name to advance Competency Based Education (CBE). They promote Social Emotional Learning (SEL). In the last election, both unions immediately endorsed a candidate with a greater than two-decade record of promoting policies undermining professional educators and privatizing public schools.

The California Teachers Association (affiliate of NEA) publishes, California Educator. There are two main thrusts in the December 2016 issue; implementation of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and promotion of STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) education.

NGSS like its sibling CCSS codifies terrible education theory that arose at the behest of a corporate leader, Louis Gerstner (RJR-Nabisco CEO). (To be fair Gerstner did not just sell cigarettes; he also worked at IBM.)

Selling Social Emotional Learning

I have positive opinions of Buddhist philosophy, however, western fads like mindfulness, where the psychological underpinnings of the Buddhist principles are not well understood, annoy me. Here is a quote from the December California Educator:

“The gentle sound of chimes is followed by the teacher’s voice asking students to focus on being in the here and now at Pioneer Elementary School in Union City.

“Neena Barreto is helping transitional kindergartners regulate their own nervous systems through practicing the art of mindfulness.”

In another short piece about Michelle Cauley, we are told:

“Cauley, one of six SEL facilitators with Los Angeles Unified School District, teaches children how to deal with their emotions by using calming techniques such as deep breathing and counting to 10. She provides professional development to educators in the Second Step SEL program, which offers K-8 lesson plans training.”

The Second Step SEL program is a product of the Committee for Children. They describe themselves:

“Committee for Children is a global nonprofit dedicated to fostering the safety and well-being of children through social-emotional learning and development. We are the world’s largest provider of research-based education programs that have helped over 9 million children in 26,000 schools develop vital social-emotional skills to avoid violence, bullying, and sexual abuse. From Iowa to Iraq, Chile to Chicago, we are helping children around the globe stay safe, respect themselves and others, succeed in school today, and build a better world tomorrow.”

Califronia Educator quotes Cauley,

“Kids should be getting these skills at home, but they’re not. Now students are teaching these skills to their families.”

All of this may seem positive, warm and fuzzy, but this last quote is problematic. Is there a darker side of SEL which includes inappropriate intrusion of government into family life and child rearing? A wise old saying alerts us that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

Joy Pullman, managing editor of The Federalist, comments on SEL Boosters:

“The federal government has pushed states to create initiatives like this by demanding in the new federal law that replaces No Child Left Behind, called the Every Student Succeeds Act, that states include “non-academic measures” in school ratings. Despite this, all the leading researchers in this nascent field say the sorts of quasi-psychological measures are not at all reliable enough to be used to rate schools, states, or individual children. That’s not stopping boosters, however (it rarely does).”

One of those boosters is the California Office to Reform Education or CORE. I have written about this faux government agency. It is financed by – the usual we know better than any professional educators “non-profits.” CORE districts has made social emotional learning 40% of school evaluation. The following graphic is taken from their pilot SEL document sent to participants.

core-districts-sel

Jane Robbins is an attorney and a senior fellow with the American Principles Project in Washington, DC.  Writing in Townhall She states:

“According to the monolithic progressive-education establishment in this country, SEL is the next big thing to fix the problems with public education. The same was true of outcome-based education, and Common Core, and fads infinitum. But this fad isn’t just ineffective, it’s dangerous. Parents should demand a halt to pseudo-psychology – and a restoration of their autonomy in raising their children.”

The big Kahuna in the SEL movement is CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning). In 2010 CASEL asked Joseph Durlak, PhD, Professor emeritus of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, to conduct of study of SEL. His investigation was the first large scale study of SEL and it showed impressive results. The main funding for the study came from William T. Grant Foundation and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health. The summary of claims:

“This article presents findings from a meta-analysis of 213 school-based, universal social and emotional learning (SEL) programs involving 270,034 kindergarten through high school students. Compared to controls, SEL participants demonstrated significantly improved social and emotional skills, attitudes, behavior, and academic performance that reflected an 11-percentile-point gain in achievement.”

This study was a meta-analysis of data collected between 1955 and 2007. There are three main bias problems with meta-analysis studies. Number one is the obvious problem of a researcher shading the data, the second common problem is a good meta-analysis of badly designed studies will still result in bad statistics. The third – and I suspect most relevant here – is the file drawer problem characterized by negative or non-significant results being tucked away in a cabinet.

In September 2011, Berkley’s Julie Suttie reported about Durlak’s paper in the journal Greater Good. Professor Suttie wrote:

“While these results are encouraging to SEL researchers and practitioners, not all large-scale studies have provided such hearty endorsements of SEL lately. Last fall, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Education, released a report that evaluated seven different SEL programs, including Positive Action, and the results were underwhelming.

“In the study, for each SEL program, a research team compared a group of five to seven schools running that program with other schools in the same district not employing the program. When the researchers looked at their results, they saw no significant differences in social and emotional literacy between the schools that received SEL training and those that didn’t, and no increases in academic achievement or decreases in problematic behavior. In other words, the SEL programs appeared to be duds.”

The December California Educator makes the NEA commitment to SEL obvious and the AFT provides free lesson plans for teaching SEL. The teachers’ unions are backing another Bill Gates promoted set of top down standards to be forced on public schools. To quote the Turko Files, “It’s just not right!”

STEM is and Always was a Fraud

In the 1990’s, I was working in Silicon Valley. The papers were full of reports about the shortage of American trained engineers. Our Democratic congresswomen, Zoe Lofgren promised to work with Democratic President, Bill Clinton to open the doors to foreign talent – to expand the H1B visa program.

In 1993, just the year before Zoe began her congressional campaign to save Silicon Valley, every company interviewing engineering graduates at San Diego State University cancelled the interviews. By 1995, in the San Jose area, engineers were rapidly changing jobs as companies tried to steal each other’s secrets and talent. One of the main motives for promoting the fraudulent H1B visa program was not as much driving salaries down as it was the fact that engineers working on those visas could not change companies.

The biggest justification for the H1B visa program was that we were not training enough math, science and engineering professionals. The reality I saw was people who could have easily applied their skill set in a different area that had a need – were laid off. New hires from India or China were given those open positions.

California Educator does not question the assumptions about needing to inspire more students into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) it just asserts “STEM education is taking off.” The union organ then regales us with real-life examples of STEM teaching heroes and heroines.

We read, “For Camie Walker’s elementary students, engineering makes math and science relevant.” Camie is quoted as saying “To me, engineering is the path-way between math and science and language arts, so students can make connections to what they are learning in ways they never could before.”

We are also assured that “Her STEM program incorporates Next Generation Science Standards and Common Core.”

Another piece in California Educator starts, “This year, Jason Diodati’s upper-level engineering students are building battling drones.” The article continues, ‘“They’ll have to rebuild the ones that get destroyed,’ says Diodati, who teaches physics and engineering at Templeton High School in Templeton, near San Luis Obispo.”

Neither Walker or Diodati are teaching engineering. They are teaching project based science. Engineering is a branch of applied physics that people cannot study until they develop advanced mathematics and science skills. Generally, people do not study engineering until their second year at a university and not in real depth until their third year.

I like the concept of teaching project based math and science, but mislabeling it engineering to placate businessmen in engineering companies has doomed the NGSS science standards. These standards have kindergarten engineering standards that are somehow supposed to be unique from kindergarten science standards. Standards based mechanized education is horrible education theory and horrible unnecessarily and confusing science standards are a disaster.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers magazine, Spectrum proclaimed “The STEM Crisis Is a Myth.” They counselled “Forget the dire predictions of a looming shortfall of scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians.

Writing for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Jay Schalin observed,

“Everybody knows that the best way to get ahead today is to get a college degree.  Even better is to major in one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) subjects, where the bulk of the jobs of the present and future lie. Politicians, business leaders, and academics all herald the high demand for scientists and engineers.

“But they are, for the most part, wrong. The real facts suggest that, in many STEM specialties, there is a labor glut, not a shortage.”

“The apparent misinformation continues to this day. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been particularly vocal about supposed shortages of skilled labor in the computer industry.”

Walter Hickey writing at the Business Insider reputed,

“We clearly don’t have a STEM shortage. If we did, rudimentary economics would kick in and show either low unemployment for new majors or a rising price of computer science labor. People wouldn’t say they’re out of the industry because of no jobs.”

Michael S. Teitelbaum wrote a powerful piece on this issue for Atlantic magazine titled “The Myth of the Science and Engineering Shortage.” He reported:

“A compelling body of research is now available, from many leading academic researchers and from respected research organizations such as the National Bureau of Economic Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Urban Institute. No one has been able to find any evidence indicating current widespread labor market shortages or hiring difficulties in science and engineering occupations that require bachelors degrees or higher, although some are forecasting high growth in occupations that require post-high school training but not a bachelors degree. All have concluded that U.S. higher education produces far more science and engineering graduates annually than there are S&E job openings—the only disagreement is whether it is 100 percent or 200 percent more.”

If the NEA and the AFT are going to be our public voice, they have got to stop promoting corporate education reform. Stop promoting SEL standards, Common Core State Standards, NGSS science standards, STEM education fraud, Competency Based Education and the federal education law ESSA that benefits everyone but students, teachers and taxpayers. Teachers unions must fight these corporate inspired raids on education funding and their effort to de-professionalize teaching.

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San Diego Schools Awash in Technology Malpractice

5 Nov

By Thomas Ultican 11/6/2016

Every year, school districts in San Diego County are wasting $10’s of millions on technology. This spending binge harms education and is difficult for school boards to oppose. Worst of all children and good pedagogy are being harmed.

ESSA Promotes Technology over Good Pedagogy

When congress passed the new education law (ESSA), the United States Department of Education (USED) was transformed into the nation’s leading education technology sales force. Secretary of Education John King has effectively become a shill for a group of corporations and their “non-profit” foundations working to sell “blended learning”; “competency based education”; “personalized learning”; “linked learning”; etc. These initiatives have at least four things in common; they all profit technology companies; they all are unproven; they all promote unhealthy education practices; and they overturn a student’s right to privacy.

The former governor of West Virginia, Bob Wise, has been leading the Alliance for Excellence in Education since 2005. On their web presence the Alliance lists this group of supporters: Anonymous, AT&T Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, GE Foundation, James Irvine Foundation, Kern Family Foundation, National Public Education Support Fund, Nellie Mae Education Foundation, State Farm, Stuart Foundation, and William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. For unknown reasons, the biggest dollars appear to come from anonymous. This foundation is just one example, there are hundreds of non-profits like this supported by many of these same groups. They sound well-intentioned but their main motive is monetizing and controlling education in a way that supports corporate desires.

Bob Wise’s organization sponsors Future Ready which says, “The Alliance for Excellent Education leads Future Ready in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education and a vast coalition of both national and regional organizations.” Pictured below are 3 of the 12 rows of sponsors advertised on their web site. It is disturbing that the two major teachers’ unions, American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are there along with the national PTA.

future-ready

Future Ready asks every superintendent of schools in the United States to take its pledge in exchange for some sort of support. Here is the opening statement for the Future Ready pledge:

future-ready-pledge

Signing up for this pledge is a bit arduous, however, almost every school superintendent in San Diego County has signed it; including Sweetwater’s Karen Janney and San Diego Unified’s Cindy Marten.

Practically speaking, the pledge means giving every child a device capable of providing both their lessons and their assessments. The Future Ready vision is for lessons delivered by software packages from various vendors including Microsoft, Pearson and Google. Students will then be awarded digital badges recorded in their profile in the cloud. The vision is to eliminate school as we know it (except for high end private schools).

Another of the ubiquitous non-profits working to monetize schools, ACT Foundation, teamed with the Institute for the Future to produce a video called “Learning is Earning”. It imagines a dystopian future for all Americans provided by technology companies.

A recent Texas study found that “there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork.” And the New York Times reported recently on classroom use of technology in Arizona, where “The digital push aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom.” As the Times reported, “schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”

A blogger who goes by the name Wrenchinthegears has created a series of posts about the digital education being promulgated by Silicon Valley billionaires, politicians and federal bureaucrats: From Neighborhood Schools to Learning Eco-Systems, A Dangerous Trade and Questions We Should be asking about “Future Ready” Schools plus Wrenchinthegears has provide an amazing slide show analyzing the threat we face. He/she concludes in Trade You a Backpack of Badges for a Caring Teacher & Well-resourced School:

“In this brave new world, education will no longer be defined as an organic, interdisciplinary process where children and educators collaborate in real-time, face-to-face, as a community of learners. Instead, 21st century education is about unbundling and tagging discrete skill sets that will be accumulated NOT with the goal of becoming a thoughtful, curious member of society, but rather for attaining a productive economic niche with as little time “wasted” on “extraneous” knowledge as possible. The problem, of course, is that we know our children’s futures will depend on flexibility, a broad base of knowledge, the ability to work with others, and creative, interdisciplinary thinking, none of which are rewarded in this new ‘personalized pathway/badging’ approach to education.”

A school teacher in Maine named Emily Talmage was one of the first educators to realize the seriousness of this current attack on public education. While the rest of us were focused on limiting the damage from standardized testing, she saw that the monetizing groups had moved on to “Ed Reform 2.0” and were actually leveraging opposition to testing to advance their agenda. In her most recent post, she writes:

“Lately, the MacArthur Foundation has been everywhere that Ed Reform 2.0 (personalized, competency-based, digital learning) has been – sponsoring conferences at the U.S. Department of Education on the merits of Social Impact Bonds, awarding grants to promote digital learning efforts, and even gaining recognition for their work with Mozilla and HASTAC in advancing the competency-based “digital badging” agenda from the Clinton Global Initiative. (Yeah – the Clinton’s are involved in this too, in a big way.)”

In this same post Ms. Talmage reports on the use of digital education in China:

“Under the auspices of corporate giants Tencent and Alibaba, Chinese citizens will be required by 2020 to earn a character credit score based on their actions on social media. If you post government-approved articles, for example, you’ll earn points that you can then show off to your friends.  [It gets even creepier than that, watch this video she linked into her post.]

“And if you’re now thinking: but that’s China! That could never happen here! Consider the fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg – now a major investor in personalized learning initiatives across the country – is quite fond of Sesame Credit’s sponsor, Jack Ma of Alibaba.

“According to the Wall Street Journal, ‘Mr. Zuckerberg said he was optimistic about China’s future development because the country focused on science and technology education.’”

 San Diego Schools Buy In

 The Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD) is a 7th through 12th grade school system serving 40,000 students in south San Diego, Chula Vista, National City and Imperial Beach. SUHSD’s 2014 technology plan says;

“According to Project RED, ‘The daily use of technology in core classes correlates highly to desirable Education Success Measures [and] was one of the top five indicators of better discipline, better attendance, and increased college attendance.’ And yet, many 1:1 schools reported using the technology only weekly or less frequently for many classes. In fact, the researchers concluded that 80 percent of schools under-utilize technologies they have already purchased.”

 The official SUHSD technology plan is highly influenced by the research of Project Red. So, what is Project Red? Is this a well-known education research center led by the most well respected education professionals in America? It is not! It’s a non-profit financed by Intel, HP, Pearson and Smart. In other words, it is a group of ‘vulture philanthropists’ tilling the soil for sales. To paraphrase Peter Greene, it is like Ford’s PR firm reporting that their new Focus is the most advanced car in the world.

SUHSD embraced 1:1 digital learning first by rolling out I-pads for all students beginning with 7th graders in 2012. This year, they have changed course; are retrieving the I-pads and replacing them with Chinese laptops from Lenov running on the Microsoft Windows operating system 10.1. It is widely believed this operating system is harvesting vast amounts of data from users, which means student’s privacy is sundered.

San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) is a k-12 district serving more the 100,000 students. It too has succumbed to the under researched but very profitable 21st century digital learning agenda. In their July 2014 i21 report, the committee charged with mapping SDUSD’s technology future recommended:

  • “Provide equity of access to all students with individual devices and 24/7 connectivity”
  • “Evaluate a blended model of district-supplied and student-owned devices “
  • “Implement competency-based learning and problem-solving-based assessments, aligned with Common Core standards”

On October, 5 2016, a San Diego Union Tribune article announced that SDUSD has agreed to purchase and distribute to students 16,000 Google Chromebooks. It stated, “Google announced a collaboration with the San Diego Unified School District this week, and sent its ‘chief education evangelist’ to tour campuses and meet with teachers and students to see first-hand how the company’s equipment, apps and search engines are used.”

In January 2016, Senator Al Franken wrote a letter to Google expressing his concerns about student privacy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported:

“After we filed our complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about Google’s unauthorized collection of personal information from school children using Chromebooks and the company’s educational apps, we heard from hundreds of parents around the country concerned about K-12 student privacy. This week, an important voice in Washington joined their growing chorus.

“On Wednesday, Senator Al Franken (D-MN) wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking for information about the privacy practices of Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Several of his questions reflect concern over the issues we raised with the FTC. Sen. Franken is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law.”

SUHSD and SDUSD are purchasing more than 30,000 laptops this year, which means they must also have the infrastructure to support these devices. In addition, all of the education applications require the school districts to purchase licenses that must be periodically renewed. That is a lot of money to spend on technology.

Both SUHSD and SDUSD have embraced blended learning. To start the school year, the teaching staff at Sweetwater was solicited to apply for the new blended learning specialist position; now there is a blended learning specialist at every school. Blended learning means children working independently at screens with some teacher instruction. It is the preferred method of the infamous mall charter schools which have been revealed as not just producing substandard education but too often are obvious frauds.

The August 31, 2016 issue of Time Magazine carried an article by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras called “Screens In Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax.” In this article, he argues that putting children in front of digital devices is bad learning strategy which has known deleterious health effects. The paragraph quoted below outlines some of these health problems and provides a powerful and diverse set of linked references supporting his arguments.

“Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids, which I will explain shortly, it can also clinically hurt them. I’ve worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus, but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion. Indeed, over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD, screen addiction, increased aggression, depression, anxiety and even psychosis.”

 What is a Better Alternative for Good Education?

I just finished reading Samuel Abrams book Education and the Commercial Mindset (see review here). In his reporting on the ill-fated Edison Project, Abrams discussed their troubled high end private school in New York City, Avenues. For financial reasons, Avenues had to raise class sizes to an average of 18 students, while their competitors in the high-end education market like Dalton maintained class sizes of 14 to 15 (page 145). The wealthy are not putting their children in front of screens and they do value smaller class sizes.

If we truly want 21st century education in America, there are three simple strategies that have been proven to work. They are the strategies implemented by the unambiguously most successful education system in the Western Hemisphere, the public-school system in Finland.

1) Require a master’s degree, thorough pedagogical training, and licensing before allowing a teacher into a classroom. This requires educators to be paid commensurate with other professionals, however, if we truly want the best, we must pay for the best.

2) Reduce average class sizes to less than 20 students. Bill Gates has said class size is not so important, but he sent his children to a high-end private school with class sizes of less than 20.

3) Make trained experienced educators the leading voices in education policy. Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, Louis Gerstner and their ilk are arrogant uninformed amateurs whose vast power due to wealth makes them dangerous.

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