Traditional teaching faces a cyberthreat from school model - LA Times

Traditional teaching faces a cyberthreat from school model - LA Times:

Op-Ed Traditional teaching faces a cyberthreat from school model

There's a new network of K-8 private schools called AltSchool, based in San Francisco and soon expanding to Brooklyn, N.Y., and Palo Alto. From that tiny amount of information — the name, the locations — you can probably guess that AltSchool is trying to modernize education for the digital age. At AltSchool, according to NPR, every student “has a laptop or a tablet, and they spend about 30% of their day on their devices, completing what are called playlists.”

AltSchool, which announced recently that it was hiring executives from Google, Uber and Zynga, is also a software developer. While AltSchool expands its network into what one investor hopes will become “the world's biggest private school system,” it is simultaneously planning to license technology to other academic institutions. Silicon Valley has taken notice: In May, AltSchool announced $100 million in funding from various investors, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. It would seem the company has tapped into the zeitgeist.

As a high school teacher, I've followed these developments with trepidation. Whether or not AltSchool meets lofty expectations, it epitomizes the increasingly popular belief that human instructors must cede to computers as the font of knowledge. That's a profound shift that educators have barely begun to contemplate.

AltSchool's pitch to parents — as opposed to investors — is familiar. It offers small class sizes, highly qualified teachers and instant feedback. Public schools have explicitly prioritized these qualities for decades. Somewhat less familiar is AltSchool's description of what those highly qualified teachers actually do. According to AltSchool's website, “The sheer amount of information available today calls for us ... to reimagine the educational experience” as one in which teachers “curate” the curriculum in partnership with students and parents and “co-learn with the students.”

Although he comes from a family of teachers, AltSchool's founder and chief executive, Max Ventilla, told me he “definitely agrees” that whereas teachers were once considered the Traditional teaching faces a cyberthreat from school model - LA Times: