Mark Zuckerberg Is Betting Tech Can Address Educational Equity. Is It That Simple?
As I'm sure you've heard by now, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, used the occasion of their daughter's birth to announce they'll be investing nearly all their fortune, some $45 billion, in good causes.
They announced this, of course, in a lengthy Facebook note. "Personalized learning" makes up the first item on their wish list: "Our initial areas of focus will be personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities."
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is making one main bet: Technology can broaden access to quality education. As the two write:
Let's do a fact check. Personalized learning is a buzzword for software programs that act like automatic tutors: giving feedback, allowing students to go at their own pace and recommending lessons based on a student's previous work.
Some studies show that these programs can produce improvements in learning, up to half a grade level in some cases and for some subjects.
So far, so good. Just one problem. Over the last two decades, educational technologies, including personalized learning, have closed few divides, even when they're free. Instead, they've opened up a new one: the digital divide.
Zuckerberg and Chan, to their credit, acknowledge that "it will take more than technology" to increase equity.
But there's little existing evidence that "the ability to use tools over the Internet" can compensate for lack of access to good schools.
As an example, he cites free online college courses, often touted as a means of democratizing higher education. Reich has just published a paper in Science showing that teens and young adults who sign up for these courses are more affluent than the norm.
In fact, "Young students enrolling in HarvardX and MITx courses live in neighborhoods where the median income is 38 percent higher than typical American neighborhoods." And, more advantaged students tend to be more successful in these courses as well. "Those with a college-educated parent have nearly twice the odds of finishing compared to students whose parents did not complete college."
True, these free online courses have lots of users in developing countries. But even in India or China, other research has shown, those who succeed tend to be those with a lot of relative advantages. "The history of education technology shows emerging