John Pane of RAND writes to correct my post on Teach to One and my response
About two weeks ago, I posted a history of the program Teach to One (TtO): how it had first been developed in NYC Department of Education as a blended learning math program called School of One, how after it had spun off from DOE as a separate company called New Classrooms, the developer Joel Rose had promised never to charge NYC schools a fee to use it, instead granting them with a “royalty free, perpetual, non-exclusive license”, but then how the company has continued to charge a license fee to NYC schools anyway. The main focus of the piece was to describe how the huge hype surrounding the Teach to One program and the suppression of the findings of negative or null evaluations of its results has allowed it to expand to more schools, despite disappointing results and a 60 percent school attrition rate.
In a single paragraph towards the end of this rather lengthy post, I summarized the findings of a RAND report on the Next Generation Learning Challenge (NGLC) schools, assuming that schools using Teach to One were part of the evaluation, since TtO is a grantee of the NGLC program. Diane Ravitch subsequently ran excerpts of my blog on hers.
John Pane, the lead researcher on the Rand report, wrote to Diane that New Classrooms / Teach to One was not one of the programs included in this evaluation. I have posted a correction on that matter on my original blog post.
He also critiqued the way I reported his remarks to Education Week about “personalized learning” schools in general, that “the evidence base is very weak at this point,” and said that the paragraph in which I described the results of the Rand report had “numerous false and misleading statements,” including my summary of survey results that suggest that the students at NGLC schools “were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools.”
He has granted his permission to quote his letter in full below, which I have done, along with my response to the points in his letter.
On Thu, Mar 7, 2019 at 12:17 PM Pane, John <jpane@rand.org> wrote:
Dear Diane,
On March 4, 2018 you published this blog entry, “Leonie Haimson: Reality Vs. Hype in “Teach to One” Program,” excerpting from Leonie Haimson’s blog. Your excerpt included this paragraph about my own research (with colleagues) and my public statements:
“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have included both Summit and Teach to One, concluded there were small and mostly insignificant gains in achievement at these schools, and their students were more likely to feel alienated and unsafe compared to matched students at similar schools. The overall results caused John Pane, the lead RAND researcher, to say to Ed Week that ‘the evidence base [for these schools] is very weak at this point.’“
This paragraph by Haimson has numerous false and misleading statements. Here I summarize my critique, excerpting the original paragraph:
“The most recent RAND analysis of schools that used personalized learning programs that received funding through the Next Generation Learning initiative, which have CONTINUE READING: NYC Public School Parents: John Pane of RAND writes to correct my post on Teach to One and my response