Code Acts in Education: Learning from Surveillance Capitalism ‘Surveillance capitalism’ has become a defining concept for the current era of smart machines and Silicon Valley expansionism. With educational institutions and practices increasingly focused on data collection and outsourcing to technology providers, key points from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism can help explore
Answer Sheet: How Corporate Interests are Overtaking Well-Intentioned Goals of Personalized Learning It’s been years now that we’ve been hearing about how “personalized learning” is the new thing in education. Actually, it isn’t. In 2013, George Wood, then the superintendent of the Federal Hocking Local School District in Ohio and chair of the board for the Coalition of Essential Schools , wrote
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Making Schools Business-Like: Google in Classrooms (Part 2) Listen to Joanna Petrone, Longfellow Middle School English teacher in Berkeley (CA), describe her use of Google. On a typical day, students start class with a warm-up activity posted on Google Classroom. After we go over their answers and I teach a lesson, I might direct my students to
Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Making Schools Business-Like: The Longest School Reform in U.S. History? (Part 1) If A Nation at Risk is one book-end of the longest school reform. the other book end has yet to be put in place. Business-influenced school reform continues into the second decade of the 21st century stretching nearly four decades. Rivaling this long run of school
Curmudgucation: Using Cultural Competency to Sell Personalized [sic] Learning Over at EdTechTimes, a site that for a consulting group that clearly is interested in pushing personalized [sic] learning, I found a podcast by Mariel Cariker entitled " Cultural Competency: Finding Ways To Bring Equity Through Personalized Learning. " (It is accompanied by a transcript.) The podcast is sponsored by Tea
Psychology Today: The Problems with Parental Notifications and "Opt-Outs" There is a controversy happening in my local school district where the superintendent has emailed all teachers a directive that they have to give one week’s notice to parents (via email) anytime they plan a lesson that will address " gender identity ." In my view, there are multiple problems with requiring parental notice t
Our Schools: Things Didn’t Go Well When Betsy DeVos was Confronted with Her Department’s Charter School Fraud During a series of recent congressional hearings in Washington, D.C., U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos had to respond to a recent report finding the U.S. Department of Education has been scammed for hundreds of millions of dollars by fraudulent or mismanaged charter schools. Her re
Diane Ravitch's Blog: Kansas: Students, Parents Rebel Against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning Today, the New York Times posted a story about a rebellion in Kansas against Mark Zuckerberg’s Summit Learning platform. They said NO to Facebook’s “personalized learning,” which replaces teachers with Chromebooks. Good for the students of Kansas! WELLINGTON, Kan. — The seed of rebellion was planted in
Janresseger: Low Salaries, High Rents, Poor Teaching Conditions Create Widespread Shortage of Qualified Teachers You’d have to be pretty out of touch to have missed that teachers, who have been striking all year from West Virginia to Kentucky to Oklahoma to California, have been showing us their pay is inadequate and their working conditions are horrible. Schools in too many places feature huge c
Nancy Bailey's Education Website: What Preschool Isn’t: Waterford UPSTART and Any Other Online Program! No one can deny the importance of early learning. We have years of research by developmental psychologists and early childhood education researchers built on findings to help us understand how preschoolers learn. We need to fund adequate preschools so students get a good introduction to the joy
Living in Dialogue: Will Oklahoma Rein In Epic Charter Failure? As the Network for Public Education documents a billion dollars wasted on failed charter schools, the national news is full of the latest charter financial scandals stretching from New Jersey to California. We can’t forget, however, that virtual charters, like Oklahoma’s Epic for-profit charters, have the potential of producing even
Shanker Blog: Dispatches from the Nexus of Boring and Important School finance is one of those education policy topics located at the extreme ends of the important continuum as well as the boring continuum. On the one hand, school funding is relevant to virtually all major education policy decisions at the state-, district-, and school levels - at least in the background, but usually in the foreg
Curmudgucation: DeVos, Class Size, and the Reformistan Bubble I almost feel sorry for Betsy DeVos. Her two big news breaks this week are not entirely her fault. First, there's the Special Olympics fiasco. It appears that the budget office made the hugely unpopular cut, and DeVos stood by it like a good soldier, right until Donald Trump threw her under the bus and canceled the cuts (that were neve
Living in Dialogue: Why I Was Shaking My Head at Betsy DeVos A video of Betsy DeVos responding to questions from Lucille Roybal-Allard of the House Appropriations Committee hearing has gone viral, and has been watched now by many thousands of people. I appear in the background, shaking my head as DeVos asserts that larger class sizes might actually be beneficial since they allow students to colla
The Conversation: Tax Credits, School Choice and 'Neovouchers': What You Need to Know As Republican lawmakers craft a tax reform bill , there’s speculation on the import taxes, value-added taxes and tax cuts it may usher in. Meanwhile, it’s likely that the bill will also include a major education policy initiative from the Trump administration: a tax credit designed to fund private school voucher
