The pandemic gave the education technology industry the opportunity to FINALLY deliver on the bold promises it has been making for decades. What happened instead was just another failure to disrupt, says MIT’s Justin Reich. Transcript is here. And a description of the Imagining September project with links to participate is here.
After thirty years of devotion to “reform” (aka, deform or disruption), reform leaders in Minnesota are proposing a state constitutional amendment that will install more mischief into the state’s public schools. Rob Levine, an ardent critic of privatization, has written this account of their multiple failures and their plans to try yet again to impose their ideas on the state’s schools. He wrote this post at my request, after I saw his tweets about the travesty that “reformers” are promoting. Rob is a “follow the money” kind of person, which unsurprisingly removes the veil from bold promises that never come true. Minnesota is allowing big money to dictate the fate of its schools. Is there any accountability in the state for thirty years of failure? Why do “reformers” never learn from their failures?
He writes:
In the Fall of 2022 Minnesotans may be voting on a constitutional amendment that will fundamentally change state law around public education. How will this change public education? Surprisingly, even the authors profess not to know the answer to this question. The only thing certain about the proposed amendment is that it will CONTINUE READING: Minnesota: Time for the Failed “Reformers” to Leave the Schools Alone | Diane Ravitch's blog
Here we go again. Before either Secretary-designate Miguel Cardona or Deputy Secretary Cindy Marten have been confirmed by the Senate, key jobs in the Department of Education are being filled by staff from the Gates Foundation and DFER, both of which are champions of bad ideas and antagonists of public schools. From my experience in the U.S. Department of Education, it is customary to allow the Secretary and Deputy Secretary to choose their assistant secretaries, and the assistant secretaries choose their deputies. These appointments seem to have been made by the White House. Please note that the Office of Planning, Evaluation, and Policy Development shapes policy for the Department. The administration previously announced a fervent supporter of high-stakes testing—Ian Rosenblum of Education Trust in New York—as the acting Assistant Secretary for that office.
Andrew Ujifusa reports in Education Week:
The latest round of political appointees to the U.S. Department of Education include a veteran of Capitol Hill and Beltway education groups, the former leader of Democrats for Education Reform’s District of Columbia affiliate, and two former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation staffers.
The Biden administration appointments, announced Feb. CONTINUE READING: Biden Administration Adds “Reformers” to Key Roles in Department of Education | Diane Ravitch's blog
This article first appeared in Salon.
DeVos' tenure leaves us with unanswered questions: How is it possible that the leader of the Education Department could be so indifferent to public education itself? Why wouldn't she learn the basics about her own department?
Scholars and pundits have offered answers. For one thing, DeVos did not care about her department because she thought her department should not exist. Like conservatives ever since the Reagan administration, DeVos yearned to dismantle her own department from within. DeVos, in this analysis, was never the guardian of public education but rather the "wolf at the schoolhouse door."
That explanation is true and important. For decades, conservative leaders have threatened to eliminate the Education Department entirely. Even when Rick Perry could not remember all three of the federal departments he planned to eliminate back in 2011, he remembered that one of them was Education.
But that explanation can only get us so far. There is another reason why conservatives like DeVos often show a stunning ignorance about public schools. After all, even if she only planned to undermine public schools, it would make sense for her to learn a little something about them. Secretary DeVos never did.
In her infamous interview on "60 Minutes" in 2018, for example, CONTINUE READING: DeVos was terrible at her job and knew nothing about public schools. That was exactly what the far right wanted - Raw Story - Celebrating 16 Years of Independent Journalism
Betsy DeVos (who will soon not be a humble servant in the education secretary's office, but will instead be a very rich lady who wants to dismantle public education) likes to compare her vision of education to the same kind of disruption offered by outfits like Uber, a comparison that many folks like to make. I've written before about what a lousy comparison that is, focusing on problems like a business mentality and the problems of automation.
But here's a quick piece by techno-critic Cory Doctorow to remind us that Uber is, at the end, a terrible thing for anybody to want to emulate. Instead, he says, Uber was "a company that was never, ever going to be profitable, which existed solely to launder billions for the Saudi royals."
Doctorow connects Uber to a Saudi plan to diversify and capture monopolies in other sectors as a cushion against future downturns in the oil market. Their plan for Uber was, well...
The S1 – the document that explains how the company plans to be profitable – set two conditions for Uber's profitability.
A Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Justin Reich)
Justin Reich is a Professor at MIT and director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. He is the author of the Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Harvard University Press, 2020). This article appeared in Teaching Times, August 20, 2020.
Over the last ten years, education technology evangelists have made remarkable claims about how new technologies will transform educational systems. In 2009, Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School predicted that half of all secondary school courses in the US would be online by 2019, and that they’d cost 1/3 of a traditional course and provide better outcomes. Sal Khan of Khan Academy proposed in a TED talk that he could use short videos to reinvent education.
Sebastian Thrun of Udacity said that in 50 years we’d have only 10 institutions of higher education in the world after massive open online courses colonized the field. As the winner of the TED Prize, Sugata Mitra claimed that students didn’t even need schools or teachers, and that groups of children with access to the internet could teach themselves anything.
A disaster
And then in 2020, the world was blighted by a terrible pandemic. Schools serving over 1.6 billion learners shut down. It was a moment that technologists had promised for years could be transformative, but for most learners and families, remote online learning has been a disaster.
As educators face the challenge of spooling up new online and hybrid schools to CONTINUE READING: A Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education (Justin Reich) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
Innosight Institute Inc
Date: May 2019Purpose: to study the adoption behaviors of districts who are now using high quality common core curriculum and better understand their “switching behaviors”Amount: $248,703Term: 17Topic: K-12 EducationProgram: United StatesGrantee Location: Lexington, MassachusettsGrantee Website: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/
