Schools spend billions on technology even as they lay off teachers with little proof it improves basic learning
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN Texas A Texas study based upon four years of solid research found that when it comes to students immersion in technology and their academic achievement there was no evidence linking technology immersion with student self-directed learning or their general satisfaction with schoolwork." And the New York Times has reported on the use of technology in Arizona classrooms where
The digital push aims to go far beyond gadgets to transform the very nature of the classroom."
And as the Times has reported Schools are spending billions on technology even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning." The August 31 2016 issue of Time Magazine carried an article by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras called Screens In Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax." In this article he argues that putting children in front of digital devices is bad learning strategy which has known deleterious health effects. The quoted comments below outline some of these health problems and provides a powerful and diverse set of linked references supporting his arguments.Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids which I will explain shortly it can also clinically hurt them.
Ive worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion.
Indeed over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD screen addiction increased aggression depression anxiety and even psychosis."
High school mathematics & physics (regular Honors and AP) teacher Thomas Ultican this points out extensively in the article below the onslaught states like Texas now face as they attempt to improve education results within a growing and vastly divergent student population. Ultican beginsEvery year school districts in San Diego County California are wasting $10s of millions on technology. This spending binge harms education and is difficult for school boards to oppose. Worst of all children and good pedagogy are being harmed.
Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Promotes Technology over Good Pedagogy By Thomas Ultican
When Congress passed the new education Every Student Succeeds Act law (ESSA) the United States Department of Education was transformed into the nations leading education technology sales force. President Barack Obamas Education Secretary John King has effectively become a shill for a group of corporations and their non-profit" foundations working to sell:
- Blended Learning
- Competency-Based Education
- Personalized Learning
- Project-Based Learning
- Collaborative Learning
- Linked Learning. etc.
- They all profit technology companies
- They all are unproven
- They all promote unhealthy education practices and
- They overturn a students right to privacy
- Anonymous
- AT&T Foundation
- Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
- Carnegie Corporation of New York
- GE Foundation
- National Public Education Support Fund
- Nellie Mae Education Foundation
- State Farm
- Stuart Foundation
- William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and more
For unknown reasons the biggest dollars appear to come from anonymous. This foundation is just one example there are hundreds of non-profits like this supported by many of these same groups. They sound well-intentioned but their main motive is monetizing and controlling education in a way that supports corporate desires.
Bob Wises organization sponsors Future Ready which says The Alliance for Excellent Education leads Future Ready in partnership with the U.S. Department of Education and a vast coalition of both national and regional organizations."
Pictured below are 3 of the 12 rows of sponsors advertised on their web site. It is disturbing that the two major teachers unions American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association are there along with the national PTA.
Future Ready asks every superintendent of schools in the United States to take its pledge in exchange for some sort of support. Here is the opening statement for the Future Ready pledge:
Practically speaking the pledge means giving every child a device capable of providing both their lessons and their assessments. The Future Ready vision is for lessons delivered by software packages from various vendors including Microsoft Pearson and Google. Students will then be awarded digital badges recorded in their profile in the cloud.
The vision is to eliminate school as we know it (except for high end private schools).
Another of the ubiquitous non-profits working to monetize schools the ACT Foundation teamed with the Institute for the Future to produce a video called Learning is Earning". It imagines a dystopian future for all Americans provided by technology companies.
A blogger who goes by the name Wrenchinthegears has created a series of posts about the digital education being promulgated by Silicon Valley billionaires politicians and federal bureaucrats: From Neighborhood Schools to Learning Eco-Systems A Dangerous Trade and Questions We Should be asking about Future Ready" Schools plus Wrenchinthegears has provide an amazing slide show analyzing the threat we face. He/she concludes in Trade You a Backpack of Badges for a Caring Teacher & Well-resourced School:
In this brave new world education will no longer be defined as an organic interdisciplinary process where children and educators collaborate in real-time face-to-face as a community of learners.
Instead 21st century education is about unbundling and tagging discrete skill sets that will be accumulated NOT with the goal of becoming a thoughtful curious member of society but rather for attaining a productive economic niche with as little time wasted" on extraneous" knowledge as possible.
The problem of course is that we know our childrens futures will depend on flexibility a broad base of knowledge the ability to work with others and creative interdisciplinary thinking none of which are rewarded in this new personalized pathway/badging approach to education."
A school teacher in Maine named Emily Talmage was one of the first educators to realize the seriousness of this current attack on public education. While most were focused on limiting the damage from standardized testing she saw that the monetizing groups had moved on to Ed Reform 2.0" and were actually leveraging opposition to testing to advance their agenda. In her most recent post she writes:
Lately the MacArthur Foundation has been everywhere that Ed Reform 2.0 (personalized competency-based digital learning) has been sponsoring conferences at the U.S. Department of Education on the merits of Social Impact Bonds awarding grants to promote digital learning efforts and even gaining recognition for their work with Mozilla and HASTAC in advancing the competency-based digital badging" agenda from the Clinton Global Initiative. (Yeah the Clintons are involved in this too in a big way.)"
Under the auspices of corporate giants Tencent and Alibaba Chinese citizens will be required by 2020 to earn a character credit score based on their actions on social media. If you post government-approved articles for example youll earn points that you can then show off to your friends.
It gets even creepier than that watch this video she linked into her post.
And if youre now thinking: but thats China! That could never happen here! Consider the fact that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg now a major investor in personalized learning initiatives across the country is quite fond of Sesame Credits sponsor Jack Ma of Alibaba.
According to the Wall Street Journal Mr. Zuckerberg said he was optimistic about Chinas future development because the country focused on science and technology education."
San Diego Schools Buy In The Sweetwater Union High School District (SUHSD) is a 7th through 12th grade school system serving 40000 students in south San Diego Chula Vista National City and Imperial Beach. SUHSDs 2014 technology plan says; According to Project RED The daily use of technology in core classes correlates highly to desirable Education Success Measures and was one of the top five indicators of better discipline better attendance and increased college attendance. And yet many 1:1 schools reported using the technology only weekly or less frequently for many classes. In fact the
researchers concluded that 80 of schools under-utilize technologies they have already purchased."
The official SUHSD technology plan is highly influenced by the research of Project Red.
So what is Project Red? Is this a well-known education research center led by the most well respected education professionals in America? It is not! Its a non-profit financed by Intel HP Pearson and Smart. In other words it is a group of vulture philanthropists tilling the soil for sales.
To paraphrase Peter Greene it is like Fords PR firm reporting that their new Focus is the most advanced car in the world.
SUHSD embraced 1:1 digital learning first by rolling out I-pads for all students beginning with 7th graders in 2012. This year they have changed course; are retrieving the I-pads and replacing them with Chinese laptops from Lenov running on the Microsoft Windows operating system 10.1. It is widely believed this operating system is harvesting vast amounts of data from users which means students privacy is sundered.
On October 5 2016 a San Diego Union Tribune article announced that SDUSD has agreed to purchase and distribute to students 16000 Google Chromebooks. It stated Google announced a collaboration with the San Diego Unified School District this week and sent its chief education evangelist to tour campuses and meet with teachers and students to see first-hand how the companys equipment apps and search engines are used."
In January 2016 Senator Al Franken wrote a letter to Google expressing his concerns about student privacy. The Electronic Frontier Foundation reported:
After we filed our complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) about Googles unauthorized collection of personal information from school children using Chromebooks and the companys educational apps we heard from hundreds of parents around the country concerned about K-12 student privacy.
This week an important voice in Washington joined their growing chorus.
On Wednesday Senator Al Franken (right D-MN) wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking for information about the privacy practices of Google Apps for Education (GAFE). Several of his questions reflect concern over the issues we raised with the FTC. Sen. Franken is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy Technology and the Law."
SUHSD and SDUSD are purchasing more than 30000 laptops this year which means they must also have the infrastructure to support these devices. In addition all of the education applications require the school districts to purchase licenses that must be periodically renewed. That is a lot of money to spend on technology. Both SUHSD and SDUSD have embraced blended learning. Blended learning means children working independently at screens with some teacher instruction. It is the preferred method of the infamous mall charter schools which have been revealed as not just producing substandard education but too often are obvious frauds. The August 31 2016 issue of Time Magazine carried an article by Dr. Nicholas Kardaras called Screens In Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax." In this article he argues that putting children in front of digital devices is bad learning strategy which has known deleterious health effects. The quoted comments below outline some of these health problems and provides a powerful and diverse set of linked references supporting his arguments.Tech in the classroom not only leads to worse educational outcomes for kids which I will explain shortly it can also clinically hurt them.
Ive worked with over a thousand teens in the past 15 years and have observed that students who have been raised on a high-tech diet not only appear to struggle more with attention and focus but also seem to suffer from an adolescent malaise that appears to be a direct byproduct of their digital immersion.
Indeed over two hundred peer-reviewed studies point to screen time correlating to increased ADHD screen addiction increased aggression depression anxiety and even psychosis."
What is a Better Alternative for Good Education? I just finished reading Samuel Abrams book Education and the Commercial Mindset (see review here). In his reporting on the ill-fated Edison Project Abrams discussed their troubled high end private school in New York City Avenues. For financial reasons Avenues had to raise class sizes to an average of 18 students while their competitors in the high-end education market like Dalton maintained class sizes of 14 to 15 (page 145). If we truly want 21st century education in America there are three simple strategies that have been proven to work. They are the strategies implemented by the unambiguously most successful education system in the Western Hemisphere the public-school system in Finland.1.) Require a masters degree thorough pedagogical training and licensing before allowing a teacher into a classroom. This requires educators to be paid commensurate with other professionals however if we truly want the best we must pay for the best.
2.) Reduce average class sizes to less than 20 students. Bill Gates has said class size is not so important but he sent his children to a high-end private school with class sizes of less than 20.
3.) Make trained experienced educators the leading voices in education policy. Bill Gates Reed Hastings Louis Gerstner and their ilk are arrogant uninformed amateurs whose vast power due to wealth makes them dangerous.
