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[Education] - Where Silicon Valley Is What's The Matter With Kansas
AngelHedgie
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Desperate after state level mismanagement of school funding left district coffers dry, Kansas schools turned to a solution presented by Silicon Valley startup Summit Learning, backed with Facebook money.
But after a number of issues that harmed students, they - and their parents - are in revolt:
The story does not get better from there.
Education is too important to have it turned into another cash flow for a tech industry that doesn't care about the damage it does.
But after a number of issues that harmed students, they - and their parents - are in revolt:
The seed of rebellion was planted in classrooms. It grew in kitchens and living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents.
It culminated when Collin Winter, 14, an eighth grader in McPherson, Kan., joined a classroom walkout in January. In the nearby town of Wellington, high schoolers staged a sit-in. Their parents organized in living rooms, at churches and in the back of machine repair shops. They showed up en masse to school board meetings. In neighborhoods with no political yard signs, homemade signs with dark red slash marks suddenly popped up.
Silicon Valley had come to small-town Kansas schools — and it was not going well.
“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.
Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.
Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit’s program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.
Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad’s hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone.
“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son’s fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.
The story does not get better from there.
Education is too important to have it turned into another cash flow for a tech industry that doesn't care about the damage it does.
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Education is really expensive and its easy to talk about it being a "well you went NIMBY and so no good schools for you" but the reality is even with the same systems found in blue states a lot of the central states and southern US would still have shitty school, Texas, California, and Florida nonwithstanding.
If you want rural America to have good schools, we all have to pay for it. Nation-wide. It needs to be a national priority, and it hasn't been since the 70s.
Kansas doesn't quite work that way. Most of the funds are gathered at and distributed at the state level, not at the county or district. Thanks to a decade long lawsuit, there are going to be increases in funding going to all districts across the state with more of the new budgets going to districts that were more affected by the cuts. This same lawsuit was well on it's way to being resolved when Brownback and company decided that they were going to slash the state's budget. This had the effect of the SCotSoK stepping in and beating the legislature with a stick. Reactionaries in the state's GOP made noise about removing members of the court (which would have required constitutional changes) or outright changing the state constitution and removing the equitable education part. Which, I should add, was inserted after Brown V. Board of Education was decided.
Neither of those idea got out of the dream phase of development because they're all deeply unpopular and would require statewide votes to approve them. As it is, education reform has been one of the better sticks both moderates and the state Democrats have been using against the GoP for the past two elections.
Edit: Seems Martini has got it covered better then I did.
The first thing, even if implemented conservatively, would effectively pay for the other five with little difficulty.
"The story does not get better from there" - I mean, it kinda does in that it gets funnier.
lmao, teachers freed from lesson plans and shifted to mentoring positions couldn't find 10min a week for some of these kids. That is a problem, but it's not technology one you can pin on Summit.
It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not.
I bet it is more stressful when you don't get to bullshit with your friends in class anymore. That's honestly worth thinking about, because highschool is social at least as much as it's educational and stripping the bullshit socialization out probably has an impact, especially for extroverts.
But still, come on now.
Socialization in high-school is an important part of teamwork dynamics and, as much as we all have horror stories about it, the effects of it prove to be a consistently scoring net positive over both self-directed and homeschooling. While the latter lead to higher scores and retained knowledge in a generalized way, they also lead to lower implementation and synthesis success rates both directly after k-12 with college and in overall lifetime success.
K-12 socialization is psychologically critical in making both effective strategies in dealing with diverse perspectives, and also in creating coping strategies for stress management through social bonding. Putting kids into high-stress, computer-based learning has shown to have low success rates in a wide range of things when not rigorously combines with team-building and collaborative assignments.
And it obviously fails generally at accessibility. I don't think I could sustain so much computer time constantly.
Edit: without breaks
There's a part of the article where they talk about an epileptic student who was repeatedly triggered by the high level of screen time.
Also, @spool32 I want to poke back into this thread for a moment because of this. The average high-school teacher has 35 students per class, with either six or seven classes per day. Even assuming the six-person schedule, assuming a 210 student load, that's 35 hours a week just to meet with each individual student for 10 minutes. Which is extremely optimistic, as some of those meetings will go beyond 10 minutes, the teachers also have lesson plans and administrative assignments, and that leaves very little prep time between meetings when to effectively advise you should have about equal time in with student as out to ensure you can prepare the right load of discussion and topics to review. So to do this effectively, the teachers would need about 70 hours a week, plus time for their administrative and supplemental assignment duties.
I say this with some degree of expertise, as I did college advising for a wide range of majors, topics, and academic levels (from honors to remedial) for over ten years. And that's for college students, which are considerably more put together than k-12. Add in the early childhood development requirements for the K-12 system, such mentoring is impossible at those numbers, especially in the elementary and junior high levels where you really need much, much lower ratios to effectively teach.
It's not "these teachers couldn't find time for their students lol" it's that this kind of system is functionally impossible to actually do without a substantially lower student-to-teacher ratio.
There is also the problem of giving a weekly mentoring session when you don't really interact with the student in any meaningful capacity outside of that 10 minutes. You don't really know how he learns and what he has problems with because you haven't seen it for yourself in a classroom. So every mentoring session would require each student to not only explain what he is having problem with, but why. Then you have to tailor a solution to that individual student. You are not to be able to go up to the chalkboard and explain a weakness in the lesson to every student simultaneously. Meaning even if you find a common problem and develop a solution, you have to repeat it 25 times instead of just one and you have to check with every student if they are having the same problem because not every student is working on the same thing.
I... just... what?
From anyone else, I'd assume this entire post was parody.
The clincher was how no one in Summit seemed prepared for anyone with special needs. It's like they've ignored the last 50 years of research on the "one size fits all" approach to education.
To be a good mentor, you don't just show up and say "well, how are things going? Good good, see you next week." Like with a therapist or psychologist you are doing a ton of research to effectively do your job.
@spool32
I'm having trouble parsing which of your lines are sarcasm and which are sincere. I think I'm not the only one. Care you clarify your post a bit?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Probably a mix of arrogance and patch culture; Release it now, fix the bugs later, which could never be something as dangerous as giving a student epileptic seizures.
"Some teenagers don't like school" is not exactly some sort of shocker. And outside of the kid with the very uncommon and specific seizure issue, it just sites a bunch of general malaise conditions. I had stress and headaches in highschool, we didn't have anything like Summit.
They don't give any test scores or any sort of performance data. They didn't apparently interview a single teacher in this district about the issue, or include any quotes from teachers in any schools using Summit. But have bunches of quotes from parents. Parents are the worst source to go to on something like this.
"Some parent don't like ________" Just throw in anything anyone ever changes about education, and you've got your news article. Summit, Common core, standardized testing, coed classrooms, sex ed, desegragation, new math, etc. That some parents don't like some thing is a completely meaningless data point. Some parents don't like vaccines, But most parents are no more experts about medicine than they are education, so I'm not sure why their opinions should carry any more weight on one than the other.
Manpower is always a big limiting constraint on what you can accomplish with education. It is literally a problem where you can throw more people at it and generally get better results. Certainly at the level any large scale education system is currently operating at.
There is a plateau for things like student:teacher ratio but it's actually on the other side. At some point each teacher has so many students that additional students piled on top of that basically don't matter. You've hit a kind of rock-bottom.
Summit is also bad for a lot of reasons not stated in that article:
This isn't to say there isn't some promise in the idea of digital, responsive student programming after a certain age. For systems at the college level, or even some more advanced courses in the high-school level like AP or ACE programming, there is a strong case to be made that these systems can provide some real assistance to a formal teaching environment. But that is assistance to, not replacement of. Humans do not have machine learning, you need a human with effective training to evaluate and measure progress of a student. A computer cannot measure the wide range of social and emotional factors that have to be taken into account with the learning process.
I’d like to add: there’s nothing nefarious about experimenting with a new system that turns out to be worse than the old one. That happens all the time! No one on Earth either can anticipate all of the effects of a big intervention on educational delivery. To find the good things we have to try lots of bad things.
Maybe the roll-out was too big too fast; maybe they are withdrawing it too slowly. I’d want to know more about it to come to any firm judgments. It is quite relevant, though, that it was offered for free to a school system that, with inadequate funds, was struggling to maintain regular instruction . That is exactly where you want to test low cost alternative experimental designs, because there is a reasonable case that even if they are worse, no one is made worse off (because the better, standard design would not have been available even if this was not offered).
Compare with the testing of short-course AZT for preventing maternal-fetal HIV transmission in low and middle income countries. We already know long-course AZT worked, but it was unaffordable in those places, whereas short course Might Work, and if it did low and middle income countries could hope to afford it (it did work).
I agree, in general. Ideally, they should have had a small scale, opt-in program which tested the system for a period of over 5 years to determine of there is evidentiary success across transfer between grades and to education systems beyond the individual school system. That Summit is problematic is a variety of ways belies its place as a leading software provider for this sort of technology.
In practice, though, it is unlike a medical system because this causes the harm rather than fails at curing the harm. A bad education will wreck a students entire life.
Otherwise, I think sitting alone on a computer at school is a depressing plan for the future.
No, the nefarious part is when you refuse to allow for independent evaluation:
This is a lot like how Theranos behaved.
Someone in another discussion of this article brought up this piece about "above/below the API" jobs, pointing out that what Summit does is apply that concept to education.
But, yeah. You need a person to evaluate both the "Can they do this more?" and "Should they move ahead?" It's the problem from shows like Numbers, even if you are outpacing the content you still need time to be a kid with other kids your age, and knowing Calculus III before you get to college isn't doing you any favors if you don't know how to talk with people or function in society.
Most alarming, it encourages a culture where peers leave behind the students not performing as well as themselves. This historically has been shown to create a negative feedback loop for a hell of a lot of people, and create real psychological harm in adolescance. There are a ton of studies done about the unethical practices of private schools in the US, Japan, and the UK with these models where you see rapid increases in suicides and self harm for what we as adults would see as minor slights of setbacks.
The annual cohort model does a lot of work to ensure social upbringing, but its also inefficient. I guess the question is do we want our children entering the workforce at 16 or 21, these software would suggest the former is a better idea. But I think everyone can agree that the latter makes more sense.
There isn't a way to tell effectively, as Summit refuses to publish their actual outcome data.
The more students get to talk, the better they retain information. I know group work sucks, especially for those of us who were successful in school, but all the educational research says it's better practice, because kids getting to talk means they will remember it better. If that's with partners, small groups, or in whole class discussions is irrelevant (though obviously whole class gives them less of a chance to talk total). These kinds of computer based systems eliminate the possibility.
Tech companies that are super disproportionately white and male failed to account for people with other life experiences than themselves? Why I never!
Yeah though, this is probably the least surprising part. You could argue (perhaps correctly even) that accommodations are something the school should handle, but the fact that it probably never came up on the Silicon Valley side of things is entirely predictable.
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First, I'm not talking as a teacher. The teachers in this question were turned into academic advisors with the teaching turned over to Summit. There is absolutely a difference between teaching in the k-12 system and college level, and a huge gulf between advising and teaching. 100% agree.
That said, I have classroom experience, perform active educational research (and am currently active on three specifically in the K-12 system for two separate counties, one of which is specifically on the effects of measuring headcounts in the classroom in comparison to preparation time), and have been on consultation committees with local schools systems. I've also looked at Summit before.
So, valid. I am not presently teaching K-12, but I work directly with, study, and measure those who do.
This is somewhat irrelevant to call out. If they didn't have the time before, and don't now, it seems like it's not Summit's fault that they aren't doing the mentoring. I'm sympathetic to an argument that individual computer-based learning doesn't actually create more time for teachers to do individual mentoring over and above the traditional system, but if they don't have 10 minutes a week for individual mentoring now, they never did before either. This is not a Summit problem.
On my part, I should have bolded or italicised "some" in some expertise. I'm certainly not the experts on the topic at all. But I'm so entrenched in the studies we are performing working with the K-12 people who are that some of that has well rubbed off.
Going too deep on this is probably outside the scope of this thread, but I'm not particularly enamored by arguments in the vein of "who cares what teenagers think about school? They're going to hate school no matter what." That's also why I asked spool32 to clarify his comments, because I read his line "It does a good bit of quoting students, because that's an excellent barometer of whether your school idea is good or not" as sarcasm, but I wasn't totally sure.
If multiple students are saying that a new program has increased their stress, I think we should take that complaint seriously. Taking it seriously doesn't mean accepting it uncritically, but it also means not dismissing it out of hand either.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.