What the NEA probably wouldn't want you to know about "personalized" learning in Boone County, KY.

from Wrench in the Gears
June 13, 2017

Just weeks before the 2017 Annual Meeting opens in Boston, an article from NEA Today, As More Schools Look to Personalized Learning, Teaching May Be About to Change, makes it clear NEA’s top leadership prioritizes digital curriculum over the right of a student to be educated without data mining and to have unconditional, full time access to a human teacher. For those familiar with NEA’s and AFT’s partnership with Ed Reform 2.0 interests on the Education Reimagined initiative this comes as no surprise, though seeing the propaganda in print is still jarring. If you’re NOT aware of this partnership, stop and read Emily Talmage’s Anatomy of a Betrayal now. Oh, and later check out the NEA’s 2011 Policy Brief in support of blended learning. Here Tom Vander Ark notes the content of the brief is largely drawn from the work of Clayton Christensen’s reformy Innosight Institute.

The general rule for ed-activists is to never, ever read the comments, though I encourage you to make an exception in this case. Over fifty heartfelt statements against digital curriculum have been logged thus far, though you should be aware that at least four other comments were posted and subsequently removed by the site administrator. One was from Emily Talmage and included a link to Anatomy of a Betrayal. Another was from a former NEA member and midwestern teacher “NEA’s motto-destroying public education from within.” A Connecticut teacher and NEA member wrote “What a deceptive article – shame on NEA Today.” And the fourth was submitted by Massachusetts Teachers Association member Mary Porter.

Mary’s comment included the full text of New Business Item 6, MTA Opposes the MAPLE / LearnLaunch Partnership with Massachusetts DESE. The NBI was approved at the state meeting of the Massachusetts Teachers Association on May 20, 2017, and as far as I am aware it is the first instance of a union taking an official position opposing digital curriculum. I am grateful to all who crafted, sponsored and supported this NBI, and I am sharing Mary’s comment below because this NBI is a landmark policy and a model other unions should look to as they develop their own responses to ed-tech’s assault on our nation’s schools.

MTA Opposes the MAPLE/LearnLaunch Partnership with Massachusetts DESE
NBI # 6 Adopted
Massachusetts Teachers Association Representative Assembly, May 20 2017

1.The MTA opposes the MAPLE/Learn launch partnership of the Massachusetts DESE, on the grounds that it reflects a predetermined plan to impose a new, untested “personalized” oversight system on the public schools. This initiative is privately controlled by LearnLaunch, a non‐profit consortium of for‐profit education technology ventures. The MTA will investigate the legality of this partnership and its appearance of being a crony arrangement to guarantee return to for‐profit vendors who would benefit financially from the policies being imposed through collaboration with the DESE.

The MTA will inform the DESE of our position in a letter, accompanied by a press release to the public.

2. The MTA will establish a MAPLE/Learnlaunch Toolkit Page, which will collect and review reports from members, describing instances where, in their professional judgement, the educational opportunity of students and the respect for teaching staff are undermined by the products and working conditions demanded by the consortium.

3.  MTA members and staff will use our toolkit to share strategies to combat the harmful effects of and unvalidated edtech products on our students, and to defend teachers’ professional judgement and standards against interference by business interests.

SUBMITTER’S RATIONALE
1.  Office of Digital Learning Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education 75 Pleasant Street Malden, MA 02148-5023 odl@doe.mass.edu www.doe.mass.edu/odl @MASchoolsK12
Digital Learning Advisory Council Meeting Minutes Date: Wednesday, January 6, 2016:
a. MAPLE (Massachusetts Personalized Learning EdTech) Consortium is a public / private partnership emerging between ESE and LearnLaunch as an effort to catalyze personalized and blended learning supported by technology in districts and schools across the Commonwealth. MAPLE is having discussions with some philanthropic organizations to support this effort.
b. There will be a convening of the DCPS (Digital Connections Partnership Schools) Grantees at LearnLaunch Symposium and a second convening of the DCPS later in the spring.
c. The Commissioner set goal of 100% online testing in Commonwealth by 2019. ODL/DLAC will be involved in advising for this effort.”

2.  Promotional materials for the Center for Collaborative Education describe its agenda-driven out-of-state backers:
“In 2016, CCE launched the Massachusetts Personalized Learning Network (MA PLN) to work with district leaders, principals, and teachers to design and implement personalized learning plans…
Center for Collaborative Education (CCE) is proud to partner with Massachusetts Personalized Learning Edtech Consortium, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, and Agilix. CCE is a regional partner with Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC) as part of a national initiative to scale up personalized learning schools. PLN is supported by EDUCAUSE through the Next Generation Learning Challenges, the Barr Foundation, Nellie Mae Education Foundation, W. Clement & Jessie V. Stone Foundation, and IBM.” http://cce.org/work/district- school-design/massachusetts-personalized-learning-network
3.   Learnlaunch is a “non-profit” consortium of for-profit investors and vendors, which specifically advertises to member investors that it has the capacity to maximize their financial return.
Examples:
“Investor Path   Want to hear from other edtech investors on how they make decisions in such a fast-paced marketplace? Want to see demos from LearnLaunch Accelerator startups and pitches from our pitch competition finalists? Check out these sessions for a closer look into the trends, innovations, and companies that are shaping the future of edtech.” http://learnlaunch.org/investorpath/
LearnLaunch sponsors http://learnlaunch.org/sponsor2017/
Learnlaunch Accelerator for-profit member Companies: http://learnlaunch.com/accelerator/accelerator-companies/
Some supporting links:
Our Children @ Risk – Parents Across America Details the Dangers of EdTech
Follow the Money – Who is Nellie Mae? Save Maine Schools
Overview and Timeline of personalized learning drive in Massachusetts: Hybrid Learning, Cicada Killers & the Next Big Fight

Given that the NEA has tipped its hand on where leadership stands with regard to Zuckerberg’s “personalized” playlist education agenda, it’s time to shine a light on what is happening in Boone County, Kentucky. The Boone County School District is exactly the type of environment described in the article, and it’s imperative that teachers, parents and community members understand what reformers REALLY mean when they use terms like “personalization” and “innovation,” because it’s NOT what you think.

To give you some idea of the problems see the post below (shared with permission) describing a school meeting that took place last October in which parents expressed serious reservations about the implementation of the Summit Basecamp personalized learning platform in their local middle school.

Click here to read a post by the Concerned Parents of Boone County and to read the rest of this article. 

 

Indiana, Personalized Learning, Smart Drugs, and the KnowledgeWorks Foundation

By Doug Martin 

(for a background on what edtech is up to, please see Alison McDowell’s post here—and all of her posts.  If you want to witness the frightening scenario many like the KnowledgeWorks Foundation have in mind for American education and the workforce, watch this video.)  

Although I’m deep into writing a new book on the national edtech movement to follow Hoosier School Heist and haven’t blogged for a while, I want to take the time to warn Hoosiers about so-called “personalized learning” (also referred to as competency-based learning) not only because of the idea to use online learning to teach pre-schoolers here, but also because Robert Behning’s House Bill 1386 offers a personalized learning pilot program.  Thankfully, Bill 1386  died recently in a House Education Committee vote of 8-3, but don’t expect the personalized learning movement to go away.  This movement is not just about using technology in the classroom, which, done well, can be a good thing.  Now a major national force, the personalized learning movement has some scary things lurking inside it and everyone should take notice.

THE EDTECH FUTURISTS AT THE STATEHOUSE

Speaking edtech and corporate school reform clichés, the KnowledgeWorks Foundation’s Matt Williams testified in favor of Behning’s personalized learning bill before the Indiana House Education Committee in February, stressing the need for Indiana to become “a leader” nationally by creating a personalized learning system where “formative assessments ….measure student mastery of academic knowledge and social and emotional competencies”  and students “master the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college and career,” which is “an essential step” for “our country’s education system.”

Personalized or competency-based learning glues students to computers, allows students to learn at their own pace, and sometimes even does away with grade levels altogether.  But, as even the Gates Foundation-funded iNACOL(International Association for K12 Online Learning), which promotes ALEC’s online learning model legislation, has publicly admitted, this is a Trojan Horse for more harmful things the billionaires have in mind.

To promote the online learning agenda, the Ohio-based KnowledgeWorks paints futuristic scenarios focusing on training workers for the gig economy via online personalized learning (K-university level) in the event that tech titans’ dreams will be eventually fulfilled when one day students will no longer go to real buildings or real jobs, since all education will be done online merely for credentials, and job gigs (like Fiverr, TaskRabbit, the Global Survey Group, etc.) will be done online to earn literally a couple of dollars (yes, literally) an hour, since these will be the only jobs left because of the quick expansion of technology (for an excellent outing of the gig economy scam and the real possible threat of technology eliminating future jobs, read Steven Hill’s book).   
  
Originally a student loan lender, KnowledgeWorks recently called on Donald Trump to “overhaul….the Federal financial aid system to ensure it is more flexible, better able to address changing career requirements, and reflective of the nation’s increasing interest in personalized education” (page 4).  For its “cradle-to-career framework,” the KnowledgeWorks Foundation in 2013 was awarded $1.8 million from Indianapolis’ Lumina Foundation, a group formed out of the student loan business “when government-sponsored enterprise Sallie Mae,” which was beginning to privatize, “purchased USA Group” and federal regulators required the $770 million from the deal to go into a “successor nonprofit” since the USA Group was a nonprofit enterprise.  The Lumina Foundation is a major player in the new credentials movement to wipe out universities and replace them with online credential-giving platforms geared specifically for the workforce, even investing in the alternative credential-granting platform Credly.

The Gates Foundation, the most well-known of the edtech promoters, has handed KnowledgeWorks millions of dollars over the last few years.  Judith Peppler, KnowledgeWorks Foundation’s CEO, had a total compensation package in 2015 of $638,000 (page 45) and the group had over $59 million in total assets (page 1)

KnowledgeWorks, like several futuristic promoters of extreme edtech, has some frightening ideas, which Indiana House member Robert Behning may or may not know about.  Here is a very rough excerpt on KnowledgeWorks from my new book-in-progress.  As you read, keep in mind, too, that although much of the edtech hype is pure pseudoscience for marketing purposes, so-called “smart drugs” are in vogue in Silicon Valley now, and research on biosensors and biometrics in education, as well as using electric shock to improve math skills is already taking place.

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BUT KNOWLEDGEWORKS HAS an even scarier agenda, having now joined the futuristic tech movement which is sneaking into edtech circles.  In a brave new world where students practice “anytime, anywhere learning,” educators become “Learning Pathway Designers,” “Micro-Credential Analysts,” “Data Stewarts,” and “Pop-Up Reality Producers” (who take their lead “from the positive aspects of both rave culture and massive cultural events such as Burning Man”) (page 8), and “Every Experience” is “a Credential” (page 2), the edtech futurist KnowledgeWorks Foundation hopes that nootropics, better known as “smart drugs,” play a major role in the cradle to career pipeline, too.  Jason Swanson, the director for Strategic Foresight for KnowledgeWorks, an Ohio-based nonprofit closely aligned with the Institute for the Future’s thinking, gives us a glimpse into the future school and work mindset, where school is “disrupted,” “personalized to each learner,” bent on “ongoing” assessments, and geared toward social control and “on-demand” gig economy jobs which “could push many people to be in a mode of constant learning and continuous career readiness and could increase the need for specialized training similar to that required for professionals such as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists” (page 2).  In Certifying Skills and Knowledge: Four Scenarios on the Future of Credentials, Swanson foresees a future that “advances in the understanding of the brain, coupled with ever-expanding data streams generated by students,” which “deepen educators’ understanding not just of how to personalize learning, but also of how each student actually learns” (page 13) Pointing out the edtech desire for so-called social and emotional learning, Swanson says that in a few years, hopefully, teachers will “have the ability to monitor a student’s cognitive, social, and emotional skills,” “their neuro-finger prints, in real time” (page 13). 

     This data-driven neuro-finger print based-education includes feeding children smart drugs.  Glimpsing a future scenario and also noting that neuro fitness programs like Lumosity (busted, as I show elsewhere in this book, for false advertising), Cognifit, and Quantified Mind already exist “to measure and improve users’ cognitive abilities” (page 15), Swanson, who has a degree in Public Policy from West Chester University, a masters in  Foresight from the University of Houston, and is a member of the Association of  Professional Futurists,” looks into the future where:

Educator roles have diversified to reflect schools’ new emphasis on monitoring the development of students’ neuro-fingerprints. Neuro-fitness coaches now work hand-in-hand with students, parents, and other learning agents. Part medical professional, part educator, these neuro-fitness coaches help teachers create lessons and monitor feedback in order to stretch students’ cognitive abilities. When students have extreme difficulty making progress, neuro-fitness coaches may recommend nootropics, changes in diet, mindfulness training, or mediation, to name a few options. In the case of nootropics, coaches watch for signs of “smart drug” abuse in students who may not need the boost but seek to gain an unfair advantage. Coaches also help to monitor whole-student health, being mindful of how issues such as trauma can impact a student’s cognitive development and recommending ways both the school and the learner can take action to begin the healing process. (page 13)

     In this new educational world, where “the employment sector has become actively involved in all levels of the formal and informal education systems” (page 8), students no longer work toward diplomas or degrees or fall victim to annual testing since credentials are set up like online videogames, measuring continuously in real time, where “students now work to attain a standardized level of mastery for a core set of cognitive abilities, along with essential social and emotional skills such as determination, grit, self-control, and growth mindset” (page 13).  So-called “mind scouts” examine students’ credentials and help them with career training in the gig economy or match their neuro-finger prints with “micro-credentials and nano-credentials” programs (page 14), so that for post-secondary education “the skills gap that employers once observed has virtually disappeared because graduates applying for jobs now display deep mastery of skills as a result of matching credential paths with neuro-fingerprints.  Now, a smaller pool of applicants with higher education degrees or other forms of post-secondary credentials is highly desirable” (page 14). 

     Swanson also notes a possible smart drug epidemic in the future, without discussing the bad idea of throwing drugs at students at all, the big boon to Big Pharma, or how making learning into a videogame creates another avenue for youth addiction:

The more stringent post-secondary credential market has also led to a high degree of nootropic abuse, as students try to gain an edge or alter their brain patterns in an attempt to gain acceptance into programs that their neuro-fingerprint may not permit. In an attempt to curtail such abuse, many credentialing organizations have a neuro-regulator on staff, trained at accessing years of neuro-fingerprint data in order to uncover possible abuse. When abuse is found, the student is removed from the program, and his or her neuro-fingerprint is flagged. Students with previous offenses are often subject to a thorough smart drug evaluation when they apply for another credentialing program. (page 14)

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Coming from several directions simultaneously, the edtech movement is vast and international, and billions of dollars are being poured into it each year in the hopes of cashing in on a market said to possibly reach $252 billion by 2020.  Personalized learning is just one aspect of the movement, whose overall goal is to rid education of teachers, among other things. 

While everyone was fighting off school vouchers and charter schools, the billionaires and their promoters (many most pro-public school activists have not even heard of) and the federal government were hard at work creating a vast infrastructure for edtech, which encompasses learning apps, gamification, virtual charter schools, online platforms, biometrics, virtual tutors, social media monitoring of students, surveillance, big-data, data-brokers, hacking, social control by the government and corporations, the gig economy, etc., and the complete financialization of education (please read Tim Scott’s piece, too). 

"Ephemeral Teacher Swarms" aka Part-Time Temps

If you think that TFA is the only corporate game in town intended to de-professionalize teaching and crush public education, think again.  The privateers have more schemes ready to launch as the TFA bubble loses gas, and here is just one of them from the CBE-based KnowledgeWorks, which is another Gates hothouse item that he hopes will grow to choke out public space.  

I suppose it is only appropriate that, as the planet dies from greed, poison, and neglect, some of our Ivy League under-employed and thoroughly positivized millennials should spend their days and earn their bread by coming up with privatizing schemes for Bill Gates that are redolent the rhetoric of eco-consciousness.  

This document and the clip below is aflutter with "stewardship" and "learning ecosystem" talk.  By far, my favorite new fragmented teacher role is "data steward." 

Seven Possible Educator Roles 

To help education stakeholders imagine what kinds of educator roles might contribute to flexible and rigorous learning ecosystems that enable both learners and the adults supporting them to thrive, this paper explores seven possible educator roles.

1. (1)  Learning Pathway Designer – Works with students, parents, and learning journey mentors6 to set learning goals, track students’ progress and pacing, and model potential sequences of activities that support learning experiences aligned with competencies. 
   
   
2. (2)  Competency Tracker – Tags and maps community-based learning opportunities by the competencies they address in order to support the development of recon gurable personalized learning pathways and school formats. 
   
   
3. (3)  Pop-Up Reality Producer – Works with educators, subject matter experts, story developers, and game designers to produce pervasive learning extravaganzas that engage learners in ow states7 and help them develop relevant skills, academic competencies, and knowhow. 
   
   
4. (4)  Social Innovation Portfolio Director – Builds networks in support of meaningful service-based learning and community impact by linking student action-learning groups seeking to develop core skills and knowledge with organizations seeking creative solutions. 
   
   
5. (5)  Learning Naturalist – Designs and deploys assessment protocols that capture evidence of learning in students’ diverse learning environments and contexts. 
   
   
6. (6)  Micro-Credential Analyst – Provides trusted, research-based evaluations and audits of micro- credential options and digital portfolio platforms in order to provide learners and institutions with comparative quality assurance metrics. 
   
   
7. (7)  Data Steward – Acts as a third-party information trustee to ensure responsible and ethical use of personal data and to maintain broader education data system integrity and effective application through purposeful analytics.
   

Some of these roles would be likely to involve full-time employment for a single organization, while others could reaect more ad hoc, network-based employment structures, at least for some of the people occupying them. Some of the roles might attract current teachers and administrators; others might attract people from other backgrounds, including the data sciences, anthropology and ethnography, neuropsychology, and media design. 

Regardless of an individual’s employment arrangements or background, educator swarms will likely form to meet the needs of individual learners or cohorts of learners. Educator swarms would be flexible and often temporary teams of educators that configured to meet learners’ needs and then reconfigured differently as needs shifted. Those swarms could span organizational boundaries as well as the line that we draw today between the formal and informal or community-based learning sectors. Furthermore, the configurations of future educator swarms could be far more ephemeral than many of today’s teaching assignments.

The Memphis Plan 2.0: Brought to You by Bill Gates and KnowledgeWorks

In a Commercial Appeal story about cuts to teacher raises on April 22 of this year, this came at the end of story by Jane Roberts:

If the board agrees to the goals [Goals 2025], the district has made it clear that the community will have to play a larger role in how they are achieved. It has joined forces with StriveTogether, a Cincinnati-based network that aligns nonprofits, college and other education partners with specific district goals. With parental permission, SCS and the Achievement School District have agreed to share student test scores with organizations here working to lift scores, college access, third-grade literacy rates and kindergarten readiness, hoping they can tailor their programs to help meet specific academic need.

The board did agree, and today Shelby County stands on the brink of another corporate foundation plan to “improve” educational outcomes in Shelby County.  The plan is called 80-90-100, and it has been developed by StriveTogether and EdWorks, both non-profit corporations that are subsidiaries and under the direction of KnowledgeWorks, another non-profit corporation that was created in 2002 by a grant from another non-profit corporation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  Gates continues to partner with KnowledgeWorks and to give generously in order to help implement the Gates Foundation vision under the label of the dummy company, KnowledgeWorks.

All of these vastly wealthy non-profit folk want your children’s data to serve as a basis for a coordinated plan to steer education policy from pre-K through college, in every town in America, if they can.

The Gates Foundation, of course, is run by the for-as-much-profit-as-possible former CEO of Microsoft, Bill Gates, who you will remember started the demolition of Memphis schools in 2009 with a 90 million dollar money bomb. 

Since Gates started “giving his money away” a few years ago, his wealthy has strangely ballooned by almost $30 billion dollars, so that today Gates is worth $82.4 billion.

But I digress.  Here is a slide below from the plan, Goals 2025, which was developed by many interconnected Gates clones and handed over to their stooge, Supt. Dorsey Hopson.  Memphis has turned into a hive of these TFA alums and Econ majors, now living in Memphis hoping to find the perfect latte and to strike it rich in the growth industry of turning over public schools to the corporate welfare predators lined for a piece of the action.

KnowledgeWorks, StriveTogether, and the other subsidiaries are to be on hand to give Barbic his marching orders, too, and to make it all look like a state and local government operation.  In a sense, it is, since taxpayers are paying the entire bill.  Just ask the investment banker on the SCS Board of Education.

Oh, did I say that KnowledgeWorks CEO is a graduate of the Broad Superintendent Academy?  Small world.

Getting to Know KnowledgeWorks, Part 1

Soon after Ted Strickland (D) was elected Governor of Ohio in 2006, he announced that he would rely on the expertise of the KnowledgeWorks foundation to "help shape his administration's education agenda."  Really not surprising, since the CEO for KnowledgeWorks, Chad Wick, served as transition team leader following Strickland's election.  What does Wick, an investment banker, know about education?  Nothing, but his patron, Bill Gates has a whole stable of Princeton and Yale grads who pretend to know everything.

Dr. Chad P. Wick is a General Partner at MAYWIC Select Investments. Dr. Wick is a commercial banking executive and leader of an educational organization in the U.S. He has also built New Tech Network. Dr. Wick co-founded RISE Learning Solutions. He was the Founding President and Chief Executive Officer at KnowledgeWorks Foundation since 1998. Previously, Dr. Wick has served as the President, Chief Executive Officer, and Board member of institutions including Ameritrust, Southern Ohio Bank, and Shawnee Life Insurance Co. Previously, he served as the President at Mayerson Company. Dr. Wick serves as a Director of ACT, Inc. He serves as Trustee at KnowledgeWorks Foundation. Prior to this, Dr. Wick served as a Director of InQBate, Corp from September 3, 2002 to September 2, 2003. He also served as a Director of ChoiceCare Corp. Dr. Wick has served as a Board member on various boards including Student Loan Funding Corp. and Mount Vernon. He served as Chair of Education Transition for Ohio Governor Mr. Ted Strickland and through his role as KnowledgeWorks Chief Executive Officer, impacted Ohio’s education policy. Dr. Wick has been a Chief Executive Officer of commercial banks, large non-profit organizations, and a national foundation for the past 35 years. He has also had significant experience structuring both the buy and sell sides of large commercial transactions. Dr. Wick organized the private acquisition of Southern Ohio Bank and ultimate sale to PNC Bank. He played a key role as Director in the sale of an HMO in the Midwest to Humana and organized and managed the sale of the third largest student loan organization in the country to Sallie Mae. Dr. Wick is a Veteran of the U.S. Air Force and has participated in the Army War College’s Strategic Leadership Forum at Columbia University. He has been accorded many awards for education achievement in Ohio and nationally. Dr. Wick has received Honorary Doctorates from both the University of Cincinnati and Youngstown State University. He received an MBA with high honors from Thunderbird Graduate School and a BS degree from the University of Cincinnati.

Started in 1998, KnowledgeWorks was really "made" with $20 million from the Gates Foundation in 2002, and that handout would be the one of the first of many multi-million dollar infusions into Ohio to mold K-12 education as Bill Gates believed it should.  KnowledgeWorks functions to advise on implementing Gates-endorsed ed schemes, including curriculum, management, and technology.  Oh, don't forget student lending (more on that later).

 From looking at the 990s, Chad is doing pretty well in his new enterprise. Below are 2009 to 2011:

rely on their expertise to help shape his administration’s education agenda. - See more at: http://www.knowledgeworks.org/strickland-seeks-input-education-agenda#sthash.c6c6t5o8.dpuf

rely on their expertise to help shape his administration’s education agenda. - See more at: http://www.knowledgeworks.org/strickland-seeks-input-education-agenda#sthash.c6c6t5o8.dpuf

rely on their expertise to help shape his administration’s education agenda. - See more at: http://www.knowledgeworks.org/strickland-seeks-input-education-agenda#sthash.c6c6t5o8.dpuf