Kansas Parents Take on Summit Learning

 This is not about education. This is about plans to make education for-profit and to minimize overhead by gradually rendering human teachers -- and brick and mortar schools -- obsolete. --pjc (top comment at New York Times story)

 Summit Learning, which is a Silicon Valley business scheme to depersonalize school learning (see explanations gathered here), save money on teachers and facilities, and to make more tech millionaires, has been around since 2003.  In 2014, the sociopathic Mark Zuckerberg got personally involved, and it wasn't long after that he started buying up politicians in Kansas and other places that had no clue what an insidious, destructive, and oppressive system of schooling that was about to be foisted on their children.  

The New York Times has done a bang-up story on what is happening in Kansas, where parents and students are striking back against their compromised school officials and the Silicon Valley oligarchs who have bought them.  A clip:

. . . .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.

In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform.

Would a Tech Exec Send Her Kid to a Summit School?

Mother Jones has published a disappointing article on the depersonlized learning phenomenon.  The most troubling part of the article comes in this paragraph near the beginning of the piece:

 "Its [personalized learning's] champions—including typically private Montessori and Waldorf schools, as well as pockets of progressive teachers in traditional public schools—claim that personalized learning stands in contrast to the familiar classroom structures born in the industrial age: students learning mostly from lectures and textbooks, practicing assignments on identical worksheets, and being sorted based on age or perceived ability measured by narrow metrics."

The clear suggestion here is that Waldorf and Montessori schools are on board with screen-immersed "personalized" learning, where at least a third of children's time in school is on computer.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Both Waldorf and Montessori environments are tech light or tech empty, preferring, instead, real embodied learning experiences as compared to isolating virtual ones.
  
In fact, at the Waldorf school in Silicon Valley where many tech execs send their kids, there are NO computers, and school is done the old fashioned way, with books, interactions, discussions, and real experiences.

Low tech learning environments do not have to be synonymous with the rote learning models "born of the industrial age."  In fact, Waldorf founder, Rudolf Steiner, and Montessori founder, Marie Montessori, were born in the 19th Century.  As was John Dewey, who had much in common with both.

You may be interested to know, too, that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs raised their kids with minimal technology.  They would be aghast at the prospect of sending their children to a Summit school.

I would have hoped that MJ would be a bit more skeptical of a learning/teaching scheme that is designed to provide magnificent financial benefits to Silicon Valley oligarchs long before we ever know what effects this new brand of screen learning is having on learners and teachers.  I would have expected, too, that important matters involving student privacy, corporate data sharing practices, policymaking, and public education impact would have been explored.  

Summit's version of personalized learning is really de-personalized learning, and it promises a cheap and extremely lucrative way to monetize public education for the poor for the benefit of corporate education reformers.  With so much resistance coming from educators and researchers, there's a reason why Summit has decided to steer clear entirely of the "personalized" descriptor.

Chaining children to computer screens for large chunks of the school day is miseducative at best, dehumanizing and abusive at worst.