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.

Losing Our Humanity: A Toolkit To Talk About The Tech Takeover of Our Schools

From Wrench in the Gears
April 11, 2018

On Saturday, April 7, 2018 I had the good fortune to spend a day with education activists from across Massachusetts and beyond at the Boston Area Educators Social Justice Conference at Fenway High School in Jamaica Plain. My colleague, Worcester-based educator, Brian Leonard submitted a proposal for us to present on ed-tech that morning:

Losing the Human Connection: tech-takeovers in classrooms and schools
What is the role of technology in the classroom? How does technology affect child development and social relationships? Do children have a right to relationships with humans in education? Who profits from the commercialization of education and how can we defend our public schools from being consumed by commercialized tech-products that computerize education? How can we extend human and social relationships in the existential struggle against computer companies and machines? These are some of the questions we would like to explore with students and educators.

We wanted to model a meeting people could adapt for use in their own communities. We wanted it to be participatory and not require in-depth knowledge of Ed Reform 2.0 to pull off. The agenda we came up with features a welcome, read aloud, video clip discussion, group activity, and exploration of possible next steps. We hope people will use the tools provided to create spaces to engage in critical thinking about technology in the classroom and begin to counter the dominant narrative that disruptive “innovations” like “personalized learning” are beneficial to public education. If you have your own meeting, please get in touch and let me know how it goes!

Click here to access the Tech Takeover Meeting Toolkit.

Teaching Kids About Personalized Data Collection

The emerging story of Facebook's marketing of 87,000,000 users' data is finally beginning to register in the minds of Americans who, otherwise, have remained somewhat blase about the threat of personal data collection, archiving, and selling.  It is not ad sales or click counts that's driving social , or anti-social, media; it has finally dawned on a distracted public that it is their personal data that is the now and future currency of FB, Google, and the other Silicon Valley high priests who have no respect for the customers they would happily turn into compliant drones and make a profit at the same time. 

This other-worldly scheme is no less apparent in the personalized data business being pushed into schools under the banner of personalized learning and competency-based learning. Of most interest to oligarchs like Gates and Zuckerberg are programs to neurologically rewire children to make them assets for capitalists like themselves, and to collect and market data on individuals from pre-K through grad school.  Every man or woman with a comprehensive digital dossier immediately accessible to anyone for a fee.

One of the prime examples of this is Summit Learning, which enjoys massive infusions of public and venture philanthropists' dollars to build a demonstration project of how you can have education with a minimum of teachers, schools, or even books.  Just think of the savings, and think of the collected data when kids are handcuffed to their laptops and iPads.

Now small actions to counter the cyber-capitalist dystopia have begun, and WaPo has an interesting piece on an new emerging curriculum being implemented down the road from Seton Hall, where it was developed by law professors.  The goal is to re-establish some connections among people and to limit the connections between individuals and servers that dish up just what we seem to want even before we know we want it.  A clip: 

The classes are free, folded into kids’ daily schedules and taught in the classrooms where the fifth- and sixth-graders typically learn about the scientific method and the food chain. Gaia Bernstein, director of Seton Hall Law’s Institute for Privacy Protection, which designed the program, said each class includes about a half-dozen lessons taught to the kids over several weeks, as well as a separate set of lectures for parents concerned about how “their children are disappearing into their screens.”

Altering Children's Neural Pathways

If psychographic data can swing the Brexit vote and get Donald Trump elected, what do think psychographic data and the algorithms that feed on and are fed by the data can do to your child's thoughts, behaviors, and actions in school and beyond. They call it personalized learning

— James Horn (@Ontogeny100) March 28, 2018

Student-Teacher Relations Are Central to Authentic Education

From Wrench in the Gears

March 3, 2018

Today I share a guest post from an elementary school teacher in Maine, a state in the vanguard of Ed Reform 2.0 implementation. Unless changes are made, this year’s freshmen are expected to graduate under the state’s new proficiency-based diploma requirements. In recent months, push-back against this new educational paradigm has grown substantially. Parents, teachers and students are finding standards-based education, a model that emphasizes technology-based education delivery, highly problematic. Here is one teacher’s perspective:

“I love technology. I love it so much that I got my Masters in educational technology through Boise State University in Idaho. Through this program I learned to teach online, gamify my curriculum, personalize learning, use countless technology tools, and promote digital literacy in the classroom.

When I switched to a school district that had one to one technology for my students, I was over the moon! That was until I actually saw it implemented on a large scale. What I saw was not more engaged students, but students clicking through activities without a moment’s notice or even thought. What I found were kids wanting tablets, but not wanting to learn on them; they just wanted to play on the devices.

So I tried to implement activities that would get them really thinking and creating. We made PowToons for our learning. We used educreations to show our thinking. We used Google docs to share writing. Most of what we tried did not enhance learning one bit. Sure, it looked cool and professional, but my students could present a wonderful powerpoint and not even be able to answer questions about what they presented.

In addition, I had to sift through hundreds of different websites, tech tools, and resources to see what would be the best to use in my classroom. I found very little that was better than what I had been using in the classroom before technology. I was disheartened to discover that this was not the silver bullet I thought it was for education. The funny thing is that I thought technology would save me so much time. It really hasn’t, except for a few instances where I don’t have to grade spelling tests; and the apps that I use for spelling do not promote better spellers.

Unless you think I am now anti-technology, I am not. I use technology every day both personally and professionally. I appreciate how it connects me with some of my family far away. I love how I can create products only imagined before, like an iMovie. I love the ease of a word processor and platforms to collaborate and share my writing with others. I also love having my students use the technology for many of the things listed above, but now I know they need so much more than a flashy program for learning. They need me. They need my instruction. They need to discuss face to face with myself and their peers. They need to struggle through problems, with me encouraging them to press on and knowing when to come alongside them and help, but not enable. They need human accountability.

There is a movement in our country to transition students into more digital learning. I could go on about why this is all happening, but others have done that work for me (see Save Maine Schools and Wrench in the Gears). In the end, it will boil down to fewer teachers and more screen time for even our youngest learners. Kids will adapt and learn to click through the system like Pavlovian subjects. We will probably have “experts” claiming increased performance on their very narrow metrics.

What I see in my own school district is not better learning but more behavior. As we push kids beyond what they are capable of understanding, and think that “personalized learning” through technology will be the answer, we are sorely misinformed. Technology has its place in the classroom, but it should never replace what has made education great for hundreds of years-teachers.”

Signed, An Elementary School Teacher in Maine

Data Mining on the Ledger

by Wrench in the Gears
January 14, 2018

This installment of Building Sanctuary features digital identity and social credit scoring as it relates to purchasing and access to life opportunities for citizens living under authoritarian power structures. This is the fourth in a seven-part series that follows the digitally-quantified lives of sisters Cam and Li in a a near-future “Smart” City dystopia. If you wish to start reading from the beginning, follow this link to the introduction and Part One: Plugging In.

Part Two: A World Without (Much) Work

Part Three: Smart and Surveilled

Solutionists maintain control over society largely through the ledger. The ledger evolved from Blockchain, a technology first used to process digital-currency transactions like Bitcoin, Global Coin’s predecessor. But corporate and government interests saw it had far greater potential. It started out as a decentralized online system through which transactions of all sorts (purchases, education credentials, marriages, property transfers etc.) could be permanently recorded in blocks that were secured by elaborate cryptographic protocols. Over time, private blockchains came to dominate the system. These were gradually consolidated by those allied with the Solutionist agenda.

Now there is one ledger that keeps track of everything and everyone: inputs and outputs; ownership and debt; locations, activities, functions, and compliance. The ledger is the master accountant that is everywhere and nowhere. It lives on a distributed system of computers. It’s promoted as infallible, untouchable. The Solutionists suppress any information that might undermine public faith in it. In a world of uncertainty, the ledger is a held up as a symbol of unquestioning trust.

In addition to facilitating and recording transactions, the ledger also calculates citizen scores, something no one with a Citi Badge can escape. These scores rise and fall based the data each person generates within the Solutionists’ “smart systems.” People are constantly evaluated against the norms set by the authorities. If your behavior, or that of your family or even friends or acquaintances, deviates from these standards, your score drops.

People who question the system have low scores. People with extensive social networks have low scores. People who travel widely have low scores. People who access “the wrong” online materials have low scores. People who are financially unstable have low scores. Your score can be lowered for being too educated or not educated enough. People who use public services have low scores. If you have a low score, you become a target of social impact interventions, programs underwritten by private investors designed to bring your score up and reorient you to the values Solutionist society demands.

Citizen scores determine access to jobs, housing, leisure opportunities, and social relationships. They affect the prices people pay for goods and services and even the type of education and medical treatment they get. At birth Cam and Li, like everyone born outside a sanctuary zone, were assigned unique identity numbers linked to retinal scans and were each issued a Citi Badge. Their Citi Badges are connected to the ledger and hold funds from their Global Coin government stipend, student vouchers, and data currency transactions.

Click here to read the rest of the post. 

Who Is Pulling The Muppet Strings?

from Wrench in the Gears
January 14, 2018

Sesame Street is an iconic brand that embodies humor, acceptance, and humanity. Who doesn’t love a muppet? So, on December 20 when the MacArthur Foundation announced they were giving Sesame Workshop and the International Rescue Committee $100 million to educate young children from displaced Syrian families and help them deal with “toxic stress,” most people were thrilled. While the optics were great, I’m here to tell you these muppets are definitely not the type of “friends” Syrian refugee children need.

How will Sesame Workshop and the IRC spend the MacArthur award money? Much of it will be spent on educational technology:

    •       Sesame-branded educational content delivered on televisions, phones and digital platforms

    •       home visits reinforced by digital content and parenting resources provided via mobile devices

    •       child development centers equipped with video-clips pre-recorded on projectors and activity sheets

This approach exactly reflects concerns raised by an April 2017 report published by Education International  on the education of Syrian refugee children. The report found that many donors were providing “decontextualized interventions” that focused too much on technology.

Click here read the entire post.

"Smart and Surveilled:" Building Sancturay Part 3

from Wrench in the Gears
January 11, 2018

This installment highlights  smart city surveillance and the Internet of Things. Cam and Li’s lives, including their educational experiences, are shaped by ubiquitous algorithms that align their behaviors to the economic and social expectations put in place by the Solutionists. This is the third installment in the series. If you want to read from the beginning use this link to access the introduction and Part 1: Plugging In.

Cam and Li have grown up in a world controlled by sensors and data. All day, every day sensors watch, track and transmit information. The devices that make up the vast web of Internet of Things are tiny, but their combined power is incalculable. The most common IoT sensor in the pre-lockdown years was the smart phone. Practically anyone over the age of ten had one. Acting as a sensor, people’s phones were a primary means of data collection, logging information about how people interacted with each other, with systems, and their physical world.

The first sensors were created to monitor global supply chain shipments. Then, corporate, government and academic researchers devised a dizzying array of sensors to transmit data about most aspects of the physical world and how people live their lives in it. Instead of tracking pallets on cargo ships, they now track people, buses, energy, animals, art, storm water runoff, even sounds and footsteps. Each processor gathers a particular type of information that can be merged into the data stream for analysis. Predictive analytics algorithms, complex mathematical equations that anticipate future outcomes, tap into the data stream. Such algorithms can be used to predict when the bulb in a streetlight will fail, when a storm sewer will overflow, or even where a crime will happen.

Click here to read the rest of the post.

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.

Omidyar, The Intercept & Impact Investing

from Wrench in the Gears
September 29, 2017

I wouldn’t expect an expose on ed-tech to come out of The Intercept any time soon, despite the solid work they have done on Google and their deep knowledge of online surveillance and ties between Silicon Valley and government officials. Read on to find out why.

I’m always looking for opportunities to raise awareness around ed-tech and digital curriculum. So when the Free Library of Philadelphia announced an author event with The Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill interviewing Edward Snowden via remote link, I bought a ticket right away. If there were an audience who would be concerned about cloud-based education, digital curriculum and surveillance, this would be it. See Tim Scott’s piece for detailed background on ed-tech and surveillance. So I made up a flyer, printed a hundred copies and arrived early to hand them out to attendees on the way into the event. Other than the board chair, who expressed concern about my presence, everyone was quite receptive.

 I wouldn’t expect an expose on ed-tech to come out of The Intercept any time soon, despite the solid work they have done on Google and their deep knowledge of online surveillance and ties between Silicon Valley and government officials. Read on to find out why.

I’m always looking for opportunities to raise awareness around ed-tech and digital curriculum. So when the Free Library of Philadelphia announced an author event with The Intercept founding editor Jeremy Scahill interviewing Edward Snowden via remote link, I bought a ticket right away. If there were an audience who would be concerned about cloud-based education, digital curriculum and surveillance, this would be it. See Tim Scott’s piece for detailed background on ed-tech and surveillance. So I made up a flyer, printed a hundred copies and arrived early to hand them out to attendees on the way into the event. Other than the board chair, who expressed concern about my presence, everyone was quite receptive.

On a related note, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation has been inserting itself into Philadelphia School District policy for quite a few years. Their donations of computers to select schools gives them access through grants to push for adoption of reform-minded initiatives like school report cards and universal enrollment systems. It wasn’t until a few years later while watching Oliver Stone’s Snowden, that I made a connection. In one scene Snowden was asked to prove his legitimacy and did so by throwing numerous credentials onto the hotel mattress. One of them was his Dell identification. As I wrote about here, Snowden obtained many National Security Agency documents while working as a Dell contractor. At the time I was fighting Dell’s influence in Philadelphia, I thought it was simply about selling more computers. Until that moment, I had not realized that Dell’s business extended far beyond the sale of laptops. In fact, the NSA is one of Dell’s most important clients. Maybe it was less about computers than it was about access to all the data generated by data-driven education systems. Watch this short video about Dell’s push for online “personalized” learning pathways. Knowing their ties to the NSA, you may see it as somewhat less than benign despite the peppy soundtrack.

 

Click here to read the entire post.

Change starts with individual acts of moral courage.

from Wrench in the Gears
September 26, 2017

It seems impossible until the day it becomes inevitable.

Change starts with individual acts of moral courage.

I posted the above comment on my Facebook page as an accompaniment to this article discussing growth of the protest movement within the NFL that manifested itself this past Sunday. On that day numerous players and owners allied themselves with a small but tenacious group of protestors who had joined Colin Kaepernick in the year since he first sat then took a knee during the playing of the national anthem. His intention: to draw attention to police brutality and oppression of people of color. You can read the transcript of Kaepernick’s comments and rationale here. Recognizing that our mythic “America” is built on genocide and the enslavement of people of color for profit is foundational to being able to move forward towards achieving any semblance of a just society. The fact that white supremacist violence erupted in Charlottesville not quite a year after Kaepernick’s initial protest makes it clear many are not yet ready to take that bitter pill and reconcile our brutal past with our present reality.

Kaepernick stood alone for a long time. There were consequences for him, emotionally and financially. He came to understand systems of oppression, and while he could have used his privilege to stake a place where those systems would be less likely to impact him, he instead chose to put himself in the center of the storm. In this individual gesture he became the pebble with the power to unleash the avalanche.

The status quo resists change mightily. There is too much power and profit riding on the continuous, uninterrupted operation of oppressive systems. Those of us watching recent developments in artificial intelligence, smart city surveillance, the Internet of Things, Blockchain, and impact investing realize the capacity to inflict harm on black and brown communities is about to rise exponentially. Outliers who question become targets of criticism, their message intentionally obscured by character attacks, criticism of the appropriateness of the method protest and other technicalities. Let us talk about anything other than the issues being raised, because recognizing and organizing around those issues could compel change, perhaps revolutionary change. Change is a threat.

While one expects criticism from those holding opposing views, people contemplating direct action outside acceptable norms of group-sanctioned protest must realize that criticism and obfuscation may also come from those technically allied with your cause. There are those who will propose a more “moderate” approach. Such tactics have the appearance of resistance, but are not intended to actually tip the apple cart. There is no meaningful change without risk. Actions taken within the comfort of groupthink may make one feel popular and accepted but are unlikely to push the envelope in any significant way.

American brutality comes in many forms: sometimes physical, sometimes financial, sometimes spiritual. Sometimes it looks like this.

This is the next wave of oppression, and it is rolling into classrooms across our nation and across the globe. Once again, communities of color will be targeted for tech-based interventions under the guise of bridging the “digital divide.” Though over time no one will be safe from the onslaught of financialization. As Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Reed Hasting, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates make their next moves I pose this question:

Will you be a Kaepernick?

Or will you hang back, waiting for some higher authority to sanction your protest?

Five things one person can do today to begin disrupting the Ed Reform 2.0 agenda:

Click here to read the rest of the post.

Big Picture Learning Off Limits

From Wrench in the Gears

September 20, 2017

The introduction to this piece including a discussion of ImBlaze can be found here.

 

Big Picture Learning students spend two days a week outside of school pursuing their “passions.” Although I’ve heard off the record that not all student end up with placements and instead languish in front of computer screens killing time. I imagine budget-conscious reformers must be salivating at the prospect of scaling a “school” model where you could outsource 40% of a student’s instruction to community partners. Imagine the cost savings! You don’t have to feed students on those days. You could reduce teaching staff. You could cram more students into the building staggering the classes. Put aside those pesky child labor considerations for a few moments and contemplate the possibilities. It’s would also be a way to begin to normalize the learning ecosystem “anytime, anywhere” model learning by app and competency-based badges. You might think there would be more to the process than getting the kids a log in for what is essentially a Yelp for education; a counselor perhaps? Of course the real imperative behind this digital solution is about data collection. In Future Ready schools students are defined by their data. As the article states “Data Tells the Story for Big Picture Learning.”

In December 2016, the School District of Philadelphia signed onto a $23 million contract with Big Picture schools. The organization, based out of Rhode Island (on track to become the first “personalized” learning state) presently operates in 24 states. The size of the Philadelphia contract indicates a major expansion of Big Picture is on the horizon here. The organization is going to occupy Vaux, which was shuttered during a wave of devastating closures that took place in 2013.

The community of Sharswood in which it is located is being “redeveloped” in using incredibly heavy-handed, predatory, 1960s urban renewal tactics. The ribbon cutting for the new Vaux Big Picture School took place today. The community members and education activists who tried to attend and voice their concerns were kept behind barriers far from the ceremony. Apparently no one was allowed within a two-block radius of the school without “necessary credentials.” Protesters included representatives from the Women’s Community Revitalization Project, ADAPT and the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools. Barbara McDowell Dowdall, a retired English teacher and former yearbook advisor who had worked at Vaux from 1974 to 1981 brought a yearbook along and shared fond memories of the school, reflecting on how much has been taken from the community in the intervening years. The event was monitored by a number of squad cars, bike patrol police and members of the civil affairs unit.

Also see:
Vaux Big Picture High School officially celebrates its opening | Philadelphia Public School Notebook
September 19, 2017
Read the comments.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson helps open a North Philly high school
Philadelphia Inquirer - September 19, 2017

Smart Cities and Social Impact Bonds: Public Education's Hostile Takeover Part II

from Wrench in the Gears
July 13, 2017

The Ed Reform 2.0 push to atomize knowledge into bits and pieces for validation by badges and micro-credentials has me very worried. It’s not what I want for my child, for other people’s children or for future generations. There are many days I feel like a Cassandra. It’s not that people don’t believe my predictions; rather, they are down in the trenches fighting more immediate battles and don’t have the luxury of time or head space to step back and let things come into focus. Part of the strategy, in fact, is to create repeated immediate threats that zap our resources and distract us from the true end game. It is unclear exactly what is to be done, because pushing back against these powerful global forces will take tremendous collective effort. And of course it is a weighty thing to hold this knowledge. I sense there are a lot of people who simply don’t want to look for fear that it will be too hard to carry that knowledge going forward.

I recognize there was no era in which public education was designed to care for ALL our nation’s children. As we stare down Ed Reform 2.0, we must be prepared not only to fight the reformers’ surveillance, human-capital management tactics, but also to collectively imagine and realize a new paradigm that will cultivate the intellect and talents of each and every child while recognizing and celebrating their human dignity. Rather than the toxic construct of “personalized” online learning that railroads children into set pathways, isolates them, and forces them to compete against one another, we need to embrace learning as an inherently human process, one that encourages students to take pleasure in discovering and constructing knowledge with the guidance of trained educators, in the fellowship of engaged peers, and within the context of their communities and culture.

Click here to read the entire article.

Getting Personal with Michael Horn in Indy

 By Doug Martin

 “In 15 years from now, half of US universities may be in bankruptcy. In the end I’m excited to see that happen. So pray for Harvard Business School if you wouldn’t mind.”  Clayton Christensen (2013)

“Thank God for Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn.” Jeb Bush

(NOTE: Michael Horn also is helping Mitch Daniels, but that topic goes beyond the scope of this blogpost)

When Michael Horn keynotes the Metropolitan School District of Warren Township’s Blended Learning Forum in Indianapolis at Creston Intermediate/ Middle School on July 20, 2017, the Harvard Business School graduate will be welcomed by the school reform crowd, since it won’t be the first time his Christensen Institute has mingled in Indiana. 

Horn and his mentor Clayton Christensen* specialize in convincing educators and politicians that personalized learning, through technology, can save a so-called failing and outdated school system.  The two co-founded the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation (formerly known as the Innosight Institute*), now a San Francisco Bay area think tank.  Although he has shuffled into a new job with Entangled Solutions, Horn is still listed as a distinguished fellow at the Christensen Institute. 

Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, is glorified in the business community for his theories supposedly explaining how disruption “takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors.” In the case of education, the “established competitors” to be displaced by “personalized” computer-based learning are public school teachers, since blended learning and online educational environments allow for a reduced labor force and will eventually lead to the elimination of brick-and-mortar schools altogether, edtech leaders hope.  

Besides pocketing over $3.4 million in Gates Foundation money over the years, the Christensen Institute has received high esteem from those determined to privatize public education from pre-school to university.  For the Christensen Institute and the billionaires, the end-game plan means first gaining access to the schoolhouse itself then using administrators and educators (like those at the MSD of Warren Township conference) to spread the technology and so-called personalized learning from school district to school district.

THE INDIANA WEB

Michael Horn and the Christensen Institute have connections at the Indianapolis-based Mind Trust.  Horn was a member of the Mind Trust/Public Impact advisory panel for the October 2015 report, “Raising the Bar: Why Public Charter Schools Must Become Even More Innovative.”

The Christensen Institute’s  senior research fellow, Thomas Arnett, an earlier Teach for America member and author of “Teaching in the Machine Age: How Innovation Can Make Bad Teachers Good and Good Teachers Better," was at the Mind Trust-hosted Marian University conference in Indianapolis on January 6, 2017, where “top national and local education thought leaders and pioneers, converged upon” campus “for a ‘Teacher Innovation Pipeline Convening’ event to discuss The Educators College teacher preparation program changes.”

With a few national players, the Mind Trust Marian event was attended by a who’s who of Indiana school privatization forces:

--former state school chief Tony Bennett*, listed as a consultant for MGT

--Mind Trust’s David Harris

--former Indianapolis mayor’s charter school director Beth Bray, now the Walton Family Foundation’s program officer

--Public Impact’s Bryan Hassel

--Marian president and prior Indiana state board of education member Daniel J. Elsener

--Republican lawmaker Robert Behning, who is Marian’s director of external affairs

--Purdue Polytechnic Indianapolis High School’s Scott Bess

--longtime school reform ally Claire Fiddian-Green

--Indianapolis Public Schools’ human resource officer, Mindy Schlegel

 

--Brent Maddin, the founding provost at the Relay Graduate School of Education

--Teach to One Math’s Christopher Rush

--Maggie Runyan Shefa, the co-CEO of New Schools for New Orleans

--Derek Redelman, now vice president of research and policy at USA Funds

--Bellwether Education Partners’ Andy Rotherham

--Scott Jenkins, the Lumina Foundation’s strategy director and a former policy director for past Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels

Previous Mind Trust operative Ken Bubp, now commanding the Arnold Foundation’s education unit, also attended the Mind Trust Marian event. 

The Arnold Foundation, a Mind Trust funder, handed Christensen and Horn’s Innosight Institute $274,075 from 2011-2012.  In October 2011 at a Philanthropy Roundtable event* in San Francisco, the Innosight Institute, the Arnold Foundation, Education Elements, and the NewSchools Venture Fund unveiled their  K-12 education technology market map, “designed to help investors, donors, and entrepreneurs better evaluate today’s landscape of education technology ventures.” Michael Horn, at the event, shared the stage with NewSchools Venture Fund’s then-CEO, Ted Mitchell, who later became Obama’s undersecretary of the Department of Education, and Education Elements’ Anthony Kim, introducing the map to, as Horn himself has written, “an audience of foundations and venture capitalists.” 

Michael Horn and the Christensen Institute also have friends at the Mind Trust-spinoff CEE-Trust.  In September 2012, when the Christensen Institute was still calling itself the Innosight Institute, Horn was on the “Launching an Inner-City Blended Learning School” panel at the Philanthropy Roundtable conference in New York City, an event where Ethan Gray, head of CEE-Trust, also presented.  In 2013, Michael Horn did a CEE-Trust webinar on disruptive innovation with host Carrie Douglass, a past Broad Foundation resident and chief strategy officer for CEE-Trust.  With the Gates, Broad, and Dell foundations, the Charter School Growth Fund, Silicon Schools, and a few others, CEE-Trust and the Christensen Institute developed “A Working Definition of Personalized Learning,” now accepted as industry gospel.  

Horn has also praised Carpe Diem’s blended-learning enterprise, which now operates in Indianapolis, writing in 2011 that the charter school chain “is one of the best-executed in terms of everything, to have rethought curriculum, instructional delivery, teacher role, and student supports.”  To create “smarter demand” in edtech, Horn notes, foundations must “Create more examples of exemplar blended-learning school models, such as Carpe Diem’s schools and Rocketship Education,” educate “the general public, media, and parents around the potential of digital learning,” and “Help educate school leaders, states, and districts, for example, to know what questions to ask as they implement online and blended learning,” since disrupting the K-12 market means going “beyond input-focused metrics–around such things as seat time and student-teacher ratios.”

COURSE ACCESS

Along with the Jeb Bush and Tony Bennett-founded Chiefs for Change and ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), Michael Horn and the Christensen Institute are big advertisers for Course Access, available in Indiana after the 2017 passing of House Bill 1007, which “creates a course-by-course voucher program to enable students to enroll and pay for online courses funded by the student's public school.”

At the Texas statehouse on March 12, 2015, Christensen’s senior research fellow Thomas Arnett testified before the Texas Senate Education Committee in favor of SB 894, a Course Access bill allowing students to grab classes through the Texas Virtual School Network, as did a representative from iNACOL, and favorable testimony from Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education followed the next day.  

Course Access is meant to disrupt traditional public schools, siphon school funding to private online companies, allow cash-strapped districts not to hire or replace teachers, and help consulting firms land money by training schools on how to manage their outsourced courses. 

Michael Horn has praised the tactic, stating “it takes school choice and ‘puts it on steroids.’” In an interview with Ron Matus at redefined, Horn says the MOOCs (the massive open online courses used at universities) and Course Access (also referred to as “Course Choice”) programs “blow up the geographic … scheme we’ve had for where someone goes to school.” He adds that students may still need a school of record to help students and parents manage their options. 

Patricia Burch, an associate professor of education and policy at the University of Southern California, worries that the Course Access maneuver, which has already been adopted by ten other states, can have a major impact on school districts’ budgets, since money for online courses will be sent not only across districts but also state lines, she told the Atlantic. 

Course Access, no doubt, could be a boon for K-12, Inc. and other online companies and platforms.  In fact, thanks to the lobbying efforts of Chiefs for Change, where IPS’ Lewis Ferebee is now a member, the new ESSA federal law permits states to use 3 percent of their Title I funding—which amounts to $425 million—for programs which include online courses, personalized learning, and Course Access programs. 

In the introduction to a 2014 Course Access brief, Jeb Bush writes that “Having a high-quality education must no longer depend on location.  For the next generation of students, the international stakes are too high to restrict access to great courses based on zip code.” In reality, trends in Florida, Utah, and Texas show that wealthy and white students are the ones using Course Access, not the low-income minority kids Bush and other edtech supporters claim.

NOTES

* Horn, who worked at America Online “during its aol.com re-launch,” has directed the hedge fund-affiliated $25 million Robin Hood Education + Technology Fund in New York City and was a member of the New York Education Reform Commission and the $100 million Gates-funded student data-collecting failure, InBloom, for starters. 

Clayton Christensen, too, has mingled with school privatization players.  In 2013, the Harvard business professor keynoted Jeb Bush’s the Foundation for Excellence in Education’s 6^th annual summit on education reform in Boston, that year sponsored by, among others, the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation, ExxonMobil, Scholastic, Target, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, K12, Inc., State Farm, CharterSchools USA, Edgenuity, Microsoft, the Oberndorf Family Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund, Intel, and Pearson.  In a promotional video for the Christensen Institute (“About the Institute,” published on June 5, 2014), Jeb even says: “Thank God for Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn.”

* The Innosight Institute should not to be confused with the Innosight consulting firm, which Clayton Christensen co-founded in 2000 with Michael Overdorf, now Eli Lilly’s vice president of corporate strategy & business transformation. 

* Besides edtech champions Tom Vander Ark, iNACOL’s Susan Patrick, and Rocketship’s CEO John Danner, the Philanthropy Roundtable conference in New York City also included the Mind Trust-backed Seton Education Partners’ Scott Hamilton and Anthony Kim, CEO of Education Elements, the NewSchools Venture Fund-backed enterprise that MSD of Warren Township hired to launch its personalized learning program. 

* In 2011, when then-Indiana superintendent of public education Tony Bennett sat on the Council of Chief State School Officers’ taskforce on Next-Generation State Accountability Systems, Horn was one of several advisors who reviewed and gave feedback on CCSSO’s Roadmap (page 38).