Sometimes it seems that education policy is nothing but a series of scams and frauds that becomes untenable in one generation only to pop up again 10 or 20 years laterwith a new name.
Take Personalized Learning, the latest digital product from the ed-tech industry to invade your local public school.
It’s cutting edge stuff.
Except that it isn’t.
It’s just the same old correspondence school nonsense of the 1980s thrown onto an iPad or a laptop.
It was crap back then, and it’s crap today.
But it sounds nice.
Personalized Learning.
I like that.
That’s exactly the kind of educational experience I want for my own daughter.
I’d like her schooling to be tailor-made for her. Teach her in a way she can best understand and that will best engage her mind and build upon her competencies.
It’s a euphemism for Competency Based Education or Outcome Based Education.
It means plopping a child in front of a computer screen for hours on end while she takes standardized tests and standardized test look-alikes on-line.
Cartoon avatars lecture students how to answer multiple-choice questions in mind numbing detail before making them go through endless drill-and-kill practice. If kids don’t get a question right, they do it again-and-again until they do.
And somehow this is personalized?
I’ll give you a little tip. You can’t have personal learning without people.
This is personalized the same way Angry Birds and Candy Crush is personalized. Except it’s way less fun – and much higher stakes.
Imagine if all of your classes were taught at the end of an automated help line. That’s really what this is:
“If you don’t understand because you need me to define a word, press 1.
If you don’t understand because you need me to explain punctuation, press 2.
If you don’t understand because you need the question repeated…”
What if your question isn’t on the menu? You have no recourse other than to just keep pushing buttons until you hit the one that’s supposedly “correct”.
Forget for a moment how ineffective that is. Just imagine how boring it is for a growing child.
Nothing stifles a young person’s natural curiosity more than being forced to suffer through hours of tedium.
And what’s worse, we already know this.
We’ve tried this kind of garbage before with similar results.
Back in the 1980s, the Reagan administration deregulated everything it could get its hands on, especially education.
This opened the floodgates to for-profit corporations to offer mail order correspondence courses with little to no accountability but funded by the federal government.
For nearly a decade, student aide systems were systemically pillaged and looted by unscrupulous vendors offering correspondence schools as a trendy alternative for trade schools and credit recovery programs. They charged hefty tuition and fees for nothing more than sending students boilerplate instructional materials, multiple choice tests, and worthless diplomas in the mail.
The blatant fraud was documented by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the hearings held by then-Chairman Sam Nunn of Georgia. This lead to eliminating correspondence schools from participation in federal aide programs.
Congress realized that sending students a book wasn’t the same as actually teaching them.
But by the late 1990s and early 2000s, things began to change. With the popularization of the Internet, the defunct business model could rebrand itself simply by offering similar materials on-line. And after significant lobbying efforts over the subsequent decades, Congress conveniently forgot its objections to almost the same kind of fraud.
However, this kind of malfeasance was at first mostly confined to credit recovery programs and on-line colleges. In K-12 this was primarily a way for students who had already failed a grade to pass the required core courses over the summer on-line. It was a way to boost graduation rates or even provide resources for students to get a G.E.D.
The poor quality of these programs has been demonstrated time and again.
But instead of limiting, fixing or eliminating them, we’re pushing them into the public school system.
This is seen as a way to save money by teaching without teachers. Sure, you still need a certified educator in the class room (for now) but you can stuff even more children into the seats when the teacher is only a proctor and not responsible for actually presenting the material.
The teacher becomes more of a policeman. It’s his job to make sure students are dutifully pressing buttons, paying attention and not falling asleep.
Moreover, this is sold as a way to boost test scores and meet the requirements of the Common Core. You can easily point to exactly which standards are being assessed on a given day and then extrapolate to how much that will increase struggling students’ scores on the federally mandated standardized test when they take it later in the year.
In fact, students’ answers on these programs are kept and recorded. They are, in effect, stealth assessments that can be used to judge and sort students into remediation classes or academic tracks.
In effect, the year-end high stakes test can be entirely forgotten. Students are given a standardized test every day. Even those whose parents opt them out of the federal assessment have no escape because the tests have become the curriculum, itself.
And all the while tech companies are raking in the cash.
Education policy is not concerned with how best to teach children. It is about how best to open the trough of tax dollars to education corporations – book publishers, test manufacturers and now tech companies.
Meanwhile, the public has almost no idea what’s going on.
Educators are sounding the alarm, but well-paid corporate shills are trying to silence them as being anti-progress.
Calling out bad educational practices conducted on a computer is not Ludditism. Certainly there are better ways to use the technology to help students learn than THIS.
Moreover, there are plenty of things from the ‘80s that deserve being revisited – new wave music, romantic comedies, even the old Rubik’s cube.
But putting crappy correspondence colleges on-line!?
No, thank you.
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