Zuck's Tech Revolution That Never Happened

One of education journalist Matt Barnum's lasty pieces of work at Chalkbeat before departing for the Wall Street Journal was a retrospective about Mark Zuckerberg's attempt to bring tech revolution to education. It's a great read, and I'm here to encourage you to go read it even as I underline a couple of Barnum's points.

The jumping off point is a blog post from the education head at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Sandra Liu Huang, that says--well, it says a lot. It takes the tone of a long-view retrospective, a fond look back at the long journey she's taken. A journey of five whole years. Because tech folks (Huang is a former project manager) think five years is a long time, I guess, while in education after five years a teacher is still just getting started. Anyway, after this long road of five whole years, she talks about the "next chapter."

Since the start, CZI’s efforts in education have been defined by collaboration.

Sure. But one of her takeaways is this:

We’ve collectively developed resources that are cutting-edge, high-quality and research-based — but some of these resources are underutilized.

Here, in one sentence, is one of the core incompetencies of ed tech. Let me rewrite that for her:

We’ve collectively developed resources that are cutting-edge, high-quality and research-based — but some of these resources turned out not to be very useful.

It is the Way of the Education Techbro to always and forever assume that if a tech tool isn't being embraced and employed, the problem must rest with the end user. Never, ever conclude things like "this tool doesn't work very well" or "this tool is not helpful for the work that teachers actually do." So instead of trying to find out why their stuff hasn't been useful, why Zuck's repeated big bets on ed tech have failed to pay off time and again, CZI has some other ideas.

Use products like Along, yet another learning-communication-digitization platform, "with coherence." And so you don't think I'm exaggerating, here's how Huang explains it:

This is what we mean by coherence: By working in lockstep, not piecemeal, we not only develop better products, we make it easier for educators to adopt research-based practices to the benefit of their students.

Sure. Ed tech isn't revolutionizing education because teachers aren't being properly lockstepped into place.

As Barnum points out, Zuck's big bet for the last decade has been "personalized learning" (though it's never been clear that he really understands what that would mean), particularly on two companies.

The flashier one was AltSchool, a boutique wired-up private school model launched by Googler Max Ventilla. It was a hugely expensive model that involved super-surveillance and data crunching of students. Students and teachers would just sort of amble through the forest of education. Teachers would capture moments of demonstrated learning on video, students would do work on modules on computer, and it would all be crunched in a back room full of IT whizzes who would churn out personalized learning stuff for the students. The lab schools turned out to be market research labs for ed tech spinoff products; the schools were sold off, the products spun off, and Ventilla headed off to his next venture. 

The bigger bet was on Summit, which started out in pre-tech days as a personalized education operation, then teched up and spun its schools off into a software and school-via-computer operation. As Barnum notes, nobody knows for sure how well Summit in its current software form works. We have anecdotes from happy parents and news items like the school where students walked out in protest of being clamped to screens all day. Summit itself has turned out to be super-resistant to having its operation studied, and when people like the National Education Policy Center do take a look, they find far more sizzle than steak. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

But CZI hadn't bet on Summit to have mixed results; they were supposed to spared across the country and change the face of education. That did not happen.

The blog post asserts that CZI will continue to support Gradient Learning (a non-profit spun off from Summit that seems fully emmeshed in CZI) and Summit itself, though "We plan to help foster a careful and responsible transition of core features of Summit Learning to a third-party platform over the next year" sounds an awful lot like "we're going to break this down for parts."

Algorithm-based, screen-delivered, sort-of-personalized education remains a dream among some folks, including lots of folks who don't seem to understand how education or young humans work, and the pandemic and rise of generative language software have given them more hope, despite all these years of aspirational marketing copy, undelivered promises, and general failure. 

Barnum closes his piece with a quote that is hilariously on the nose. 

John Bailey, a fellow at CZI and the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote an optimistic essay about the potential of AI, with a headline that marked the end of one era and the dawn of a new one: “The Promise of Personalized Learning Never Delivered. Today’s AI Is Different.”

That is edtech, education's bad boyfriend, in one sentence. "Yes, we've lied to you every other time and never delivered what we promised, but, by God, this time it's going to be completely different." Sure.