Zuck's Ed Tech Baby Goes With A Whimper

A new chapter in the long story of Summit Learning.

Summit Schools were an early entry (2003) into the world of charters, with founder Diane Tavenner trying to do personalized learning the low tech way. Tavenner was reportedly a former teacher, asst. principal and a graduate of the Broad Faux Academy of Superintendenty Stuff: she served as the board chair for the California Charter Schools Association, a board that includes Joe Williams, head of DFER as a member). 

Mark Zuckerberg, fresh off a disastrous attempt to finance an overhaul of New Jersey schools,  ran across the Bay area school in 2014 and decided that he would give it not just an infusion of cash, but an infusion of technology. Including engineering support to "make this better." Summit became one of Zuckerberg's pet projects, and it was also beloved by that other well-connected super-rich education amateur, Bill Gates, who has some of his Top People promoting hell out of it.

Summit handed off its "education. in a box" program to all sorts of schools (about 400 at its peak) and it was yet another experimennt in large scale education-via-screen. 

Many folks did not love it. . Take a look at some of the comments in this piece "The Inherent Racism of Summit 'Public' (Charter) School." And many schools have backed away from the Mass Customized Learning Program (a term that deserves a place on the oxymoron shelf right next to Jumbo Shrimp and Peacekeeper Missiles).

Indiana, Pennsylvania schools tried to quietly implement Summit programming, and parents began to squawk almost immediately. After just one month

parents began telling the school board that their kids were not adjusting to the new learning style, that they found questionable and objectionable material in the recommended online resources in their classes, and that their children were spending too much time in front of computer screens

NY Magazine just profiled Cheshire, Connecticut, another town that fought back when the mass customized learning program came to town (or rather, the town came to them, since the Summit model involves logging on to the Summit website). The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative had paid for the 130 Chromebooks needed, but once again, reality got in the way of CZI dreams.

Students rarely met with teachers, but instead had lots of screen time with a computer program that was reportedly easy to trick (just skip the lessons and go straight to the tests). The program still has glitches, including questions that cannot be answered correctly (maybe some nerdy programmer decided Summit needed its own Kobayashi Maru?) And there's the problem of the open-sourced playlists themselves:

Nothing about the platform said Silicon Valley more than the open-source approach to the “playlists.” Teachers were encouraged to customize them, to add and subtract — and Cheshire’s teachers were working on this, Superintendent Jeff Solan said in an email — but the base material was often just a bunch of links, to sites ranging from Kids Encyclopedia to SparkNotes to the BBC. I interviewed several educators who were involved in developing the platform in 2014, and when I mentioned this to one, he agreed they were “shoddy.” “We knew it,” he said. They were in such a hurry, he said, “we were just throwing things in there, that, at least from a Google search, looked reputable.”

Yikes. It's almost as if the actual education piece is secondary to some other part of the operation. I wonder what that could be...

And there was the question of data. Summit is clear about the 18 partners it shares its data with, and subjects itself to its own strong privacy agreements in addition to the legal protections around student data already in place, but parents and other locals were nonetheless concerned. “The Chromebooks were free. Nothing’s free. There’s always a reason,” said Mary Burnham, a retired educator who was part of the campaign against Summit. “If somebody’s giving you something free, chances are, they want something back, or they’re already getting something from it. As best I can tell, with Summit, it’s data.

Like the equally tech-heavy and success-light Altschool, Summit seemed to be one part market research and one part experiment on human lab rats, with the goal of finding proof of concept for computer-managed education. But mostly Altschool lost truckloads of money, and it eventually faded away into various other products and companies (Altitude Learning was one piece, apparently part of Guidepost Learning, another edu-prenuer undertaking that has since gone bankrupt). 

Traction was not happening for Summit, either. Chalkbeat found that 1 in 4 schools dropped the program by the 2018-19 school year.

In 2018, Summit spun the digital program off into a non-profit entity whose initial four-person board included Diane Tavenner, Summit founder; Priscilla Chan; and Peggy Alford, the CFO for CZI.It seemed suspiciously like a subsidiary of the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The program was designed to follow what has now become the familiar model-- students getting their education from a compter-manab=ged algorithm while (low-cost) "coaches" provided some human oversight in the room. Maybe not so much oversight as "accountability sinks," because somebody has to be responsible when things go south. But Summit even went so far as to create its own special farm for training "facilitators."

The National Education Policy Center took a look at Summit's learning system, and found that it was a lot more hat than cowboy (and it was also extraordinarily reluctant to submit to any examination of their work or results). 

So in 2023, CZI (not really pretending it hadn't swallowed Summit whole) spun Summit off again, this time an outfit called Gradient, which the CZI blog said "we can help these important research-based resources more consistently reach students and educators, by focusing on coherence for educators." "Consistency" and "coherence" come up a lot in the history of Summit, because Zuck and his friends repeatedly concluded that the reason the computer-managed curriculum in a box wasn't working better and winning hearts and minds was that teachers were not implementing it faithfully enough. Damned mat widgets.

Gradient was yet another company whose promised whiz-bangery invokes the the "whole student" and a "unified learning platform," and while it can be hard to see through the smokey argle bargle, it sure looks like Trascend also wants to make computer-managed software-delivered education a thing. With a "dedicated coach." 

Gradient was going to have things chugging along by the 2024-2025 school year, but in Februarty 2026, Gradient announced its "next chapter,"

Expanding the scale and impact of this work is more important than ever. After much deliberation with our board, we are pleased to share that the future of the Gradient Learning program will move to a new home at Transcend, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting schools and systems to create extraordinary experiences and outcomes for all students. Transcend brings the expertise to take our program to the next level, as well as the ability to amplify a community of education innovators working for lasting change.

Transcend is about "model sharing" and "community innovation." They want to "reimagine educator roles" and their Leaps toward Extraordinary Learning for All is just the same old "school hasn't changed in a century" and educatyion should be relevant and a lot of nice words about what education should be like that nobody should disagree with, given that they offer nothing in the way of specific techniques that teachers should use. They jpin. a whole long line of edu-prenuers who offer pretty ideals about what education should be like without addressing any of the nuts and bolt specifics, which is where teachers live and do their work. Agency! High expectations! Rigor! Not one size fiots all! I have no evidence, but it is entirely possible that Transcend is actually headquarterd on a farm upstate, where tired old reform mcliches can run and play and are definitely not euthanized.

There is a certain symmetry to this story, however. I didn't follow up on the various team members of Transcend, so who knows-- maybe none of them were in Teach for America. The board is largely investment and business types. The CEO is Aylon Samouha, whose previous jobs include  Chief Schools Officer at Rocketship Education and several years as a Senior Vice President at Teach For America, and I feel compelled to note, lists jazz guitar as one of his pursuits, so God bless him for that.

But the kicker. The board has two lifetime members. One is Stacey Childress, former CEO of New Schools Venture Fund, and the other is Diane Tavenner, currently listed as CEO and Co-founder of her latest ventures, Futre.me.

These are the stories I think of every time some reformbro tries to argue that in the private sector, when you fail there are consequences-- not like in public education. Maybe. But it sure seems that in the private sector, the invisible hand doesn't cut failure loose so much as it just shuffles it around, to kick back and forth from one doomed enterprise to another. Will the ghost of Summit ever be laid to final rest? It may take decades to find out.