What Does "Personalized Learning" Even Mean?

Personalized learning is all over the educational landscape these days, even though nobody can offer a clear and consistent explanation for what it might be. The field encompasses everyone from teachers designing more effective methods to businesses with a new edu-product to sell. Assuming for the moment that there is no solid, universal definition, let's consider the different aspects of instruction that could be involved when someone is pitching personalized learning.

Pace

Personalized learning can refer simply to pace. All students cover the same materials in the same order, moving at whatever speed seems to best suit them. If you're old enough to remember doing SRA reading exercises out of the box in your elementary classroom, you have experienced this type of personalization.

Timeline

A more extreme version of pace. Some versions of personalization involve flexible time, with the student allowed as much (or as little) time as is required for them to show mastery of that particular unit. This often requires changes to the traditional rules in order to accommodate students with wildly different, so that Pat's school year may be less than 180 days and Chris's might be more. This could mean that Pat could finish high school by age 15 while Pat was still there at age 20. Nobody has really addressed how to handle this, yet.

Content

The personalization may refer to the content used to deliver the lesson. For instance, everyone in the class may be working on reading for context clues, but Pat gets a reading selection about dinosaurs and Chris gets one about opera, because those are things that Pat and Chris care about. This will require a large library of materials.

Pitch

Netflix is one of many companies that has had success in personalizing pitches. In other words, they take a chunk of content, and they create tailored trailers that are aimed at particular groups.  That's how you end up with a trailer for Lost In Space aimed at Canadians who like comedies. In education terms, this will come out as "we will find the ways to tap into student motivation" aka "we will make this lesson appear to be about something that interests the students." But all the students will still get the same lesson.

Remediation

Chris and Pat take a pre-test about parts of speech. Pat does poorly with adverbs and Chris does poorly with pronouns, so for their next assignment, Chris and Pat get different worksheets. Each gets one geared to the weaknesses they displayed on the previous test. Again, a large and varied bank of materials will be needed.

Learning Styles

The most important thing to know about learning styles is that the whole concept has been repeatedly debunked. Nevertheless, you may find personalization based on this popular but discredited theory. So for a unit about the Civil War, Pat may be assigned a chapter of reading, while Chris is told to watch an instructional video. Be prepared for complaints about how someone got the "easy" assignment.

Assessment Modes

The idea here is to use a mode that best allows the student to display her level of achievement. That might be an objective test or an essay or some sort of project. It may include more than one attempt in more than one mode. Does such a system allow us to consider Pat and Chris's grades comparable? Nobody has really answered this.

Student Choice

One distinguishing feature of different personalization models is the degree of student choice. In a model that's strictly about pace, the student really has no choice except when to move ahead. Other models may give a student a choice of columns A, B or C. The extreme version would be a system that allows the student to make all the choices-- what will be studied, how it will be studied, and how the student will ultimately be assessed.

Delivery Systems

Everything we've discussed so far could be (and often is, because teachers have been personalizing instruction since the invention of dirt) handled by a human teacher. But much of the recent push for personalization comes from the edtech world, where there's a belief that A) computer software can handle many of the complex tasks involved and B) there is money to be made selling that software. The software may be billed as Artificial Intelligence, claiming that it can "learn" the student's style and strengths and therefor generate just the right materials. There are many issues to consider with computerized delivery-by-algorithm, not the least of which is having your educational experience designed and written by software engineers.

Location

Edtech folks like to talk about personalization as anytime, anywhere learning. If all the learning and the assessment of mastery is done via computer, then it could happen any place that the student can hook up to the internet. The issue here becomes the monitoring of these various learning events. Who decides whether or not helping pick up trash earns a student a micro-credential in environmental science.

Questions to ask.

A personalized learning system can include any or all of these features, and yet few come with clear explanations of which features are involved and how they are managed. Personalized learning advocates have generally steered away from discussing the delivery aspect, perhaps because "Let a computer teach your child," is not a great sales pitch. Pitches are also often vague about just how deep and wide their library of materials is; it's worth asking whether the personalized materials are being newly generated or simply plucked from a pre-existing bank of materials, and how large that bank is.

Another good line of inquiry is to ask about the outliers. If you have a student who is socially withdrawn, low-achieving, very interested in Edwardian England, tends to work slowly, but has a very large vocabulary and excellent reading skills, will the program really deliver personalized lessons for that student, will it only come close, or will the student just get basically the same lessons as the rest of the class. In other words, how broad a spectrum of personalization can this system really cover?

Finally, make no assumptions. "Personalized learning" can be a legitimate descriptive educational term, but these days it is just as likely to be used as a marketing term, and like any good marketing term, it is used to encourage the customer to make assumptions about the product that may or may not be related to reality. Don't assume that just because your idea of personalized learning includes a certain feature, so does someone else's. Ask.

Originally posted at Forbes.com

Guest Post: Please Treat Teachers Like Dirt

Last week I posted a blog on Forbes.com about the Phi Delta Kappa annual report on education. This year it features a focus on teacher morale, and I pulled the quote "Tired of being treated like dirt." A reader-- Stacey Miller Chester-- wrote a reply on Facebook I just love, because I'm a sucker for good analogies and metaphors, and so I'm reprinting it here, with her permission:

May I be honest? 

I actually feel we aren't treated like dirt. 

"What?!" No, you read that right. We aren't treated like dirt. I'm a farm girl. I guarantee you that dirt is treated better than teachers. 

Dirt is indeed evaluated...regularly. If it's not producing as expected then the farmer acts quickly to determine the problem. Does it need fertilizer so that the quality of the plants it's responsible for growing is stronger? Perhaps it needs rest since fallow ground repairs itself over a short period of time. Perhaps it needs additives such as lime or nitrogen since so much is expected of it in such a short time. 

Dirt is a limited resource and therefore its value is important to the farmer. He or she values it so much that no expense is spared in its protection and use. Typically, the value of dirt increases and therefore the quality of the dirt is bragged about. Farmers regularly spend thousands of dollars to root out any problems so that dirt's ability to produce is supported and valued by the farmer. 

No, dirt is treated better than most teachers. So, you know, take it for what's worth to you.

Indian Hill, Free To Teach, And How To Bust A Union

If you are a teacher in Pennsylvania, you have probably heard from the folks at Free To Teach (I'm sure there are at least two of them) about how much better your life could be without a union. Their most recent letter includes an example of a district where teachers are happily existing without any connection to the state or national unions.

Free To Teach has been around for a while. It's an operation of the right-wing Commonwealth Foundation which is in turn connected to the State Policy Network, and it's all tied to ALEC and Koch funding. It's the same old gang of people who would like to see unions go away-- particularly those damned teachers unions that provide so much support for the Democratic Party. If you want more details, I've gathered them here.

This time, FTT director Keith Williams wants to tell us about a district he visited-- Indian Hill Exempted School District just outside Cincinnati. It's one of the highest achieving school districts in the country, and they dropped out of the national and state unions five years ago.

They have some facilities, too.

That process apparently involved the help of John Concannon, a lawyer who served as the district lawyer for Cincinnati schools for years. You can read his relatively unthreatening FAQ about the process here; it includes all of the usual reassurances that the teachers don't really need the sorts of protections that the unions offer.

But upon closer examination, Indian Hill Exempted Village School District is a good example of how you really bust a union. Let me tell you a story.

For years, folks from the national union tried to unionize one of our local grocery stores. It never, ever came close to succeeding. The owner of the store paid his workers really well. Beyond that, he treated them with kindness and respect, didn't jerk them around, didn't make them work under crappy conditions, and regularly accommodated their needs outside the job. The employees' stance was simple: What would a union get for us that our boss does not already give us freely? The boss didn't run his business this way in order to keep the union out; that just happened to be one of the side effects.

Let's take a look at Indian Hill Exempted Village School District.

They serve about 1,900 students, who are spread over four schools; those schools are separated by grade bands, not geography, because the district is small. They serve mainly three communities:

Kenwood, Ohio, is 2.3 square miles, includes a little over 3,000 households. Median family income-- $74,511. 1.6% of families below poverty line. 89% white.

Camp Dennison, less than half a square mile with a population under 400.

Indian Hill Exempted Village. A bit over 18 square miles. A little more than 200 households, with a household median income (per 2000 census) of  $179,356. 92% white, less than 1% black. 

In 2002, the Robb Report ("Your global luxury resource") rated it the "best place to raise a family" saying it attracted "well-heeled parents seeking a quiet, safe setting to raise children." Half of the students are labeled gifted. High school student body is 82% white, 8% Asian, 4% Black, 2% Hispanic. Nobody seems to have numbers on free lunch students. Teacher student ratio is 13:1. 53 teachers in the high school. Tons of AP classes and test-takers. Graduation rate is 97%. Average salary is $71,908 (Ohio average is $56, 928). They keep winning awards for being a great place to work-- not a great school, but a great place among all employers.

So, Pennsylvania teachers, as you contemplate this example, consider just how much this district does or does not look like yours. Small, compact, white, wealthy, high-achieving, community supported, with a relatively small teaching staff-- does this sound like your district?

Look, I have never been and will never be a die-hard uncritical fan of the teachers unions; they can be obnoxious, wrongheaded, and focused on issues that don't matter to your local. But it would be foolish to trust the good will and interests of school district management. You will note that Indian Hill School District teachers did not drop all thoughts of a union-- they simply gave themselves a raise by dropping out of unions that tied them to a whole lot of teachers who are poorer and generally worse off than they are (and who don't have access to a friendly edulawyer). They said, "We've made it to the top of the ladder, and it is costing us money and effort to stand around holding onto it so that everyone else can climb up."  That may be a sensible and practical decision (though time will tell), but it's not a decision available to everyone.

In short, Free To Teach's assertion that since Indian Hill teachers ditched the union, your local can, too, is like saying that since LeBron James can skip exercise for a few days, you might as well sit on the couch binging on Cheetos and Top Chef. The real message is, "We don't like unions, and we hop you will quit yours."

Ed Reform vs. Democracy

It was not that long ago that I wrote a piece about how school choice, by shifting the locus of control for the education purse strings, tends to undermine democractic processes. After all, if only parents of school age children, or only rich folks who contribute to tax credit scholarships, get to decide which schools get paid, then the non-parent taxpayers who are footing the bills don't really have much say, and the duly-elected school board has nothing much to do or say, either. School choice is, often, literally taxation without representation (a topic that I could swear has come up before in US history).

Still, it's not always so subtle.

One of the most famously unsubtle incidents would be Reed Hastings (Netflix), who in 2014 told the California School Boards Association in fairly clear terms that elected school boards were a scourge and should be done away with. Hastings has been plenty active in the charter sector, managing to help push through the California law that not only did away with charter caps, but made it possible to run a chain of charters with just one (unelected) board.

But education reform has generally found democracy to be an obstruction. After all, if Bill Gates thinks he knows how to fix education, why should he have to run for some sort of public office when he can just grab power and finance cooperation? Much of ed reform has been powered by movers and shakers and corporate power guys who like (and undoubtedly feel justified by) the all-powerful CEO model. As Hastings once put it when discussing Netflix, "We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team. Netflix leaders hire, develop and cut smartly, so we have stars in every position."

These guys hate unions and government regulation for the same reason guys like Carnegie and Rockefeller hated them-- not just because they cost them money, but because they hampered their ability to be visionary leaders who could control all the elements of their business and make the corporation operate "properly and efficiently" (understanding that only the visionary Captain of Industry truly sees what steps must be taken).

These dismissals of democracy are happening all the time. Let's check in in Florida (state motto "Let's drag public education out back and bury it in the swamp") where privatizers in government jobs have been pushing Duval schools to hurry up and hand their schools over to charter companies, already.

So now, lawmaker Jason Fischer has a new idea-- replace the elected school board with an one appointed by the mayor.

Reformsters are fans of the mayoral takeover of school districts. It gives them cover (after all, the mayor is elected) but insulation from actual democracy (mayoral elections are rarely--though not never-- about education).

Fischer may seem especially cranky because he was elected to the board at one point, but... well, that could have gone better. Like a good Floridian Republican, he clashed with the board over spending money or raising taxes, because Florida (state motto "How can charters compete for education dollars if public schools are fully funded?"). And he's long been a school choice advocate. Ultimately he resigned in order to find some other election fish to fry, but he's kept at the Duval board by proposing term limits and calling for audits. This might also have something to do with the fight between the school board and the mayor over a tiny tax levy to fix some tragically old school buildings.

Whatever the case, the bottom line is the same-- Fischer would like the state legislature to strip Duval County voters of their right to elect a school board, and he's not even offering a lame explanation for why that would be a good idea. Just need to get some of that troublesome democratic process out of the way.

What Can We Learn From An Experimental High Tech Wunderschool Failure?

Max Ventilla launched AltSchool quietly enough in 2013, but within two years it was a hot Silicon Valley startup. In 2015, $100 million of investment dollars from major education reform players like Mark Zuckerberg and the Emerson Collective spurred an impressive wave of press. In just 24 hours the Silicon Valley Wunderschool had been covered by Kevin Carey in the Pacific Standard, Natasha Singer in the New York Times, and Issie Lapowski at WIRED.com. And USA Today and techcrunch and Forbes.

AltSchool would be a proof of concept for the most ideal version of personalized learning, centered on teachers who would be backed up by tech and tech engineers, and backed by, ultimately, about $174 million. Ventilla envisioned a chain of profitable private schools setting a new standard for high-tech personalization. But click over to the AltSchool website today and all you will find is a push for something called Altitude Learning. Ventilla has sold off the schools themselves and created a new venture that will focus on selling the tech software that AltSchool developed. The headlines are not nearly as glowing as they were four years ago. "AltSchool Gives Up On Schools" and "AltSchool's Out...Calls It Quits" and, most brutally, "How An Education Startup Wasted Almost $200 Million."

So what lessons are there in this startup's trajectory?

Education Is Harder Than You Think

Ventilla came from Google, and had a Silicon Valley attitude about innovating other fields. In 2016, he told Adam Lashinsky of Fortune, "We're kind of flying the plane while we're building it." Lashinsky saw the problem:

The difference is that AltSchool is experimenting with the lives of children, not a better way of tagging beer-bust photos. The reason the plane-flying analogy amuses is that no one in their right mind would tinker with an airborne plane. Yet AltSchool asks parents to pay for the privilege of supplying their children as guinea pigs."

Modern education reform has been driven in large part by wealthy amateurs, convinced that their expertise in other areas can be translated into education reform, rebirth, and revival. Some, like Nick Hanauer in his recent Atlantic piece and Larry Berger (CEO, Amplify), have stepped forward to acknowledge that they were wrong. Others just keep swinging and in the process discover that fixing schools is not as simple as they thought it was. Ventilla was thinking small, investing large financial and human resources, and even paying some attention to trained educators, and he still couldn't pull it off. Keep that in mind the next time someone with big business success but not education background announces that he knows how to fix everything.

Personalized Education Is Much, Much Harder Thank You Think

Personalized learning is one of the great new waves in education, promising that every student can have an individualized, customized education. Zuckerberg has been backing it, both with AltSchool and at Summit Learning. Charles Koch has a new initiative focused on it. What is offered is almost always a version that cuts some corners, because full scale personalized learning would require a huge bank of resources and a great deal of human-hours to do the personalized design for each student. AltSchool had the resources-- human, technological, and financial-- and still had trouble making it work. This is not a complete surprise; a new report from the National Education Policy Center shows that personalized learning has a myriad of pitfalls. Keep that in mind the next time you hear someone announce that personalization is going to revitalize a local school district.

Business Is Business

Some charter and private schools are businesses. That does not make them inherently evil or bad, but it gives them a different set of priorities than those of a public school.

Businesses measure success financially, and they can be very flexible in pursuing it. MTV started out showing music videos, and when it became apparent that there were better ways to remain successful as a cable content company, they did not announce, "Well, we were founded to show music videos, so we're going to stay true to our roots whether that brings in revenue or not." Instead, they pivoted to something else. They shifted their mission.

AltSchool has been shifting for a while. Late in 2017, Ventilla started getting out of the school business. Some parents were not very happy to discover that they had been paying to have their children serve as beta testers for an edtech company. One parent, quoted by Melia Robinson at Business Insider, summed up the issue clearly:

We're not the constituency of the school," a parent of a former AltSchool student told Business Insider. "We were not the ones [Ventilla] had to be accountable to."

AltSchool has shifted its mission. It's certainly within its right--maybe even its responsibilities--to do so. But keep that in mind the next time you're considering enrolling your child in somebody's business.
Originally posted at Forbes.com

PA: Governor Calls Charters Private, Makes Advocacy Group Sad

When Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf trotted out his budget last month, he made it a point to note that he was raising money for public schools-- and that he had some definite ideas about which schools are public and which schools are not.

He wants to see more of those basic education dollars to school districts get distributed through the state’s fair funding formula. He also wants to address concerns related to cyber charter schools, which he referred to as “the growing cost of privatization of education in our public schools.”

And just in case that wasn't clear enough, a press release from the governor's office was even more direct:

Pennsylvania must help school districts struggling with the problem of increasing amounts of school funding siphoned by private cyber and charter schools. Funding reform would increase transparency so all schools that receive state dollars are accountable to the taxpayers.

This made Ana Meyers sad.

This lady

Meyers is the current executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public [sic] Charter Schools. She has previously worked as "Director of Legislative Affairs" for LeadingAge PA (an advocacy group for aging services providers) as well as PA Field Director for Libertarian advocacy group, FreedomWorks. Before that she co-chaired the Kitchen Table Patriots, a Tea Party group in southeastern PA, and before that sales and marketing for the likes of Nickelodeon and American Airlines. Her degrees are in business. In short, she has virtually no background or expertise in education, but does have a long-standing experience in arguing that government services should be privatized. This is not new for PCPCS-- their previous chief's experience was as PR head for Westinghouse.

Meyers has been in the charter schools biz for just over two years, but that's plenty long enough to learn the current talking point-- "charter schools are public because they are paid with public tax dollars." This is baloney. But it's popular baloney with privatizers because it's hard to convince people that public education should be privatized-- much easier to get them to change the definition of "public." So privatizers from the Governor of Florida to the Secretary of Education are arguing repeatedly that "public" does not mean what you think it means, even as they hope you will keep believing that it means what it's always meant, because then you will assume that charter schools have certain features that they do not have.

And so Meyers expressed her sadness.

“I am shocked that you and your staff are unaware that none of Pennsylvanian’s charter schools [brick-and-mortar or cyber] are private or for-profit institutions,” states the letter signed by Ana Meyers, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Public Charter Schools, the state’s largest organization representing charter schools.

“I would have thought that a governor who has championed public education like you have over the past four-plus years would know better. I believe that you would have a much better understanding of how charter schools operate in Pennsylvania if you took the time to visit a few of them.”

Baloney. Pennsylvania's charter schools are not public. They are not owned by the public. They are not run by elected representatives of the taxpayers. They are under no obligation to serve all students who are members of the public. They do not operate with public transparency. They are not public schools, and the governor is exactly correct to say so. Nor would visiting the actual schools reveal any of those characteristics.

Meyers doesn't have an argument here-- just an assertion. This has been the charter industry's tactic-- just keep using the word, claiming the word, demanding the word, and even getting your advocates to insert the word in the language of charter laws. But you can insist that your pig is a cow all day-- when you butcher it, you'll still be eating pork. We can have a conversation about whether or not charters are an educational benefit, whether they can deliver on their promises, and if they should be part of the educational landscape (and under what conditions). But there is no discussion to be had about whether or not they're public-- they aren't.

If you are in Pennsylvania, drop Governor Wolf a line and tell him that he got this one absolutely right, and that he is also right to ignore letters from high-paid mouthpieces who serve as advocacy professionals, but education amateurs.

Ed Reform Was Supposed To Crush Unions

Every once in a while I stumble on an old article from back in the days when some reformsters would just say certain parts out loud instead of trying to be subtle or dog whistly.

Take this piece from April of 2014 by Terry M. Moe. It's an excerpt from his book What Lies Ahead for America's Children and Their Schools, and it's really, really clear what this Hoover Institute Fellow has in mind. Here's the subheading that pops up if you share a link to the article:

Real change won't come until we strip teachers unions of their power.

This frickin' guy

The arguments are familiar: Collective bargaining has forced schools to use inefficient organization. They block change in order to protect their vested interests (not, of course, because they are educational professionals who have some thoughts about what actually works in a classroom).

Moe talks about the "two great education reform movements" by which he means accountability and school choice. Choice progress has been slow, and Moe is very disappointed in accountability because even though students are taking the test, teachers aren't being fired or having their pay adjusted based on test results.

But Moe sees reason for hope, reason to believe that reformsters are going to turn it around thanks to two sets of factors.

One he calls endogenous change. These are politics within the education system, and he points to conservative gains in 2010 that helped lead to states gutting collective bargaining. It is hard to overstate just how positively Moe views any damage inflicted on teachers and their unions. He also points to the rise of reformy groups within the Democratic Party, like DFER and the network of activists rooted in TFA and Barrack Obama and Arne Duncan (who are "clearly in the reform wing of the party). These folks, he notes, are actually "serious about improving the nation's schools" and so think that unions must be made part of the solution. Yes, he missed a lot back then, from imagining that DFER includes actual democrats to the fact that union desire to collaborate with reformists spurred a noisy member pushback.  At any rate, he doesn't see these endogenous changes as sufficient to "bring about major change."

It propels the education system in the right direction. But it is inherently limited, because it does little to reduce the power of the teachers unions—and they will continue to use their power to prevent the schools from being effectively organized.

So what are the changes that can bust union power? Exogenous changes, originating from outside the education system-- specifically, those emerging from "the worldwide revolution in information technology."

Online curriculum can be created and customized. Give instant feedback and assessment. Allow students to learn at a personalized pace while giving access at any time or any place. Is Moe excited about these things because he thinks they'll make education better? Not exactly:

By strategically substituting technology (which is cheap) for labor (which is expensive), moreover, schools can be far more cost-effective than they are now—which is crucial in a future of tight budgets.

Teaching staffs will be reduced and dispersed (because they can teach from anywhere). This will undermine the union membership, money and power. Woohoo!

Do we have to wait for this "tsunami" to come and wash those damn teachers away/ Well, Moe had some thoughts about things that could be done to hasten that joyous day. He wants researchers to dig up some information. Does collective bargaining increase the costs of public education? Are unions swinging board elections? How do unions use their power to block ed reform? Do right to work states successfully weaken the unions? Is the rising Democratic reformy tide yield real results? How have the unions dealt with ed tech-- do they control it, defeat it, or "support" it (scare quotes are his, because, you know, any teacher support for ed tech must be fake).

Now, five years later, some other questions occur, like how does the attempt to crush teachers and their unions result in an inability to find enough teachers who will take your crappy job at crappy pay? And how disappointed are you that a Trump administration sucked all the air out of the faux democrat support for reformy ideas? Do you think wealthy parents are really excited about having their children taught by computer screen?

It is striking the degree to which this article completely bypasses the question of whether his dreamed-of reforms will actually help students. "We've got to bust those damned unions" is the main focus, and the most desired outcome of everything from accountability to his nascent vision of personalized learning.

So who is this guy? Terry Moe is a Stanford professor and a Hoover Institution education task force guy. His degrees are in economics and political science. He has also been a fellow at the Brookings Institute, and Fordham Institute gave him an award for excellence in 2005. In 2011 he had published a book along much the same themes outlined above, and it was praised by Joel Klein and former DC Chancellor, She Who Will Not Be Named.

But perhaps his most telling work isn't about education at all-- consider his 2016 book Relic, which argues that the Constitution needs to be rewritten in order to push Congress aside so that a President has far more power and freedom to govern as he will. So, you know, more like a king. Or, in keeping with the corporate school of ed reform, more like a powerful visionary CEO.

You may be asking-- with Donald Trump as President, does Moe still think the President needs more power? The answer is yes. The argument is that Trump is awful, but he was elected because government has been sucky, which is Congress's fault, and if the President had more power, government would work better, and we wouldn't get a Trump in the White House. So there's that.

But we're digressing from the main feature here, which was our little trip back to 2014, when a reformster might just come out and say, "We need more Democrat reformsters and ed tech and personalized learning and students taught via computer because it will help us destroy the teachers union as a political force and so we can remake schools according to our amateur hour vision without anyone getting in our way. It's a nightmare vision of ed reform, but at least it's honest.