How Did This Happen???

The backlash against edtech and a curious case of collective amnesia

Stories about parents rebelling against big tech are everywhere right now. They’re sick of the screens, the hoovering up of their children’s data, and they view AI and its rapid incursion into schools as a menace, not a ‘co-pilot’ for their kids’ education. This is a positive development, in my humble opinion, especially since the backlash against the tech takeover of schools crosses partisan lines. Meanwhile, pundits and hot takers are weighing in, declaring the era of edtech, not just a failure, but the cause of our failing schools.

Which raises a not insignificant question. Now that everyone who is anyone agrees that handing schools over to Silicon Valley was big and costly mistake, how did the nation’s teachers and students end up on the receiving end of this experiment in the first place? And here is where our story grows murky, dear reader. In fact, if you’re old enough to remember the absolute mania around ‘personalized learning’ that took hold during the Obama era, count yourself as fortunate. Because lots of the same influential, not to mention handsomely compensated, folks who were churning out ‘reports’ about our factory-era schools 15 minutes ago, suddenly seemed cursed by failing memories.

The not-so-wayback-machine

If you need a refresher to summon forth the 2010-era ed tech frenzy, proceed directly to Audrey Watters’ unforgettable write-up: “The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.” Watters’ has moved on to a new newsletter and AI refusal, but her once lonely voice as the ‘Cassandra’ of education technology remains as essential as ever. Her tally of “ed-tech failures and fuck-ups and flawed ideas” is studded with now tarnished silver bullets that promised to transform our factory-era schools into futuristic tech centers, making a pretty penny in the process: AltSchool, inBloom, Rocketship, Amplify, DreamBox, Summit… The names have changed or been forgotten but the throughline—a fundamental misunderstanding of schools and teaching combined with the promise of hefty returns—remains constant.

My own introduction to the ed tech hustle came back in 2015. Jeb Bush’s annual convening for his group, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, or FEE, to use its comically apt acronym, came to Boston. To which I said, ‘sign me up!’ Always an early adapter (see, for example, school vouchers in Florida), FEE was unabashedly pro technology, as I wrote in a story for the Baffler.

It’s one of FEE’s articles of faith that the solutions to our great educational dilemmas are a mere click away—if, that is, the schools and the self-interested dullards who run them would just accept the limitless possibilities of technology. Of course, these gadgets don’t come cheap. And this means that, like virtually all the other innovations touted by our postideological savants of education reform, the vision of a tech-empowered American student body calls for driving down our spending on teaching (labor costs account for the lion’s share of the $600 billion spent on public education in the United States each year) and pumping up our spending on gizmos.

In virtually every session I attended, someone would relate a story about a device that was working education miracles, followed by a familiar lament: if only the teachers, or their unions, or the education ‘blob’ would get out of the way.

False profits

In a recent piece for Fortune, reporter Sasha Rogelberg offers an interesting origin story for the tech takeover of public education. And you don’t need to read past the title to get where she’s going. ‘American schools weren’t broken until Silicon Valley used a lie to convince them they were—now reading and math scores are plummeting.’ I’d make the header even clunkier and add ‘the education reform industry’ to the mix. While the push to get tech into classrooms predates Obama-era education reform (check out Watters’ fantastic history of personalized learning, Teaching Machines, for the extended play version), it was the reformers’ zeal, when married to Silicon Valley’s profit optimization, that would prove so irresistible.

In the last hundred years, the base of the United States economy has shifted from industry to knowledge—but the average American classroom operates in much the same way it always has: one teacher, up to thirty same-age students, four walls. This report from StudentsFirst argues that this one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t cut it in the modern world, in which mastery of higher-order knowledge and skills ought to matter more than time spent in front of a teacher—and that what we need is competency-based education. This approach, also known as the “personalized model,” is characterized by advancing students through school based on what they know and can do, using assessments to give them timely, differentiated support, made easier by the introduction of learning technology.

StudentsFirst, the hard-charging school reform org started by Michelle Rhee, has since been eaten by 50CAN, which now advocates for school vouchers, but the fare they offered up was standard. Indeed, here’s a fun activity for you. Revisit any prominent reform group, individual, or cause of that era and you will find the same argument about our factory-model schools, followed, inevitably, by the inevitable pitch for a tech-centric solution.

Race to the Top, Obama’s signature education reform initiative, didn’t just bribe cash-strapped states into overhauling their teacher evaluation systems. It also ‘encouraged’ states to shift their standardized tests online. And Arne Duncan and Obama’s Department of Education actively courted the tech industry, encouraging them to think of schools as a space ripe for disruption. “Many of today’s young people will be working at jobs that don’t currently exist,” warned the XQ Institute, the reform org started by Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs. Today Powell Jobs presides over the Atlantic, where new panic pieces regarding young, tech-addled dumb dumbs appear seemingly every day.

Warning signs

My obsessive interest in the intersection of education and politics began back in 2012, when my adopted home state of Massachusetts came down with a serious—and well-funded—case of education reform fever. At a time when red states were crushing the collective bargaining rights of teachers (Wisconsin, anyone?), I was struck by how often reform-minded Democrats ended up repurposing the right’s anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-public-school rhetoric for their own righteous cause. Ed tech sat right smack in the center of this queasy juncture—beloved by liberal reformers, ensorcelled by press releases promising higher test scores, and conservatives who liked the idea of spending less on schools by replacing teachers with machines.

Recall, if you will, Rocketship charter schools, whose innovative blended learning model caused the test scores of its students—almost all poor and minority—to go up like a rocket. Richard Whitmire’s fawning 2013 book, On the Rocketship: How Top Charter Schools Are Pushing the Envelope, is a veritable time capsule of the era. Unlike the fusty Model-T schools of yore, Rocketship schools were tech forward. Students spent a chunk of each day in so-called Learning Labs, taking, retaking or practicing taking tests, a practice that had a measurable impact, especially since 50 percent of teachers’ pay was tied to test scores ascending. All that clicking also translated into dollar signs, wrote Whitmire. “A major cost-saving solution was for students to spend significant time working on laptops in large groups supervised by noncertified, lower-paid “instructional lab specialists.”

Rocketship has since fallen back to earth, in part because of stellar reporting like this from Anya Kamenetz, documenting the chain’s less savory practices. But it’s hard to overstate just how excited the reform world was about this stuff. Next time you hear an edu-pundit bemoaning the take over of kindergarten classrooms by big tech, remember that Rocketship got there first. “[K]indergarten teachers are spending less time making letter sounds,” co-founder Preston Smith told Kamenetz. Reformers couldn’t get enough…

Whodunit?

Investigative reporter Amy Littlefield has an intriguing-sounding new book out in which she uses the model of an Agatha Christie novel to suss out who killed abortion rights in the US. I imagine that taking a similar approach to the question of how big tech conquered public education would end up in Murder on the Orient Express territory. That’s the classic Christie whodunit in which everyone on the train ends up having ‘dunit.’ These days, there is a comical effort underway by reformers to distance themselves from the tech takeover—what train? I’ve never been on a train! But the idea that Silicon Valley had the cure for all that ailed the nation’s public schools was absolutely central to Obama-era education reform.

I’d locate the zenith of the reformer/tech love affair in 2017 when New Schools Venture Fund, a reform org that funds all of the other orgs, laid down a challenge, or rather, a big bet. At its annual summit, backed by a who’s who of fond of tech funders—Gates, Zuckerberg, Walton—NSVF called for big philanthropy to bet big on tech-based personalized learning. “The world has changed dramatically … and our schools have struggled to keep up,” then CEO Stacey Childress warned the crowd. But not all the news was bad. Going all in on education innovation would also pay off handsomely, claimed NSVF, producing an estimated 200 to 500 percent return on investment. And lest parents, teachers and students failed to adequately appreciate the various reimaginings they were in for, NSVF had an answer for that too: a $200 million ad campaign to “foster understanding and demand.”

As I was preparing to type a sentence about how poorly NSVF’s “Big Bet on the Future of American Education” has aged, a press release popped up in my inbox, announcing that Netflix founder Reed Hastings has joined forces with Democrats for Education Reform or DFER. “Just as Netflix replaced a one-size-fits-all broadcast model with something more personal and responsive, Hastings believes public education can make the same leap.”

AI is a once-in-a-thousand-year shift, and what happens in K-12 is at the center of it. The schools that figure out how to combine individualized software with teachers focused on social-emotional development are going to unlock something we’ve never seen before.

Of course, transforming “a school system in desperate need of reinvention” the way that Hastings reinvented home entertainment will require “governance innovation and political will.” No doubt an ad campaign is in the works too. And yet convincing education ‘consumers’ that school = individualized software is going to be a tough sell, especially as the Great Big Tech Backlash accelerates.

That’s my big bet.