Rolling in the Dough and STILL Can't Move the Public Education Needle

 I see from the latest info from the Gates Foundation that they are pivoting towards "ensuring that students have not just a voice, but also a role in transforming education." Interesting. They have an article about a program, Kitsap Strong, that includes help for students in that area.

Kitsap Strong is a collective impact initiative of over 100 community partners in Kitsap and North Mason counties, including schools in six school districts, working to improve residents’ well-being and educational attainment. Kitsap Strong’s Future Bound program is all about helping high schoolers design the future they want.

Over the last year, the Youth Leadership Team conducted outreach to students, teachers, and administrators at their schools and prepared for and hosted a Future Bound Convening to share their recommendations to over 100 school and community leaders.

Here are three things the Youth Leadership Team recommended:

- More academic and mental health counselors - The Youth Leadership Team recommend that high schools have more academic counselors, as well as separate mental health counselors, so students can receive more support. They also recommended more support groups for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and LGBTQ+ students, along with expanding multicultural activities.

- More in-school programs about college and careers - It is very important that every student gets a chance to learn about the opportunities they have with financial aid,” said Eden. “We emphasized the need for this to happen during school hours, as not everyone has the means (specifically transportation) to come before or after school.”

- Better connections to career interests- The Youth Leadership Team suggested that the High School & Beyond Plan could better link a student’s career interest to the steps they need to take to explore that career.

From the Gates Foundation's own story:

- Nearly 90% of Washington's high schoolers say they want to pursue some kind of education after graduation.

- Students said they want more personalized support that matches their needs and interests.

We cannot design solutions that we think students want and need. We need to design programs that meet students where they are and reflect what students actually want and need. 

And speaking of the Gates Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) hasn't been doing well in their public education ideas. In August it was announced that 48 employees were laid off. 

Now, from the Chalkbeat blog, there's this story - Mark Zuckerberg tried to revolutionize American education with technology. It didn't go as planned.

Gee, where have I heard that before? One of the richest people in the world thinking that they have the answers for public education and wasting millions of dollars on ideas that don't work. It is so very sad that neither the Gates Foundation nor (apparently) Chan Zuckerberg Initiative understand that real change will come from supporting teachers and principals who ARE the people on the frontlines. 

From the article (bold mine):

The Facebook founder and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, poured well over $100 million into an online platform known as Summit Learning that initially aspired to be in half of the nation’s schools. In 2017, Zuckerberg suggested that technology-based “personalized learning” could vault the average student to the 98th percentile of performance.

Fast forward to this summer: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropic arm, laid off dozens of staff on its education team and announced a shift in strategy. “Our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed,” Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, wrote in an August blog post. “And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. 
 
This moment demands not just investment but innovation — and that’s why we are building a team of experts and partners to identify opportunities where technology and grantmaking can drive coherence,” she wrote. 

I cannot roll my eyes hard enough.

Summit, CZI’s pet project, has not spread as far as once hoped, and there’s little evidence that it or similar efforts have led to the large learning gains that Zuckerberg envisioned. This gap between ambitions and results underscores the difficulty of using technology to dramatically improve America’s vast system of decentralized schools.

“People keep hoping that our technologies are the Swiss Army knives or steamrollers that they can do everything,” said Justin Reich, a professor at MIT and author of a bookon the limits of technology in education. “Instead, our best technologies are very particularly shaped ratchet heads and the landscape of education is millions of bolts.”

About the Summit program: 

Hundreds of schools have adopted Summit, and some parents say it’s helped their child. “Students who may understand a concept more quickly are able to move forward instead of having to wait for the rest of the class,” wrote Annie Thomas, a Colorado parent who defended the program in an op-ed last year.

But in other cases, parents complained about the newfangled approach to education or worried that students’ data would be shared with Facebook. (Summit says Facebook does not have any access to its data.) Some students said there was too much time on screens. In 2018, students at a Brooklyn high school walked out in protest, prompting a flurry of news stories. The following year, the New York Times published a piece featuring complaints from parents in Kansas. “We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” one parent told the Times.

It wasn’t clear how representative either the success or the horror stories were, though.

That’s in part because Summit struggled to produce evidence that its program was leading to the large learning improvement that Zuckerberg had hoped for. Summit declined to participate in a study of the program designed by Harvard researchers. (Asked about Summit’s effectiveness now, both CZI and Gradient Learning pointed to positive experiences in a number of schools, as well as a survey of school leaders in which nearly all said Summit had made a positive difference for their schools.)

Presently, Gradient Learning says that over 300 schools are using Summit, indicating that in recent years more schools have left the program than have newly adopted it.

What's next?

CZI is not getting out of education. Huang, the company’s education head, said the company will now focus on “creat[ing] educational tools” that can help “address chronic learning and teaching challenges.” That includes exploring how artificial intelligence can improve education, according to a document obtained by Insider. (A spokesperson for CZI said in an email, “The public discussion about AI in education is evolving rapidly, and we are approaching it thoughtfully and cautiously.”)

Comments

Anonymous said…
Did someone really say that the average student would move into the 98th percentile? If so, who takes their place in the 50th percentile?! As usual, the big tech folks aren't really thinking things through...

Cracking up
Greg said…
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said…
I do not think it is a funding problem at all, given the amount of money used to try and solve the issues by all of the public and private parties involved. There is more to the success of the students in Seattle’s competitive private schools than just money and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise.

Public 2Private
Greg said…
The funding levels are different. Go look at the data I cited in my comment instead of tossing out your foolish insults. The data says that public school funding is much less than private school funding.
Anonymous said…
I think these poor schools carry every burden society is shouldering and yeah money can help with some of that but there’s no way there can ever be enough of it. Schools cannot fix the economic instability of the families who have remained in the system. And then some things are so infused in our lives there’s no salvation - take gun violence or social media and the attention deficit even adults are battling. Americans generally do not value education. I will get my kids through SPS and then start saving for private school for my grandkids.

I love the idea of public schools, but the constant churn of leadership, the toxic community that enables the mismanagement and Byzantine regulations show up in the classroom, in a not good way. Just look at yesterday’s Seattle Times article about shuffling classes and moving to split grade models in October, and district leadership calling this all “routine.” This is some amateur hour management stuff.

And it’s predictable that tech giants cast themselves as the starring role in turning education around. Tech can be effective at getting information up on a medium, but how it is accessed and used are the same old people problems that need other solutions.

HAL
Anonymous said…
Greg

$11k/student funding doesn’t sound right. When I divide the operating costs of the district ($1.2B) by the number of students (48k), the number is closer to $25k. And that’s not including capital costs, which I assume the private school number includes (they don’t have other options to pay for new capital but to bill students). Private schools benefit from other factors - cohesive community, enforceable rules and standards, ability to dismiss onerous teaching/testing requirements. But dollars to dollars, they are not far off. Teachers earn less at private schools.

Something Else
Public 2 Private, it's apples and oranges. When you can control your enrollment, you have far fewer issues to fund.

HAL, you hit on something. We are asking schools and districts to handle more and more societal issues and something's got to give. Keeping families afloat is important but then, what is the mission of a public school?
Greg said…
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Anonymous said…
Greg, that's incomplete. The state gives us in the low teens, but we also levy ourselves, and get money from foundations (big ones, not the piddly PTA stuff in the news) and directly from the federal government which brings us up into the 20's. Average private school tuition is not 30k plus, that's very high end. We do have harder kids and higher teacher salaries, but I agree the numbers are not really that far off.

Blue Dog
Outsider said…
The $11,500 per student number from OSPI is "basic education" -- the amount they supply per vanilla non-special student. Special ed students get a much bigger amount from the state, which is why the districts are always complaining about the "cap" on special ed numbers. The overall average spending per student in SPS is a blend of basic and special ed, and is higher than the number shown for basic alone, even not counting local levy, federal, and grant money. Plus actual construction of school buildings plus some other expenses are considered capital and are paid from a different account.

Regardless, imagine if you could get hold of that $11,500 in the form of a voucher, and join forces with other families to run a parent cooperative school where a classroom of 20 students has a $230,000 budget. Imagine what a great education you could provide for your kids that way. Awkward truths about public education suddenly become hard not to see.
Greg said…
Okay, it's true that state funding is only part of the funding, though it is the majority. Thanks for pointing that out. You are correct that some smaller additional funding sources exist for Seattle's public schools that I should have included.

But the rest of what you said is a tough slog to deal with. The number eleven isn't in the teens by definition. Average private school tuition isn't $30k+ if you include religious schools with their separate funding sources, sure, but that doesn't mean their per student spending is the same. The state funding is 60% of total funding according to SPS, so, sure, you can try to claim the additional sources of funding "brings us up to the 20s" but it doesn't (11.5k / 60% = 19k).

I feel like you're trying to round all the public education funding number up "to the 20s" -- maybe 40% higher than it actually is if readers of what you write are somehow thinking high 20s is "in the 20s" -- so you can claim the disparity is small, but those claims really requiring some stretching to the point of breaking, don't you think?

I mean, c'mon. Public schools are underfunded, especially given the additional challenges they have to deal with that private schools cheerfully get to self-select out of. Can't we just agree on that?
Anonymous said…
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Anonymous said…
I agree with Something Else. If SPS "needs" $1.2B/yr to serve and educate 48k students, besides the inexplicably big capital funds for vaguely explained construction costs, the cost per student question returns the answer of $25k per student. Never say that $1.2B was never collected or received. That's actually spent. What's not done is the best or proper use.

Something Else is perfectly correct:
"Private schools benefit from other factors - cohesive community, enforceable rules and standards, ability to dismiss onerous teaching/testing requirements. But dollars to dollars, they are not far off. Teachers earn less at private schools."

SPS doesn't seem to have enforceable rules and standards for the Central Office staff, never mind the students, for allocating the money properly and transparently. That would require proper oversight. But the Board doesn't think oversight is necessary.

Private schools are not perfect but are not a jobs program for the mediocre staff in control of the spending. Board Directors there seldom try to use the Board positions for power trips in their political party, either. Their students are their customers who cannot be undermined.

Oversight Or Else
Unknown said…
I think the term you're looking for is"rent seekers." Bureaucratic public institutions slowly add rent seekers who add cost but no performance gain. I've met second year teachers who can't wait to leave the classroom, earn 15% more, and make a difference becoming a specialist downtown. Often, identity based desk jobs are the way to go these days.

SP

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