Seattle Schools Community Forum

I've written about "personalized learning" before and I will continue as this becomes an ever-growing story.  There is absolutely every reason to consider new and better ways to use technology to increase academic outcomes and hopefully that drills down to each and every student's learning style.  But there are many factors to consider like:

Here's an event you might consider attending: Parents Across America Presents Alison McDowell  " Future Ready Schools: How Silicon Valley is Reshaping Our Schools" Saturday, March 25th from 10:30 am to noon at the Lake City library branch., 12501 28th Avenue, NE This talk is free and open to the public.

When thinking of the Gates Foundation's work in the public education arena, there are not many wins to point to except for Common Core.  Of course, that's quite a large win even though many publications either don't know Gates funded that whole mission or they just leave it out of their writing about Common Core. I may have printed this editorial that appeared in June of last year in the Los Angeles Times   before but it bears repeating because of what the Gates Foundation says about itself.  About Common Core: The Gates Foundation strongly supported the proposed Common Core curriculum standards, helping to bankroll not just their development, but the political effort to have them quickly adopted and implemented by states.

I've already written several times about "personalized learning" (here's the latest post that I wrote.) But let's see how personalized learning will play out within a Trump administration. 

You'll notice I didn't say "looking forward" because honestly, I don't see much hope for public education for all students in this country, state and city.  Let's start with nationally. Trump won the Electoral College and is therefore elected president.  However, that win is clearly not a mandate when you consider that he received nearly 63 million votes to Hillary Clinton's nearly 66 million votes.  Add into her votes the ballots cast for Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, and others and you get to about 74 million people who voted against Trump. He has not even been sworn in and already there are many warning signs.  His background and actions tell us three important things.

To start, I'm not against using computers to aid in teaching and learning.  But there are huge costs and unknowns and because of the investment of time and finances for this endeavor, parents need to ask hard, hard questions about what this will look like for their child. I'm almost glad it took this long to get to Part Two because Data & Society put out a very good working paper about the topic: Personalized Learning: The Conversations We’re Not Having.  They start with this quote: The Promise of Personalized Learning “...if instead of having mass education as we now have, must have, with a curriculum, once we have outlets, computer outlets in every home, each of them hooked up to enormous libraries where anyone can ask any question and be given answers...then you ask, and you can find out, and you can follow it up, and you can do it in your own home, at your own speed, in your own direction, in your own time, then everyone will enjoy learning. Nowada...

Personalized learning is the next big thing in public education but how it will play out in your child's classroom is, at this point, a big guess.  I note that Michael Tolley, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning, seems interested in it and put forth requests to the Board about starting it up in Seattle Schools. (To note, I believe that many teachers are, of course, doing personalized learning as much as they can within the scope of the size of their classrooms and the resources they have.  This is what teachers have done since teaching began.)

I actually had not meant to sit down and write this one but I had so many articles piling up on this subject, it seemed the right time.  To be clear (as I am certain that 99% of adults in the U.S. would agree), all is not well with public education.  There are many reasons for that.  Now, if you just looked at white and many Asian students, the U.S. is doing as well as most top-level countries. But the U.S. is a very heterogeneous country that tests all public school students.   We are also a country that seemingly is accepting that nearly 25% of our children live in poverty.  Anyone who thinks that a good teacher is going to overcome institutional racism, poverty and inconsistent/low funding is wrong.  Also, when I speak of education reform in the U.S., I mean corporate ed reform.  I'm not saying change isn't needed; I'm saying what is being pushed is not really working and, at the end of the day, seems to be serving to allow some people to make...

I have many public ed stories that have piled up on my computer so here goes.   (There won't be any charter school stories because there are so many of those, I'll be giving them a separate thread.  The news is not good.)

To start, consider this from Inside Philanthropy (one of my new favorite places to stop by and read awhile:)

 Think your student has a specific "learning style?"  This thoughtful NY Times op-ed gathers a variety of voices on this issue.   Is learning style the same as a learning disability?  How much weight can/should teachers give this issue?  Students do have preferences when it comes to receiving information visually or verbally, said Mark A. McDaniel, a psychology professor at Washington University and a co-author of the book “ Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning .”  And, said Harold Pashler, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego, and one of Dr. McDaniel’s co-authors on the study, no compelling evidence for teaching to students’ learning styles has emerged in the years since: “There’s one or two somewhat oddball studies,” he said, “but there’s a number of new negative findings that are more substantial.”