All posts tagged Facebook

I Love You but You Didn’t Do the Reading

I don’t know how people had time to write stuff when the Brewers were in the playoffs, but they did. It has been a whirlwind week. Here are some of the top ILYBYGTH-themed stories from the interwebs:

What 81%? A new look at white evangelicals and Trump, at CT.

Some background on the new president of the Moody Bible Institute at RNS.

1940s postcard library

Getting those dispensations right…c. 1940s.

Trump, Pocahontas, and the Cherokee Nation: Senator Warren releases her DNA results, denied by both Cherokee Nation and Trump, at Politico.

Schools and the midterm elections: In Ohio, a failed charter network becomes a political football.

“He was clinically upset.” Rich parents reject Zuckerberg’s edu-plan, at NYMag.

Atheists keep sneaking in God through the back door. A review of Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism at NR.

What Christianity and secular humanism share is more important than their differences: No other religious tradition—Jewish, Greek, Indian, Chinese—envisions history as linear rather than cyclical or conceives of humanity as a unitary collective subject. The very idea of utopia—a place where everyone is happy—could not have occurred to people who took for granted that individuals have irreconcilable desires and ideals, and that conflict is therefore impossible to eliminate. Western universalism, Gray scoffs, is very provincial indeed.

It can happen here: A century after the Spanish flu, what are the chances of another worldwide pandemic? At Vox.

keep the faith vote for science

Hoosiers can love Jesus AND Bill Nye…

Finally! Indiana voters urged to “Keep the Faith and Vote for Science,” at IS.

How are America’s public schools really doing? It’s a trickier question than it seems, says Jack Schneider at WaPo.

America’s schools don’t merely reflect our nation’s material prosperity. They also reflect our moral poverty. . . . Reform rhetoric about the failures of America’s schools is both overheated and off the mark. Our schools haven’t failed. Most are as good as the schools anyplace else in the world. And in schools where that isn’t the case, the problem isn’t unions or bureaucracies or an absence of choice. The problem is us. The problem is the limit of our embrace.

Why is an academic life harder for women and minorities? Columbia offers its findings at CHE.

Conservative campus group restricts audience for Ben Shapiro at USC, at IHE.

New survey: America’s evangelicals tend to like heresy, at CT.

religion as personal belief

How school reform works, until it doesn’t. Maine tries a new approach, then retreats, at Chalkbeat.

Proponents of proficiency-based learning argue that none of this reflects flaws in the concept. Maine struggled, they say, because they didn’t introduce the new systems thoughtfully enough, moving too quickly and requiring change rather than encouraging it.

Atheist and creationism-basher Lawrence Krauss announces his retirement after harassment allegations, at FA.

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by Adam Laats on October 22, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in ICYMI, Uncategorized
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Posted by Adam Laats on October 22, 2018

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2018/10/22/i-love-you-but-you-didnt-do-the-reading-92/

Why Can’t Facebook Fix Schools?

[Warning: Explicit goose-related content.]

It’s not news. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and other tech-illionaires keep trying and failing to fix schools. The latest story from Connecticut gives us a few more clues about why these smartest-people-in-the-room can’t get it right. In the shocker of the year, it turns out parents don’t like having their kids read about people having sex with geese.

sex with a goose

Will this be on the test?

It’s not the first time Zuckerberg has goofed when it comes to school reform. As SAGLRROILYBYGTH may recall, he has dropped the ball in Newark and with SAT prep classes. He has mistaken the right way to think about schools, repeating centuries-old errors.

What’s the latest? Parents in an affluent section of Connecticut have rebelled against a facebook-sponsored introduction of Summit’s “personalized” learning system. These sorts of systems promise that students will be able to work productively instead of marching at lockstep with the rest of the class. They hope to use technology to allow students and teachers to learn, instead of just sitting idly in classrooms.

In towns like Cheshire, Connecticut, the Summit system was run on free student computers, sponsored by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, facebook’s philanthropic arm. Students in middle school and elementary school would be able to work at their own pace toward clearly delineated learning goals.

It was gonna be great.

As New York Magazine reported, it didn’t work out that way:

the implementation over the next few months collapsed into a suburban disaster, playing out in school-board meetings and, of course, on facebook. The kids who hated the new program hated it, to the point of having breakdowns, while their parents became convinced Silicon Valley was trying to take over their classrooms.

What went wrong? As anyone who knows schools could tell you, the Summit/facebook folks made a fundamental error about the nature of schools. They forgot or never knew a couple of basic, non-negotiable requirements of real schools.

First, they fell into the start-up trap. Priscilla Chan of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative described her awe when she first saw a Summit-style school. As she gushed,

I walked into the school and I didn’t recognize where I was. . . . My question was like, ‘What is this? Where am I? Because this is what I see folks actually doing in the workplace: problem-solving on their own, applying what they’re learning in a way that’s meaningful in the real world.’

Like other techies, the facebook folks thought that schools could should look like tech companies, with maximum productivity and maximum independence. What they don’t seem to notice is that schools are not only open to those few nerds who like to work that way.

In Cheshire, teachers found that about a third of the students flourished in their new classrooms. But that left a vast majority of students floundering. As teachers do, they filled in the gaps. As New York  Magazine describes,

The teachers started holding “Thursday Night Lights” sessions, where they’d stay until about 8 p.m., helping students rush through the playlists and take assessments while the information was fresh in their memories. To make up for the rest, he said, teachers found “workarounds,” like rounding up half-points in students’ grades, or coming up with reasons to excuse students from certain segments. (The other educators confirmed this.) “Looking back,” he said, “it was grade inflation, and it was cheating the system that we had spent the whole year trying to figure out and couldn’t make work.”

Maybe even more crucially, the facebook approached crashed in Cheshire because it failed to satisfy another absolute requirement of all schools. Viz., it failed to convince parents that it was keeping children safe.

First off, parents fretted about the ways facebook was selling data about their kids. Even if the company bent over backwards to be accommodating to parents’ concerns, no parents liked the idea of putting their children’s data on the market.

More dramatically in this case, the Summit approach doesn’t try to protect kids from the informational anarchy that the interwebs can provide. Instead of textbooks and other vetted classroom content, Summit mostly provides a set of links that students can follow to read content. In this case, that lead to some dramatic difficulties. In fact, the whole controversy in Connecticut might have blown over if one concerned parent hadn’t discovered what Summit students might be reading in class.

When the parent—Mike Ulicki—followed up on some social-studies links, he came across this page from factsanddetails.com. Yes, the page explained, ancient Romans had some pretty wild sexual habits, including sex with geese.

As anyone who knows anything about real schools could have told you, that was all it took.

As NYMag reported,

Ulicki posted the image on Facebook. As outraged comments multiplied on the thread, a school-board member announced he would call for a vote at the next meeting on whether to keep the program in place. But before the meeting could happen, they all received a letter from the superintendent’s office, announcing that Summit was being removed by executive order.

Now, honestly, any parent knows that their middle-schoolers could have found those kinds of images on their own. But for a school to be sending students to a picture of man-on-goose kink blew open one of the most foundational rules of schools. [There are other not-PG-13 images available at that site that I am too prudish to share. Interested readers can follow up here, though you might not want to do it at school.]

Schools are not only about giving students information. They are not only about preparing students to be life-long learners. They are not only about math, history, English, or science. Above all, schools must promise to keep students safe. Safe from physical threats, of course, but also safe from intellectual dangers such as the wild sexual practices of ancient Rome.

Until facebook’s founders and other would-be tech saviors recognize the way schools really work, they’ll never be able to deliver on their reform promises.

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on October 16, 2018  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News, school reform, Teaching Sex and Sexuality, Tradition in the Classroom
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Posted by Adam Laats on October 16, 2018

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2018/10/16/why-cant-facebook-fix-schools/

A Google, a Plan, a Canal

Why don’t start-up tech types understand school reform? They’re excited about it. By and large, though, their schemes flop. Why? The history of school reform offers a big-picture answer.erie canal

Googlers might think they have the wrong logarithm. Or the wrong charismatic leader. Or maybe the wrong business plan. There’s a simpler, better answer that my current research is making painfully clear to me. It might seem like google has nothing to do with the Erie Canal, but when it comes to school reform, they look depressingly similar. Like the school reformers of the early 1800s, today’s googlers are plagued by a fundamental problem they don’t even see:

The wrong metaphor.

Google-founded schools don’t work. They approach school like a start-up business, as curmudgucrat Peter Greene has pointed out time and time again.

It’s not only google, of course. Other techies have experienced similar flops when they thrust themselves into the school-reform game. We can’t forget, for instance, Mark Zuckerburg’s warm-hearted but dunderheaded efforts in Newark.

Today’s tech types have had enormous success with google and facebook and uber and etc. So they jump too quickly to assume that those successes will apply to school as well. In general, and with some exceptions I’m sure, techies invest in bad school reform schemes because they misunderstand the nature of schooling. They think of it too often as a question of information delivery. They assume—based on google’s big success at shepherding information—that they can improve schools the same way they improved the interwebs. If they can only get their proprietary app right—they assume—and get free of stuck-in-the-mud thinking and red tape, there ain’t nuthin they can’t do.

They aren’t the first to make this sort of goof. In fact (and this is the thing that really chaffs us nerds), though they think they are making ground-breaking social changes, today’s tech-fueled reformers are reading from a very old school-reform script. Though many of them are motivated by the best intentions, if they took time to read even one book they could dodge some of these predictable perils. Heck, they could even avoid the library and just spend time with Larry Cuban’s blog or Peter Greene’s.

clinton opening erie canal

Clinton connecting the waters, 1826.

It wouldn’t take much for today’s ambitious reformers to recognize their similarity to those of earlier generations. As I work on my next book about urban school reform in the early 1800s, I’m struck by the parallels. Take, for example, the big dreams of DeWitt Clinton. Clinton was the 19th-century equivalent of today’s tech heroes. He was brilliant, talented, connected, and far-sighted. Most important for our purposes, he embraced new technology in the face of old-fashioned opposition. He pushed through modern solutions to ancient problems, and it all happened fast enough for him to witness the amazing social improvements wrought by his efforts.

In Clinton’s case, it wasn’t the interwebs, but a really long ditch. Clinton believed in the possibilities of a transformational investment in the Erie Canal. Naysayers said nay, but Clinton was proven right. The canal utterly changed the face of American society. Small farmers and city-dwellers alike benefitted.

Elated and maybe a little puffed-up, Clinton looked around for new worlds to conquer. At the time, New York City was growing by leaps and bounds. Its schools couldn’t keep up. Clinton dived into school reform, putting all his chips on Joseph Lancaster’s scheme to transform and systematize schooling for all students, especially those without a lot of money.

You know the end of the story already: It didn’t work. At least, not the way Clinton planned. Unlike a canal, a school system is not something that can be created once and for all. A school system needs more than a one-time start-up investment. The problems that make schooling difficult are not the same as the problems that make a canal difficult.

urban apple orchard

They can thrive anywhere…

It might help if well-intentioned reformers thought of school differently. School isn’t a start-up business. School isn’t a canal.

What IS school? There are many ways we could think about it, but this morning I’d like to suggest one idea and I invite SAGLRROILYBYGTH to suggest their own.

To get school reform right, we can’t think of school like a start-up business. We can’t think of it like a canal. We might do better if we thought of school like an orchard. Why?

  • Orchards take a long time to be healthy and productive, but can be damaged or killed quickly.
  • Orchards are intensely local; they can’t be shipped or packaged easily.
  • Orchards take constant loving care from many people.
  • There are some things that all orchards need, like sunshine, water, and fertilizer.
    • The exact recipe for success, though, depends on local conditions.
    • …and it isn’t the ingredients themselves that lead to success, but the constant loving care with which they are applied and monitored.
  • Orchards can thrive anywhere, but in some places they need more intensive care and maintenance than others.
  • Orchards can be tweaked easily, but they can’t be radically transformed quickly.
  • A healthy orchard isn’t focused on the people taking care of it, but rather on the things it produces.
  • Different orchards can thrive while producing different things; one measurement won’t compare apples very easily.

Now that I see that list in black and white, I’m not sure. Maybe that’s not the best metaphor. I’m not sure if children are supposed to be the fruit…? Or if kids are the ones picking the fruit of education…?orchard

When it comes to thinking about schools, though, I can’t help but think that imagining schools as orchards is better than thinking about them as start-ups or canals. As today’s tech leaders have discovered, thinking about schools as start-up tech firms leads to predictable flops. As yesterday’s leaders found out, thinking about schools as canals didn’t work either.

So maybe thinking about schools as orchards isn’t the best metaphor. I bet people can come up with better. In the meantime, though, I’ll look forward to a multi-million-dollar school reform plan that starts with a more profound understanding of the way real schools work.

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by Adam Laats on November 26, 2017  •  Permalink
Posted in school reform
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Posted by Adam Laats on November 26, 2017

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2017/11/26/a-google-a-plan-a-canal/

How Facebook Can Save America

It won’t be by buying new computers for schools. It won’t even be by dumping bajillions of dollars into schools. But Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that he plans to donate 99% of Facebook shares—some 45 BILLION dollars’ worth—might just make a difference if he can learn from his mistakes.

facebook-zuckerberg-chan-launching-private-school-thumb-525x403-16272

Take my money…Please!

You’ve seen the story by now. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan have pledged oodles of their nerd-gotten gains to help low-income families. Good for them. The danger is that they will continue to misunderstand the nature of the relationship between schooling and society.

Money helps. But in the past, philanthropists in general and Zuckerberg in particular have misunderstood the basic relationships involved. As a result, big money has not made a big impact.

You may have read about Zuckerberg’s ill-fated promises in Newark. Charmed by Mayor Cory Booker, Zuckerberg pledged up to $100 million in matching funds to improve Newark schools.

As journalist Dale Russakoff described in her book The Prize, big dreams petered out into only meh results. Russakoff blamed poor communication between philanthropists, city managers, teachers, and parents. The money, she argued, did not go to the right places at the right time, because Zuckerberg and Booker took a “knight in shining armor” approach to complicated educational problems. Instead of communicating with interested locals, they hired fancy $1000-a-day education consultants. Instead of building a consensus about problems and solutions, they dictated solutions and labeled people as problems.

There is a more basic difficulty, however, that Russakoff did not address. She argued that the roll-out of the Newark plan was flawed and ill-considered. At a more foundational level, however, even the best-considered plans to fix society by fixing schools are doomed.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Schools can’t fix society. Schools ARE society.

In other words, if a society is racist, dominated by a wealthy elite, and strangled by cultural divisions, a new set of textbooks, computers, or state standards will not change that. Throughout the twentieth century, as I argued in my recent book, conservative activists repeated progressives’ attempts to reform society by reforming schools. Without the proper understanding of the ways schools function in society, such plans are doomed before they begin.

Consider the sobering example of Native American education. As a recent article in Politico described, government-run schools are a failure. And they fail despite the fact that they spend more money per student than do comparable schools.

The Facebook folks have made some worrying noises. In announcing their gift, they suggested that they were still trapped in their old, mistaken views. They seemed to be saying that society can be healed—poverty can be alleviated—if only we can make sure that all kids have good schools. It is just not that simple.

In their announcement, for instance, Zuckerberg and Chan declared that their money would help level the social playing field. As they put it,

You’ll have technology that understands how you learn best and where you need to focus. You’ll advance quickly in subjects that interest you most, and get as much help as you need in your most challenging areas. You’ll explore topics that aren’t even offered in schools today. Your teachers will also have better tools and data to help you achieve your goals.

Even better, students around the world will be able to use personalized learning tools over the Internet, even if they don’t live near good schools. Of course it will take more than technology to give everyone a fair start in life, but personalized learning can be one scalable way to give all children a better education and more equal opportunity.

Watch out! Despite their qualification that “it will take more than technology to give everyone a fair start in life,” it sounds as if the rest of their plan depends on their assumption that the right technology can indeed do just that.

To be fair, they make smarter noises elsewhere. They have also argued, for example, that

“We need institutions that understand these issues are all connected.” . . . Only with schools, health centers, parent groups, and organizations working together, they said, “can we start to treat these inequities as connected.”

That is exactly right. Only if we understand that young people are more than just schoolchildren can we see the problem with earlier philanthropic efforts in education.

We need to be careful about the conclusions we draw. Some observers have concluded that since increased spending on schools does not lead to utopia, we don’t need to increase funding for schools. That’s not right.

Rather, we need a better analogy. Spending money on schooling is not like putting a Band-Aid on a gut wound. Rather, spending money on schooling for low-income students is like building a three-legged stool with one strong leg. Only one. Because the other two legs are harder to reach, they are usually ignored. But a three-legged stool needs three strong legs, not just one. The legs need to be improved at the same time, in the same degree, in order to make a real difference.

I’ll say it again and then I’ll be quiet: We DO need to pour money into schools.  But not ONLY into schools.  We need to address questions of poverty and structural racism.

2 Comments
by Adam Laats on December 4, 2015  •  Permalink
Posted in In the News, Uncategorized, What is school?
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Posted by Adam Laats on December 4, 2015

https://iloveyoubutyouregoingtohell.org/2015/12/04/how-facebook-can-save-america/