A lot of words, a few facts, no outcomes and little knowledge

From Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion. by Nellie Bowles. An intriguing article which raises many more questions than it answers.

The framing is unfortunate. You have an east coast NYT reporter writing about a west coast Silicon Valley experiment in education being conducted in Kansas. A model which can't help but invoke images of left-right, flyover country, coastal elites versus the silent majority, with a dash of What's the Matter with Kansas?

But the topic and questions are interesting.

How do we improve educational outcomes?
Does self-directed learning work?
How do we serve remote rural communities, providing children there equal opportunities to those in cities?
How can we leverage technology to improve outcomes?
How can we ensure that new solutions work in the real world before deployment?
How can we distinguish between general reluctance to change and factual objection to a specific change?
How important is the social dimension and human interaction in learning?
What role should plutocrats have in creating or setting public policy for the ordinary citizen?
What are the consequences of extended screen time at a young age?
How do you balance the needs for the large majority against possible needs of small fringes?
How do we balance the theoretical knowledge of experts versus the practical interests of students and parents?
What have been the outcomes of the experiment so far?

On the latter, we have nothing. Bowles has written a process story rather than an outcome story. We get a sense of what is happening but not what has been achieved.

While there are some loose facts strewn around the story, there isn't much structure to it. I get the sense that the experiment was initially well-supported by the community and now it is not but there are no numbers to give a sense of proportion. The story needed the attention of an editor in order to make sense and provide value.

Stuck in the middle of the text is probably the best summary:

The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit’s platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017.

“When there are frustrating situations, generally kids get over them, parents get over them, and they all move on,” said Mary Burnham, who has two grandchildren in Cheshire’s school district and started a petition to end Summit’s use. “Nobody got over this.”

Zuckerberg et al wrote an education program built on education theory and in particular a still debated idea of self-directed learning, provided it free as an inducement to communities across the US, has seen it implemented in a handful of places, and is now encountering many forms of resistance and objection, without any clearly discernible benefits and some easily identified problems.

Is this a technology issue, a scaling issue, a project management issue, a cultural issue, a health issue, a governance issue, a mismatch issue, etc.? Hard to tell. Would be nice to know.

What would be really interesting is to remove some of the very obvious confounds. Is there a school district in California or New York which is functional, serves high income/high SES families, has good metrics and infrastructure for monitoring performance and strong support from teachers, administration, and parents to deploy? And if so, what has been their experience?

My guess is that there has not been. In which case this takes on more of a shade of rich plutocrats forcing untested theory on those with the most to lose and the least position to object.

But right now, we can't know because the reporter has not done her homework.