Silicon Valley came to Kansas students. This led to protests.

The seeds of contention were sown in school audiences and sprouted in kitchens, in living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents. When 14-year-old Collin Winter, an eighth-grader from the Kansas city of MacPherson, joined the protests, they reached their climax. In nearby Wellington, high school students staged a sit-in strike, and their parents gathered in living rooms, in churches and in the courtyards of auto repair shops. They went to school board meetings en masse. “I just want to take my chromebook and tell them that I’m not going to do this anymore,” says 16-year-old Kylie Forslund, a 10th grade student in Wellington. In the neighborhoods where there were never political posters, self-made posters suddenly appeared.

Silicon Valley came to provincial schools - and everything went awry

Eight months ago, public schools near Wichita switched to a web-based platform and Summit Learning courses - a “personalized learning” curriculum in which online tools are used to personalize education. The platform for Summit was created by the developers of Facebook; it is funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan. As part of the Summit program, schoolchildren sit for laptops for most of the day, study subjects online and pass tests. Teachers help children, work as mentors and lead special projects. This system is free for schools except laptops, which are usually purchased separately.

Many families in Kansas cities, where test scores have deteriorated due to underfinancing of public schools, were initially delighted with this innovation. After some time, schoolchildren began to come home with headaches and cramps in their hands. Some said they were more nervous. One girl even asked her father’s hunting headphones not to hear classmates who were distracting her from studying now alone.

Among the parents of MacPherson High School, a survey was conducted: 77 percent of them were against their children’s education through Summit Learning, and more than 80 percent said their children were dissatisfied with learning on the platform. “We allowed computers to teach children, and they looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig from MacPherson after attending the lessons of his ten-year-old son. In October, he took him out of school.
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“Changes rarely go smoothly,” said Gordon Mon, school superintendent of McPherson County, “the students began to study on their own and now show a great interest in their studies.” John Backendorf, director of Wellington School, says that "the vast majority of parents are satisfied with this program."

Protests in Kansas are only part of the growing discontent of Summit Learning.

The platform came to public schools four years ago and now covers 380 schools and 74,000 students. In November in Brooklyn , high school students relocated after their school moved to Summit Learning. In Indiana, the school board first cut down and then abandoned the use of the platform after a poll , in which 70 percent of students asked to cancel it, or to use it only as an option. And in Cheshire, the program was curtailed after the protests in 2017. “When disappointment with the results appeared, the children and adults managed to overcome it and move on,” said Mary Burnham, the grandmother of two grandchildren from Cheshire, who launched a petition to refuse Summit, “no one accepted this.”

Despite the fact that in Silicon Valley itself, many avoid gadgets at home and donate children to high-tech schools, she has long been trying to remake American education in her own image and likeness. Summit has been at the forefront of this process, but protests have raised questions about technology dependence in public schools.

For years, experts have been discussing the benefits of self-directed online learning versus traditional learning under the guidance of a teacher. Proponents of this idea argue that such programs give children, especially in small towns with poor infrastructure, access to high-quality curricula and teachers. Skeptics, on the other hand, worry about too much time spent by the children behind the monitor, and argue that students lose important interpersonal lessons.

John Payne, a senior researcher at RAND, has studied programs for learning customization, and believes that this direction is still in its infancy.

“Too little research,” he said.

Diana Tavenner, a former teacher and CEO of Summit, in 2003 founded a network of private schools Summit Public Schools and began developing software that would allow students to "independently discover their strength." The resulting program, Summit Learning, has moved to a new non-profit organization - TLP Education . Diana argues that the protests in Kansas are mainly associated with nostalgia: “They do not want change. They like schools as they are. Such people actively resist any changes. ”

In 2016, Summit paid the Harvard Research Center for exploring the influence of the platform, but did not pass it . Tom Kane, who was supposed to process the results, said he was afraid to speak out against the Summit, as many educational projects receive funding from the charity organization of the founder of Facebook and his wife, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Mark Zuckerberg supported Summit in 2014 and identified five Facebook engineers for developing the platform. In 2015, he wrote that Summit would help “meet the individual needs and interests of the student and free up mentoring time for teachers - what they do best”. Since 2016, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has allocated grants to Summit at $ 99.1 million. “We take issues seriously, and the Summit works with school leaders and parents in the field,” commented Abby Lunardini, CEO of The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, “many schools that use Summit love and support it.”

Best of all, this love and support can be seen in the Kansas cities of Wellington (8,000) and MacPherson (13,000). They are surrounded by wheat fields and factories, and residents work in agriculture, at a nearby refinery or aircraft factory. In 2015, Kansas announced that it would support “flight to the moon” in education and introduce “personalized training.” Two years later, he chose “ astronauts ” for this project: McPherson and Wellington. When parents received brochures with the promise of “individualized learning,” many were delighted. School district leaders chose Summit.

“We wanted equal opportunities for all children,” said Brian Kyneston, a member of the school board. With Summit, his 14-year-old daughter felt independent.

“Everyone judged it too quickly,” he added.

With the beginning of the school year, the children received laptops for Summit use. With their help, they studied subjects from mathematics to English and history. The teachers told the students that now their role is to be mentors.

Parents of children with health problems immediately ran into trouble. 12-year-old Megan, suffering from epilepsy, a neurologist recommended limiting the time on the monitor to 30 minutes a day to reduce the number of attacks. Since the beginning of using web tools, attacks have happened to Megan several times a day.

In September, some students received dubious content when Summit recommended sources on an open network. In one of the lessons on the history of Paleolithic Summit included a link to an article in the British newspaper The Daily Mail with juicy ads for adults. When searching for the Ten Commandments, the platform sent to a religious Christian site. To these claims, Tavenner replied that the training course was created on open sources and an article in The Daily Mail was suitable for his requirements. “The Daily Mail is writing at a very primitive level and it was a mistake to add this link,” she said and added that the Summit curriculum does not direct students to religious sites.

Summit divided teachers across the country. Some he freed from the preparation of plans and evaluation of tests and gave more time for individual students. Others said they were in the role of bystanders. While Summit demanded from schools that the lesson with teachers lasted at least 10 minutes, some children said that the lessons did not last more than a couple of minutes or they were not there at all.

There was a question about the protection of students' personal data. “Summit collects a huge amount of personal data about each student and plans to track them in college and beyond,” outraged Leoni Heimson, co-chair of the Parental Coalition for Student Confidentiality. Tavenner replied that the platform fully complied with the law on the protection of children's privacy on the Internet.

By winter, many students from McPherson and Wellington were fed up.

The 16-year-old Myriland French started to get tired of her eyes and she did not have enough conversations with teachers and students in the classroom. “Now everyone is very tense,” she said. An eighth grader Colleen Winter, participated in the January strike, along with 50 other students. “I was a little afraid,” he said. “But I still felt good doing at least something.”

In the backyard of a car workshop of one of the parents, Tom Henning, held an organizational meeting. The driver, Chris Smalley, father of two children, 14 and 16 years old, put a sign against the Summit in front of his house: “We were very nicely described everything. But it was the worst limo car we’ve ever bought. ” Dinna Garver, also made a sign in the courtyard: "Do not sink with the Summit."

In MacPherson, the Koenig couple saved money and transferred children to a Catholic school: “We are not Catholics, but it is easier for us to discuss religion lessons at dinner than a Summit”. According to Kevin Dodds, a member of the Wellington City Council, after the fall semester, about a dozen parents in Wellington have already transferred their children from public school and another 40 are planning to pick them up by the summer.

“We live on the periphery,” he laments, “and experimental rabbits were made of us.”

PS The answer from Summit Learning is here .