Last week, Matt Barnum reported in Chalkbeat that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is laying off dozens of staff members and pivoting away from the personalized learning platform they have funded since 2015 with somewhere near $100M.
CZI’s shift in approach marks something of a coda to an era when various advocates and funders believed that computer-based “personalized learning” could dramatically improve education. 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.
On Twitter, the social network where people are particularly sensitive to the hubris of the billionaire class, commenters have received Barnum’s article fairly gleefully. I’d like to go farther than glee, however, and name the single misunderstanding about education that, more than any other, led Zuckerberg to make this investment which he is now writing down.
This is the Summit model, which I have witnessed firsthand:
Summit also featured 16 hours a week of “personalized learning time.” Students worked at their own pace on a computer, which fed them a “playlist” of content where they learned specific skills. Students could move on once they got eight of 10 questions right on an online quiz.
That seemed to be the biggest draw for Zuckerberg, who contrasted the approach to “having every student sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher explain the same material at the same pace in the same way.” He suggested this could lead to transformational improvements in student learning. The goal, he wrote in 2017, was “scaling this approach to every classroom.”
There it is. You see this misunderstanding time and again from the people who influence whatever passes for a national strategy in education technology.
In 2016, for example, the Gates Foundation announced a fund for personalized learning under the same premise:
[Personalized learning] allows students to progress through content at their own pace without worrying about being too far behind (or ahead) of their classmates.
Sal Khan echoed this premise in 2018:
For us, personalization is — and we could talk about the different flavors of personalization that people use out in the world — but for us, it is, you learn at your own time and pace.
I have tried to illustrate as often as my subscribers will tolerate that students don’t particularly enjoy learning alone with laptops within social spaces like classrooms. That learning fails to answer their questions about their social identity. It contributes to their feelings of alienation and disbelonging. I find this case easy to make but hard to prove. Maybe we just haven’t done personalized learning right? Maybe Summit just needed to include generative AI chatbots in their platform?
What is far easier to prove, or rather to disprove, is the idea that “whole class instruction must feel impersonal to students,” that “whole class instruction must necessarily fail to meet the needs of individual students.”
For that proof, I only need to raise the existence of a single classroom where the teacher interacts with the whole class in ways that feel personal and responsive to the individual students. Here is one of thousands operating daily.
In our take on the classic Pool Border problem, students eventually write an algebraic equation to represent the number of tiles around a pool of any size. Liz Clark-Garvey of New York City Public Schools starts the lesson with a whole class move that supports the personal learning of every student in the class.
She flashes a pool and its bord
