By Rebecca Mead | Annals of Technology
| March 7, 2016 Issue of The New Yorker | http://bit.ly/218fKxK
 |
Inside, the space has been partitioned with dividers creating several classrooms. The décor evokes an IKEA
showroom: low-slung couches, beanbags, clusters of tables, and wooden
chairs in progressively smaller sizes, like those belonging to
Goldilocks’s three bears. There is no principal’s office and no
principal. Like the five other AltSchools that have opened in the past
three years—the rest are in the Bay Area—the school is run by teachers,
one of whom serves as the head of the school. There is no school
secretary: many administrative matters are handled at AltSchool’s
headquarters, in the SOMA district of San Francisco.
There aren’t even many children. Every AltSchool is a “micro-school.” In
Brooklyn Heights, there are thirty-five students, ranging from
pre-kindergarten to third grade. Only a few dozen more children will be
added as the school matures. AltSchool’s ambition, however, is huge.
Five more schools are scheduled to open by the end of 2017, in San
Francisco, Manhattan, and Chicago, and the goal is to expand into other
parts of the country, offering a highly tailored education that uses
technology to target each student’s “needs and passions.” Tuition is
about thirty thousand dollars a year.
In
December, I visited a classroom for half a dozen pre-kindergartners.
Several children were playing “restaurant,” and one girl sat in a chair,
her arms outstretched as if holding a steering wheel: she was
delivering food orders. “I’m taking a shortcut,” she announced. A
teacher sitting on the floor told her, “That’s a good word—you used it
correctly.” Then she took out her phone and recorded a video of the
moment.
Another teacher and a
student were looking at a tablet computer that displayed an image of a
pink jellyfish. The girl had been drawing her own jellyfish with a
violet crayon. “Let’s see if we can learn a name of a new jellyfish,”
the teacher said. “Which one do you want to learn more about?” She
touched the screen, and another jellyfish appeared—a feathery white one.
“This is a . . . hippopodius?” the teacher read, stumbling
over the name. “I wonder if this one glows in the dark.” The girl said,
“Do you have another pink one?”
Students
at AltSchool are issued a tablet in pre-K and switch to a laptop in
later years. (For now, AltSchool ends at the equivalent of eighth
grade.) When I visited a mixed classroom for second and third graders,
most of the children were sunk into their laptops. All were engaged in
bespoke activities that had been assigned to them through a
“playlist”—software that displays a series of digital “cards” containing
instructions for a task to be completed. Sometimes it was an online
task. Two children were doing keyboarding drills on a typing Web site.
Their results would be uploaded for a teacher’s assessment and added to
the student’s online Learning Progression—software developed by
AltSchool which captures, in minute detail, a student’s progress.
The
curriculum is roughly aligned with the Common Core, the government
standards that establish topics which students should master by the end
of each grade. But AltSchool’s ethos is fundamentally opposed to the
paradigm of standardization that has dominated public education in
recent decades, and reflects a growing shift in emphasis among theorists
toward “personalized learning.” This approach acknowledges and adapts
to the differences among students: their abilities, their interests,
their cultural backgrounds.
A girl
in the class was completing an offline task—reading a book about polar
bears. A boy lay on his stomach on the carpeted floor, headphones on,
using a Web site called BrainPOP to learn how to calculate the
perimeters of basic shapes. “Two out of five!” he shouted at one point,
as oblivious of those around him as a subway rider wearing earbuds and
singing along to Drake.
Not all
the activities were solitary. Two girls sat together, laptops before
them, using Google Images to scroll through pictures of seals for a
social-studies assignment; occasionally, they paused to compare notes.
Every so often, a student spoke with the teacher, a young woman in jeans
and a loose top, her iPhone tucked under her thigh as she sat on the
carpet. One girl had been using her laptop to research castles—an area
of sustained interest. She and the teacher discussed princesses and
castles, and whether they always went together. “That’s a good
question,” the teacher said, and then asked, “Does America have
princesses?”
A girl working nearby said, “Yes—my mom told me there was a princess and she died because of the paparazzi.”
“My mom says that every castle has got a torture place,” the girl who was studying castles said.
“What
is a castle?—that was your starting question today,” the teacher said.
After the girl wrote a response, on paper, the teacher snapped a
photograph of the page, in order to upload it to the girl’s playlist
card.
She might also send it to a
parent’s phone, using AltSchool Stream, an app that enables instant
communication between home and school. Meanwhile, above the students’
heads, a network of white audio recorders hung from the ceiling, and
fish-eye lenses were embedded in the walls. The goal of this
surveillance system, AltVideo, is to capture every word, action, and
interaction, for potential analysis.
“Does
every castle have torture?” the teacher said, her voice sounding sunny,
if a bit distracted.
“That’s a good starting question for tomorrow.”
Max
Ventilla, AltSchool’s thirty-five-year-old founder, is a native New
Yorker who attended Buckley, on the Upper East Side, and proceeded to
Andover, the New England prep school. He went to Yale, where he majored
in math and physics, and then earned an M.B.A. Ventilla worked briefly
for Google, then launched a startup, Aardvark, which developed a tool
for “social search”—the ability to direct a question to a targeted group
of people. In 2010, he sold the company to Google, reportedly for fifty
million dollars. Ventilla rejoined Google as a group product manager,
and eventually became responsible for creating a “unity of experience”
across the company’s products—insuring that, say, a user’s search
results are informed by her YouTube browsing history. When Ventilla quit
Google to start AltSchool, in the spring of 2013, he had no experience
as a teacher or an educational administrator. But he did have extensive
knowledge of networks, and he understood the kinds of insights that can
be gleaned from big data.
The
first AltSchool opened that September, in the Dogpatch neighborhood of
San Francisco. The idea grew out of the search that Ventilla and his
wife, Jenny Stefanotti, a former Google executive, conducted to find a
preschool for their daughter, who is now four. (They also have a
two-year-old son.) “It was a startlingly miserable experience,” he told
me. “You are thrown into this high-stakes world of trying to get your
two-year-old into a school, and all the places that are desirable have a
hundred times more people applying than they admit, and if you don’t
pick your preschool right your child will be penniless and alone at
thirty. And there is, absurdly, a little bit of truth to that.” While
visiting schools, Ventilla was struck by how little education had
changed since he began school. “A three-year-old today isn’t that
different,” he told me. But, largely because of technology, “a
thirteen-year-old is really different.”
The
more Ventilla thought about education, the more he thought that he
could bring about change—and not just for his own children. Instead of
starting a “one-off school,” he would create an educational “ecosystem”
that was unusually responsive to the interests of children, feeding them
assignments tied to subjects they cared about. Ventilla’s vision fit
the prevailing ethos of middle-class child rearing, in which offspring
are urged to find their enthusiasms and pursue them into rewarding
nonconformity.
Ventilla also
wanted students to focus on developing skills that would be useful in
the workplace of the future, rather than forcing them to acquire
knowledge deemed important by historical precedent. “Kids should be
spending less time practicing calculating by hand today than fifty years
ago, because today everyone walks around with a calculator,” Ventilla
told me. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to do math—I shouldn’t
have to whip out my phone to figure out if someone gave me the correct
change. But you should shift the emphasis to what is relatively easier,
or what is relatively more important.” Ventilla loves languages—his
parents are Hungarian, and he grew up bilingual before studying French
and Latin in school. He later learned some Persian, so that he could
understand what a girlfriend’s family was saying about him at the dinner
table. But he’s not certain that his daughter should devote similar
energy to language acquisition. “If the reason you are having your child
learn a foreign language is so that they can communicate with someone
in a different language twenty years from now—well, the relative value
of that is changed, surely, by the fact that everyone is going to be
walking around with live-translation apps,” he said.
I
recently toured the Dogpatch facility, which is situated in a former
industrial building near the waterfront. “It was basically put together
with spit and toilet paper,” Carolyn Wilson, one of AltSchool’s founding
teachers, who is now the company’s director of education, told me.
Today, the company employs more than a hundred and fifty people, split
evenly among educators, technologists, and operations managers. This
rapid growth has been funded by a hundred and ten million dollars in
venture capital—and twenty million in venture debt—that has been raised
over the past two years, among the largest investments ever made in
education technology. AltSchool’s capital comes from some of Silicon
Valley’s top investors, including the Founders Fund, Andreessen
Horowitz, and John Doerr. Last year, the philanthropic Silicon Valley
Community Foundation invested fifteen million dollars in AltSchool,
through a fund financed by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.
(Currently, tuition fees cover most of the expenses of running the
schools, including teacher salaries; the investment money helps cover
technologists’ salaries, real-estate costs, and other expenditures
related to the company’s growth.) None of these backers want merely to
own part of a chain of boutique micro-schools. Rather, they hope that
AltSchool will help “reinvent” American education: first, by innovating
in its micro-schools; next, by providing software to educators who want
to start up their own schools; and, finally, by offering its software
for use in public schools across the nation, a goal that the company
hopes to achieve in three to five years.
Silicon
Valley entrepreneurs are convinced that the flexibility and innovation
of the tech sphere can be productively and profitably applied to the
education sector, which is perceived as sclerotic. Sal Khan, who in 2005
founded Khan Academy, the popular online math-tutorial platform, says,
“Most of the people who end up doing well in Silicon Valley did very
well academically, but they often have a very strong viewpoint about how
it could have been better.”
The
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has poured billions of dollars into
education grants, including for research on digital tools and
personalized learning. Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, has
made education a priority for her charitable organization, the Emerson
Collective, pledging fifty million dollars to fund innovation in
high-school education. (The Emerson Collective is an investor in
AltSchool.) Mark Zuckerberg made a much publicized investment of a
hundred million dollars in the public schools of Newark, although, as
the journalist Dale Russakoff has chronicled, much of it was wasted.
Facebook has been more successful in offering coding assistance to
Summit, a chain of charter schools in the Palo Alto area; this year,
Summit’s free software, called the Personalized Learning Plan, has been
introduced in nineteen pilot schools nationwide.
AltSchool
is what Silicon Valley people call a “full-stack” company, meaning that
it is not just concerned with software. Most education-technology
startups do not operate any schools. (Khan Academy has a single school,
in Mountain View, but expanding its bricks-and-mortar operation is not a
priority for the company.) Companies that are a hybrid of the virtual
and the actual, like Uber or Airbnb or AltSchool, are particularly in
vogue among Silicon Valley investors.
“Facebook
started as, essentially, a bulletin board for Harvard students,”
Ventilla told me. “Uber started as a private chauffeur that
Garrett”—Garrett Camp, Uber’s founder—“hired and rode around with. This
is a relatively common occurrence. You start in a very narrow way that
you control and that really represents a kind of fundamentally different
approach. And then you iterate.”
Two
years ago, AltSchool Fort Mason opened in the Marina District of San
Francisco, on a commercial strip next to a Starbucks. When I stopped by,
in December, children in the lower grades were being entertained by a
startlingly tall blond woman dressed in a very short dress of Russian
folk design. She was impersonating Snegurochka, the Snow Maiden, who
visits children on New Year’s Eve. (It turned out that she was a
student’s mother.) Upstairs in the middle school, the class was engaged
in a complex simulation of a society that is undergoing a financial
crisis and is ruled by a pair of dictators. (The two teachers played the
tyrants.) This group project, which combined math and civics, was part
of a broader effort to study different forms of government and to learn
how an economy works.
The
classroom resembled a tech employee’s studio apartment: couches,
bookcases, a flat-screen TV, a kitchen area. Bowls on the counter were
filled with apple slices and blue corn chips. Each student was using a
Chromebook. The lead teacher, Christie Seyfert, was an energetic young
woman with green hair, but the students weren’t watching her. They were
looking at her image on the TV screen, where her face and voice had been
distorted to signal her role as dictator. In an earlier session, the
students had drawn lots to determine their jobs in the simulated
society. Some were sales supervisors, others secretaries; one boy was
the C.E.O. of an oil company. Their task that day was to research their
salaries online and figure out what their tax bracket should be, by
consulting a list that was posted on a wall. They were using real-world
data, but to liven up the proceedings their income would be paid in
units of POoO (an acronym for People’s Organization of Opportunity).
After
Seyfert’s introduction, the students formed small groups. Several boys
crowded around a couch, Googling salaries. Another group excitedly
discussed the arbitrariness of the job assignments and the dictator’s
instructions. “I’m going to form a union!” a girl cried. Seyfert was
pleased by the ferment.
Seyfert, who
is twenty-eight, started her career with Teach for America, working
among low-income students in San Jose. “I started out thinking there was
a way to close the achievement gap,” she told me. “It became clear to
me, teaching in those neighborhoods, that by looking for standards to
pull everyone up we are forgetting to address what the individual needs.
We are forgetting to think about how kids learn and what they need to
be successful in life.”
In
San Jose, students’ scores on annual state tests were made available
only after the end of the school year. At AltSchool, Seyfert could keep
tabs on her students’ daily, if not hourly, progress. Every task card on
a student’s playlist is tagged to denote not just academic skills, like
math and literacy, but also social and emotional skills.
Seyfert
pulled up the Learning Progression spreadsheet of one of her students, a
seventh grader. Grades from kindergarten to eighth grade were denoted
on the X axis, and various subject areas on the Y axis. Areas of
completed study—sixth-grade math, for example—were indicated by cells
filled in with green. Areas the student was still working
on—seventh-grade science, for instance—were colored orange. In English,
he was working well ahead of his expected grade level. Seyfert could
click on each subject area to get more precise information about his
progress. The effect was rather like opening an online report from a
credit-card company that can show expenditures by category—Shopping,
Travel—as well as specific purchases. She could see how many articles
the student had read on Newsela, a site that provides Associated Press
articles edited for different reading levels. She could click to see the
student’s scores on the quizzes that accompanied each article, and then
go into the article itself to read his annotations and marginal notes.
Here
and there a solitary orange cell indicated an area that the student had
not yet mastered. A student might have been sick the week that his
fifth-grade class consolidated its knowledge of fractions and might not
quite have grasped the principle. “If I notice he is really scoring low
on a standard, I can go and look at the cards that assess that standard
and see where the breakdown is happening,” Seyfert explained.
At
the same time, educators at AltSchool are discussing whether children
really need to attain certain skills at particular stages of their
educational development, as the Common Core implies. Seyfert thinks that
it might be more useful to think of learning not as linear but as
scrambled, like a torrent file on a computer: “You can imagine all the
things you need to learn, and you could learn it all out of order so
long as you can zip it up at the end, and you are good to go.”
Like
other AltSchool teachers, Seyfert was drawn to the startup because of
its ambition to make systemic change. Two or three times a week, she
told me, she gives colleagues feedback about the school’s digital tools.
The Learner Profile, Stream app, and other tools are only about a year
old, and AltSchool’s personalization still requires considerable human
intervention. Software is updated every day. Carolyn Wilson, AltSchool’s
director of education, told me, “We encourage staff members to express
their pain points, step up with their ideas, take a risk, fail forward,
and fail fast, because we know we are going to iterate quickly. Other
schools tend to move in geologic time.” (Ventilla may question the
utility of foreign-language acquisition, but fluency in the jargon of
Silicon Valley—English 2.0—is required at AltSchool.)
Ventilla
told me that these tools were central to a revised conception of what a
teacher might be: “We are really shifting the role of an educator to
someone who is more of a data-enabled detective.” He defined a
traditional teacher as an “artisanal lesson planner on one hand and
disciplinary babysitter on the other hand.” Educators are stakeholders
in AltSchool’s eventual success: equity has been offered to all
full-time teachers.
In
Seyfert’s classroom, I spoke with Otto Craddock, the seventh grader
whose Learning Progression I had glimpsed. He had been researching the
job that he held in the simulation: secretary. His parents, an
advertising consultant and an executive at BlackRock, had moved him from
a well-regarded private school. Gorse Jeffries, his mother, told me
that he had seemed listless. Otto said, “At my old school, they were,
like, ‘O.K., you want to do architecture? Maybe in college you can do
architecture.’ Here some people selected architecture, and we did a
whole unit on architecture, and we built models and projects.”
The
previous day, Otto said, a guest teacher had come in to lead several
students in a 3-D-modelling project, using a Web site called Tinkercad.
“We built little models online—some people built phone cases, or little
towers, or yo-yos,” Otto said. “I built a toilet, because I thought it
would be fun. It has lots of different components—you have the base, you
have the seat, you have the back.” He clicked to the site and pulled up
his model. “I was looking around at pictures of toilets online,” he
said. “I think I want to make it a bit more shaped for your back. I also
want really sanitary toilets. And I want to make it really comfy. I’m
quite bony, and I’m small, and if they don’t have a cushion they hurt.”
Eventually, Otto said, he planned to 3-D print his prototype: a model
toilet, fashioned to his personal specifications and preferences.
One
afternoon in December, two dozen AltSchool technologists gathered in a
conference room at the company’s headquarters for a “hackathon”—a
concentrated session of brainstorming and coding. Some participants had
laptops in front of them; others had curry or salad from the company
kitchen. All but a few were male, and nobody looked older than forty.
The
point of the hackathon was to sketch out in code potential solutions to
“robot tasks”—routine aspects of a teacher’s job that don’t require
teaching skills. Kimberly Johnson, the head of product success and
training, addressed the team. “Basically, what we have told teachers is
we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are
doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a
computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer
should do it,” Johnson said.
Since
the previous hackathon, three months earlier, teachers at AltSchool had
filed more than a hundred digital “tickets” to Johnson, indicating how
AltSchool software might be improved. Some teachers had asked for a more
streamlined way to input data. Johnson acknowledged, “It is a lot of
work to go into each card and click the learning objective and click the
score and click ‘save.’ It’s just four or five clicks, but it adds up.”
The teachers also wanted to enter assessment scores to groups of kids
at once. “If you say, I want to give all of these kids threes, and all
of these kids fours, there must be an easy way to do that,” Johnson
said. “I don’t know what it would look like, but you could probably hack
something together.”
Teachers
also wanted faster access to the video recordings of their classrooms,
to better evaluate students’ breakthrough moments, or to see what was
going wrong when the classroom grew disorderly. Currently, Johnson said,
teachers were using Slack, the group-messaging app, to alert her when
there was a moment in the classroom that they wished to review. She’d
watch the footage in order to find the right clip to bookmark, then send
a link to the teacher through e-mail. This process could take days.
“That would be a cool thing to automate,” she said.
Technologists
have been trying to transform the classroom for decades. In the late
seventies, Seymour Papert, a pioneer of artificial intelligence at
M.I.T., contended that children’s minds might be profoundly enriched by
coding. A child who learns to program “both acquires a sense of mastery
over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes
an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from
mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building,” Papert
wrote in his book, “Mindstorms,” which was published in 1980.
Coding
has become a familiar part of the curriculum, but computers are being
used more and more for customized instruction. Jose Ferreira, the
founder and C.E.O. of Knewton, an adaptive-learning platform that has
raised more than a hundred million dollars in venture funding, recently
compared his product to “a robot tutor in the sky that can semi-read
your mind and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are, down to
the percentile.”
Studies
of the effectiveness of online learning programs suggest that greater
humility is in order. A 2010 meta-analysis commissioned by the
Department of Education concluded that students whose teachers combined
digital and face-to-face learning did somewhat better than students who
were not exposed to digital tools, but there was a major caveat: the
teachers who added digital tools were judged to be more effective
educators in general.
In 2012,
Teach to One, a program that incorporates software to guide
middle-school students through a math curriculum, was adopted at seven
schools nationwide, including some in New York City. After a year,
results were mixed: one school made gains far better than the national
average, one did far worse, and the remaining five were close to the
national average. In the second year, the program was expanded, and the
results were better: eleven schools made higher-than-average gains, two
made gains significantly lower than the national average, and two
performed at par. A report commissioned by Teach to One stressed that
improved scores could not be attributed entirely to the software. Joel
Rose, the co-founder of New Classrooms, the company that developed Teach
to One, likes to use an alarming metaphor popular among Silicon Valley
innovators: “You’ve got to build the plane while you’re flying.”
So
far, Teach to One is limited to math. Machines have become quite good
at measuring the acquisition of arithmetical operations, but they are
much less good at quantifying such skills as creativity or
flexibility—let alone measuring less easily definable aspects of a
humanistic education, such as literary appreciation or artistic
sensibility or the development of empathy. A digital reading platform
that embeds interactive vocabulary assessments and comprehension tests
in literary texts may guide young readers to “just right” books, and may
give teachers insight into their students’ reading stamina and their
progression from one “Lexile level”—a measure of literacy—to another. It
may even achieve the elusive goal of encouraging reluctant readers to
become enthusiastic ones. The creators of one literacy tool, LightSail,
report that many kids, especially boys, treat the embedded assessments
as a competitive game, fist-pumping when they get a vocabulary word
right. But, at least for now, no literacy tool can tell whether a reader
laughed at “The Mouse and the Motorcycle” or wept over “The Fault in
Our Stars.” Nor can an app weigh the value of those moments when a
reader looks up from the digital page and stares into space. To a
computer measuring keystrokes, a student zoning out because he’s bored
is indistinguishable from one who is moved by her book to imagine a
world of her own.
Even ed-tech
advocates have warned against an overzealous embrace of the digital and
the measurable. Jennifer Carolan, a former teacher who is now an
investor at Reach Capital, recently wrote on her blog, “With all of the
investment hype and entrepreneurial frenzy, I worry that some might view
personalization as yet another silver bullet for education.” There have
already been several high-profile ed-tech failures. News Corp developed
Amplify, an educational-software division, and appointed Joel Klein,
the former New York schools chancellor, as its head, only to spin it off
this fall after school districts declined to buy into it.
Unlike
Amplify, AltSchool generates revenue by charging tuition. And in cities
like San Francisco and New York it could prove a popular option for the
many families who opt out of the public system. About a quarter of
AltSchool students receive financial aid. “To provide students with a
school experience that prepares them for the future, we need classrooms
that are representative of the diversity in our country,” Ventilla says.
AltSchool’s technological schemes, however, may be very hard to
implement in less affluent public school districts. A child who doesn’t
have wireless Internet access at home can’t do homework on a tablet,
even if her school provides one.
Some
education advocates are wary about potential privacy violations that
might result from data collection on the scale intended by AltSchool,
particularly given that AltSchool is a for-profit company. (Most
independent schools are not-for-profit institutions.) These concerns
could complicate the adoption of AltSchool software by public school
systems. Ventilla says that there is no intention to use AltSchool data
for commercial purposes, and that AltSchool can gather data in a way
that will respect a student’s anonymity. Only salient moments in the
classroom videos are saved, he says, and most are not even stored. “I
would never want to record all the things a kid says and keep them
around,” he said. But he added that looking at vocabulary-acquisition
patterns in aggregate could provide teachers with valuable information
that will help them teach each individual more effectively. “The
collection of any kind of data is not free,” Ventilla acknowledged. “But
the alternative is the incredibly invasive, inaccurate
standardized-testing regimen that we have now, which comes at a lot of
cost, psychic and otherwise, and doesn’t provide nearly the amount of
benefit that we want.”
Daniel
Willingham, an education scholar at the University of Virginia, told me
that adopting technology in schools can be maddeningly inefficient.
“The most common thing I hear is that when you adopt technology you have
to write twice the lesson plans,” he told me. “You have the one you use
with the technology, and you have the backup one you use when the
technology doesn’t work that day.” Willingham also notes that the most
crucial thing about educational software isn’t the code that assesses
student performance; it’s the worthiness of the readings and the clarity
of the math questions being presented onscreen. “People are very
focussed on the algorithm,” he said. “But equally important is the
quality of the materials.”
The gap
between AltSchool’s ambitions for technology and the reality of the
classroom was painfully obvious the morning that I spent in the Brooklyn
school. One kindergartner grew increasingly frustrated with his tablet
as he tried to take a photograph of interlocking cubes that he had
snapped into a strip of ten. (He was supposed to upload the image to his
playlist.) He shook the unresponsive tablet, then stabbed repeatedly at
the screen, like an exhausted passenger in a cab after an overnight
flight, unable to quell the Taxi TV.
Even
when AltSchool’s methods worked as intended, there were sometimes
questionable results. The two girls whom I watched searching for seals
on Google Images found plenty of suitable photographs. But the same
search term called up a news photo of the corpse of a porpoise, its
blood blossoming in the water after being rent almost in half by a seal
attack. It also called up an image in which the head of Seal, the
singer, had been Photoshopped onto a sea lion’s body—an object of much
fascination to the students. To the extent that this exercise was
preparing them for the workplace of the future, it was also
dispiritingly familiar from the workplace of the present, where the
rabbit holes of the Internet offer perpetual temptation.
Under
Arne Duncan, who resigned as Secretary of Education in 2015 after six
years in the post, U.S. schools deployed an ever-expanding regimen of
standardized tests, and Common Core was widely adopted. The goal was to
improve the assessment of student learning and teacher performance
through the collection of data and the use of shared standards. But
toward the end of his tenure Duncan acknowledged that the pressures of
high-stakes testing had deformed classroom practices, to the detriment
of students and teachers alike. His resignation may mark the beginning
of the end of thirty years of standards-based education reform.
Meanwhile,
there is a rise in interest among parents and educators about habits of
success. Qualities like “grit” and “resilience,” and how to cultivate
them, are much discussed in contemporary educational theory, and
teachers increasingly speak of “meeting children” where their abilities
and interests lie. Among educational theorists, one of the buzzwords is
“blended learning”—in which students receive “content” from a
combination of classroom lectures and software.
AltSchool
families might be described as early adopters of this new paradigm.
Ventilla is wary of the characterization. “No one who likes gadgets
chooses to send a kid to a school because it’s new—it is such a
meaningful, high-intensity purchase,” he told me. Still, Don MacAskill, a
parent at AltSchool Palo Alto, told me, “We are very comfortable with
our kids being guinea pigs. I do buy into the AltSchool mission. I
believe education needs to change, not just in our little micro-school
here but all over the world. We are raising a generation that will have
the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips, for every minute of
their life, so clearly education needs to change to accommodate that.”
I
met MacAskill and several other parents one day after school. He and
his wife, Liz, were wearing sweatshirts bearing the logo of SmugMug, a
photo-sharing startup. MacAskill is its co-founder and “chief geek.” He
knew Ventilla from tech circles, and recalls, “We ran into each other a
couple of years ago, and he said, ‘I’m doing this great thing to
revolutionize education.’ I said, ‘Wow, that sounds like a big hard job,
dude. Good luck—I can’t wait to watch.’ And then our kids started to
grow up.” The three MacAskill children—Leia, named for the princess;
Logan, named for the X-Men character; and Audrey, named for Hepburn—had
been in public schools, but MacAskill said, “Once our twins got into
third grade, some of the issues around non-personalized learning really
sort of kicked in.”
There
had been some bumpy moments for the Palo Alto school, which opened last
fall. One family left after concluding that there wasn’t enough
homework. Other parents wanted to know the curriculum in advance—an
impossible demand in a school dedicated to following children’s
interests. A look around the classrooms confirmed that for some children
the ability to follow their own passions reaped rich dividends. I
observed the kindergarten-and-first-grade classroom during afternoon
“choice time,” and saw two children separately involved in complicated
long-term projects. A seven-year-old boy with an avid interest in
American history had built a dining-table-sized model of Fort Sumter out
of cardboard—he was painting black-splotch windows on its perimeter. He
had also composed a storybook about Paul Revere, which was vibrantly
written, if impressionistically spelled. Another seven-year-old boy had
undertaken a physics experiment, building two styles of catapult out of
tongue depressors and tape. He was measuring their power with the help
of a yardstick affixed to the wall, and recording the data in a
notebook. The AltSchool environment—and an inspiring young teacher named
Paul France—had liberated these children’s individual creativity and
intellectual curiosity in just the way that the parents of a potential
Elon Musk might hope.
The
boys’ classmates, however, had made less demanding use of their choice
time, and this had apparently allowed the teaching staff to provide the
necessary support for the more ambitious projects. Four boys were seated
on the floor making primitive catapults with Jenga blocks. Half a dozen
girls had chosen “art creation,” and were sitting around a table
affixing stickers to paper and chatting. One girl had opted to work in
clay. But no students had chosen to engage in dramatic play, or to work
at the light table, or to do jigsaw puzzles—options that were displayed
on a wall chart. The remaining eight children—six boys and two girls—had
selected “tablet time.” They were sitting around a table, each with
headphones on, expertly swiping and clicking their way through word or
number games. Their quiet immersion would be recognizable to any parent
who has ever bought herself a moment’s peace from the demands of
interacting with her child by opening Angry Birds on her phone.
“Teach
these boys and girls nothing but Facts,” Thomas Gradgrind, the rigid
schoolteacher in Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times,” declares. “Plant
nothing else, and root out everything else.” Dickens’s novel was a
satire of the philosophy of utilitarianism as it was applied to
education: the idea that working-class children needed to know enough to
work in factories and nothing more.
Personalized
education promises an escape from the more recent Gradgrindian practice
of standardized tests. In a world of personalized learning, the
argument goes, every child’s particular genius will be permitted to
shine. But AltSchool’s philosophy of education is also essentially
utilitarian, even as it celebrates the individuality, autonomy, and
creativity of its students. It holds that children should be prepared
for the workplace of the future—and that the workplace of the future
will demand individuality, creativity, collaboration, and critical
thinking.
AltSchool’s perspective
does not necessarily require abandoning texts that have long been
considered central to a humanist education, but it does mean approaching
them anew. One middle-school class undertook a lengthy study of the
Iliad by focussing on the theme of “rage” and designing a spreadsheet
that logged instances of it. They then used data-visualization
techniques to show their findings, and wrote persuasive essays based on
their results. Afterward, their teacher, James Earle, wrote, “Analyzing a
piece of literature this way turns the work into a piece of robust data
that can be understood quantitatively, in addition to allowing a
qualitative reading.” The workplace of the future, according to
AltSchool’s premise, will look a lot like some workplaces in the
present—places like Google and Facebook, where Gradgrind’s faith in
facts is matched by faith in the revelatory power of data.
Last
spring, AltSchool hired Bharat Mediratta, a ten-year Google veteran, as
chief technology officer. Mediratta had been running part of the search
infrastructure that powered Google’s home page. I met with him in an
AltSchool office in San Francisco, and he told me, “When I joined
Google, no one wanted to work on this project—it was literally the
world’s largest Web app, but it was mostly me doing infrastructure. And
when I left I had built a team of two hundred to two hundred and fifty
people.”
Joining
Mediratta was Rajiv Bhatia, AltSchool’s “vice-president of
product”—overseeing its software development. He previously worked at
Zynga, the company behind Farmville and other online games. “I feel a
little bit better about working on something a little bit more noble,”
he said. “Selling virtual sheep was fun, and getting better at it was
great, and I do feel the principles and constructs of reacting to what
your users need, and what the market is asking you to do, is useful
here.” Mediratta, too, was motivated to join AltSchool by the
opportunity to have greater social impact. “For us to complete our
mission, we need to get to the fifty million kids in public school,” he
said. So far, AltSchool’s data pool was small, and not particularly
“actionable.” But, Mediratta went on, “Raj and I both come from big-data
backgrounds. We have this deep belief that, as we start pulling in
data, we will be able to find ways to help teachers and improve the
system.”
Both men were
particularly excited about the data that might be gathered through
AltVideo. “It allows the teacher to be what I like to call
‘retroactively omniscient,’ ” Mediratta said. He noted that a teacher
could unobtrusively observe a student who had taken a long time
completing an assignment and determine if he had been struggling or
goofing off. The video also allows the AltSchool real-estate team to
discern how to improve the layout of its schools. Bhatia clicked on his
laptop to show me a recording that had been made in a classroom the
previous morning as students were settling in. “We are hoping to be able
to use it to make inferences—like what peer groups exist in the
classroom,” he said. (Pity the student who tries to pass notes under
AltVideo’s watchful eye.)
Mediratta
envisaged a time when AltSchool technology would get “into the sci-fi
realm.” What insights might be drawn from aggregated data culled from
video and audio? He spoke of the video moments that teachers were
bookmarking. “The next useful thing would be for us to analyze all the
things that are bookmarked, and to draw inferences,” Mediratta said.
“Like, bookmarks seem to happen when the classroom is noisy. So let’s
generate a few other interesting moments that the teacher might want to
look at—say, a moment when the classroom was full of kids but was dead
quiet. What was happening there? Is this good? Is this bad? Or you could
look at a moment when it was absolutely chaotic—but maybe that is what
the activity called for. So we can start applying machine learning to
this data to start driving inferences. Maybe what we should be doing is
detecting when the classroom gets noisy, and then we could have the head
of the school, who is also an educator, stop by your classroom and
participate and help.”
When
the AltSchool technologists who participated in the December hackathon
shared their discoveries at the end of the session, the team that had
focussed on bookmarking video seemed particularly pleased with its
innovations. The team had decided to try to find a “fun route” to help
teachers request a video clip of a moment in class. “The idea is that
the teacher could, in theory, just knock twice on their phone,” one team
member said. He patted twice on his device, which was buried in the
front pocket of his jeans, to demonstrate the ease and unobtrusiveness
of the gesture.
Another member of
the team tapped on his laptop, and a graph that resembled an
echocardiogram, with troughs and spikes, appeared on a large video
screen at the head of the table. A third team member, a young man with a
starter beard, tapped twice on his phone, and the graph reappeared with
a new spike—the result of his tapping.
There
were cheers around the room as the developers explained how they had
filtered the data so that the jostling motions of a teacher walking
upstairs, say, would not show up as a bookmark. “It’s reasonably
robust,” one said, with pride. Someone asked about a cluster of spikes
on the graph. “That was, I don’t know—me digging around with the phone
in my pocket,” came the answer.
From the back of the room, a woman spoke up: “Did you test it with a female?”
Many
participants laughed. “I’m serious,” the questioner went on. “A lot of
our teachers are females, and they carry phones in different places.”
The
members of the bookmark team, all of whom were male, looked deflated.
In coming up with their apparently elegant solution, they had not
visualized a female teacher slapping her bottom to activate a phone
tucked into her back pocket.
“That’s
a really good point,” one of them acknowledged, his smile waning.
“Yeah, it could use a lot of fine-tuning. This was just, like, hey, get
ourselves to a demo.” They had failed fast and failed forward. That was
what they were supposed to do. Tomorrow, they would iterate. ♦
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