On April 21 the New York Times published an interesting story on “Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools; That Started a Rebellion” (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/technology/silicon-valley-kansas-schools.html). The article talks about the recent implementation of the Summit Learning product in two Kansas school districts, the McPherson Unified School District and the Wellington Public Schools. The implementation has experienced some significant push-back by parents, students, and teachers.

The article seems to have hit a nerve; it generated over 1,300 comments, and the most popular comment had 2,444 likes. Most commenters agreed with the tone of the article, that the current direction of the use of technology in our schools is ill-advised.

School district officials have disputed some of the facts reported in the article, and it’s unclear how accurate the article may be. But at minimum it’s fair to say that there is unhappiness in Kansas with the way that the product was implemented, or even that the product is being used at all.

Not knowing more, what can we observe?

First, the single biggest power of technology in K-12 education is to enable personalized learning. Without that, the use of traditional large group instruction may work well for the average kids in the middle, but the kids who struggle to stay on the pace are doomed, and the sharpest kids who we need to be our leaders in the future are left to stare out the window. Personalized learning has always had the potential to fix this, but it’s never been practical on a large scale without the enabling software. Note also that personalized learning has a special value for disadvantaged kids, who are the most at risk of falling behind and being doomed.

So products like Summit are not the problem. The problem may be how it was implemented here, in what seems to have been a top-down way. And, it sounds as though the scope of the project immediately went all the way to the extreme of a school experience for all students that was heavily virtual. Plus the implementation didn’t seem to target tasks such as math exercises that benefit the most from personalized learning, but instead it tried to automate many if not most learning tasks.

A big gripe about the implementation was a great reduction in teacher and student interaction. The article reported that, “Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least ten minutes; some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.”

But even if the ten minute goal was achieved, that’s not much of an accomplishment. To me, one of the goals of the use of technology in learning should be to automate mundane tasks so as to free the teacher to provide more and better human interaction. The use of technology shouldn’t have to be a choice between computer interaction and human interaction.

Hundreds of districts have very successfully implemented products like Summit, but they did it in a “top-down/bottom-up” way, maintaining a district-wide and school-wide focus, while also working intensely with the teachers to gain their help in designing the solution and helping them to change their teaching practices.

Pessimists might tend to look at the experience in McPherson Unified School District and the Wellington as some sort of milestone point on a movement away from implementation of technology to enable personalized learning. But I’d like to take the optimistic view, that this implementation can act as a learning experience on the problems such an implementation can encounter. And, we can hopefully learn from this experience to help manage future implementations in a more effective way.