Personalized Learning: the Best Education Or the Worst?

theodp writes: In an exclusive interview with Education Week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about why he is shifting his K-12 giving priorities to personalized learning. While acknowledging that there's not yet any independent, large-scale research to show personalized learning's effectiveness, Zuck argues that "the model just intuitively makes sense." But just days later, Fordham University professor Mark Naison wrote in the Washington Post about why the personalized learning efforts of 'a growing number of those with investment capital seeking profitable outlets,' which presumably includes Zuck, make him 'incredibly pessimistic' about the future of public education. That Zuck — like fellow personalized learning cheerleaders/funders Bill Gates and former U.S. Education Chief Arne Duncan — seemed to be unaware of studies on personalized learning studies that date back to the '70s is troubling. But people don't "Like" 40+ year-old Ed.gov papers, so Zuck could be forgiven for not seeing them and, as a result, believing that the personalized learning plan dashboard his Facebook engineers knocked out truly is the ground-breaking solution to 'one of education's biggest problems' that Melinda Gates cracks it up to be.

Comments

40+ years old studies

[AchilleTalon]

The problem with 40+ years old studies on computer aided learning is the computing lanscape has changed so much since then they are mostly irrelevant. Even the University of Illinois at Urbana is making the shift offering on-line education.

Re:40+ years old studies

[Sique]

And if you read the WP article, you know why: To save on teaching staff. The head count of the teachers at universities and other educational institutions has stagnated since decades, but enrollment has exploded, and so has administrative staffing (and the wages for the administrational staff).

It's not because online education is inherently better, it's because you can offer the same course material to more people without investing into more buildings, additional positions for teachers and mentors or any other infrastructure that actuallyhelps the students. No one cares if it profits the single student, as long as you can profit from more students.

Re:You know...

[bluefoxlucid]

The problem is nobody listens to you unless they agree; they're more likely to listen if you're famous or have some kind of credential.

I've found these problems where I'll explain how markets or how macro-economics work and people will go, "... okay, yeah. I get that. I still think you're wrong, even though everything you said is obviously correct."

Favorite example: I want to replace our welfare system with a Citizen's Dividend, a particular form of basic income (I have a complete tax plan, including transitions, financing considerations, risks, mitigation, and contingency plans in case certain outcomes occur that need a response). I've shown the math for how I came up with the amount of the Citizen's Dividend; I've shown how much it costs in taxes; I've shown how it combines with even below-minimum-wage incomes to make a sharp increase in quality-of-life; and I've demonstrated how simply changing around *how* taxes are taken (not necessarily who ultimately pays) changes the dynamics of employment, reducing the cost of products and increasing employment. I've backed this up with both direct inspection of history and with airtight logical models that show certain conclusions are likely correct because all other conclusions are mathematically impossible (for example: reducing cost of a general market good always *eventually* reduces price as a proportion of both per-capita and median buying power, else we'd have eliminated all employment thousands of years ago--any other conclusion prohibits the creation of new products).

After long explanations of the technical details, people frequently tell me one of several things:

• * It makes sense that lower cost of wage-labor means lower product cost and consumer buying power *but* we should raise minimum wage a lot to make the businesses pay. (Logical flaw: acknowledging that the base cost of wage-labor creates the base cost of goods implicitly acknowledges that consumers pay wages.)
• * Wage-labor increases like taxes on the working class, payroll taxes, wages, and sales taxes reduce consumer buying power, eliminating jobs; *but* increasing minimum wage will make more people richer, even if it does eliminate a few jobs. (Logical flaw: acknowledging that raising the cost of labor destroys jobs is acknowledging that products are more expensive in such a way that consumers can, in total, afford less; you've just suggested that you're making the poor poorer *and* richer at the same time.)
• * Same as above with wage-labor increases eliminating jobs; *but* a national sales tax should be the only tax because reasons. (All kinds of holy hell here; this is just blunt politics from people who think a national sales tax will somehow make businesses "pay their fair share," while they simultaneously argue that businesses are offshoring all their profits in such a way that would dodge the national sales tax anyway, and that the rich are avoiding all taxes by making capital gains.)
• * Such a plan does reduce taxes on consumer take-home pay, increasing take-home pay per dollar wage-labor paid by the employer (including taxes), thus making *everyone* richer; *but* it's an expensive waste of money to give "our hard-earned taxpayer dollars" to drug dealers and lazy bums. (X causes Y; I like Y, but I don't like X. More politics.)
• * More take-home pay does create jobs by creating the consumer buying power to buy products, thus increasing production demand and necessitating more people working to make things we're buying; thus jobs are not there because you worked hard, but because someone else wants to buy what you're making; *but* all poor people are lazy and should just get jobs, and welfare should be removed wholesale. (This seems reasonable on the face--welfare is expensive--until you realize population expands to scarcity, and full employment destroys an economy, and all kinds of other reasons that there will always be unemployment.)

Mostly, people agree with what they agree with. If you can put on a good