Bill Gates Has Spent $1+ Million To Get Mark Zuckerberg's Software In Schools

theodp writes: "Today is a milestone for personalized learning," boasted Mark Zuckerberg in a Facebook post Tuesday. "For the first time, more than 100 new schools will adopt personalized learning tools this school year. [...] A couple of years ago, our engineering team partnered with Summit [a Zuckerberg, Facebook, and Gates Foundation supported charter school network] to build out their personalized learning software platform so more schools could use it. [...] Congratulations to the Summit team, the new Basecamp schools and the entire personalized learning community on an exciting milestone!" Perhaps Zuckerberg should have also given a shout-out to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which awarded a $1.1 million grant last year "to support the Summit BaseCamp Program that will bring Next Generation learning at no cost to all partner schools that are accepted into the program." The New York Times characterized the Facebook-Summit partnership as "more of a ground-up effort to create a national demand for student-driven learning in schools." Before you scoff at that idea, consider that an earlier Gates-Zuckerberg collaboration helped give rise to a national K-12 Computer Science crisis!

Comments

If they want to make an impact

[MikeRT]

They need to go to Arkansas and Alabama, not California and NY. The reasons are simple. Most "red states" would welcome this stuff with open arms. If they faced organized opposition to innovation in teaching, the political class of most red states would be more likely to curb stomp that opposition than support it. These are states where support for vouchers, homeschooling and other education reforms are extremely high.