Education Week - May 30, 2018 - 22

COMMENTARY
Is Silicon Valley Standardizing Learning?

ith more than 2
billion monthly
active users
worldwide, Facebook has an effective monopoly
on digital news
and information
distribution. Any troubling behavior on the
site has the power to affect many lives. The
recent case of Cambridge Analytica's mining of Facebook data for political means is
an invasion of personal privacy on a whole
new level. But Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg's seemingly helpful support of
technology-driven personalized education
represents a different kind of monopolizing
threat that we shouldn't overlook.
Personalized learning, or tailoring curricula
and instruction to students' academic needs
and personal interests, seems to mean a lot
to Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan-
at least according to their investment moves.
More than two years ago, they announced
plans to invest hundreds of millions annually in whole-child personalized learning
through their limited-liability company, the
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Just this month,
they gave $14 million to support schools in
Chicago, both public and private. And they

Getty

By Natalia Kucirkova

recently teamed up with the Bill & Melinda
Gates Foundation to fund and develop a host
of "state of the art" education initiatives, including personalizing math instruction.
They are doing so despite criticism from
academic circles that technology-driven personalization undermines teachers' professionalism and promotes specialist over gen-

eral education. Not to mention, personalized
learning is still a hazy concept that means
different things to different educators.
Though many school leaders see its promise, it's not cheap or easy to implement.
In fact, Silicon Valley's keen interest in
shaping the personalized-learning agenda
could create a one-sided model that under-

Math Is a Language.
Let's Teach It That Way

Getty

By Jeannine Diddle Uzzi
he United States has a math problem, and,
like most middle school students sitting
down with their homework, we are not finding any easy solutions. Young people in this
country are struggling to attain the proficiency necessary to pursue the careers our
economy desperately needs. Universities bemoan students' inability to complete collegelevel math. Each year thousands of newly admitted college
students are placed in non-credit-bearing remedial courses
in math, a path that immediately puts them at higher risk
of not completing a degree.
Maybe it's the classics professor in me talking,
but I approach this math problem from an
unorthodox angle: Latin. In a 2011 article, "An Apology for Latin and Math,"
high school Latin teacher Cheryl
Lowe made a compelling comparison between the study of Latin and
the study of math. Much like Latin, she
observed, "math is hard because it builds so relentlessly year after year. Any skill not mastered
one year will make work difficult the next."
High school teachers have discovered that the unrelentingly cumulative nature of the study of Latin and the study
of mathematics explains why students struggle to excel in
either discipline.
A favorite lament of college and university faculty in
quantitative fields is that students cannot perform college-

22 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 30, 2018 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

mines the diverse nature of education.
When done well, personalized learning
can empower students to create their own
projects and learning paths and provide
tailored academic support. In my own work
with personalized reading instruction, I
have seen its potential for motivating children to read.
But sticking commercial technology's
heavy hand into the mix concerns me.
Tech-based platforms have the potential to
standardize learning through a commercialization of knowledge and a product-centric
approach to children's education, with no
agency or reciprocity for the learner. Schools
that are too quick to adopt platforms may
hurt their capacity to provide learning experiences that are not technology-mediated,
such as outdoor education, physical libraries, or music classes. It's a move away from
human-centered teaching and a failure to
acknowledge that learning is more than absorbing facts in nice packaging.
Take Chan Zuckerberg's 2016 $50 million
backing of BYJU's-an India-based math
and science-learning platform. BYJU's
learning app offers more than 1,000 hours
of videos with practice questions and content, but focuses on motivation through
preferred learning styles at the expense of
classroom debates and face-to-face teaching.
And when AltSchool, a private education

level math. But what is college-level math?
In the world of classics, there is no such thing as collegelevel Latin. My daughter's high school Latin teacher uses the
same textbook for her class that I have used to teach Latin
at Duke University, Whitman College in Washington state,
and the University of Southern Maine. It turns out that there
are only two differences between high school Latin and college Latin. The first is pace. I tell students that one year of
college Latin is the approximate equivalent of three years of
high school Latin.
The other difference is the developmental level of the student. A high school student is often not as prepared as a
college student to confront demanding theoretical material,
and therefore college classes might incorporate more theory
than would a high school class.
Like Latin, algebra is a language; and like Latin, algebra
is taught to students of different developmental levels at different paces and with different levels of theoretical grounding across the K-16 landscape. The crucial difference between
Latin and math education is that classicists understand that
Latin is Latin, no matter the level.
Students who took Latin in high school are often encouraged to begin Latin anew when they get to college. The
review students receive in an introductory college course
reinforces their learning in preparation for more advanced
work. This is precisely what I did when I got to college, and
no one suggested that mine was not college-level study,
quite the opposite: I became a classical languages major
and nine years later finished a doctorate in classical studies.
In contrast, the United States has been sucked into the
myth of college-level math. If students need a review of algebra, instead of encouraging them to start anew in order to
reinforce their skills, we test them, label that review "remedial," and withhold college credit from them. This message
is jarring and discouraging to new college students, many of
whom already have significant doubts about whether they
belong in college or whether college is worth the investment.
I point out the discrepancy between our approaches to
these subjects not to downplay the national crisis in quanti-

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Education Week - May 30, 2018

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