This article first appeared in Bright, a Medium-based publication

Student privacy has become one of the hottest issues in education, with some 170 bills proposed so far this year that would regulate it. These legislative efforts stress the need to protect students when they're online, safeguarding their data from advertisers as well as from unscrupulous people and companies. There's some pushback against these proposals too, with arguments that restrictions on data might hinder research or the development of learning analytics or data-driven educational software.

But almost all arguments about student privacy, whether those calling for more restrictions or fewer, fail to give students themselves a voice, let alone some assistance in deciding what to share online. Students have little agency when it comes to education technology - much like they have little agency in education itself.

The Domain of One's Own initiative at University of Mary Washington (UMW) is helping to recast the conversation about student data. Instead of focusing on protecting and restricting students' Web presence, UMW helps them have more control over their scholarship, data, and digital identity.

The Domains initiative enables student to build the contemporary version of what Virginia Woolf in 1929 famously demanded in A Room of One's Own - the necessity of a personal place to write. Today, UMW and a growing number of other schools believe that students need a proprietary online space in order to be intellectually productive.

As originally conceived at the Virginia liberal arts university, the Domains initiative provides students and faculty with their own Web domain. It isn't simply a blog or a bit of Web space and storage at the school's dot-edu, but their own domain - the dot com (or dot net, etc) of the student's choosing. The school facilitates the purchase of the domain; it helps with installation of WordPress and other open source software; it offers both technical and instructional support; and it hosts the site until graduation when domain ownership is transferred to the student.

And then - contrary to what happens at most schools, where a student's work exists only inside a learning management system and cannot be accessed once the semester is over - the domain and all its content are the student's to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.

Intellectual productivity on the Web looks a bit different, no doubt, than it did at Woolf's writing desk. But there remains this notion, deeply embedded in Domain of One's Own, that it is important to have one's own space in order to develop one's ideas and one's craft. It's important that learners have control over their work - their content and their data. In a 2009 article that served as a philosophical grounding of sorts for the initiative, Gardner Campbell, then a professor at Baylor University, called for a "personal cyberinfrastructure" where students:

not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments…. Fascinating and important innovations would emerge as students are able to shape their own cognition, learning, expression, and reflection in a digital age, in a digital medium. Students would frame, curate, share, and direct their own ‘engagement streams' throughout the learning environment.

In developing this "personal cyberinfrastructure" through the Domain of One's Own initiative, UMW gives students agency and control; they are the subjects of their learning, not the objects of education technology software.

Having one's own domain means that students have much more say over what they present to the world, in terms of their public profiles, professional portfolios, and digital identities. Students have control over the look and feel of their own sites, including what's shared publicly. This means they have some say - although not complete - over their personal data, and in turn they begin to have an understanding of the technologies that underpin the Web, including how their work and their data circulate there.

At the simplest level, a Domain of One's Own helps students build their own digital portfolio. They can be used in a classroom setting in order for students to demonstrate their learning. These portfolios can contain text, images, video and audio recordings, giving students opportunities to express themselves in a variety of ways beyond the traditional pen-and-paper test or essay. One student uses her domain to showcase her artwork. Another chronicled her semester abroad. A third student has built a living CV, highlighting her academic research as well as her work experience.

Since UMW launched Domain of One's Own in 2013, other schools have picked up on the program's relevance in today's world - including Emory University, the University of Oklahoma, and Davidson College, as well as at several high schools. Domain of One's Own has also spun out a startup of sorts, Reclaim Hosting, that provides low-cost Web hosting and helps educators offer their students their own domains.

Clarence Fisher introduced Domains last year to his high school students at the Joseph H. Kerr School in Snow Lake, Manitoba. "The kids came in to the class with what I would call fair and average teen tech skills," he said. "Lots of iPods, iPads, and laptops. Lots of Facebook and Instagram. But none of them had a presence online they were in control of before this."

This observation was echoed by Bryan Jackson, who has implemented Domains at Gleneagle Secondary School in Coquitlam, British Columbia. "I wanted them to see and be aware of all of the options and the control that they are giving up when services such as Facebook are their primary web presence," he said. By contrast, he introduced his students to open source platforms like WordPress, teaching them about Web standards like HTML and CSS.

Often when schools talk to students about their presence on the Web, they do so in terms of digital citizenship: what students need to know in order to use technology "appropriately." Schools routinely caution students about the things they post on social media, and the tenor of this conversation - particularly as translated by the media - is often tinged with fears that students will be seen "doing bad things" or "saying bad things" that will haunt them forever.

While some schools are turning to social media monitoring firms to keep an eye on students online, rarely do schools give students the opportunity to demonstrate the good work that they do publicly. Nor do schools give students the opportunity to decide what and when and how that public, online display should look like. It's a drawback to our digital citizenship conversations - we're concerned about what students do online but we fail to probe the "appropriateness" of the demands on data and content that (education) technology companies increasingly make on the students in turn.

It's one of the flaws too with how privacy conversations about education technology are usually framed. Debates about what happens to student data - who it's shared with, for example - seldom include students' input. These debates do not recognize the ways in which students have already developed rich social lives online and could use help, not punishment or paternalism, in understanding how to think through the data trails they're leaving behind.

There is an understandable learning curve to helping students manage their online presence via their own domain. "At first there was a fair amount of fumbling around, Googling solutions, and trying to understand their options," said teacher Clarence Fisher. "Within a week, the kids were able to understand what their options were and how their site was affected by changes they made. As time went on, we talked a lot more about technical issues (backup, recovery, privacy options, hosting laws in different countries, etc). But we also talked a lot more about digital citizenship, safety, control, design, etc. The kids saw the site much more as their own and their responsibility."

The importance of giving students responsibility for their own domain cannot be overstated. This can be a way to track growth and demonstrate new learning over the course of a student's school career - something that they themselves can reflect upon, not simply grades and assignments that are locked away in a proprietary system controlled by the school.

And if a student owns their own domain, as she moves from grade to grade and from school to school, all that information - their learning portfolio - can travel with them.

Education technology - and more broadly, the culture of education - does a terrible job with this sort of portability and interoperability. When a student moves to a new school, for example, they often have to request their transcript, a document that lists their courses and their grades. A transcript is by definition a copy of their education record. The transcript is often printed on a piece of paper with formal letterhead, perhaps with a watermark or stamp to show that it's "official." This lack of portability continues in much digital schoolwork too. Even if students are encouraged to create online portfolios or to use services like Google Apps for Education in order to store all their work, they don't actually get to take that work with them when they move or graduate. (In the case of Google Apps, you can download your files. But then you'll need to find a new place to store them.) Too often, students' work in these systems gets deleted over the summer months as schools aren't in the business of permanently storing student work. School district IT is not the right steward for student work: the student is.

Giving students their own digital domain is a radical act. It gives them the ability to work on the Web and with the Web, to have their scholarship be meaningful and accessible by others. It allows them to demonstrate their learning to others beyond the classroom walls. To own one's domain gives students an understanding of how Web technologies work. It puts them in a much better position to control their work, their data, their identity online.

"I want to know where my ones and zeros are stored," said Bryan Jackson, referring to the basic binary code in which computers ‘think.'"And I want my students to know that that's something they can ask about, and learn to manage for themselves."

This keynote was delivered today at NWeLearn. The slides can also be found on Speaker Deck.

This is – I think (I hope) – the last keynote I will deliver this year. It’s the 11th that I’ve done. I try to prepare a new talk each time I present, in no small part because it keeps me interested and engaged, pushing my thinking and writing forward, learning. And we’re told frequently as of late that as the robots come to take our jobs, they will take first the work that can be most easily automated. So to paraphrase the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, any keynote speaker that can be replaced by a machine should be.

That this is my last keynote of the year does not mean that I’m on vacation until 2016. If you’re familiar with my website Hack Education, you know that I spend the final month or so of each year reviewing everything that’s happened in the previous 12 months, writing an in-depth analysis of the predominant trends in education technology. I try in my work to balance this recent history with a deeper, longer view: what do we know about education technology today based on education technology this year, this decade, this century – what might that tell us about the shape of things to come.

In my review of “the year in ed-tech,” I look to see where the money’s gone – this has been a record-setting year for venture capital investment in education technology, for what it’s worth (over $3.76 billion). I look to see what entrepreneurs and engineers are building and what educators and students are adopting and what politicians are demanding, sanctioning. I look for, I listen to the stories.

Today I want to talk about three of these trends – “themes” is perhaps the more accurate word: austerity, automation, and algorithms.

I have the phrase “future of education” in the title to this talk, but I don’t want to imply that either austerity or automation or algorithms are pre-ordained. There is no inevitability to the future of education, to any of this – there is no inevitability to what school or technology will look like; there is no inevitability to our disinvestment in public education. These are deeply political issues – issues of labor, information, infrastructure, publicness, power. We can (we must) actively work to mold this future, to engage in public and political dialogue and not simply hand over the future to industry.

Austerity looms over so much of what is happening right now in education. Between 1987 and 2012, the share of revenue that Washington State University received from Washington state, for example, fell from 52.8% to 32.3%. Boise State University saw its state support fall from 64.7% of its revenue to 30.3%. The University of Oregon, from 35.8% to 9.3%.

Schools are now tasked to “do more with less,” which is often code, if you will, for utilizing digital technologies to curb “inefficiencies” and to “scale” services. The application of the language and practices of scientific management to education isn’t new. Not remotely. Raymond Callahan wrote a book called Education and the Cult of Efficiency in 1962, for example, that explored the history and the shape of school administration through this very lens. Measurement. Assessment. “Outcomes.” Data. Standardization. The monitoring and control of labor. And in many ways this has been the history of, the impetus behind education technology as well. Measurement. Assessment. “Outcomes.” Data. Standardization. The monitoring and control of labor. Education technology is, despite many of our hopes for something else, for something truly transformational, often a tool designed to meet administrative goals.

As Seymour Papert – MIT professor and probably one of the most visionary people in education technology – wrote in his 1993 book The Children’s Machine,

Little by little the subversive features of the computer were eroded away: Instead of cutting across and so challenging the very idea of subject boundaries, the computer now defined a new subject; instead of changing the emphasis from impersonal curriculum to excited live exploration by students, the computer was now used to reinforce School’s ways. What had started as a subversive instrument of change was neutralized by the system and converted into an instrument of consolidation.

For Papert, that consolidation involved technology, administration, and (capital-S) School. Under austerity, however, we must ask what happens to “School’s ways.” Do they increasingly become “businesses’ ways,” “markets’ ways”? What else might “the subversive features of the computer” serve to erode – and erode in ways (this is what concerns me) that are far from optimal for learning, for equity, for justice?

I first included “Automation and Artificial Intelligence” as one of the major trends in education technology in 2012. 2012 was, if you recall, deemed “The Year of the MOOC” by The New York Times. I was struck at the time by how the MOOCs that the media were suddenly obsessed with all emerged from elite universities’ artificial intelligence labs. Udacity’s founder Sebastian Thrun, Coursera’s founders Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller were from Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Anant Agarwal, the head of edX, from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Laboratory.

I wondered then, “How might the field of artificial intelligence – ‘the science of creating intelligent machines’ – shape education?” Or rather, how does this particular discipline view “intelligence” and “learning” of machines and how might that be extrapolated to humans?

The field of artificial intelligence relies in part on a notion of “machine learning” – that is, teaching computers to adapt their behaviors algorithmically (in other words, to “learn”) – as well as on “natural language processing” – that is, teaching computers to understand input from humans that isn’t written in code. (Yes, this is a greatly oversimplified explanation. I didn’t last too long in Sebastian Thrun’s AI MOOC.)

Despite the popularity and the hype surrounding MOOCs, Thrun may still be best known for his work on the Google self-driving car. And I’d argue we can look at autonomous vehicles – not only the technology, but the business, the marketing, the politics – and see some connections to how AI might construe education as well. If nothing else, much like the self-driving car with its sensors and cameras and knowledge of the Google-mapped-world, we are gathering immense amounts of data on students via their interactions with hardware, software, websites, and apps. And more data, so the argument goes, equals better modeling.

Fine-tuning these models and “teaching machines” has been the Holy Grail for education technology for a hundred years – that is to say, there has long been a quest to write software that offers “personalized feedback,” that responds to each individual student’s skills and needs. That’s the promise of today’s “adaptive learning,” the promise of both automation and algorithms.

What makes ed-tech programming “adaptive” is that the AI assesses a student’s answer (typically to a multiple choice question), then follows up with the “next best” question, aimed at the “right” level of difficulty. This doesn’t have to require a particularly complicated algorithm, and the idea actually based on “item response theory” which dates back to the 1950s and the rise of the psychometrician. Despite the intervening decades, quite honestly, these systems haven’t become terribly sophisticated, in no small part because they tend to rely on multiple choice tests.

And yet the marketing surrounding these adaptive learning systems is full of wildly exaggerated claims about their potential and their capabilities. The worst offender: Knewton.

In August, Knewton announced that it was making its “adaptive learning” engine available to anyone (not just to the textbook companies to whom it had previously licensed its technology). Educators can now upload their own materials to Knewton – videos, assignments, quizzes, and so on – and Knewton says it will assess how well each piece of content works for each student.

“Think of it as a friendly robot-tutor in the sky,” Jose Ferreira, Knewton founder and CEO, said in the company’s press release. “Knewton plucks the perfect bits of content for you from the cloud and assembles them according to the ideal learning strategy for you, as determined by the combined data-power of millions of other students.” "“We think of it like 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,” Ferreira told NPR.

A couple of years ago, he was giving similar interviews: “What if you could learn everything,” was the headline in Newsweek.

Based on the student’s answers [on Knewton’s platform], and what she did before getting the answer, “we can tell you to the percentile, for each concept: how fast they learned it, how well they know it, how long they’ll retain it, and how likely they are to learn other similar concepts that well,” says Ferreira. “I can tell you that to a degree that most people don’t think is possible. It sounds like space talk.” By watching as a student interacts with it, the platform extrapolates, for example, “If you learn concept No. 513 best in the morning between 8:20 and 9:35 with 80 percent text and 20 percent rich media and no more than 32 minutes at a time, well, then the odds are you’re going to learn every one of 12 highly correlated concepts best that same way.”

“We literally know everything about what you know and how you learn best, everything” Ferreira says in a video posted on the Department of Education website. “We have five orders of magnitude more data about you than Google has. …We literally have more data about our students than any company has about anybody else about anything, and it’s not even close.”

The way that Knewton describes it, this technology is an incredible, first-of-its-kind breakthrough in “personalization” – that is, the individualization of instruction and assessment, mediated through technology in this case. “Personalization” as it’s often framed it meant to counter the “one-size-fits-all” education that, stereotypically at least, the traditional classroom provides.

And if the phrase “semi-read your mind” didn’t set off your bullshit detector, I’ll add this: there’s a dearth of evidence – nothing published in peer-reviewed research journals – that Knewton actually works. (We should probably interrogate what it means when companies or researchers say that any ed-tech “works.” What does that verb mean?) Knewton surely isn’t, as Ferreira described it in an interview with Wired, “a magic pill.”

Yet that seems to be beside the point. The company, which has raised some $105 million in venture capital and has partnered with many of the world’s leading textbook publishers, has tapped into a couple of popular beliefs: 1) that instructional software can “adapt” to each individual student and 2) that that’s a desirable thing.

The efforts to create, as Ferreira puts it, a “robot-tutor” are actually quite long-running. Indeed the history of education technology throughout the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries could be told by looking at these endeavors. Even the earliest teaching machines – those developed before the advent of the computer – strove to function much like today’s “adaptive technologies.” These devices would allow students, their inventors argued, to “learn at their own pace,” a cornerstone of “personalization” via technology.

It’s easy perhaps to scoff at the crudity of these machines, particularly when compared to the hype and flash from today’s ed-tech industry. Ohio State University professor Sidney Pressey built the prototype for his device “the Automatic Teacher” out of typewriter parts, debuting it at the 1924 American Psychological Association meeting. A little window displayed a multiple choice question, and the student could press one of four keys to select the correct answer. The machine could be used to test a student – that is, to calculate how many right answers were chosen overall; or it could be used to “teach” – the next question would not be revealed until the student got the first one right, and a counter would keep track of how many tries it took.

Ed-tech might look, on the surface, to be fancier today, but these are still the mechanics that underlies so much of it.

It’s Harvard psychology professor and radical behaviorist B. F. Skinner who is often credited as the inventor of the first teaching machine, even though Pressey’s work predated Skinner’s by several decades. Skinner insisted that his machines were different: while Pressey’s tested students on material they’d already been exposed to, Skinner claimed his teaching machine facilitated teaching, introducing students to new concepts in incremental steps.

This incrementalism was important for Skinner because he believed that the machines could be used to minimize the number of errors that students made along the way, maximizing the positive reinforcement that students received. (This was a key feature of his behaviorist model of learning.) Educational materials should be be broken down into small chunks and organized in a logical fashion for students to move through. Skinner called this process “programmed instruction.”

In some ways, this is akin to what Knewton claims to do today: taking the content associated with a particular course or textbook and breaking it down into small “learning objects.” Again, to quote Ferreira in the company’s latest press release, “Knewton plucks the perfect bits of content for you from the cloud and assembles them according to the ideal learning strategy for you, as determined by the combined data-power of millions of other students.”

That assembly of content based on “data-power” is distinct from what either Pressey or Skinner’s machines could do. That capability, of course, is a result of the advent of the computer. Students using these early teaching machines still had to work through the type and the order of questions as these machines presented them; they could only control the speed with which they progressed (although curriculum, as designed to be delivered by teacher or machine, typically does progress from simple to difficult). Nevertheless the underlying objective – enhanced by data and algorithms or not – has remained the same for the last century: create a machine that works like a tutor. As Skinner wrote in 1958,

The machine itself, of course, does not teach. It simply brings the student into contact with the person who composed the material it presents. It is a laborsaving device because it can bring one programmer into contact with an indefinite number of students. This may suggest mass production, but the effect upon each student is surprisingly like that of a private tutor.

A private tutor.

It’s hardly a surprise that echoing this relationship has been a goal that education technology has strived for. A private tutor is often imagined to be the best possible form of instruction, superior to “whole class instruction” associated with the public school system. And it’s what royalty and the rich have provided their children historically; parents can still spend a great deal of money in providing a private tutor for their child.

A tutor is purportedly the pinnacle of “individualized instruction.” Some common assumptions: A tutor pays attention – full attention – to only one student. The lessons are crafted and scaffolded specifically for that student, and a tutor does not move on to the next lesson until the student masters the concept at hand. A tutor offers immediate feedback, stepping in to correct errors in reasoning or knowledge. A tutor keeps the student on task and sufficiently motivated, through a blend of subject-matter expertise, teaching skills, encouragement, compassion, and rigor. But a student can also take control of the exchange, asking questions or change the topic. Working with a tutor, student is a more actively engaged learner – indeed, a tutor provides an opportunity for a student to construct their own knowledge not simply receive knowledge instruction.

Now some of these strengths of tutors may be supposition or stereotype. Nonetheless, the case for tutoring was greatly reinforced by education psychologist Benjamin Bloom who, in 1984, published his article “The Two Sigma Problem” that found that “the average student under tutoring was about 2 standard deviations above the average of the control class,” a conventional classroom with one teacher and 30 students. Tutoring is, Bloom argued, “the best learning conditions we can devise.”

But here’s the challenge that Bloom identified: one-to-one tutoring is “too costly for most societies to bear on a large scale.” It might work for the elite, but one tutor for every student simply won’t work for public education.

Enter the computer – and a rekindling of interesting in building “robot tutors.”

While the “robot tutor” can trace its lineage through the early teaching machines of Pressey and Skinner, it owes much to the work of early researchers in artificial intelligence as well, and as such, the successes and failures of “intelligent tutoring systems” can be mapped to a field that was, at its outset in the early 1950s, was quite certain it was on the verge of creating a breakthrough in “thinking machines.” And once we could could build a machine that thinks, surely we could build machines to teach humans how to think and how to learn. “Within a generation,” MIT AI professor Marvin Minsky famously predicted in 1967, “the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.”

The previous year, Stanford education professor Patrick Suppes made a similar pronouncement in the pages of Scientific American:

One can predict that in a few more years millions of school­ children will have access to what Philip of Macedon’s son Alexander enjoyed as a royal prerogative: the personal services of a tutor as well-informed and responsive as Aristotle.

Of course, we have yet to solve the problems of artificial intelligence, let alone the problem of creating “intelligent tutoring systems,” despite decades of research.

These systems – “robot tutors” – have to be able to perform a number of tasks, far more complex than those that early twentieth century teaching machines could accomplish. To match the ideal humor tutor, robot tutors have to be programmed with enough material to be subject matter experts (or at least experts in the course materials. That’s not new or unique – pre-digital teaching machines did that too.) But they also should be able to respond with more nuance than just “right” or “wrong.” They must be able to account for what students’ misconceptions mean – why does the student choose the wrong answer. Robot tutors need to assess how the student works to solve a problem, not simply assess whether they have the correct answer. They need to provide feedback along the way. They have to be able to customize educational materials for different student populations – that means they have to be able to have a model for understanding what “different student populations” might look like and how their knowledge and their learning might differ from others. Robot tutors have to not just understand the subject at hand but they have to understand how to teach it too; they have to have a model for “good pedagogy” and be able to adjust that to suit individual students’ preferences and aptitudes. If a student asked a question, a robot would have to understand that and provide an appropriate response. All this (and more) has to be packaged in a user interface that is comprehensible and that doesn’t itself function as a roadblock to a student’s progress through the lesson.

These are all incredibly knotty problems.

In the 1960s, many researchers began to take advantage of mainframe computers and time-sharing to develop computer assisted instructional (CAI) systems. Much like earlier, pre-digital teaching machines, these were often fairly crude – as Mark Urban-Lurain writes in his history of intelligent tutoring systems, “Essentially, these were automated flash card systems, designed to present the student with a problem, receive and record the student’s response, and tabulate the student’s overall performance on the task.” As the research developed, these systems began to track a student’s previous responses and present them with materials – different topics, different complexity – based on that history.

Early examples of CAI include the work of Patrick Suppes and Richard Atkinson at their lab at Stanford, the Institute for Mathematical Studies in the Social Sciences. They developed a system that taught reading and arithmetic to elementary students in Palo Alto as well as in rural Kentucky and Mississippi. In 1967, the two founded the Computer Curriculum Corporation, which sold CAI systems – mainframes, terminals, and curriculum – to schools.

(The company was acquired in 1990 by Simon & Schuster, which a few years later sold the CAI software to Pearson.)

Meanwhile, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, another CAI system was under development, no small part due to the work by then graduate student Don Bitzer on the university’s ILLIAC–1 mainframe. He called it Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations or PLATO. Bitzer recognized that the user interface would be key for any sort of educational endeavor, and as such he thought that the terminals that students used should offer more than text-based Teletype, which at the time was the common computer interface. Bitzer helped develop a screen that could display both text and graphics. And more than just display, the screen enabled touch. PLATO boasted another feature too: the programming language TUTOR which (ostensibly at least) allowed anyone to build lessons for the system.

(Much like CCC, PLATO was eventually spun out of the university lab into a commercial product, sold by the Control Data Corporation. CDC sold the trademark “PLATO” in 1989 to The Roach Organization which changed its name to PLATO Learning. Another online network based on PLATO called NovaNet was developed by the UIUC, later purchased by National Computer Systems which in turn was acquired by Pearson. NovaNet was only recently sunsetted: on August 31 of this year. Pearson is also, of course, an investor in Knewton.)

Work on computer-assisted instruction continued in the 1970s and 1980s – the term “intelligent tutoring system” (ITS) was coined in 1982 by D. Sleeman and J.S. Brown. Research focused on modeling student knowledge, including their misconceptions or “bugs” that led to their making errors. In general, artificial intelligence had also made strides in natural language processing that boosted computers’ capabilities to process students’ input and queries – beyond their choosing one answer in a multiple choice question. The emerging field of cognitive science also began to shape research in education technology as well. Intelligent tutoring systems have remained one of the key areas in the overlap between AI and ed-tech research.

Nevertheless many of the early claims about the coming of “robot tutors” were also challenged early, in no small part because buying these systems proved to be even more expensive for schools and districts than hiring human teachers. And as MIT researcher Ronni Rosenberg wrote in a 1987 review of the “robot tutor” literature,

My readings convinced me that ITS work is characterized by two major methodological flaws. First, ITSs are not well grounded in a model of learning; they seem more motivated by available technology than by educational needs. Many of the systems sidestep altogether the critical problem of modeling the tutoring process and the ones that do try to shed light on cognitive theories of learning do not provide convincing evidence for their theories. What almost all the systems do model, implicitly, is a single learning scheme that is hierarchical, top-down, goal-driven, and sequential. Most of the researchers appear to take for granted that this is the best (if not the only) style of learning, a point that is disputed by educational and social science researchers.

Second, positive claims for ITSs are based on testing that typically is poorly controlled, incompletely reported, inconclusive, and in some cases totally lacking.

So in the almost thirty years since Ronenberg’s article, has there been a major breakthrough in “robot tutors”? Not really. Rather there’s been a steady progress of work on the topic, driven in part by a belief in the superiority of individualized instruction as exemplified by a human tutor. And there’s a ton of marketing hype. We seem to love the story of a “robot tutor.”

As I joked at the beginning of this keynote, the discussions and development of automation are fundamentally labor issues: the robots, we’re told, are coming for our jobs.

Now everyone from B. F. Skinner to Knewton’s CEO Jose Ferreira likes to insist that they don’t intend for their machines to replace teachers. (Sometimes I think they doth protest too much.) Nevertheless, the notion of a “robot tutor” – as a replacement for a human tutor or as an augmentation to a human teacher – still raises important questions about how exactly we view the labor of teaching and learning. As I argued in a talk earlier this year at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, there are things that computers cannot do – things at the very core of the project of education, things at the very core of our work: computers cannot, computers do not care. It may be less that our machines are becoming more intelligent; it may be that we humans are becoming more like machines.

I was recently contacted by a writer for Slate magazine who was working on a story on adaptive technologies. We all know the plot by now: these stories stress the fact that this software is “reshaping the entire educational experience in some settings.” (That last phrase – “in some settings” – is key.) That teachers no longer “teach”; they tutor. They walk around the class and help when an individual student gets stuck. Students can move at their own pace. “This strikes me as a promising approach in a setting like a developmental math course at a community college,” the journalist wrote to me. And I asked him why the most vulnerable students should get the robot – a robot, remember, that does not care.

A 2011 article by Arizona State University’s Kurt VanLehn reviewed the literature on human and intelligent tutoring systems found that the effect size of the latter was .76, far below Bloom’s famous “two sigma” claim. But VanLehn found that, broadening his analysis beyond the limited number of studies Bloom included, human tutoring also failed to attain that storied 2.0 effect size. The effect of human tutoring, according to VanLehn’s literature review, was only .79. In other words, “robot tutors” might be almost as effective as humans – at least, as measured by the ways in which researchers have established their experiments to gauge “effectiveness.” (There are numerous caveats about VanLehn’s findings including the content areas, the problem sets, the student populations excluded, and the different types of ITS systems included.)

Overall the research on “robot tutors” is pretty mixed. As MIT education researcher Justin Reich has pointed out, “Some rigorous studies show no effects of adaptive systems as compared to traditional instruction, and others show small to moderate effects. In the aggregate, most education policy experts don't consider it to be a reliability effective approach to improve mathematics learning.”

Robot tutors are not, as Knewton’s CEO has boasted, “magic pills.”

So as Reich says, we should be cautious about what exactly these adaptive systems can really do and if it’s the type of thing we really value. Reich writes that,

Much of what we care most about in the mathematics of the future – the ability to find problems in complex scenarios, the ability to create appropriate models of those problems, and the ability to articulate and defend the rationale for particular solutions – is nearly impossible to test using computer graded systems. Most of what computer assisted instructional systems can evaluate are student computational skills, which are exactly the kinds of things that computers are much better at doing than human beings.

“Robot tutors,” it is worth noting, are not the only path that computers in education can follow. As Seymour Papert wrote in his 1980 book Mindstorms, computers have mostly been used to replicate existing educational practices:

In most contemporary educational situations where children come into contact with computers the computer is used to put children through their paces, to provide exercises of an appropriate level of difficulty, to provide feedback, and to dispense information. The computer programming the child.

Papert envisioned instead “the child programming the computer,” and he believed that computers could be a powerful tool for students to construct their own knowledge. That’s “personalization” that a skilled human tutor could help facilitate – fostering student inquiry and student agency. But “robot tutors,” despite the venture capital and the headlines, can’t yet get beyond their script.

And that’s a problem with algorithms as well.

Algorithms increasingly drive our world: what we see on Facebook or Twitter, what Amazon or Netflix suggest we buy or watch, the search results that Google returns, our credit scores, whether we’re selected by TSA for additional security, and so on. Algorithms drive educational software too – this is the boast of a company like Knewton. But it’s the claim of other companies as well: how TurnItIn can identify plagiarism, how Civitas Learning can identify potential drop-outs, how Degree Compass can recommend college classes, and so on.

Now I confess, I’m a literature person. I’m a cultural studies person. I’m not a statistics person. I’m not a math person. Some days I play the role of a technology person, but only on the Internet. So although I want to push for more “algorithmic transparency,” a counter-balance to what law professor Frank Pasquale has called “the black box society,” it’s not like showing me the code is really going to do much good. But we can nevertheless, I think, still look at the human inputs – the culture, the values, the goals of the engineers and entrepreneurs – and ask questions about the algorithms and the paths they want to push students down.

(I saw a headline from MIT this morning – “Why Self-Driving Cars Must Be Programmed to Kill” – for an article calling for “algorithmic morality.” I reckon that is something for the humanities scholars and the social scientists among us to consider; not simply the computer scientists at MIT.)

We can surmise what feeds the algorithms that drive educational technologies. It is, as I noted earlier, often administrative goals. This might include: improving graduation rates, improving attendance, identifying classes that students will easily pass. (That is not to say these might not be students’ goals as well; it’s just that they are distinct, I’d contend, from learning goals.) The algorithms that drive ed-tech often serve the platform or the software’s goals too: more clicking, which means more “engagement,” which does not necessarily mean more learning, but it can make for a nice graph for you to show your investors.

Algorithms circumscribe, all while giving us the appearance of choice, the appearance of personalization: Netflix thinks you’ll like the new Daredevil series, for example, based on the fact you’ve watched Thor half a dozen times. But it won’t, it can’t suggest you pick up and read Marvel’s Black Panther. And it won’t suggest you watch the DC animated comics series, either, because it no longer has a license to stream them. What’s the analogy of this to education? What are algorithms going to suggests? What does that recommendation engine look like?

And who gets this “algorithmic education”? Who experiences automated education? Who will have robot tutors? Who will have caring and supportive humans as teachers and mentors?

Serendipity and curiosity are such important elements in learning. Why would we engineer those out of our systems and schools? (And which systems and which schools?)

Austerity. I think that can explain (partially) why.

Many of us in education technology talk about this being a moment of great abundance – information abundance – thanks to digital technologies. But I think we are actually / also at a moment of great austerity. And when we talk about the future of education, we should question if we are serving a world of abundance or if we are serving a world of austerity. I believe that automation and algorithms, these utterly fundamental features of much of ed-tech, do serve austerity. And it isn’t simply that “robot tutors” (or robot keynote speakers) are coming to take our jobs; it’s that they could limit the possibilities for, the necessities of care and curiosity.

That’s not a future I want for anyone.

Education Politics

Via The New York Times: “Riot police officers and students protesting against tuition increases clashed on Wednesday outside the Parliament building in Cape Town, the latest in a series of student demonstrations that have gripped South Africa this year.” Following this week’s protests, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma announced he would scrap the plan to raise tuition fees.

Elsewhere in South Africa: “Students in mainly-black South African townships around Johannesburg and Pretoria are being given shiny new tablet computers as part of the provincial government's ambition to create a ‘paperless classroom’,” The Economist reports. “But the investment in technology is having an unwanted side-effect: it is attracting the attention of criminals. Along with lessons, education officials are issuing tips on how to avoid muggers.”

“Education Secretary Arne Duncan is preparing to unveil a package of proposals aimed at forcing colleges that receive federal money to improve graduation rates and to provide students with job skills,” says The Wall Street Journal. More via Inside Higher Ed.

In order to “move innovation forward,” Arne Duncan posted on Medium. Or something like that.

According to The Digital Reader, the Affordable Textbook Act has been reintroduced in Congress.

From the US Presidential trail: via The Atlantic: “In an interview with Glenn Beck, Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson declared that if elected, he wouldn’t eliminate the Department of Education, as parts of the conservative movement have long urged. ‘I actually have something I would use the Department of Education to do,’ he said. ‘It would be to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.’”

And congrats to Canada for ousting Prime Minister Harper. The Liberals won this week’s elections, meaning (former teacher) Justin Trudeau will be the new PM.

Via Vox: “What Scotland learned from making college tuition free.”

Via TechDirt: “UK Goes Full Orwell: Government To Take Children Away From Parents If They Might Become Radicalized.”

The US federal government says it supports OER.

The H–1B visa program is coming under increasing scrutiny, says Inside Higher Ed.

“Airbnb ad campaign in San Francisco riles locals and librarians.”

“The Evolution of the GI Bill.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “On Wednesday 72 women’s and civil rights organizations urged the U.S. Education Department to tell colleges that they must monitor anonymous apps like Yik Yak – frequently the source of sexist and racist comments about named or identifiable students – and do something to protect those students who are named. The groups said they view anonymous online abuse as an emerging issue under provisions of the Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.”

“The University of Phoenix is facing another investigation by a federal agency.”

Education in the Courts

Via The Atlantic: “On Friday, a federal circuit court made clear that Google Books is legal. A three-judge panel on the Second Circuit ruled decisively for the software giant against the Authors Guild, a professional group of published writers which had alleged Google's scanning of library books and displaying of free ‘snippets’ online violated its members’s copyright.” More via Inside Higher Ed and Buzzfeed. The Authors Guild plans to appeal.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Student loan borrowers and others will be able to sue a national student loan corporation after a federal appeals court said Wednesday that the corporation’s affiliation with a state government does not shield it from lawsuits.”

Via the AP: “A federal judge has issued a final judgment rejecting Gov. Bobby Jindal’s federal lawsuit against the Common Core education standards, clearing the way for him to take his case to an appeals court.” Jindal’s lawsuit contends that the Department of Education is illegally compelling states to adopt the Common Core.

Testing, Testing…

Via Education Week: “The Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates schools for children from military families, announced Wednesday that it is joining the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) testing consortium.”

More students are taking the CS AP exam, CS professor Mark Guzdial observes (although way more take the physics AP test).

The number of people getting their GED since recent changes to the test is declining. Nine times fewer people in Mississippi, for example, have passed the test.

“Major Delay in Obtaining ACT Scores,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Well look at that. MOOCs – or “certain coursers” at least – on Coursera will no longer be free.

The end of the Open University as we know it?

People are still signing up for MOOCs, and The Chronicle of Higher Education is on it.

Via Justin Reich: “Are MOOC Forums Echo Chambers or Bridging Spaces?”

“Philanthropy University” – MOOCs to teach people how to donate their money.

“Value of MOOCs more nuanced than completion rates,” says Education Dive.

The University of Florida has cancelled its contract with Pearson that would have had the the company brings the school’s degree programs online. More via Inside Higher Ed and Buzzfeed.

The New York Times looks at the edX course“Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought,” taught by Feng Wuzhong, an associate professor at Tsinghua’s School of Marxism. “It was like watching propaganda,” one student said. An NYU professor called the class “pure hack stuff” and said it should be cancelled.

Meanwhile on Campus

I really can’t summarize all the drama from this NYT story on Stanford’s Hoover Institution.

Via the New York Post: “A Bronx principal ordered her teachers to give up their desks last week, and had the furniture dumped at the curb — telling staff she doesn’t want them sitting in class.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, are starting a private school in East Palo Alto.

“History Class and the Fictions About Race in America.”

Via Vox: “Goldman Sachs paid to expand pre-K in Utah. It worked.”

“The first School in the Cloud learning lab in the United States opens in Harlem.” This is part of Sugata Mitra’s $1 million TED Prize.

Via The New York Times: “$300-a-Night Hotel Houses N.Y.U. Students.”

“Cal State U System Expands E-Portfolio Option,” says Inside Higher Ed.

“Indiana University at Bloomington has expelled Triceten D. Bickford, a sophomore who has been charged with physically attacking a Muslim woman and trying to remove her head scarf,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

PBS ran a segment on the charter school chain Success Academy and its discipline practices. The segment prompted a dust-up with founder Eva Moskowitz demanding an apology and releasing one student’s school records, purportedly to counter claims made in the show. Related: “Student Discipline, Race And Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy Charter Schools” by the Shanker Institute’s Leo Casey.

A man armed with a sword killed a teacher and a student at a school in Sweden.

One person was killed and two were injured in a shooting at Tennessee State University.

“Is this the beginning of the end for ITT?” asks The Washington Post. More on ITT via Inside Higher Ed.

Via The LA Times: “UC President Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that she is preparing a plan to significantly increase the number of California undergraduates in the 2016–17 school year throughout the university system, including at UCLA and UC Berkeley, where admission is the most difficult.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The University of Kentucky is asking a small distillery, Kentucky Mist Moonshine, to stop using the word ‘Kentucky’ on T-shirts and other materials, saying that the word is covered by a university trademark.”

Via Buzzfeed: “A $20 million donation to the small, struggling Paul Smith’s College by the wife of a finance billionaire came with a significant string attached: the school had to rename itself after her, changing its name to Joan Weill-Paul Smith’s College.” A judge ruled that the school could not change its name; so Joan Weill withdrew her donation.

Via Quartz: “Ole Miss students vote to take down the state flag, with its Confederate symbol.”

“This Is What a Rapist Can Look Like, Actually,” writes Jamil Smith in TNR about a college student’s photo that’s gone viral.

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “George Wythe University, a tiny, unaccredited institution in Utah that is known for its unorthodox curriculum and its ties to several conservative state lawmakers, will shut its doors after reaching a settlement with the state’s consumer-protection division.”

Go, School Sports Team!

Hocking Community College faces criticism after recruiting Trent Mays as quarterback. Mays was one of the Steubenville High School students convicted of rape in 2013.

Via the AP: “College of The Albemarle trustees indefinitely suspend athletics.”

“Cleveland Browns cornerback Ifo Ekpre-Olomu collected a $3 million insurance policy on Monday for slipping in the NFL draft, a source confirmed to ESPN.com. It’s the most a college player has ever collected on a loss of value policy, which insures the player if he slips in the draft. Olomu and the University of Oregon bought the loss of value policy for the first team All-America cornerback before his senior year. Olomu tore his ACL in practice two weeks before the college football semifinal playoff game at the Rose Bowl against Florida State.”

From the HR Department

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The National Labor Relations Board – voting 3 to 1 – agreed Wednesday to reconsider whether graduate teaching assistants at private nonprofit universities are entitled to collective bargaining.”

“Competency-Based Education Gets Employers’ Attention,” says Education Week.

Via The Atlantic: “When the Boss Foots the Bill for College.”

“Why Is Blackboard Laying Off Staff Despite Improved Market Share Position?” asks Mindwire Consulting’s Phil Hill.

Upgrades and Downgrades

Via The LA Times: “Why Sesame Street’s new character isn’t representative of most kids with autism.”

And the winner for the silliest ed-tech headline this week: “Google, micro-learning & the future of education.” Congratulations, The Next Web, for posting an article by the CEO of a company called Lrn.

The Digital Public Library of America has released“Primary Source Sets” designed for education.

“As the Online Learning Consortium unveiled a $2.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to reward digital education initiatives that help underserved students,” says Inside Higher Ed. More via The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Skills Fund is a new private lender for the coding bootcamp market. Inside Higher Ed has the details. (Meanwhile, the credit rating agency Moody’s says that bootcamps are a “credit positive” for institutions.)

Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old Texas teen who was arrested after bringing a homemade clock to school, is moving with his family to Qatar.

Edsurge’s “guide to a nation of edtech accelerators.”

“Amazon Announces New Kids Pilots for Its 2015 Fall Pilot Season” including If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

Money Stuff

“Pearson Stock Stumbles After Slashing Earnings Forecast,” Edsurge writes.

The Internet Archive has received a grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation to improve the Wayback Machine.

Via Edsurge: “Six Questions About Reach Capital’s $53 Million Edtech Fund.” (That is, a new VC firm spun out of NewSchools Venture Fund.)

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

Via Education Week: “A Special Report on Student-Data Privacy.”

Via Patch.com: “Three Commack High School students were arrested Tuesday morning and charged with hacking into the district’s computer system and changing student grades and schedules earlier this year.”

Data and “Research”

Via the Hechinger Report: “Schools exacerbate the growing achievement gap between rich and poor, a 33-country study finds.”

High school graduation rates rose in most states in 2014.

“Does a new study on Tennessee’s pre-K program prove preschool is ineffective? Not quite,” says Sara Mead in US News & World Report.

The latest from the Pew Research Center: “Slightly fewer Americans are reading print books.”

Via the Christian Science Monitor: “A study published in the Journal of Research in Personality threatens to put a damper on America’s grit mania, with research that suggests that knowing when to throw in the towel is just as important as the willingness to put up a fight.”

From a paper titled “Changing Distributions: How Online College Classes Alter Student and Professor Performance”: “Using an instrumental variables approach and data from DeVry University, this study finds that, on average, online course-taking reduces student learning by one-third to one-quarter of a standard deviation compared to conventional in-person classes. Taking a course online also reduces student learning in future courses and persistence in college.”

My latest book is now available for purchase.

Claim Your Domain – and Own Your Online Presence is part of the series “Solutions for Modern Learning” and draws on my work on students “reclaiming” their education and in particularly owning their own domain. (Other titles in the series, edited by Will Richardson and published by Solution Tree, include The End of School as We Know It by Bruce Dixon, Freedom to Learn by Will Richardson, and Make School Meaningful – And Fun by Roger Schank.)

From the publisher’s description:

Help protect student work – and more importantly – student identity. This powerful book puts learners at the forefront of education to ensure they control their schoolwork, content, and data. Dig deep into the digital revolution occurring in schools and classrooms, explore how to incorporate traditional instructional practices in the digital classroom, and understand the skills students need to be digitally literate.

It’s quite a short book and it’s probably familiar territory to those who’ve followed my work. In it, I look at the ways in which students’ personal data is increasingly wrenched from their (or their parents’) control, thanks to new digital technologies that schools compel students to use. I'm interested in pushing back on this particular vision for ed-tech, and I want us to ask: how do we change education technology (and more broadly, education itself) from an extraction effort so something that students have ownership over. One of the cornerstones of this effort is, of course, the University of Mary Washington’s Domain of One’s Own Initiative.

Students – all of us really – should work to build and adopt technologies that we control for ourselves. Hopefully this book helps to lay out the groundwork for why this is so crucial.

Education Politics

“Obama Wants Students To Stop Taking Unnecessary Tests.” Here’s the official “Testing Action Plan,” that includes some details on how tests will be limited to just 2% of classroom time. (Is that actually less than what tests take now?) Via Vox: “Obama’s flip-flop on standardized tests, explained.” Via the International Business Times: “How Obama’s Push For Fewer Assessments Could Affect Education Companies.” And one, lonely crocodile tear falls down my cheek.

Via Al Jazeera: “Koch brothers pour millions into education to promote libertarian ideals.”

California has become the first state to ban schools from using “Redskins” as a team name or mascot.

“The University of Colorado Hosted the Third GOP Presidential Debate, but Almost No Students Were Allowed In.”

Elsewhere on the campaign trail: Jeb Bush, who has a degree in Latin American studies, mocked those who major in the liberal areas, particular psychology.

Via Vox: “Sanders and Clinton want the federal government to fund public college. Colleges aren’t so sure.” Some clarification: by “colleges,” the story actually means “10 university presidents, eight from large public universities.” For what it’s worth, these aren’t the institutions that educate most Americans. That would be community colleges. Let’s ask them instead of relying on the prestige market to protect its prestige.

Senator Marco Rubio (who like most Republicans is running for President) has reintroduced the “Investing in Student Success Act,” which would allow students to fund their college education through private loans to be repaid through income sharing agreements.

The US Department of Education has proposed “a new regulation that would require any new intellectual property developed with grant funds from the department to be openly licensed,” says Education Week.

The Department of Education also finalized its new rules surrounding campus debit cards.

NY “Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch won’t seek another term,” says the Times Union.

Education in the Courts

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “A federal judge has ruled that the defunct Corinthian Colleges is liable for roughly $530 million in damages to former students, concluding a lawsuit brought by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau a year ago. According to the judge’s order, Corinthian deceived students by misrepresenting their career prospects, among other things.” More on the story from Inside Higher Ed.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has filed a lawsuit against Global Financial Support, which runs the Student Financial Resource Center and College Financial Advisory, accusing it of predatory behavior.

Testing, Testing…

It was NAEP week, sorta like Shark Week but for scary test score results. Doom! Panic! Handwringing)! Speculation! (And a reasonable response from USC’s Morgan Polikoff.)

“These are the states that really have the best schools in the US,” Vox suggests– that is if you look at test scores and adjust for student demographics.

“Students Take Too Many Redundant Tests, Study Finds.” (See the Education Politics section above for the Obama Administration’s announcement about “too many tests.”)

Via The New York Times: “Superintendents in Florida Say Tests Failed State’s Schools, Not Vice Versa.”

Echoing what’s happening with scores from the ACTs, “Some SAT Score Reports Are Delayed,” says Inside Higher Ed.

Via EdSource: “The California Department of Education is recommending that the state dock the Educational Testing Service, the company administering the state’s standardized testing program, $3.1 million for delivering the scores and reports on the new Smarter Balanced tests late.”

Via The Atlantic: “How the Common Core Is Transforming the SAT.”

NYC will make the SAT free for public school juniors.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The College of Idaho and Salem State University are both dropping requirements that all applicants submit SAT or ACT scores.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The average instructor of a massive open online course is most likely to be a white man in his 50s with two decades of experience in academe but none in online education, according to a study by researchers at Indiana University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” LOL. So disruptive.

“Can data help save MOOCs?” asks The Stanford Daily.

Now that the MOOCs and their certificates are no longer free: “Coursera’s Financial Aid: What it is and who is benefiting,” via the Coursera blog.

NPR profiles the University of the People: “The Online College That’s Helping Undocumented Students.”

Inside Higher Ed reports that Kadenze, an online platform that offers “creative arts” classes, will offer for-credit courses. Its partners include California Institute of the Arts and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Meanwhile on Campus

Using her cellphone, a student at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina videotaped a school resource officer violently throwing a fellow student, a young black woman to the ground, purportedly because she refused to comply quickly enough to her teacher’s demand she put her phone away. Both students were arrested. The video – horrific – went viral. Ben Fields, the sheriffy’s deputy, was subsequently fired. More, via The Atlantic, on “Race and Discipline in South Carolina Schools.”

“Teen ‘faces assault charge’ for throwing baby carrot at teacher.”

SNHU and the Flat Iron School, a coding bootcamp, have partnered, one of the first partnerships as part of the Department of Education’s new plan to allow bootcamps’ students to receive federal financial aid.

Via The Atlantic: “The Law-School Scam Continues.” (More, via The NYT, on a study that has discovered schools are admitting students who are unlikely to ever pass the bar.)

Investigations into the charter school chain Success Academy and its discipline policies continue, this week with a story in The New York Times: “At a Success Academy Charter School, Singling Out Pupils Who Have ‘Got to Go’.”

“Black Colleges Might Be Struggling, but Their Alums Are Thriving,” according to The Atlantic. (Not “thriving” economically, one should note. This is based on a subjective rating of one’s well-being.)

Albany State University, a HBCU, plans to “deactivate” 15 of its programs, says Inside Higher Ed.

The Harvard Law Library is digitizing some 40 million pages of its collection, with the intention of making “a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet, allowing instant retrieval of vital records that usually must be paid for.”

“Can a Professor Be Forced to Assign a $180 Textbook?” More on the controversy in the math department at Cal State Fullerton in The LA Times.

“The American Museum of Natural History now offers a master of arts in teaching and a Ph.D. in comparative biology,” according to The New York Times, in an article in the Art & Design section titled “Museums, Always Educational, Now Confer Degrees.”

Via The New York Times: “Cardiff University Rejects Bid to Bar Germaine Greer.”

The University of California system has extended its open access policy to all scholarly articles written by university employees.

Pretty jealous of the 20,000 New York high school students who, thanks to funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, will get free tickets to see Hamilton.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The University of Southern Mississippi has become the second university in the state, following the University of Mississippi, to stop flying the state flag.”

“Stratford University, a for-profit institution based in Virginia, this week announced that it has become a public benefit corporation,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Via Wired: “The Tech Elite’s Quest to Reinvent School in Its Own Image.” That is, by building private schools. The story’s about Khan Academy’s new private school, which is sorta like Dewey meets YouTube meets the Panopticon.

Unlike AltSchool, Khan Academy, or Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s new private school, Oracle says it will build a high school next to its Silicon Valley headquarters. This one, however, will be a public school and thankfully will not be called Larry Ellison High.

4 people were killed and 47 injured when a drunk driver plowed into a spectators watching the Oklahoma State University homecoming parade.

Via the AP: “Two male students in [Fredricksburg] Virginia have been arrested and accused of plotting an attack at their high school, law enforcement officials said Saturday.”

“College Students Find Audio Time Capsule, Can’t Find Tape Player.”

Go, School Sports Team!

Via SB Nation: “The State v. Robertson: How Four Football Players Beat the Rap and Changed Free Speech in Oregon”

Andre McGee, an assistant basketball coach at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, has resigned from his position following the ongoing scandal at the University of Louisville (where McGee was a graduate assistant) involving supplying nude dancers for potential basketball team recruits.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill last week released new guidelines for how coaches, counselors and faculty members should and should not communicate about the academic work of athletes.” This follows a huge cheating scandal where the university helped thousands of students take “paper classes,” often to aid them in easily maintaining athletic eligibility.

From the HR Department

The Gates Foundation’s Vicky Phillips is leaving the organization, Edsurge reports.

Margaret Spellings, former secretary of education, is now the president of the University of North Carolina system. Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Questions Linger Over How UNC Chose Spellings.” And via Inside Higher Ed: “John Fennebresque, whose tenure as chairman of the University of North Carolina Board of Governors was marked by unhappiness over his brusque and secretive style and capped by the controversial selection of Margaret Spellings as the system’s president, resigned Monday.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

SXSW cancelled two panels this week for its big “Interactive” event. One panel dealt with design decisions to address harassment in gaming. (Another was ostensibly going to address “ethics in games journalism,” which is a dog-whistle for harassing women in gaming.) Caroline Sinders writing for Slate: “I Was on One of Those Canceled SXSW Panels. Here is what went down.” Facing several news organizations threatening to back out of the event, SXSW has now agreed to run a day-long event addressing online harassment... that includes the *cough* "ethics in journalism" panel. Boy, I'd sure love to see educators boycott SXSWedu... but who the hell am I kidding.

Via The Guardian: “Artist Ai Weiwei banned from using Lego to build Australian artwork.”

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Alphabet’s Google to Fold Chrome Operating System Into Android.” Enjoy those Chromebooks while they last/work/automatically-update/aren’t full of malware, schools!

Venture capitalists continue to demonstrate that they have no understanding of how school works. Take Mark Cuban, for example. He’s cited in Education Week promoting Snapchat and other “disappearing message apps,” (particularly one in his investment portfolio, CyberDust). “Hopefully, more school officials will use Cyber Dust,” Cuban said. “It will allow them to have private conversations where they can be honest and productive rather than writing every message … to protect themselves.” Uhhhhhhh.

#ProQuestGate: ProQuest announced this week that it had cancelled the subscription to the Early English Books Online database for Renaissance Society of America members. It later reversed its decision, but damn, scholars forget this moment at their peril.

Via Edsurge: “How Teachers Can Run Classrooms Like ”Lean Startups’." Because teaching and learning is just like a high growth, high risk tech company building mobile apps.

Elsewhere in ed-tech-as-ideology (also from Edsurge): “Do Wealthy Communities Breed the Best Education Innovations?”

“Artificially intelligent software is replacing the textbook – and reshaping American education,” Slate contends.

This is the sort of partnership that always prompts me to say: we do a lousy job interrogating TOS and privacy policies in ed-tech. Via Campus Technology: “Civitas Learning Taps into Echo360 Student Data.” “‘Combining historic and student profile data with real-time classroom activity, gives institutions more actionable insights to help each individual student on their path to success,’ said Fred Singer, CEO of Echo360, in a prepared statement.”

“World’s First School to Issue Academic Certificates via Bitcoin Blockchain.”

Funding and Acquisitions

Coursera has finalized its Series C round of investment, bringing the total raised this time around to $61.1 million. Coursera has raised $146.1 million total.

Outlearn has raised $2 million from General Catalyst Partners and former Akamai CEO Paul Sagan. The PD-for-software-engineers startup has raised $4 million total.

Tutoring startup MyTutorWeb has raised $1.25 million in seed funding.

Cengage Learning has acquired e-portfolio company Pathbrite.

“Macmillan will be combining its two divisions -- Higher Education and New Ventures -- into a single unit starting January 1, 2016,” says Edsurge.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, with help from Edsurge, has created a list of “The 10 Ed-Tech Companies That Are Raising the Most Money.” I don’t understand why 2U is on it, however, since the company IPOd (and another entry, Instructure, has just filed for IPO). Missing from the list: Social Finance, a private loan provider, which has raised $1.3 billion.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

From the ACLU of Massachusetts, a report on student data and privacy in K–12.

Via Pacific Standard: “When Students Become Patients, Privacy Suffers.” Related to privacy and health records: “‘I Don’t Blame the University for a Rape. I Blame Them for How They Responded to It.’”

What will happen to ed-tech in Europe now that the EU has ruled that “Safe Harbour” protections for data are insufficient? According to the BBC, there have already been talk of schools pulling out of Dropbox.

Data and “Research”

The results of the latest Campus Computing Project survey are out. Inside Higher Ed and Edsurge offer their takes.

The latest from Pew Research: “Technology Device Ownership: 2015.” (Notable: a sizable decline in e-reader ownership.)

According to a study by CREDO, cyber charter schools have an “overwhelmingly negative impact.” More via Education Week and Buzzfeed.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Students who took out student loans and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 2014 had an average debt load of $28,950, up 2 percent from the year before and 56 percent more than their peers from 10 years earlier, the Institute for College Access and Success says in a report released today.”

According to a report by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, “70 to 80 percent of college students are active in the U.S. labor market.”

Via Education Week: “USDA Sees 20 Percent Increase in Schools Offering Free Meals to All Students.”

“Coding bootcamp grads boost their salaries by 40% on average,” the Quartz headline reads. But that boost is quite different based on demographics.

From the MAA National Study of College Calculus: “The picture that emerges of the young people who enroll in Calculus 1 in U.S. colleges and universities is of students who are, for the most part, privileged, talented, and very confident. One of the clearest conclusions to come out of our study was how effective this course is in destroying that confidence.”

Education Politics

Election news round-up: Politico’s coverage. Via The Atlantic: “What School Proposals Failed on the Ballot?” Via Education Week: “Three conservative school board members elected on promises to reform teacher pay and boost charter schools in suburban Denver were overwhelmingly recalled in a high-priced election that highlighted the continuing importance of teachers’ unions in education politics.”

Larry Lessig has ended his campaign for president.

Via Politico: “Education Department officials say a series of actions it is announcing today centering on transparency will force accreditors to focus more on student outcomes and hold failing colleges accountable, with Under Secretary Ted Mitchell saying the steps will help make a ‘substantial difference’ in how accreditors work.”

On the heels of giving the state of Ohio some $32+ million in grants to expand its charter school system, the Department of Education is now putting some restrictions on that money, sending a letter“to state officials in which it said it did not realize the extent of concerns regarding Ohio's charter schools.”

The Department of Education will allow some high school students to receive financial aid if enrolled in dual enrollment programs.

Via The New York Times: “Federal education authorities, staking out their firmest position yet on an increasingly contentious issue, found Monday that an Illinois school district violated anti-discrimination laws when it did not allow a transgender student who identifies as a girl and participates on a girls’ sports team to change and shower in the girls’ locker room without restrictions.”

Via Buzzfeed: “Xerox Under Federal Investigation Over Student Loan Business.”

Also via Buzzfeed: “California’s Attorney General Is Investigating The Online Charter School Industry.”

“7 Senators Call for End to For-Profit-to-Nonprofit College Conversions.”

“A Turkish religious movement has secretly funded as many as 200 trips to Turkey for members of Congress and staff since 2008, apparently repeatedly violating House rules and possibly federal law, a USA TODAY investigation has found.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “In the final months of Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, one of her advisors drafted ideas for how she could create a public policy school, newly released emails show.”

Testing, Testing…

“ACT Says All September Scores Released.”

“Everything You Need to Know About the New SAT.”

“Walmart, fast-food chains offer employees free GED program.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Udacity says it has graduated 1000 students from its program.

Institut Mines-Télécom joins Coursera.

You can watch Coursera videos on the new Apple TV. Whee.

“Using MOOCs to Help Refugees.”

“Cheating in Online Classes Is Now Big Business,” The Atlantic reports.

“DMCA Exemptions for Circumventing Copyright Protections on Motion Pictures, 2015 edition” now include MOOCs.

Meanwhile on Campus

“Michigan 7-year-old handcuffed by officer on school grounds.”

Via NPR: “The Changing Role Of Police In American Classrooms.”

Remember when folks were thinking Eva Moskovitz was going to run for NYC mayor? Yeah… “High-Profile New York Charter School Kept List of Kids It Wanted to Force Into Quitting.” “Success Academy Founder Calls ‘Got to Go’ List an Anomaly.” “What the Success Academy fight over kicking out students says about the charter movement.” A FERPA complaint has been filed by a parent, accusing Eva Moskowitz of violating student privacy.

“How For-Profit Colleges Hang on to Federal Funding.”

“The for-profit Westwood College has agreed to forgive the student-loan debt of graduates of its criminal-justice program, amounting to roughly $15 million,” says The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The for-profit Dade Medical College has closed its doors. Meanwhile, the owner of the college “hired a private investigator to follow a Miami Herald reporter who has written critical articles about the sector, according to court documents given to the South Florida newspaper.”

“As Transgender Students Make Gains, Schools Hesitate at Bathrooms.”

“The Costs of English-Only Education.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Many Colleges Now See Centers for Teaching With Technology as Part of ‘Innovation Infrastructure’.”

Via NPR: “As New Tools Bust Down Barriers For The Blind, Schools Struggle To Keep Up.”

Via Pacific Standard: “Does Utah Really Think It's Protecting Sixth Graders by Keeping Climate Science Out of Classrooms?”

“LAUSD plans to expand computer science to every grade by 2020.” iPads will be super useful for that, LOL.

The latest in Bryan Alexander’s coverage of schools scrapping departments and firing faculty: “Queen sacrifice at Wartburg College.”

NPR profiles coding bootcamps.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “4 Stabbed at U California Merced; Suspect Killed.”

Two high school students in Connecticut were arrested after dressing up as the Columbine killers for Halloween and threatening to hurt other students.

“Rift Emerges Among Gun Owners Over Concealing Weapons in Schools.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Miles College. North Carolina A&T State University. North Carolina Central University. Tennessee State University. Texas Southern University. Winston-Salem State University. All are historically black colleges or universities, and shootings have occurred on or near all of the campuses in the last month.”

Go, School Sports Team!

Adidas says it will “lead a nationwide voluntary initiative for high schools who want to change mascot names and identities. adidas will offer its design resources to any high school in America that wants to change their logo or mascot from potentially harmful Native American imagery or symbolism. Additionally, the company will provide financial assistance to schools who want to change their identity to ensure the transition is not cost prohibitive.”

From the HR Department

Following the recent hiring of Margaret Spellings as UNC system president, “The UNC Board of Governors approved pay raises for some chancellors on Friday but did not disclose the new salaries – calling into question the legality of a closed session vote.”

Yale will spend $50 million to increase the diversity of its faculty.

“CUNY Faculty Members Arrested After Staging Protest.” (That is, demanding a salary increase.)

“Wisconsin Tenure Wars: Part Two.”

“Recent Teacher Of The Year Resigns In Alabama Over Certification Issues.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

Via Fortune: “Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Has A Few Ideas About Improving Education.” Because of course she does.

“Did Amazon Just Replace the Public Library?” asks The Atlantic, giving librarians everywhere a good chuckle at the headline. Um, no. it did not. Amazon did however open a brick-and-mortar bookstore.

“The six editors and 31 editorial board members of Lingua, a top linguistics journal, have all resigned to protest Elsevier pricing. They plan a new open-access journal,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Wikipedia will now use TurnItIn to makes sure its entries aren’t plagiarized or violating copyright.

Twitter changed “favorite” to “like” and “star” to “heart.” Yuck.

“Edmodo Adds Enterprise Tools.”

“The Desmos Activity Builder Community.”

Google says that Chrome OS is not going away, contrary to reports last week that it plans to merge it into Android.

Via The Atlantic: “Sesame Street’s New Brand of Autism Education.”

“Instructure Dodges a Data Bullet,” says Phil Hill. That is, Canvas Data is out of beta and will offer free daily data logs to clients, not just monthly logs as initially planned.

Oculus Rift founder Palmer Luckey says schools are broken so they should buy VR equipment.

“How McDonalds Is Using Schools to Try to Change What Kids Eat.”

Via USA Today: “As oil market sags, Norway drills new ground with education tech.”

Funding and Acquisitions

The publisher Bertelsmann has invested $230 million in HotChalk, which is described as a “solution provider for higher ed,” whatever the hell that means.

Via China Money Network: “Shanghai-based online education platform Hujiang.com has completed RMB1 billion (US$157 million) series D round of financing from China Minsheng Investment Corp. Ltd., Wanxin Media, and other investors.The company is in the process of corporate structure reorganization, and is planning an initial public offering inside China, according to announcements made at a press conference reported by Chinese media.”

“TAL Education Group, a K12 after-school tutoring services provider in China, has invested $30 million in Phoenix E-Learning, which operates zxxk.com, an online educational platform serving the Chinese public school system,” says Edsurge.

Cielo24 has raised $5.1 million from ff Venture Capital, North Base Media, Pereg Ventures, Indicator Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, and Educated Ventures. The startup which “wants to make videos more skimmable and accessible with searchable subtitles” has raised $8.5 million total.

SchoolGuru has raised $3 million in funding from unnamed investors.

Financial education app Apptuto has raised $500,000 from “Michael Staton, a partner at Learn Capital, and executives from Google, HSBC, Macquarie Bank, and Delta Partners Group,” says Edsurge.

PowerSchool has acquired InfoSnap, “a developer of online tools that help parents streamline registrations for a range of school services including student enrollment, meals and sports.”

“The Michael & Susan Dell Foundation has sold Double Line Partners, an Austin, TX-based company, to Cross Street LLC, a local private equity firm,” says Edsurge. Double Line Partners were the developers of the “Ed Fi” data standards funded by the foundation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Having filed for an IPO, we can now pour through Instructure’s financials. (Or rather, we can read what Carl Straumsheim when he did so.)

Data, Privacy, and Algorithms

“What We Know About the Computer Formulas Making Decisions in Your Life.”

Data and “Research”

Via The Atlantic: data on “The Ever-Growing Ed-Tech Market.”

Via Vox: “A study suggests it’s easy to catch students cheating. So why don’t colleges try?” Uh…

“IDEA Public Schools reports success amid questions around data reporting,” says Education Dive.

The College Board has released reports on tuition prices and trends in student financial aid.

“Campus Technology 2015 Salary Survey: IT Pay.” “Campus Technology 2015 Salary Survey: IT Job Satisfaction.”

“NMC Releases Strategic Brief Exploring the Potential for Course Apps to Transform Teaching and Learning.”

Via The New York Times: “The Digital Disparities Facing Lower-Income Teenagers.”

Also via the NYT: “A small survey of parents in Philadelphia found that three-quarters of their children had been given tablets, smartphones or iPods of their own by age 4 and had used the devices without supervision.”

The Economist ranks schools based on how much graduates earn. The Atlantic and Vox repeat the story.

Via ProPublica: “How We Analyzed College Accreditation Data.”

Via Education Week: “Search for Quick, Rigorous Ed-Tech Evaluations Underway.”

I know I just wrote a blog post with nearly the same headline less than two weeks ago, but here I go again: my latest book is now available for purchase.

The Revenge of the Monsters of Education Technology is the sequel, if you will, to last year’s similarly titled book. And like The Monsters of Education Technology, this one is a collection of all the keynotes and talks I delivered in 2015 – eleven altogether, plus one essay I wrote specifically for this book.

E-book versions are available for purchase via the usual online retailers: Amazon and Smashwords (for now. Wider distribution coming soon). Even better: you can buy from me directlyvia Gumroad. You can purchase a MOBI, ePUB, or PDF version for $4.99.

Coming soon: a print version as well as audiobooks for both Monsters publications. (When the latter is available, I will make “bundles” for sale so you can buy the e- and audiobooks together.)

As always, thanks for supporting my work.

Education Politics

“In Swan Song, Arne Duncan Extols School Progress Under His Tenure,” says The New York Times. Part of that song: the Department of Education boasted what Race to the Top has done for schools in a new 76-page report. Via Education Week: “What the Ed. Dept.’s New Race to the Top Report Reveals, and What It Avoids.”

On the heels of the Department of Education’s announcement that it’s going to experiment with letting students get financial aid for taking courses at MOOCs and bootcamps (here’s a “primer” on the policy by Edsurge), consulting firm Entangled Solutions says that it’s going to apply to become a “quality-assurance entity.” Inside Higher Ed has the details, but misses this key one: Entangled Solutions is run by Paul Freedman, whose company Altius Education had its “experiment” at Bridge College at Tiffin University shut down by an accreditor over concerns about outsourcing and quality control. God, this bootcamp thing is going to be a fucking disaster. Well done, Department of Ed. Well done.

Meanwhile, “The Department of Education Demands Greater Accountability From College Accreditors.” /headdesk

Hillary Clinton said something critical about charter schools while on the campaign trail, and considering the blowback, it’s a nice reminder of why most of the Democrats just keep their mouths shut on education policy.

Of course, the Republican candidates might do well to keep their mouths shut too. This gem from Ben Carson: “We know that the very best education is homeschool. The next is private school. The next is charter schools. And the last is public schools.” Homeschooled neurosurgeons FTW.

Via the LA School Report: “A year later, secrecy surrounds FBI probe of LAUSD's iPad program.”

“Newark was V1 of our education work,’’ Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Bloomberg. ”And so now we’re onto V2." Move fast and break things…

Education in the Courts

The University of Illinois has paid $875,000 to settle Steven Salaita’s lawsuit, resulting from the school’s decision to fire Salaita based on comments he made on Twitter about Palestine.

“The Phi Kappa Psi fraternity chapter at the University of Virginia filed a $25 million lawsuit Monday against Rolling Stone magazine, which published an article in 2014 that alleged a freshman was gang raped at the house during a party,” The Washington Post reports.

Via Motherboard: “Court Docs Show a University Helped FBI Bust Silk Road 2, Child Porn Suspects.” That university: Carnegie Mellon. To help the FBI, researchers there attacked the Tor network, a system that helps anonymize Internet traffic. How did CMU IRB approve this, eh?

Via The New York Times: “A former Wesleyan University student pleaded guilty on Thursday to a federal drug dealing charge, admitting that he had distributed a party drug that left nearly a dozen students hospitalized, two in critical condition, after they overdosed on the drug last winter.”

Testing, Testing…

Via Education Week: “PARCC Restructures, Allows States to Customize Test.” (States can now buy parts of the PARCC system and choose different vendors.)

Also via Education Week: “Paperless Testing: Most Grade 3–8 Students To Be Assessed Online in 2016.”

“Barbara Ericson's 2015 AP CS demographics analysis: Still No African-Americans Taking the AP CS Exam in 9 States.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Udacity has raised $105 million. It’s now valued at $1 billion, which means the tech sector congratulates it as a “unicorn.” Investing in this round: Bertelsmann, Baillie Gifford, Emerson Collective, Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Drive Capital. The startup has raised $160 million total. More via Inside Higher Ed.

When Fortune writes “Why Ed Tech Is Currently ‘The Wild Wild West’” the answer it offers is not “because it’s dominated by imperialism and white male supremacy.” Why, it's almost like these people don't read my work at all. Anyway, I guess there was a Fortune-run panel at a Fortune-run conference where Daphne Koller weighed in on MOOCs, and other panelists made predictions about the coming demise of universities.

Open University is investing £13 million more in FutureLearn. Via David Kernohan: “A brief note on FutureLearn finance.”

“Better Residential Learning Is The True Innovation of MOOCs,” IHE blogger Joshua Kim contends.

“Both Sides Of The Education Debate Are United In Scorn For Online Charter Schools,” says Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy (although I’m never sure what “both sides” really means as I find myself at odds with “both.”)

Also by Molly Hensley-Clancy: “Black Colleges Are Going Online, Following Their Students And The Money.”

It’s a pretty familiar promise in for-profit education: “Bloc’s Guarantee: Get a Job as a Programmer or Your Money Back.” (Bloc charges $24,000 for a 48-week online “coding bootcamp.”)

“The Starbucks Corporation this week announced that it will offer a tuition-free education to a spouse or child of its employees who are veterans or active-duty members of the U.S. military,” Inside Higher Ed reports. (That is, tuition-free education at ASU Online as part of Starbucks’ existing deal with the school.)

Meanwhile on Campus

From Mizzou: “What’s Happening at the University of Missouri?” The football team protests and threatens a boycott, and, shocker, the school starts to listen. Via Vox: “How football and a hunger strike forced the University of Missouri president to resign.” Via NPR: “Demonstrators Clash With Journalists At The University Of Missouri.” More via Vox: Student protestors at the University of Missouri want a "no media safe space". (Bravo, journalists who tried to make this story about you and not about Black students. Bravo.) The university president resigns. From The Nation’s Dave Zirin: “3 Lessons from the University of Missouri President Tom Wolfe’s Resignation.” The chancellor of the Columbia campus R. Bowen Luftin resigned. The University of Missouri has selected Michael Middleton as its interim president. Two suspects who made threats to Black students via Yik Yak were apprehended. Via the St. Louis Post Dispatch: "Northwest Missouri State freshman posted social media threat to shoot black people, police say."Via Inside Higher Ed: "Missouri Police Apprehend Suspect in Yik Yak Threats."Via The LA Times: "Man arrested in University of Missouri threats had ‘deep interest’ in Oregon mass shooting."Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: "U. of Missouri Professor Offers to Resign After Declining to Cancel Class." (Resignation not accepted.) Via Boing Boing: "Mizzou student files complaint against teacher who asked for ‘muscle’ to block reporters."Via The New York Times: "University of Missouri Professor Who Confronted Photographer Quits Journalism Post."The NYT on the campus climate. "A Real Missouri ‘Concerned Student 1950’ Speaks, at Age 89" is an actual NYT headline. ("Real"?!)

From Yale: “Large Rally at Yale Follows Week of Racial Tensions” via Inside Higher Ed. “22 thoughts on the protests at Yale” by Dara Lind. “Yale’s big fight over sensitivity and free speech, explained,” Vox explains.

Elsewhere: a hunger strike at Claremont McKenna College. And then, “Dean at Claremont McKenna College Resigns Amid Protests.”

Elsewhere: “Black students take over VCU’s president’s office to demand changes.”

And The New York Times is on it: “Racial Discrimination Protests Ignite at Colleges Across the U.S.” Conor Friedersdorf wrote a couple of things in The Atlantic, but ugh. Do not link.

“The chancellor of the Georgia higher education system announced Friday afternoon that he plans to seek the merger of Albany State University, a historically black institution, with Darton State College, whose enrollment is about half white,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

“Oxford Students Want Statue of Cecil Rhodes Removed.”

“Kids In Texas Are More Likely To Get Tasered At School Than In Jail,” The Huffington Post reports.

Via ProPublica: “How 5 Florida Schools Ended Integration and Became Among Worst in State.”

“David Geffen, the entertainment industry executive, is giving $100 million to the University of California at Los Angeles for the institution to create a school for grades 6–12,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Go, School Sports Team!

The latest by Taylor Branch on the NCAA: “Toward Basic Rights for College Athletes.”

Via The News & Observer: “UNC dismisses two more employees in academic-athletic scandal.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “U. of Illinois Fires Athletic Director After Full Report of Former Coach’s Misconduct.”

From the HR Department

Via WaPo: “Donald E. Graham, the longtime Washington publisher who engineered the sale of The Washington Post and formed a holding company to run a diverse collection of businesses, is stepping down as chief executive.” (That includes the for-profit Kaplan.)

“Blackboard lays off more employees,” The Washington Business Journal reports.

“Portland Community College fires teacher for quiz on shootings, pimps, prostitutes,” The Oregonian reports.

“Reprimand Upheld for Professor Who Wouldn't Assign $180 Text,” says Inside Higher Ed.

Upgrades and Downgrades

Lots of Yik Yak in the news this week, a startup that has raised over $73 million in venture capital, particularly if it handed over user data following threats made on the platform. Via Vox’s Libby Nelson: “Colleges’ Yik Yak problem, explained.” Way to support a horrific environment, investors.

Elsewhere in tech investing: “Nearly every week, all around the world, wealthy people, self-made business owners and senior executives in a range of industries gather at private clubs, cultural centers or five-star hotels for free, invitation-only angel investing ‘boot camps’ intended to help them size up fledgling business ideas and the people behind them. The events are organized by Angel Labs, a global angel investor academy based in San Francisco whose mission is to widen the influence of angel investing, a field in which the relatively affluent put money into start-ups, usually in the tech industry.” More via The New York Times.

“How to Get Your Name into the Minds and Hearts of Teachers,” writes EdCamp director Hadley Ferguson in Edsurge, in an article I guess is directed at ed-tech companies. The answer: product placement and sponsorships to EdCamps. Because grassroots, baby.

“Math tutoring service in the form of a phone sex hotline.” Stay classy, ed-tech.

“Schools Can’t Stop Kids From Sexting. More Technology Can,” Jonathan Zimmerman argues in a NYT op-ed. Moar technology!

Google says its “Expeditions Pioneer Program” is coming to 15 new cities.

“Star Wars Characters Will Now Teach Your Kids To Code.”

Ed-tech is not all awful. See, for example, Jim Groom on “Reclaiming Community at BYU with Known.” Or Clint Lalonde on “An open edtech playground infrastructure (or the magic of Grant Potter).” But let’s be honest. Most of ed-tech is pretty damn awful.

Funding and Acquisitions and Quarterly Reports

In addition to Udacity’s $100+ million funding round…

The tutoring company Varsity Tutors has raised $50 million from Technology Crossover Ventures, Adam Levine, and Stuart Udell. The startup has raised $57 million total.

Knewton has filed to raised $47.25 million according to the SEC, Edsurge reports. I bet investors truly love the “mind-reading robot tutors” story.

“The Silicon School Fund debuted a $40 million fund to be invested in 40 new schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, benefiting 20,000 students, over the next five years,” Edsurge reports.

LMS startup Schoology has raised $32 million from JMI Equity, FirstMark Capital, Intel Capital, and Great Road Holdings. This brings to $57.1 million the total raised by the company.

Macat has raised $30 million from unnamed sources. The company offers “a library of commissioned multimedia analyses of seminal texts in the humanities and social sciences that aim to improve the user’s critical thinking,” says Edsurge.

Hullabalu has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Technicolor Ventures, Vayner RSE, SparkLabs Global, Rothenberg Ventures, 645 Ventures, Great Oaks VC, SV Angel, Scout Ventures, Liberty City, Nasir Jones, Carmelo Anthony, and Joanne Wilson. I mean if Carmelo Anthony is in on it, you know this “interactive story platform” has got to be… bwa ha ha, sorry Knicks fans. Anyway, Hullabalu has raised $6.45 million total.

Shirsa Labs has raised $250,000 in angel funding from ah! Ventures for its “50 week virtual after school program.”

Edsurge says that Touchpress is seeking a buyer for its educational iPad apps.

Via Politico: “SEC filings due for the third quarter of 2015 show that many for-profit college operators are again seeing lower revenue and fewer students than at this time last year, as regulations, lawsuits and closures continue to plague the industry. ITT Educational Services, which filed its third quarter results on Friday, reported a 16 percent revenue decrease and similar drop in enrollment for the three months ended Sept. 30, compared to the same period in 2014. DeVry disclosed a total revenue decrease of 4.5 percent, or about $441 million, for the same period . Strayer’s revenues fell 2 percent to about $99 million. And as we reported last month, Apollo made about $600 million in the quarter ending Aug. 31, compared to $696 million in the fourth quarter 2014. But Capella reported a third-quarter revenue of nearly $104 million, up from about $103 million in the same three months last year. And its enrollment increased over 4 percent.” But I'm sure bootcamps are gonna be terrific.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

“At least 100 students at a high school in Cañon City traded naked pictures of themselves, the authorities said Friday, part of a large sexting ring.” More via The New York Times.

“More universities adding drone programs.”

Via The Intercept: “Not So Securus: Massive Hack of 70 Million Prisoner Phone Calls Indicates Violations of Attorney-Client Privilege.”

Data and “Research”

Via The Washington Post: “Education researchers caution against using students’ test scores to evaluate teachers.” That is AERA vs VAM, for those who prefer news items reduced to acronyms.

Via Pacific Standard: “Unconscious Teacher Bias Harms Black College Students.”

I forget: is rule-breaking for innovators good or bad? Anyhoo, Michael Horn, formerly of the Clayton Christensen Institute, writes in Edsurge about “How Amplify Broke All the Rules for Innovators.”

Of those elites at the World Innovation Summit of Education in Doha, Qatar, a survey“found just 39% of global education leaders believe their institutions adequately address the skills gap, and in the U.S., where more educators think so, few employers agree.”

A survey by CompTIA found that “96 percent of people between the ages of 13 and 24 either like or love technology, only 19 percent of those 18 to 24 and 13 percent of those 13 to 17 said they were interested in IT careers.”

Research from the RAND Corporation and the Gates Foundation says there’s been “continuing progress” on personalized learning.

“The National Science Foundation (NSF) will give North Carolina State University a nearly $800,000 grant to study how digital learning programs can best benefit students,” says Campus Technology.

The costs of textbook – data, blogged. “Bad Data Can Lead To Bad Policy: College students don't spend $1,200+ on textbooks,” says Phil Hill. “Asking What Students Spend on Textbooks Is the Wrong Question” Mike Caulfield responds. “Asking What Students Spend On Textbooks Is Very Important, But Insufficient” Phil Hill agrees. David Wiley weighs in with “The Practical Cost of Textbooks.” Phil Hillthen offers “Data To Back Up Concerns Of Textbook Expenditures By First-Generation Students.”

Via The New York Times: “Breakthrough Prize Looks to Stars to Shine on Science.” Or there’s this headline from Entrepreneur magazine: “ Why Mark Zuckerberg Just Gave This High School Student $400,000.”

“What Google’s New Open-Source Software Means for Artificial-Intelligence Research.”

The latest from the Pew Research Center: “Google Play Store Apps Permissions.”

Via Singularity University’s Singularity Hub: “Online Education in 2025: Here’s What to Expect.”

From Renaissance Learning, maker of Accelerated Reader, the latest “What Kids Are Reading” report.

“A Roundup of All Those College Rankings.”

“The Benefits of the Ukulele on Kids’ Attitudes.” (But the research involves Canadian children, so please let’s not extrapolate to the US. Please.)

RIP

RIP Jay Cross.

Education Politics

No Child Left Behind just might be left behind. Via The New York Times: “Negotiators Come to Agreement on Revising No Child Left Behind Law.” Via Education Week: “House, Senate ESEA Compromise Sails Through Conference Committee.”

The Department of Education announced the results of an investigation that founds even more students were ripped off by Corinthian College than initially thought. The DoE’s announcement. More via NPR and Inside Higher Ed.

Via The New York Times: “The Department of Education announced Tuesday that it would expand its program to forgive federal student loan debt to thousands more students who attended programs of Corinthian Colleges, once one of the nation’s largest for-profit education companies.”

“Texas rejects letting academics vet public school textbooks,” the AP reports.

“Can California AG’s new bureau clean up for-profit virtual schools?” asks Education Dive. “A K12 Inc subpoena revealed in an SEC filing reveals wider investigation of virtual charters.”

“The Competency-Based Education Experiment Expanded to Include More Flexibility for Colleges and Students,” says the US Department of Education. That flexibility allows for “subscription delivery models.” Question: if you cancel the subscription, do you get to keep your competencies?

From the presidential campaign trail: “Clinton says ‘no evidence’ that teachers can be judged by student test scores.”

Education in the Courts

Via The New York Times: “The nation’s second-largest for-profit college operator, Education Management Corporation, is expected to agree to pay nearly $90 million to settle a case accusing it of compensating employees based on how many students they enrolled, encouraging hyperaggressive boiler room tactics to increase revenue.” But as Goldie Blumenstyk observes, “Little for Students in ‘Historic’ Settlement of Education Management Case.” However, it will forgive about 80,000 students’ loans.

Via The News Tribune: “The Washington State Supreme Court announced Thursday that it will not reconsider its September decision declaring the state’s voter-approved law establishing charter schools was unconstitutional. The high court had been asked to reconsider its decision by several parties, including the state charter school association, state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a bipartisan group of 10 legislators and four former state attorneys general.”

Via The San Jose Mercury News: “A 17-year-old Lincoln High School student has been criminally cited after he hosted an Instagram account that featured nude photos of underage girls, authorities say, including some from Lincoln.”

“Prosecutors Weigh Teenage Sexting: Folly or Felony?”

Testing, Testing…

The Pacific Standard reviews the new GED: “Making the Case for a Good-Enough Diploma. Common Core and big business have combined to make the lot of the upwardly mobile high school dropout even more dire.” (“Could Your Pass the New GED Test?”)

Massachusetts will develop its own Common Core assessments, dropping its plans to use PARCC’s.

Education Week asks, “How Is the Big Year for Common-Core Tests Shaking Out?”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Udacity and Google announced a co-developed nanodegree in “senior Web development.”

“edX and Microsoft Collaborate to Help K–12 School Leaders Improve Education,” says edX.

“Has edX become a platform for a Chinese propaganda course?” Inside Higher Ed asks.

“Reflections on the Paris attacks from Coursera CEO Rick Levin.”

From IHE blogger Joshua Kim: “5 Ways That Campus MOOC Initiatives Impact Local Residential Learning.”

The arts-oriented MOOC platform Kadenze has launched an LMS called Kannu. Sigh.

Meanwhile on Campus

Protests continue on campuses…

Via Corey Robin: “Black Alumni at Yale Weigh In With Major List of Demands.” “Responding to student demonstrations and demands related to the racial climate at Yale University, its president, Peter Salovey, introduced a host of initiatives and promises in a letter to alumni on Tuesday,” The New York Times reports. (The letter.)

“Princeton Students Hold Sit-In on Racial Injustice.”

“Journalists Closed out of Smith College ‘Sit-In,’ Should We Be Troubled?” asks Angus Johnston.

Amherst faculty unanimously agreed to get rid of the school’s unofficial mascot Lord Jeff – “tarnished by his dealings with Native Americans more than 200 years ago” – in a non-binding vote.

Via The Atlantic: “Black Tape Over Black Faculty Portraits at Harvard Law School.” Via The WaPo: “Harvard Evacuates 4 Buildings After Bomb Threat.”

“Howard University Increases Security After Students Receive Death Threats.”

The Seattle school board has okay’d a proposal for high schools to start at 8:45am, giving students some additional minutes of sleep each day (ideally at least).

“It Won’t Be Long Now Until Every School Has Internet Access,” Wired trumpets. According to EducationSuperHighway, the schools which meet the FCC’s minimum requirements for Internet speed has jumped from 30% to 77% since 2013. (Mark Zuckerberg also announced this week he’s giving EducationSuperHighway $20 million. While headlinesread that the money will help schools get faster Internet, it will actually go towards more staff and consultants for EducationSuperHighway.) Education Week has a good series of stories on how schools are charged outrageous fees for lousy Internet service.

Washington College will remain closed until after Thanksgiving weekend as police have been unable to locate a student who brandished a gun on campus.

“Westwood College, a for-profit chain with 14 campus locations, last week announced on its website that it has stopped enrolling new students,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Via NPR: “U.S. Colleges See A Big Bump In International Students.”

“The University of Montana on Tuesday announced plans to cut 201 full-time positions – 52 of them faculty slots – to deal with enrollment declines,” says Inside Higher Ed.

“The Silicon Valley Suicides” by Hanna Rosin.

Accreditation

From the California Community College Board of Governors: a call to establish a new model to accredit the systems’ 113 colleges. “The board approved a resolution citing the need to raise the professionalism of accreditation in California, stating that the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges (ACCJC) has lost credibility with its peers and no longer meets the current and anticipated needs of California community colleges.”

“A College Watchdog Finally Barked, So The Colleges Got A New Dog,” Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy writes.

Go, School Sports Team!

“The $10-Billion Sports Tab.”

The University of Missouri football coach Gary Pinkel has announced his resignation so he can focus on his fight with cancer.

From the HR Department

“Teachers at California’s largest online charter school unionize,” The Santa Barbara Sun reports. (That is, the California Virtual Academies.)

Via The Chicago Sun-Times: “Chicago taxpayers paid almost $900,000 for three and a half years’ work by disgraced former Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. And though she’s a felon since pleading guilty in a contract rigging scheme at CPS, she still stands to cost taxpayers in districts that employed her more than $140,000 in annual public pensions.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

“Months after being acquired by Follett, campus store operator Neebo is still sending students to collection agencies over textbooks the students say they have already returned,” IHE’s Carl Straumsheim reports.

Meanwhile… “Northern Virginia Community College’s Extended Learning Institute (ELI) and open courseware provider Lumen Learning announced a collaboration to publish 24 online college courses for two complete degree programs. All courses were developed for zero student cost using open educational resources (OER) (i.e., no textbooks, just public access Internet).”

“The War on Campus Sexual Assault Goes Digital,” says NYT’s Natasha Singer in a profile of an online service called Callisto that lets students anonymously record details of sexual assaults and then decide on whether or not to later report them.

Via The Washington Post: “FBI Online Game Combating Youth Extremism Draws Ire of Muslim Groups.”

The word of the year is an emoji, FFS.

Investments and IPOs

Match Group raised $400 million in its IPO. Match Group, a unit of billionaire Barry Diller’s IAC owns Match.com, OK Cupid, Tinder… and Tutor.com and the Princeton Review.

LMS Instructure raised $70 million in its IPO. MindWire Consulting’s Phil Hill interviews CEO Josh Coates.

Via Vox: “David Geffen’s $100 million gift to UCLA is philanthropy at its absolute worst.”

Earnest has raised $275 million in funding from New York Life Investment Management and Battery Ventures. The company has raised $299.1 million total. This makes Earnest the ed-tech company that has raised the second most amount of funding this year. The most: SoFi, which has raised $1.2 billion in 2015. Both of these companies offer private student loans, which is truly a fascinating indication of how venture capitalists predict the push for MOOCs and coding bootcamps and other post-secondary education/tech opportunities will be funded – on the backs of students carrying loan debt. Disruptive!

TutorGroup has raised “about” $200 million in funding from GIC, the Russia-China Investment Fund, Goldman Sachs, and Silverlink Capital LP. It’s a unicorn now, Edsurge notes, with a valuation of over $1 billion. The company, which offers online tutoring, has raised $315 million.

“The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest some $34 million in cooperative initiatives designed to improve teacher-preparation programs’ overall effectiveness,” Education Week reports.

PresenceLearning has raised $25 million from Catalyst Investors, Birchmere Ventures, Blue Heron Capital, Catamount Ventures, and New Markets Venture Partners. The company which offers online speech and occupational therapy, has raised $33 million total.

Lingvist has raised $8 million from Rakuten, Smart Cap, Jaan Tallinn, and Geoff Prentice. The company, which says it can teach you a foreign language in 200 hours, has raised $9.47 million total.

Student loan management company Tuition.io has raised $5 million from MassMutual Ventures LLC, Wildcat Venture Partners, and Mohr Davidow Ventures. The company has raised $8.15 million total.

VersaMe has raised $2.5 million from Learn Capital and Stanford-StartX for its wearable device (price-tag: $149) that you pin to your toddler to count how many words they hear. Certainly in the running for worst ed-tech idea of 2015.

BridgeU has raised $2.5 million from Octopus Investments, Fresco Capital, and Seedcamp. The company, which boasts that it has built “the first truly adaptive university preparation & application platform for students,” has raised $2.9 million total.

“Pearson Affordable Learning Fund (PALF) and Aavishkaar have announced a $2.3 million Series A round of investments in Karadi Path, which makes immersive English language curriculum and multimedia materials,” Edsurge reports.

WriteLab, “a browser-based tool that provides feedback on writing,” has raised $2 million in seed funding from Reach Capital, Kapor Capital, and Learn Capital.

Job placement company iStar has raised $1.51 million from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation.

Authess has raised $675,000 from “US investors and Manipal Global Education,” says BetaBoston. “The company makes mobile and online assessment systems that better reflect a person’s abilities, instead of his or her ability to memorize information for a multiple-choice test, according to its website.”

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

Via Politico: “The Education Department is doing a poor job on everything from responding to cyber attacks to updating its software and hardware, but it’s especially bad at monitoring its computer networks for threats, according to an annual inspector general audit.”

Carnegie Mellon Universities denies taking money from the FBI to infiltrate the TOR network.

“California school bus service eyes biometric technology for pupils,” says CS Monitor. “A transportation service that serves four districts in California is testing iris scanners to ensure students aren’t accidentally left on a bus, but the trial raises privacy concerns for some experts.”

Data and “Research”

A report from Australia’s National Assessment Programme says that tablets are “eroding” children’s digital skills.

According to data from the US Department of Education’s Quarterly Student Aid Report, “Two-Thirds of Freshmen FAFSA Applicants List Only One College on Their Applications.”

“There’s No Substitute for In-Person Lectures,” says Pacific Standard. “A study released last week finds that students who watched a videotaped lecture recalled less of the material, and felt less engaged in the subject, than they did after sitting through a similar live lesson.”

“Hufflin Muffin (or the craziness of textbook data).”

“Research” from Knewton on the effectiveness of its platform.

A report from Common Sense Media (via Education Week): “Media Usage Highest Among Poor, Minority Youth.”

According to a study by Digital Promise (also via Education Week): “Little Consistency in How Districts Judge Ed-Tech Through Pilot Tests.”

A survey from Gallup and Google on computer science. Among the findings: “Observations from students and parents suggest that TV and film media portrayals, as well as personal perceptions among students, parents and educators, often reflect stereotypes about people who engage in computer science; this has the potential to limit participation among certain student groups.”

According to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, “Fewer students are earning a college credential within six years of first enrolling in college” – down 2.1% from the previous year’s cohort.

Moody’s Investor Service projects blah blah blah.

US student loan debt has officially surpassed $1.2 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Again, congrats venture capitalists for getting in on this important education trend.

After decades of explosive growth, the future of for-profit higher education might not be so bright. Or, depending on where you look, it just might be…

In recent years, there have been a number of investigations – in the media, by the government– into the for-profit college sector and questions about these schools’ ability to effectively and affordably educate their students. Sure, advertising for for-profits is still plastered all over the Web, the airwaves, and public transportation, but as a result of journalistic and legal pressures, the lure of these schools may well be a lot less powerful. If nothing else, enrollment and profits at many for-profit institutions are down.

Despite the massive amounts of money spent by the industry to prop it up – not just on ads but on lobbying and legal efforts, the Obama Administration has made cracking down on for-profits a centerpiece of its higher education policy efforts, accusing these schools of luring students with misleading and overblown promises, often leaving them with low-status degrees sneered at by employers and with loans students can’t afford to pay back.

But the Obama Administration has also just launched an initiative that will make federal financial aid available to newcomers in the for-profit education sector: ed-tech experiments like “coding bootcamps” and MOOCs. Why are these particular for-profit experiments deemed acceptable? What do they do differently from the much-maligned for-profit universities?

School as “Skills Training”

In many ways, coding bootcamps do share the justification for their existence with for-profit universities. That is, they were founded in order to help to meet the (purported) demands of the job market: training people with certain technical skills, particularly those skills that meet the short-term needs of employers. Whether they meet students’ long-term goals remains to be seen.

I write “purported” here even though it’s quite common to hear claims that the economy is facing a “STEM crisis” – that too few people have studied science, technology, engineering, or math and employers cannot find enough skilled workers to fill jobs in those fields. But claims about a shortage of technical workers are debatable, and lots of data would indicate otherwise: wages in STEM fields have remained flat, for example, and many who graduate with STEM degrees cannot find work in their field. In other words, the crisis may be “a myth.”

But it’s a powerful myth, and one that isn’t terribly new, dating back at least to the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and subsequent hand-wringing over the Soviets’ technological capabilities and technical education as compared to the US system.

There are actually a number of narratives – some of them competing narratives – at play here in the recent push for coding bootcamps, MOOCs, and other ed-tech initiatives: that everyone should go to college; that college is too expensive – “a bubble” in the Silicon Valley lexicon; that alternate forms of credentialing will be developed (by the technology sector, naturally); that the tech sector is itself a meritocracy, and college degrees do not really matter; that earning a degree in the humanities will leave you unemployed and burdened by student loan debt; that everyone should learn to code. Much like that supposed STEM crisis and skill shortage, these narratives might be powerful, but they too are hardly provable.

Nor is the promotion of a more business-focused education that new either.

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Career Colleges: A History

Foster’s Commercial School of Boston, founded in 1832 by Benjamin Franklin Foster, is often recognized as the first school established in the United States for the specific purpose of teaching “commerce.” Many other commercial schools opened on its heels, most located in the Atlantic region in major trading centers like Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and Charleston. As the country expanded westward, so did these schools. Bryant & Stratton College was founded in Cleveland in 1854, for example, and it established a chain of schools, promising to open a branch in every American city with a population of more than 10,000. By 1864, it had opened more than 50, and the chain is still in operation today with 18 campuses in New York, Ohio, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

The curriculum of these commercial colleges was largely based around the demands of local employers alongside an economy that was changing due to the Industrial Revolution. Schools offered courses in bookkeeping, accounting, penmanship, surveying, and stenography. This was in marketed contrast to those universities built on a European model, which tended to teach topics like theology, philosophy, and classical language and literature. If these universities were “elitist,” the commercial colleges were “popular” – there were over 70,000 students enrolled in them in 1897, compared to just 5800 in colleges and universities – something that highlights what’s a familiar refrain still today: that traditional higher ed institutions do not meet everyone’s needs.

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The existence of the commercial colleges became intertwined in many success stories of the nineteenth century: Andrew Carnegie attended night school in Pittsburgh to learn bookkeeping, and John D. Rockefeller studied banking and accounting at Folsom’s Commercial College in Cleveland. The type of education offered at these schools was promoted as a path to become a “self-made man.”

That’s the story that still gets told: these sorts of classes open up opportunities for anyone to gain the skills (and perhaps the certification) that will enable upward mobility.

It’s a story echoed in the ones told about (and by) John Sperling as well. Born into a working class family, Sperling worked as a merchant marine, then attended community college during the day and worked as a gas station attendant at night. He later transferred to Reed College, went on to UC Berkeley, and completed his doctorate at Cambridge University. But Sperling felt as though these prestigious colleges catered to privileged students; he wanted a better way for working adults to be able to complete their degrees. In 1976, he founded the University of Phoenix, one of the largest for-profit colleges in the US which at its peak in 2010 enrolled almost 600,000 students.

Other well-known names in the business of for-profit higher education: Walden University (founded in 1970), Capella University (founded in 1993), Laureate Education (founded in 1999), Devry University (founded in 1931), Education Management Corporation (founded in 1962), Strayer University (founded in 1892), Kaplan University (founded in 1937 as The American Institute of Commerce), and Corinthian Colleges (founded in 1995 and defunct in 2015).

It’s important to recognize the connection of these for-profit universities to older career colleges, and it would be a mistake to see these organizations as distinct from the more recent development of MOOCs and coding bootcamps. Kaplan, for example, acquired the code school Dev Bootcamp in 2014. Laureate Education is an investor in the MOOC provider Coursera. The Apollo Education Group, the University of Phoenix’s parent company, is an investor in the coding bootcamp The Iron Yard.

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Promises, Promises

Much like the worries about today’s for-profit universities, even the earliest commercial colleges were frequently accused of being “purely business speculations” – “diploma mills” – mishandled by administrators who put the bottom line over the needs of students. There were concerns about the quality of instruction and about the value of the education students were receiving.

That’s part of the apprehension about for-profit universities’ (almost most) recent manifestations too: that these schools are charging a lot of money for a certification that, at the end of the day, means little. But at least the nineteenth century commercial colleges were affordable, UC Berkley history professor Caitlin Rosenthal argues in a 2012 op-ed in Bloomberg,

The most common form of tuition at these early schools was the “life scholarship.” Students paid a lump sum in exchange for unlimited instruction at any of the college's branches – $40 for men and $30 for women in 1864. This was a considerable fee, but much less than tuition at most universities. And it was within reach of most workers – common laborers earned about $1 per day and clerks' wages averaged $50 per month.

Many of these “life scholarships” promised that students who enrolled would land a job – and if they didn’t, they could always continue their studies. That’s quite different than the tuition at today’s colleges – for-profit or not-for-profit – which comes with no such guarantee.

Interestingly, several coding bootcamps do make this promise. A 48-week online program at Bloc will run you $24,000, for example. But if you don’t find a job that pays $60,000 after four months, your tuition will be refunded, the startup has pledged.

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According to a recent survey of coding bootcamp alumni, 66% of graduates do say they’ve found employment (63% of them full-time) in a job that requires the skills they learned in the program. 89% of respondents say they found a job within 120 days of completing the bootcamp. Yet 21% say they’re unemployed – a number that seems quite high, particularly in light of that supposed shortage of programming talent.

For-Profit Higher Ed: Who’s Being Served?

The gulf between for-profit higher ed’s promise of improved job prospects and the realities of graduates’ employment, along with the price tag on its tuition rates, is one of the reasons that the Obama Administration has advocated for “gainful employment” rules. These would measure and monitor the debt-to-earnings ratio of graduates from career colleges and in turn penalize those schools whose graduates had annual loan payments more than 8% of their wages or 20% of their discretionary earnings. (The gainful employment rules only apply to those schools that are eligible for Title IV federal financial aid.)

The data is still murky about how much debt attendees at coding bootcamps accrue and how “worth it” these programs really might be. According to the aforementioned survey, the average tuition at these programs is $11,852. This figure might be a bit deceiving as the price tag and the length of bootcamps vary greatly. Moreover, many programs, such as App Academy, offer their program for free (well, plus a $5000 deposit) but then require that graduates repay up to 20% of their first year’s salary back to the school. So while the tuition might appear to be low in some cases, the indebtedness might actually be quite high.

According to Course Report’s survey, 49% of graduates say that they paid tuition out of their own pockets, 21% say they received help from family, and just 1.7% say that their employer paid (or helped with) the tuition bill. Almost 25% took out a loan.

That percentage – those going into debt for a coding bootcamp program – has increased quite dramatically over the last few years. (Less than 4% of graduates in the 2013 survey said that they had taken out a loan). In part, that’s due to the rapid expansion of the private loan industry geared towards serving this particular student population. (Incidentally, the two ed-tech companies which have raised the most money in 2015 are both loan providers: SoFi and Earnest. The former has raised $1.2 billion in venture capital this year; the latter $245 million.)

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The Obama Administration’s newly proposed “EQUIP” experiment will open up federal financial aid to some coding bootcamps and other ed-tech providers (like MOOC platforms), but it’s important to underscore some of the key differences here between federal loans and private-sector loans: federal student loans don’t have to be repaid until you graduate or leave school; federal student loans offer forbearance and deferment if you’re struggling to make payments; federal student loans have a fixed interest rate, often lower than private loans; federal student loans can be forgiven if you work in public service; federal student loans (with the exception of PLUS loans) do not require a credit check. The latter in particular might help to explain the demographics of those who are currently attending coding bootcamps: if they’re having to pay out-of-pocket or take loans, students are much less likely to be low-income. Indeed, according to Course Report’s survey, the cost of the bootcamps and whether or not they offered a scholarship was one of the least important factors when students chose a program.

Here’s a look at some coding bootcamp graduates’ demographic data (as self-reported):

(According to several surveys of MOOC enrollees, these students also tend to be overwhelmingly male from more affluent neighborhoods, and MOOC students also tend to already possess Bachelor’s degrees. The median age of MITx registrants is 27.)

It’s worth considering how the demographics of students in MOOCs and coding bootcamps may (or may not) be similar to those enrolled at other for-profit post-secondary institutions, particularly since all of these programs tend to invoke the rhetoric about “democratizing education” and “expanding access.” Access for whom?

Some two million students were enrolled in for-profit colleges in 2010, up from 400,000 a decade earlier. These students are disproportionately older, African American, and female when compared to the entire higher ed student population. While one in 20 of all students are enrolled in a for-profit college, 1 in 10 African American students, 1 in 14 Latino students, and 1 in 14 first-generation college students are enrolled at a for-profit. Students at for-profits are more likely to be single parents. They’re less likely to enter with a high school diploma. Dependent students in for-profits have about half as much family income as students in not-for-profit schools. (This demographic data is drawn from the NCES and from Harvard University researchers David Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence Katz in their 2013 study on for-profit colleges.)

Deming, Goldin, and Katz argue that

The snippets of available evidence suggest that the economic returns to students who attend for-profit colleges are lower than those for public and nonprofit colleges. Moreover, default rates on student loans for proprietary schools far exceed those of other higher-education institutions.

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According to one 2010 report, just 22% of first- and full-time students pursuing Bachelor’s degrees at for-profit colleges in 2008 graduated, compared to 55% and 65% of students at public and private non-profit universities respectively. Of the more than 5000 career programs that the Department of Education tracks, 72% of those offered by for-profit institutions produce graduates who earn less than high school dropouts.

As Tressie McMillan Cottom notes in her forthcoming book Lower Ed, there are important discrepancies within for-profit higher education when it comes to which programs get marketed to which students:

These two schools – the Beauty College and the Technical College – can be said to represent the poles of the for-profit college’s Wall Street Era. The Wall Street Era begins in the mid 1990s and (with some debate) continues presently. This period is defined as one where the investment classes not only recognized the huge economic potential of on-demand market-based degrees but when millions of people suddenly needed more on-demand education to stay afloat in the labor market. The pull between good jobs in IT and business and bad jobs in the service sector is the world of life and work by the 2000s. When and how deeply you felt pulled by these magnetic energies depends greatly on things beyond your control: who you are, what you are, what you inherited, what you know, who you know and where you were on the social ladder of opportunity when the poles started pulling apart. The poles of the for-profit college sector reflect that greater push and pull. Short-term certificates with clearly articulated job paths, like nine-month cosmetology degrees at the Beauty College, tend to enroll browner, poorer students. At the other end, Masters degrees in technology like the 24-month programs at the Technical College enroll more men, a greater share of which are white, less poor, have more college and more immediate earning power.

For their part, today’s MOOCs and coding bootcamps also boast that their students will find great success on the job market. Coursera, for example, recently surveyed its students who’d completed one of its online courses and 72% who responded said they had experienced “career benefits.” But without the mandated reporting that comes with federal financial aid, a lot of what we know about their student population and student outcomes remains pretty speculative.

What kind of students benefit from coding bootcamps and MOOC programs, the new for-profit education? We don’t really know… although based on the history of higher education and employment, we can guess.

EQUIP and the New For-Profit Higher Ed

On October 14, the Obama Administration announced a new initiative, the Educational Quality through Innovative Partnerships (EQUIP) program, which will provide a pathway for unaccredited education programs like coding bootcamps and MOOCs to become eligible for federal financial aid. According to the Department of Education, EQUIP is meant to open up “new models of education and training” to low income students. In a press release, it argues that “Some of these new models may provide more flexible and more affordable credentials and educational options than those offered by traditional higher institutions, and are showing promise in preparing students with the training and education needed for better, in-demand jobs.”

The EQUIP initiative will partner accredited institutions with third-party providers, loosening the “50% rule” that prohibits accredited schools from outsourcing more than 50% of an accredited program. Since bootcamps and MOOC providers “are not within the purview of traditional accrediting agencies,” the Department of Education says, “we have no generally accepted means of gauging their quality.” So those organizations that apply for the experiment will have to provide an outside “quality assurance entity,” which will help assess “student outcomes” like learning and employment.

By making financial aid available for bootcamps and MOOCs, one does have to wonder if the Obama Administration is not simply opening the doors for more of precisely the sort of practices that the for-profit education industry has long been accused of: expanding rapidly, lowering the quality of instruction, focusing on marketing to certain populations (such as veterans), and profiting off of taxpayer dollars.

Who benefits from the availability of aid? And who benefits from its absence? (“Who” here refers to students and to schools.)

Shawna Scott argues in “The Code School-Industrial Complex” that without oversight, coding bootcamps re-inscribe the dominant beliefs and practices of the tech industry. Despite all the talk of “democratization,” this is a new form of gatekeeping.

Before students are even accepted, school admission officers often select for easily marketable students, which often translates to students with the most privileged characteristics. Whether through intentionally targeting those traits because it’s easier to ensure graduates will be hired, or because of unconscious bias, is difficult to discern. Because schools’ graduation and employment rates are their main marketing tool, they have a financial stake in only admitting students who are at low risk of long-term unemployment. In addition, many schools take cues from their professional developer founders and run admissions like they hire for their startups. Students may be subjected to long and intensive questionnaires, phone or in-person interviews, or be required to submit a ‘creative’ application, such as a video. These requirements are often onerous for anyone working at a paid job or as a caretaker for others. Rarely do schools proactively provide information on alternative application processes for people of disparate ability. The stereotypical programmer is once again the assumed default.

And so, despite the recent moves to sanction certain ed-tech experiments, some in the tech sector have been quite vocal in their opposition to more regulations governing coding schools. It’s not just EQUIP either; there was much outcry last year after several states, including California, “cracked down” on bootcamps. Many others have framed the entire accreditation system as a “cabal” that stifles innovation. “Innovation” in this case implies alternate certificate programs – not simply Associate’s or Bachelor’s degrees – in timely, technical topics demanded by local/industry employers.

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The Forgotten Tech Ed: Community Colleges

Of course, there is an institution that’s long offered alternate certificate programs in timely, technical topics demanded by local/industry employers, and that’s the community college system.

Vox’s Libby Nelson observed that “The NYT wrote more about Harvard last year than all community colleges combined,” and certainly the conversations in the media (and elsewhere) often ignore that community colleges exist at all, even though these schools educate almost half of all undergraduates in the US.

Like much of public higher education, community colleges have seen their funding shrink in recent decades and have been tasked to do more with less. For community colleges, it’s a lot more with a lot less. Open enrollment, for example, means that these schools educate students who require more remediation. Yet despite many community colleges students being “high need,” community colleges spend far less per pupil than do four-year institutions. Deep budget cuts have also meant that even with their open enrollment policies, community colleges are having to restrict admissions. In 2012, some 470,000 students in California were on waiting lists, unable to get into the courses they need.

This is what we know from history: as the funding for public higher ed decreased– for two- and four-year schools alike, for-profit higher ed expanded, promising precisely what today’s MOOCs and coding bootcamps now insist they’re the first and the only schools to do: to offer innovative programs, training students in the kinds of skills that will lead to good jobs. History tells us otherwise...

Education Politics

It’s Black Friday. Maybe I’ll go out and buy the domain “hasESEAbeenrenewedyet.com,” although it appears as though the bill will be passed next month. Of course, we’ve thought that all year long. Via Education Week: “#StopESEA? Conservative Blogger Who May Have Helped Derail ESEA Has New Qualms.” Also via Education Week: “A New ESEA: A Cheat Sheet on What the Deal Means for Teachers.”

Via Politico, a look at the worst school system in the US, those on Native American reservations: “How Washington created some of the worst schools in America.”

An “update on British Columbia’s open textbook project” by Tony Bates.

According to the BBC, British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne plans to overhaul school funding in England “to remove big regional differences in levels of per pupil funding.”

“At Donald Trump Rally, Ohio Students Become Part of a Lesson.”

Melinda Anderson looks at “The Other Student Activists” in The Atlantic. (That is, high school students.)

Education in the Courts

Via Education Week: “Ahmed Mohamed, the Irving teenager who made national news after he was suspended for bringing a clock to school, is seeking $15 million in damages from the city of Irving and the Irving school district.”

Via Bloomberg: “Testing companies failing to disclose to students’ that their personally identifiable information was sold at a profit to educational organizations doesn’t provide injury sufficient for Article III standing, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit affirmed Nov. 18. In yet another blow to putative class actions alleging privacy violations, Judge Michael S. Kanne agreed with the trial court that the plaintiffs didn’t establish how ACT Inc. and The College Board ‘deprived them of the economic value’ of their PII.”

Alejandro Amor, the owner of the for-profit college FastTrain, has been convicted of 12 counts of theft of government money and one count of conspiracy.

Testing, Testing…

“The Northwest Evaluation Association has been chosen to develop and implement one of the tests overseen by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in a move that will broaden the U.S. testing organization’s international reach,” Education Week reports.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The College Board has notified some students who took the SAT outside the United States this month that their scores are being delayed due to an investigation into a possible security breach.”

Via The Oregonian: “Oregon teachers despise the Smarter Balanced tests, survey says.”

Mark Guzdial writes “A Call to Action for Higher Education to make AP CS Principles Work.”

Via Edsurge: “BenchPrep Partners with Hobsons to Universalize Test Prep.” Woohoo! Universal test prep!

Credentials and Credits

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Southern New Hampshire U’s College for America releases a promising early snapshot of the general-education learning and skills of students who are enrolled in a new form of competency-based education.”

“3 reasons open source needs Open Badges” by Doug Belshaw.

ACE’s Deborah Seymour on the Alternative Credit Project Ecosystem.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Via Edsurge: “EdX Stays Committed to Universities, Offering Credits for MOOCs.”

An interview in Inside Higher Ed with Robert Rhoads, the author of MOOCs, High Technology and Higher Learning.

“Introduction to Mao Zedong Thought MOOC & open course transparency” by George Veletsianos.

“No Rich Child Left Behind, and Enriching the Rich: Why MOOCs are not improving education” by Mark Guzdial.

Meanwhile on Campus

CNN aired the documentary The Hunting Ground last weekend, despite legal threats from former FSU quarterback Jameis Winston, who is accused in the film of a violent sexual assault. (More on FSU below.) Via NPR: “CNN’s ‘The Hunting Ground’ Scrutinized For Portrayal Of Campus Sexual Assault.” Via Science of Us: “The Hunting Ground Uses a Striking Statistic About Campus Rape That’s Almost Certainly False.”

From the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: “Custom-Redacted School Texts Make a Worrying Trend”:

In the past few months we’ve noticed an uptick in a different kind of censorship from what we usually see. Namely, a few schools across the country have assigned their students to read texts that were first edited by hand: words blacked out with marker and modified from what the author wrote.

Unlike the more familiar cases involving challenges, review committees, and school board meetings that happen in public for all to see, these instances of unauthorized editing are more insidious. On the surface, it appears that the students are reading complex, potentially controversial texts; in reality, though, the texts have been pre-sanitized so as to avoid even the possibility of a public challenge. Not only does this practice rob the students of a well-rounded education, but it also violates both the First Amendment and U.S. copyright laws designed to protect authors’ creations from tampering.

Western Washington University cancelled classes this week following threats via Yik Yak. Via the AP: “The student body president of Western Washington University said Wednesday she has received death threats involving her race and no longer feels safe on the Bellingham campus.”

Protests at Princeton. Via The New York Times: “At Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, a Heralded Alum, Is Recast as an Intolerant One.” “What We Owe the Students at Princeton” by Corey Robin.

“‘White Student Union’ Groups Set Off Concerns at Campuses.”

Via Vox: “Why college protestors are telling the media to stay away.”

Via the Ottowa Sun: “Student leaders have pulled the mat out from 60 University of Ottawa students, ending a free on-campus yoga class over fears the teachings could be seen as a form of ‘cultural appropriation.’” (“Do you know the weird political history behind yoga?” asks Boing Boing.)

Via The Columbus Dispatch: “The state has ordered the entire administrative and teaching staff at a Columbus middle school to undergo training in identifying warning signs for behavioral disabilities among students after they suspended an unruly sixth-grader for 70 days last school year.”

“Missing Maryland College Student Is Found Dead in Apparent Suicide.”

The BBC looks at “merger madness” – that is, the consolidation of European universities.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “American Indian College, which describes itself as the nation’s only private college for Native American students, will teach out its 91 students and close its doors after having its accreditation withdrawn by the Higher Learning Commission, the Phoenix institution’s president said Monday.”

Via The Atlantic: “A For-Profit College Initiative That Just Might Work” – a partnership between Strayer University and Fiat-Chrysler car dealerships.

Go, School Sports Team!

Via Deadspin: “Former FSU Official: Football Players Receive Special Treatment As Dozens Accused Of Sexual Assault Or Domestic Violence.” Via The New York Times: “F.S.U. Reported Few Rape Cases to the U.S.”

A $15 million buyout for LSU’s football coach?!

From the HR Department

Jamienne Studley, the “number 2” higher ed official in the US Department of Education, will leave her post at the end of the month.

“Maps: Collective Bargaining, State By State.”

“Just How Few Professors of Color Are at America’s Top Colleges? Check Out These Charts,” Mother Jones asks you to click.

Contests and Competitions

“A 14-Year-Old Just Solved A Rubik’s Cube In Under Five Seconds.”

“Announcing the 2015 Dance Your Ph.D. winner.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

“The New Wordpress Dot Com.” More from Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg.

The world’s largest OER collection has been released by the Smithsonian.

“YouTube Kids App Faces New Complaints Over Ads for Junk Food.” More via Wired.

“Pi Zero: A full Raspberry Pi for just $5.”

Funding

Via Reuters: “ Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs, is the lead investor who funded the buyout of News Corp’s money losing digital education business Amplify earlier this year.” Other investments by Powell Jobs: AltSchool, Udacity, and Nearpod. The amount invested in Amplify was not disclosed.

Study tool startup Quizlet has raised $12 million– its first founding round after being bootstrapped for a long, long time – from Union Square Ventures, Costanoa Venture Capital, Owl Ventures, Altos Ventures, Geoff Ralston, Tim Brady, and Greg Brockman. Here’s founder and CTO Andrew Sutherland on why the company opted to raise VC and “what’s next.”

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

From Pearson VUE: “We recently were made aware that an unauthorized third party placed malware on Pearson VUE’s Credential Manager (PCM) system, which is a platform that supports adult professional certification and licenses. The unauthorized party improperly accessed certain information related to a limited set of Pearson VUE’s PCM system users. As of now, we do not believe that U.S. Social Security numbers or full payment card information were compromised as a result of this issue.”

“Is ‘Hello Barbie’ spying on your kid?”

Data and “Research”

From the OECD: “Education at a Glance 2015.” (Write-ups on the news include Inside Higher Ed’s take and this from Education Week: “International Survey Finds U.S. Lagging in Early-Childhood Education.”)

“Data Mining Reveals How Smiling Evolved During a Century of Yearbook Photos.”

A peak at the upcoming Horizon Report for higher education from Bryan Alexander. (Hopefully not on the horizon: “Tech Tats, A New Biowearable Technology In the Form of Temporary Circuit Board Tattoos.”)

“Google donated $760K to a university that wrote pro-Google policy papers.” The “research” in question was done by George Mason.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Study finds notable drop in proportion of recent high school graduates from bottom 20 percent of family incomes who are enrolling in college.” Via Bryan Alexander: “Fewer and richer high school grads heading to college: ACE analysis.” Via Mic: “One of the Biggest Problems on College Campuses Is One We Never Talk About.” (That is, classism.)

According to a study by the American Institute of Physics Statistical Research Center, “in a recent 10-year period while there has been an increase in the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the physical sciences and engineering, the share of such degrees awarded to black students has fallen, as other groups are seeing larger increases.”

Via The Atlantic: “The Missing Black Students at Elite American Universities.”

“Children are becoming more trusting of what they see online, but sometimes lack the understanding to decide whether it is true or impartial,” according to a study by Ofcom, which uses the phrase “digital natives” in its headline. Ugh. Don’t do that. Here’s a better headline, from Motherboard: “Only 31% of Preteens Can Distinguish Paid Ads from Real Search Results.”

Via Phil Hill: “New Visual From LISTedTECH Shows LMS Market By New Implementations.”

Via Susan Dynarski in the NYT: “Urban Charter Schools Often Succeed. Suburban Ones Often Don’t.”

“What Roadblocks Stand in the Way of a Digital K–12 Market?”

“Not Even Scientists Can Easily Explain P-values.”

It’s time once again for my annual review of the year in ed-tech. This is the sixth year I’ve done so.

It’s a fairly massive undertaking – Gates-Foundation-free research, a rarity in ed-tech – which means I have to start thinking about this project long before the end-of-the-year. That always makes me nervous that I’ll leave something out – that something “big” will happen in December that’ll change everything. Or at least, something that’ll change the focus of my analysis.

I’m not sure why I worry. As education technology entrepreneurs and investors and politicians like to remind us, education has not changed in hundreds of years, right?. Or at least, it never ever changed until education technology entrepreneurs and investors came along to “disrupt” things. LOL. #thanksSiliconValley.

But looking back on the last five years of my “Top Ed-Tech Trends,” it does seem as though very little has changed. (Indeed, this series is beginning to feel like the Horizon Report, except instead of predicting what’s “on the horizon,” I’m always observing “the history of the future” of education by looking at the recent past.

Many of the things I have written about previously – and will write about again this year – remain the same. If nothing else, ed-tech remains incredibly political, and venture capitalists continue to pour money into the sector, hoping it will become incredibly profitable as well.

2010

• Ed-Tech Politics
• Online Learning
• Mobile Learning
• Social Learning / Social Networks
• Investment in Education Technology

2011

• The iPad
• Social Media – Adoption and Crackdown
• Text-messaging
• Data (Which Still Means Mostly “Standardized Testing”)
• The Digital Library
• Khan Academy
• STEM Education’s Sputnik Moment
• The Higher Education Bubble
• “Open”
• The Business of Ed-Tech

2012

• The Business of Ed-Tech
• The Maker Movement
• Learning to Code
• The Flipped Classroom
• MOOCs
• The Battle to Open Textbooks
• Education Data and Learning Analytics
• The Platforming of Education
• Automation and Artificial Intelligence
• The Politics of Ed-Tech

2013

• “Zombie Ideas”
• The Politics of Education/Technology
• Standards
• MOOCs and Anti-MOOCs
• Coding and “Making”
• Hardware
• Data vs Privacy
• The Battle for “Open”
• What Counts “For Credit”
• The Business of Ed-Tech

2014

• Buzzwords
• The Business of Ed-Tech
• School and “Skills”
• MOOCS, Outsourcing, and Online Education
• Competencies and Certificates
• The Common Core State Standards
• Data and Privacy
• The Indie Web
• Social Justice
• #Fail

Ed-Tech’s Zombie Ideas

2015 was another great year for “zombie ideas” in ed-tech. “Zombie ideas,” as economist Paul Krugman has described them, are those “policy ideas that keep being killed by evidence, but nonetheless shamble relentlessly forward, essentially because they suit a political agenda."

Zombie ideas are sort of like SkyMall, which declared bankruptcy in January admitting that people don’t browse its catalog of crap any longer thanks to in-flight Wi-Fi. But then Skymall didn’t actually die, as it found new owners who promised to bring the magazine back to life and to airplane seat pockets. And remember, as VCU’s Jon Becker wrote way back in 2010, ed-tech has a lot in common with SkyMall.

Some of the “zombies ideas” in ed-tech include the notions that technology facilitates cheating or that technology is a distraction and therefore should be banned in the classroom. (It is worth noting that the New York City public schools did lift their longstanding ban on cellphones this year. But it was hardly a fatal blow to that particular zombie idea.) Headlines appeared regularly throughout the year, stirring up panic about schools’ and students’ technology usage. From The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Facebook Addiction and GPA” From Salon: “Wi-Fi exposure may be worse for kids than we thought.” And some of the fears of ed-tech were warranted, as we witnessed data breaches, sexting rings, threats of violence (and real violence), and so on.

One of ed-tech’s most powerful zombies, the learning management system, not only refused to die this year, but one of its makers, Instructure, had its initial public offering.(The latest on INST on the NYSE.) In related zombie news, Reuters reported in July that the most infamous LMS provider, Blackboard, was up for sale (again). But it doesn’t appear that there’ve been any buyers as of yet. The company continues to lay off employees, but alas it’s probably not a fatal blow for that particular monster.

Also among the undead in 2015: virtual reality, which has seen renewed interest by the tech press, which continues to be pretty damn uncritical when it comes to reviewing new products or assessing the industry’s predictions. Google tried to convince everyone that its Cardboard viewer is VR and that the videos students can watch on the devices are akin to field trips. TIME insisted “Virtual Reality Is About to Change the World,” but then it put this photo on the cover of the magazine, surely setting VR back quite a bit.

According to Second Life founder Philip Rosedale who’s still involved in various VR projects, “kids will one day go to school through a VR headset.” One day, man. One day. Meanwhile, Fusion’s Patrick Hogan took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life.

Ed-Tech’s Failures

In September, the OECD has released a report on computers and education, which found that – no big surprise – ed-tech isn’t really all that transformational, despite all the investor, media, and entrepreneurial frenzy.

The report provides a first-of-its-kind internationally comparative analysis of the digital skills that students have acquired, and of the learning environments designed to develop these skills. This analysis shows that the reality in our schools lags considerably behind the promise of technology. In 2012, 96% of 15-year-old students in OECD countries reported that they have a computer at home, but only 72% reported that they use a desktop, laptop or tablet computer at school, and in some countries fewer than one in students reported doing so. And even where computers are used in the classroom, their impact on student performance is mixed at best. Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes, even after accounting for social background and student demographics.

The results also show no appreciable improvements in student achievement in reading, mathematics or science in the countries that had invested heavily in ICT for education. And perhaps the most disappointing finding of the report is that technology is of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Put simply, ensuring that every child attains a baseline of proficiency in reading and mathematics seems to do more to create equal opportunities in a digital world than can be achieved by expanding or subsidising access to high-tech devices and services. Last but not least, most parents and teachers will not be surprised by the findings that students who spend more than six hours on line per weekday outside of school are particularly at risk of reporting that they feel lonely at school, and that they arrived late for school or skipped days of school in the two weeks prior to the PISA test.

One interpretation of all this is that building deep, conceptual understanding and higher-order thinking requires intensive teacher-student interactions, and technology sometimes distracts from this valuable human engagement. Another interpretation is that we have not yet become good enough at the kind of pedagogies that make the most of technology; that adding 21st-century technologies to 20th-century teaching practices will just dilute the effectiveness of teaching. If students use smartphones to copy and paste prefabricated answers to questions, it is unlikely to help them to become smarter. If we want students to become smarter than a smartphone, we need to think harder about the pedagogies we are using to teach them. Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.

But let’s be honest. There is a dearth of “great technology.” Most ed-tech is crap.

And echoing the final post in last year’s review of ed-tech trends – #fail– 2015 has seen its share of ed-tech failures. There’s still no clear conclusion to last year’s massive LAUSD iPad fiasco, and while Pearson did agree to pay the district a $6.4 million settlement for the botched software implementation, we have heard no word on the FBI’s investigation or the SEC’s probe into the $1 billion deal.

Apple wasn’t the only company that struggled with its hardware in schools this year. In April, Bloomberg wrote that “News Corp.s $1 Billion Plan to Overhaul Education Is Riddled With Failures.” (My favorite quote from the story comes from a seventh grader describing the Amplify tablets: “I think they’re evil.”) The company lost several key executives and laid off staff before finally being sold off by News Corp (to the old management team, including Joel Klein).

I’ll detail more of these and other failures in subsequent articles in this series – particularly in “The Business of Ed-Tech,” which surely needs to be tempered from all the glee about this year’s record-setting investments. Because, yes, it’s worth noting (again and again and again) that “The Business of Ed-Tech” still includes all sorts of ridiculous marketing claims, made most notably this year by the likes of Knewton and Desire2Learn (but god, so many others as well).

Those Who Ignore Ed-Tech History…

In the coming weeks, I’ll publish ten articles in this series. Stay tuned for some of the most exhaustive analysis (of US ed-tech) you’ll find anywhere. (And hey, feel free to make a donation to this site to support my work.)

I write these posts because it’s important to me that we look more closely at the history of education, technology, and education technology. The news cycle tends to push things out of our minds so quickly. By December, we’ve forgotten what happened in March, let alone what happened a year, five years, ten years, fifty years ago. There were two very significant anniversaries this year – the 25th anniversary of the first one-to-one laptop program (at the Methodist Ladies’ College in Melbourne, Australia) and the 15th anniversary of the Maine Learning Technology Initiative, which made Maine the first state in the US to provide laptops to all middle-schoolers. I don’t think any major ed-tech publication (um, except this one) noted the date.

Instead, there’s been the continuous clarion call for more data collection, more automation, more social and bio-engineering, more scientific management, and of course more disruptive innovation in education. These are the narratives loudly, frantically trying to shape the future.

And this is why history matters – the long history and the short history of ed-tech that this blog tries to cover. We can’t accept an invented history– the invocation over and over, for example, of a “factory model of education.” Those of us who work in education and technology would do well to consider origins and trajectories and to think more carefully and critically about the past – that includes the recent past, the upgrades, downgrades, failures, wins, and trends of 2015.

This is the first article in my series The Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

One of the challenges of identifying the “Top Ed-Tech Trends” is that most of these developments are deeply interconnected. It’s hard to separate “The Politics of Education Technology” from “The Business of Education Technology.” It’s hard to separate the push for more standardized testing and more computers for students to use for standardized testing from either of these. It’s hard to separate concerns about testing from concerns about data and privacy. And so on.

It’s hard too, despite the title of this article, to solely talk about the politics of education technology. How does one distinguish such a thing from the politics of education or the politics of technology? To ignore these – something that happens too often – is to pretend that ed-tech is politics-free, that it is value-neutral.

Context matters. Unfortunately, when one narrows the focus to ed-tech alone, context is lost. (Moreover, things often get reduced to just “the business of ed-tech.”)

There were plenty of important news items this year that cannot be directly tied to “the politics of education technology” but that nonetheless help provide context for everything that’s occurred in schools, including some of the other trends I’ll look at in this series (data, privacy, social justice, testing, and so on): school shootings; the militarization of school police; poverty and homelessness; re-segregation; student protests; banned books; the school-to-prison pipeline; measles outbreaks and inanity about vaccinations; sexual assault on college campuses; undocumented immigrants’ access to education; trans* students’ rights; fossil fuel divestment; the revocation of Bill Cosby’s honorary degrees; the high price (monetarily and physically) of school sports; and so on.

As that list underscores, this review of the “Top Trends in Ed-Tech” tends to be very US-centric. I apologize. Too often, the rest of the world’s education systems are ignored by American writers like myself… unless there’s news about Finland. “Always cover Finland” – that’s written in the very first paragraph of the education journalist official manual, you know. And while updates from Europe and Canada do seem to make it into US education publications from time-to-time, it’s much rarer to see news from the global South. (Two exceptions that prove the rule: an attack on Garissa University in Kenya this spring that left 147 dead and the #feesmustfall protests in South Africa this fall.)

Electoral Politics

But in a nod to global coverage, I’ll note that David Cameron and the Conservatives won re-election in the UK this year. Cameron now wants every school in England and Wales to become an academy (that is, a school independent of local control). Admittedly, I’m really only including this in my “politics of ed-tech” post so I can type the words “pig fucker.” You’re welcome.

For their part, Canadians ousted the Conservatives and Stephen Harper in their federal election this year, delivering a “stunning victory” to the Liberal Party and its leader (and former teacher) Justin Trudeau. The educational and scientific communities of Canada breathed a huge sigh of relief at the outcome, even though the election was one of the longest and most expensive in modern Canadian history– bless your hearts, my dear northern neighbors.

Meanwhile, in the States, we will still have to suffer through almost another full year of presidential campaigning.

But hey, education is a “hot topic,” so let’s run through what (some of) the candidates have had to say:

Jeb Bush: Bush was expected to run on his education record from his time as Florida’s governor, but that’s proven to be challenging for him. Insert joke about Florida here, I guess. He’s pro-Common Core (one of the few Republican candidates who’s taking this position). Part of Bush’s problem is that he hasn’t been able to distance himself from his brother. Bush, who has a degree in Latin American studies, has been one of the candidates who’s repeatedly mocked college students who major in the liberal arts.

Ben Carson: Unlike other Republican candidates who’ve indicated they want to eliminate the Department of Education, Carson has said he would use it “to monitor our institutions of higher education for extreme political bias and deny federal funding if it exists.” A neuroscientist, Carson says the best kind of education is homeschooling, which is exactly how I want my neuroscientists to be trained.

Chris Christie:He was for the Common Core before he was against it. He has consistently, however, remained a jerk.

Hillary Clinton: Clinton has deep ties to the for-profit college chain Laureate Education – or her husband does. She was also paid nearly a quarter million dollars for a speaking gig by Jeb Bush’s education company, Academic Partnerships. I think she’s trying – maybe – to brush up on her liberal cred (thanks to her opponent in the primaries, Bernie Sanders); and she’s been endorsed by both major teachers’ unions, the American Federation of Teachers and by the National Education Association. Clinton has criticized Sanders’ free college plan. Hers, she’s boasted, would make low-income students work for aid – echoes of the punitive “welfare reform” of her husband.

Ted Cruz: The Texas Senator announced his presidential candidacy at (Jerry Falwell-founded) Liberty University. Speaking of “liberty,” students were mandated to attend. Here’s what they said on Yik Yak. Yik Yak is going to make lots of appearances in this years series. Ugh. Cruz is also anti-Common Core.

Carly Fiorina: Fiorina is running on the track record of her time as CEO of HP, which seems like a really, really, really bad idea. She has a degree in medieval history, which she says prepares her to fight ISIS. Sorta like Obama being a constitutional law professor helped him fight the NSA, I bet.

Mike Huckabee: Also anti-Common Core. Yawn.

Bobby Jindal: He’s dropped out of the race now, but Jindal has (recently at least) been an outspoken opponent to the Common Core, suing to try to block the standards’ implementation.

John Kasich: The Ohio governor has expanded charter schools in his state – pretty much a disaster. Like Bush, he supports the Common Core. Like Bush, he’s not doing so well in the polls.

Larry Lessig: He’s dropped out of the race now too, but the Harvard law professor and founder of Creative Commons was running on a platform of reforming campaign finance.

Martin O’Malley: When announcing his plan for debt-free college, the former governor of Maryland / former mayor of Baltimore said that he and his wife had taken out nine loans, totaling almost $340,000 to pay for their daughters’ tuition. Dude. Learn 2 FAFSA better.

Rand Paul: The Kentucky Senator wants to close the Department of Education. “Here’s how that would work.”

Marco Rubio: Rubio has been a supporter of the now-defunct for-profit college chain Corinthian Colleges. Rubio has been wooing the tech industry too. Like Rand Paul, Rubio thinks we should shut down the Department of Education. He’s anti-Common Core and a huge thorn in fellow Floridian Jeb Bush’s side.

Bernie Sanders: The Vermont Senator has proposed“the federal government … give $18 billion a year in dollar-for-dollar matching grants to states, which he says would allow them to slash public college tuition by 55 percent. He said this would apply to students at all public universities and colleges.” (More on others’ plans for “free college” below.) “Bernie Sanders’s plan to have Wall Street pay for your college tuition, explained.”

Rick Scott: LOL. Who?

Donald Trump: The clown candidate has “criticized the federal government for earning a profit on the federal student loan program.” (Remember that one time Trump ran a for-profit “university” that got fined by New York state because it wasn’t accredited and was making false claims? Good times. Good times.)

Scott Walker: Also a flip-flopper on the Common Core, Walker has dropped out of the race now, returning to Wisconsin where he’s working to dismantle the state’s public higher education system.

Yes, I’ve left some candidates off this list. Good grief. Let 2016 be over already.

The End of the Arne Era

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We haven’t even wrapped up the Obama Presidency yet, and I’ve written more than 1200 words on a bunch of people who will not be the next President of the United States.

US Secretary of Education Arne Duncanannounced) in October that he’d be stepping down from the position at the end of the year. Duncan is one of the few Cabinet members that’s stayed for (almost but not quite) the duration of Obama’s presidency. (His replacement: John King, the former commissioner of education for New York.)

Education history Sherman Dorn and doctoral student Amanda Potterton examined the Secretary’s legacy. And Education Week looked specifically at his ed-tech legacy. “In Swan Song, Arne Duncan Extols School Progress Under His Tenure,” was how The New York Times framed it, as Duncan boasted about, among other achievements, what the Race to the Top initiative and its $4.3 billion in competitive grant funds have done for schools. “We haven’t gotten everything right,” Duncan admitted, “and we’ve seen unintended consequences that have posed challenges for educators and students.” No details from the Secretary on what those consequences might have been. But swan songs are often light on details.

Education Policies (and Policy Proposals)

Free (Community) College: In January, President Obama proposed making 2 years of community college free for some students. He didn’t offer a lot of details on how the plan would be funded (the federal government would pick up three-fourths of the cost; states the rest). Students would need to maintain a 2.5 GPA in order to remain eligible.

As the cost of tuition and student loan debt have continued to increase, this idea of free or debt-free college has, no surprise, remained a popular theme this year (not just on the campaign trail among Democratic candidates, but from Democratic Senators, particularly Elizabeth Warren and from many in higher ed as well.)

Oregon followed Tennessee to become the second state to offer free community college. Richmond Community College in North Carolina will also offer free tuition to high school students in the area: “The program, dubbed RichmondCC Guarantee, promises two free years of college for students of public, private and home schools who have at least a 3.0 grade-point average and two college courses under their belts.”

I mean, who could be against “college for all”?! (#WellActually.)

Elsewhere in Financial Aid: Promising to focus on college access and affordability, as part of his State of the Union address, the President proposed scrapping the “529” college savings accounts, something used by just 3% of families. But bowing to Republican pressures, he backed away from the plan.

The Perkins Loan Program lapsed this year, although higher education groups continue to pressure Congress to revive the program. Senator Lamar Alexander was one of those pushing for the program’s elimination, arguing that the financial aid system needs to be simplified.

And hey, the Department of Education did try to simplify FAFSA, axing the PIN number for FAFSA applications. So that’s something. I guess. It also announced that it’s making a change to the financial aid applications, starting in the fall of next year: applicants will be asked to provide the prior prior year’s tax information, rather than the prior year’s.

The Department of Education also expanded Pell Grant eligibility – to high school students in certain dual enrollment programs and to (some) prisoners, “the first adult inmates to be eligible for the grants since Congress barred prisoners from receiving them more than 20 years ago.”

And in an experiment I will examine in much more detail in an upcoming article in this series, the Department of Education said it will grant financial aid eligibility to partnerships between accredited colleges and unaccredited “alternative” education providers like MOOCs and coding bootcamps. I bet the ed-tech industry is pretty stoked to have former venture capitalist Ted Mitchell there in DC as the Undersecretary of Education, eh.

Ed-Tech Boosterism: It isn’t only MOOCs and coding bootcamps that benefit from the current administration’s commitment to expanding education technology. Timed with the annual ed-tech investor conference, the ASU-GSV Summit, the Department of Education released an ed-tech developers guide. (The alternate preface penned by MIT TILT’s Justin Reich is, for what it’s worth, much, much better than the department’s.)

In April, “Linking reading to technology, the White House marshaled major book publishers to provide more than $250 million in free e-books to low-income students and is seeking commitments from local governments and schools across the country to ensure that every student has a library card.” (Jessamyn West asked, “Aren’t libraries already doing that?”) The initiative is part of Obama’s ConnectED program, in which ed-tech companies push their products into schools. In June, the White House boasted about the initiative, saying it’s “on track to achieve its goal of connecting students to tools they need for 21st century learning.” It’s 2015 and we’re “on track” to move towards “21st century learning.” Strong work, team.

OER:The Department of Education supports open educational resources. Big if true.

A College Rating System Scorecard:Last year, the Obama Administration said it planned to create a college rating system – “transparency, accountability, and equity” blah blah blah – in order to identify and rate colleges’ “institutional performance.” In March, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that “Education Dept. Considers Creating Not 1 but 2 College-Ratings Systems,” one to lure prospective students and one to punish schools. Or something like that. Having set aside some $4 million to build the system, the administration later scrapped its original plan, releasing a “scorecard” instead.

Responses: The news, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Vox. And the analysis: Via Mindwire Consulting’s Phil Hill: “17% Of Community Colleges Are Not Included In College Scorecard” and “College Scorecard Problem Gets Worse: One in three associate’s degree institutions are not included.” “What Actual High Schoolers Think of the New College Scorecard.” Actual high schoolers! The head of the University of Phoenix was unhappy with what the scorecard says about his school. Shocking. The best advice, no surprise, came from UW education professor Sara Goldrick-Rab: “College Scorecard: For Analysis Not Action.”

Privacy Legislation: Again, this is a topic I’ll cover in more detail in a subsequent post – data, privacy, security, bullshit claims about learning analytics and so on. But I’ll note here, for the record, the legislative record on privacy in 2015. Student privacy was something Obama mentioned in his State of the Union address. And there were numerous attempts to tackle the issue in Congress too. But of course Congress can’t get anything done.

In April, a “discussion draft” of a revision to FERPA was released to the US House of Representatives’ education committee. US Representatives Jared Polis and Luke Messer introduced the Student Digital Privacy and Parental Rights Act of 2015, which “would prohibit operators of websites, apps and other online services for kindergartners through 12th graders from knowingly selling students’ personal information to third parties; from using or disclosing students’ personal information to tailor advertising to them; and from creating personal profiles of students unless it is for a school-related purpose.” The ed-tech industry was “wary,” Education Week reported.

Then in May, Senators Edward Markey and Orrin Hatch reintroduced their update to FERPA, the “Protecting Student Privacy Act.” And David Vitter introduced his “Student Privacy Protection Act.” Vitter’s bill, according to Education Week, “would expand the types of student information covered under FERPA, require educational institutions to obtain prior consent from parents before sharing that information with third parties, outlaw a host of data-sharing practices that have become commonplace over the past decade, and require educational agencies and private actors who violate FERPA to pay cash penalties to individual families.”

And in July, “(Yet Another) Federal Student-Data-Privacy Bill Introduced”: “The SAFE KIDS Act would prohibit ed-tech companies and operators from selling student data, using that information to target advertising to students, or disclosing such information to unapproved third parties.”

And at the end of the day? Nothing passed at the federal level (although states have had more luck passing privacy legislation).

Testing: And again, I’ll write a whole big, detailed round-up on the state of testing and ed-tech in 2015, but let me include a few words here, with even more words below on the possible renewal of NCLB.

In October, Obama came right out and said he wants students to “stop taking unnecessary tests.” Of course, we need to ask what constitutes an “unnecessary test.” Here’s the official “Testing Action Plan,” that includes some details on how tests will be limited to just 2% of classroom time. (Is that actually less than what tests take now? We should probably ask that too…) Vox offered an “explainer”: “Obama’s flip-flop on standardized tests, explained.” And the International Business Times wrung its hands: “How Obama’s Push For Fewer Assessments Could Affect Education Companies.” tl;dr: they’ll be fine.

Net Neutrality: Elsewhere in executive branch ed-tech-related updates: in February, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler unveiled new rules that would preserve net neutrality by reclassifying broadband as a telecommunications service, governed by Title II. Broadband providers promised to sue.

Net neutrality purports to keep the Internet “free and open,” but it’s still pretty “slow and closed” at most schools. “It Won’t Be Long Now Until Every School Has Internet Access,” Wired recently trumpeted. Of course, it doesn’t help that telecoms continue to overcharge schools for lousy Internet service, as ProPublicaand others have reported. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is on the case; so I’m sure it’ll all be fixed, just like he’s “fixing” – cough – the Internet in the developing world.

The FCC also sought comments this year on a proposal to allow the Lifeline program to subsidize broadband, much as it has long subsidized phone service, to low income households. And from July, ConnectHome: a new Obama Administration initiative to expand access to broadband to low-income families in order to address the “homework gap.”

Consumer Finance Protection: During one of the Republican presidential candidate debates that aired on the Fox Business Network this fall, a Soviet-themed ad ran opposing the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. The ad was paid for by the student loan sector. The CFPB is a new agency created by the Obama Administration, so no surprise it’s the target of Republican ire. The agency is charged with protecting consumers in the financial sector, a mandate that includes enforcement of rules surrounding student loans – hence the ire of the student loan sharks. Again, I’ll look more closely at the for-profit education industry in a subsequent post, but I’ll note here that the CFPB has been quite active this year, demanding search engines crack down on student loan scams, for example, investigating and fining loan providers like Discover and Navient for illegal, deceptive, and “stressful” practices.

Charters: I’ll look at charter schools in more detail in my upcoming post on “The Business of Ed-Tech,” as ed-tech and charters share many (tech) investors. And perhaps I’ll talk about charters too in my post on for-profit higher ed, expanding that one to cover K–12 as well. We’ll see. The month is young. So I’ll just make a quick note here about one of the most significant developments this year: the decision in September by the Washington State Supreme Court to declare charters unconstitutional. After rejecting charter schools in the states in three previous referendums, Washington voters had approved a charter school law in 2012 (thanks in part to the financial support for the proposal from the Gates and Bezos families).

The Court’s decision involved whether or not charters count as private or public entities. It’s not a new debate, and clearly it remains an unsettled one.

No Child Left Behind: Not Left Behind Quite Yet…

I should have purchased the website “HasESEABeenRenewed.com” because almost every week this year – hell, for a decade now – there’s been some promise of maybe possibly revising the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Of course, its most recent version is best known as No Child Left Behind, a George W. Bush-era piece of legislation that mandated (among other things) more regularly scheduled standardized testing and the threat of punishment for schools that failed to make “adequate yearly progress” towards “proficiency.”

“No Child Left Behind May End, But The Industry It Spawned Is Here To Stay,” Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy wrote in January. (That is, the testing/ed-tech industry.) And that really set the tone for the rest of the year. February updates. March updates. April updates. July updates. November updates.

I’m going to hit “publish” on this post before the House of Representatives votes this afternoon on the revision, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015. Education Week has a look at its provisions. Among them: states will still have to test students in reading and math in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school but they will have greater flexibility on setting accountability goals and punishments.) Here’s the copy of the latest bill, if you’d like to read those 1000+ pages instead of the 1000+ in my “Top Ed-Tech Trends” series.

Education/Technology Lobbying

• According to OpenSecrets.org, the top five “Schools/Education” lobbyists were the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Apollo Education Group, the University of Washington, Warburg Pincus, and University of California.
• According to OpenSecrets.org, Google spent almost five times on lobbying than the top education lobbyist.
• FratPAC, a lobbying arm for fraternities, has raised some $2.1 million for Congressional candidates who would press for legislation to make it harder for universities to investigate rapes on campus.
• Via Politico in April: “Loan servicer Navient spent $1 million lobbying Congress in the first three months of 2015, new records show, more than the company has spent in any quarter thus far but a little less than Sallie Mae spent in the first quarter of last year. Sallie Mae has wound down its lobbying operation, spending only $60,000 in the first quarter. Other big spenders among education groups in the first quarter of 2015: The Association of American Medical Colleges ($1 million); the National Education Association ($605,000); Apollo Education Group ($350,000); American Federation of Teachers ($332,527) and California State University ($270,000).”
• “Education Groups Were The Biggest-Spending Lobbyists In New York Last Year,” Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley-Clancy reported in April. The pro-charter school group Families for Excellent Schools, Inc. spent $9.6 million on lobbying in 2014, outspending the next four highest groups on the list combined.
• According to The Washington Post, “analysis, done by the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit liberal watchdog and advocacy agency based in Wisconsin that tracks corporate influence on public policy, says that four companies – Pearson Education, ETS (Educational Testing Service), Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and McGraw-Hill – collectively spent more than $20 million lobbying in states and on Capitol Hill from 2009 to 2014.”
• Everybody in education pays the Pearson tax.

A Few More Education/Technology Numbers for Context

• Nearly 90% of school districts expected their 2014–2015 technology budgets in hardware, software, teacher training, and technical support to stay the same or increase.
• 77% of school districts meet the FCC’s minimum Internet access goal of 100 kilobits per second per student).
• Federal revenues for public elementary and secondary education dropped by 21.5% in fiscal year 2012.
• Per pupil spending dropped by 2.8%, as “schools across the country spent an average of $10,667 per student.”
• Obama’s 2015 budget included $200 million to revive the Enhancing Education Through Technology program as a competitive grant initiative.
• Obama’s 2015 budget included $29.7 billion for Pell Grants.
• Obama’s 2015 budget revealed a $21.8 billion shortage in the federal student loan program.
• “Congratulations, Class of 2015. You’re the Most Indebted Ever (For Now).”
• One in five school-age children lived in poverty in 2013, up from about one in seven in 2000.
• The high school graduation rate in the US hit 81%, a historic high.
• 92% of teens go online daily.
• Over $4 billion in venture capital has been invested in ed-tech companies this year.

Education Technology and Education Reform

Late last year, the Chicago Tribune broke the story that “Companies that Chicago Board of Education member Deborah Quazzo has an interest in have seen the business they get from the city’s schools system triple since Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointed her to the board.” The controversy spilled over into the new year, and in February, Quazzo sent an angry, all caps, mass email to her industry supporters saying “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!” No more hard questions from the public or the Fifth Estate! Quazzo later stepped down from her role on the board.

Elsewhere in Chicago Public Schools shadiness: Barbara Byrd-Bennett resigned as the head of Chicago Public Schools “amid a federal investigation into a $20.5 million no-bid contract.” She later pled guilty for “her role in a scheme to steer $23 million in no-bid contracts to education firms for $2.3 million in bribes and kickbacks.” She will serve 7.5 years in jail. As The Chicago Sun-Times noted, “Chicago taxpayers paid almost $900,000 for three and a half years’ work by disgraced former Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. And though she’s a felon since pleading guilty in a contract rigging scheme at CPS, she still stands to cost taxpayers in districts that employed her more than $140,000 in annual public pensions.”

Other ed-reform/ed-tech policy folks in the news this year: Richard Culatta, the head of the Office of Education Technology, is stepping down from his position at the Department of Education at the end of the year. Condoleeza Rice took over as the head of Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellent in Education. Scott Benson, who oversaw grants to blended and charter schools as a program officer at the Gates Foundation, became a managing partner at NewSchools Venture Fund. Gates Foundation program manager Emily Dalton-Smith joined Facebook in March as product manager for its K–12 education team, working with Summit Public Schools on its ed-tech software system. (More on that partnership in “The Business of Ed-Tech.” Or maybe in the article I’ll write on data and privacy.) Jim Shelton, former deputy secretary of education and former Gates Foundation program manager and former NewSchools Venture Fund partner, joined 2U as “Chief Impact Officer.” Success Academy's Eva Moskowitz is not running for NYC mayor. And daaaamn, things aren’t looking so good for Michelle Rhee’s political future, are they.

Meanwhile, in the world of “philanthropy”-as-politics: the Gates Foundation looked back on how it’s spent some $3 billion on education and how it plans to use the Gates’ riches to shape the future of education. The Koch Brothers remained busy promoting their libertarian ideals on college campuses. Thanks to an investigation by The LA Times, we know the Broad Foundation has a plan to convert half of LAUSD schools to charters. And now Mark Zuckerberg’s doing the family foundationLLC thing too (Newark turned out so well, right?), announcing he will donate 99% of his Facebook shares to “charity,” with a focus on, among other things, ed-tech efforts.

Democracy!

The Politics of Labor and Teaching Machines

I always frown at those who repeat Arthur C. Clarke’s contention that if a teacher can be replaced by a machine, she or he should be. I mean, it’s pretty clear to me that there are many forces at play – some of the most dystopian politics of education technology– that want precisely that. I spoke about teaching machines and educational labor in August at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. The Wisconsin university system had a particularly rough year, thanks to the efforts of no-longer-presidential-candidate-but-still-governor Scott Walker, who announced in January a $300 million budget cut to the state’s higher education system, couching it in terms of “independence.” He said his plan would make universities “do things that they have not traditionally done” – including requiring professors teach more classes per semester, all without tenure. Walker also proposed scrapping the “Wisconsin Idea,” changing the mission of the illustrious state system from the “search for truth” to focus on meeting “the state’s workforce needs.”

I’ll examine labor issues and tenure issues and academic freedom issues (all related) in more detail in upcoming posts – you know, those ridiculous claims about “mind-reading robo tutors in the sky” and such. But let’s just note here in this article because it bears repeating: that as long as teachers have demands, as long as teachers strike, there will be those who push to replace them. And these days, the arguments – particularly those from the tech sector – are for machines taking the place of workers.

-Isms and the Ed-Tech Industry

Sexism:“Edtech Women Defy Tech Industry’s Sexist Trends,” Edsurge’s managing editor Tony Wan argued in April. The “proof”: less than a third of those who registered for the chintzy ASU-GSV corporate education investment event offered information about their startup’s demographics, but of those who did, 29% said they have a woman founder or woman on the exec team. (I’m curious what percentage had a male founder or man on the exec team. I’m guessing 100%.) A pretty low standard for “defying sexism.” But there you go.

I’m fairly relieved, I must say, that we’re close to a sexism-free ed-tech industry having dealt with harassment, doxxing, and tone-policing in this and previous years.

Other stats and reports related to gender and ed-tech aren’t as sunny as Edsurge’s assertions, strangely enough: According to a study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly, “men are much more likely than women to reject findings of sexism in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and even to make sexist comments in response to such research.” The OECD’s report on gender equality and education finds that the “among high-performing students, girls do worse than boys in mathematics; in no country do they outperform boys at this level. In general girls have less confidence than boys in their ability to solve mathematics or science problems.” Piazza also found a “STEM confidence gap.” UCLA professor Linda Sax authored a paper on changes to interest in computer science and the gender gap in that field. Google also published research on gender and the CS pipeline.

Oh, and COSN published a report on the gender gap in K–12 ed-tech leadership. Among the findings: “Only a handful of K–12 chief technology officials earn more than $160,000 per year. All are men. Women comprise 65 percent of those who reported making under $70,000 per year.” Sexism defied, right?!

And 88% of ed-tech leaders are white.

Racism: And perhaps that statistic explains some of the ed-tech products and promotions this year.

Take Interactive timeline tool Hstry, for example, which thought it was a good idea to re-enact the murder of Emmett Till on Twitter. Needless to say, folks onTwitter did not agree. The company said it was sorry.

Or take “Slave Tetris.” I’m not kidding. Slave Tetris.

Or read Rafranz Davis who wrote – “shocked” – about Mission US: Flight to Freedom, a slavery simulation promoted in Common Sense Media’s Black History month email. In an op-ed in Edsurge, the producer of the slavery simulation said “we regret to hear that some people have found the game to be problematic, we stand by it.” Sorry, not sorry.

The conservative publication Education Next celebrated (yep, celebrated) the 50th anniversary of the Moynihan Report, which helped pathologize Black women as “welfare queens” and Black men as “deadbeat dads.” Michael Petrelli gleefully trolled Twitter with the cover of its latest magazine. Later he said he was sorry for sending the tweets. (No apology for the cover itself.)

From The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration”

From Techcrunch’s Kim-Mai Cutler: “East Of Palo Alto’s Eden: Race And The Formation Of Silicon Valley.”

Ableism: In May, the US Department of Justice joined a lawsuit by a student at Miami University in Ohio, charging the university of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act by adopting education technologies that are inaccessible. The software listed in the suit included the university’s websites, YouTube, Vimeo, TurnItIn, Google Docs, and more.

In August, the New York Public Schools said it would delay a deal it had struck with Amazon – the company was poised to manage a book marketplace for students – following letters from the National Federation of the Blind has concerns about accessibility, noting that the platform would exclude the visually impaired.

In September, Seattle announced it would take steps to make the ed-tech used in its schools accessible to blind students, faculty, and parents, settling a lawsuit against the district brought by Noel Nightingale and her co-plaintiff, the National Federation of the Blind. A statement from the NFB:

This landmark agreement with the Seattle Public Schools should serve as a model for the nation and should put school districts on notice that we can no longer wait to have equal education for blind students and to have access to information, use of school services, and full participation in school activities by blind faculty, personnel, and parents.

Activism: I plan to devote an entire article in this series to activism, social justice, and ed-tech. Coming soon…

Solutionism and the Ed-Tech Industry

Ed-tech likes to present itself as “the fix” to a broken system. For example: “Kids Are Using Minecraft To Design A More Sustainable World,” says Fast Company. (“Letting Kids Play Minecraft Is Probably Better Than Telling Them They Have No Future,” the Awl responded.)

Ed-tech likes to present itself as innovative, rarely questioning who benefits.

Ed-tech likes to present itself as ideology-free, even though it’s steeped in such.

From Paul Prinsloo’s reflection on the ICDE conference, which I was fortunate enough to keynote this fall:

Education, as I understand it, is about creating spaces for learners to learn to read the world, to recognise the meta-narratives as well as the epistemological and ontological alliances, as well as develop the capabilities and agencies to disrupt these meta-narratives and create new localised narratives in service of hope, equality and justice. Various keynotes and panelists raised the issue that we seriously and urgently needed to rethink our understandings of “open”, “access”, “knowledge production” (see the thought-provoking keynote by Laura Czerniewicz) and “hope.”

Rethinking the relationship between access, justice and equality (as Tressie McMillan Cottom suggested) means resisting the neoliberal discourses celebrating the collapse of public education in order to invite venture capital in to “save” and “fix” education – ala “the shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism” exposed by Naomi Klein. We were reminded by Audrey Watters that Africa should not and cannot afford to accept the Silicon Valley narrative that technology is all we need. Designing hope is, however, much more than resistance, but reclaiming (as suggested by Stella Porto) the potential of education as liberation through pedagogies of hope.

Laudato Si’

In June, Pope Francis issued his second encyclical, Laudato Si'. The subtitle: On Care for Our Common Home. Laudato Si’ is not simply a theological document; it is a work of social criticism – a critique of capitalism, consumerism, and technology and a warning about environmental destruction and climate change.

I’m including Laudato Si’ here because it can be situated alongside the work of other theorists who cautioned against technology and power – Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman – and who inform my writing on ed-tech.

Indeed, I think this encyclical provides one of the most powerful recent counters to Silicon Valley solutionism, which still dominates so much of the framing and so much of the politics of education technology.

Education Politics

The House of Representatives voted on the “Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015,” an update to No Child Left Behind. The bill – some 1000+ pages in length – now heads to the Senate. Via Vox: “Congress is getting rid of No Child Left Behind. Here's what will replace it.” Robert Pondiscio writes on “ESEA and the return of a well-rounded curriculum.” Rick Hess “scores” the new law. “Why the ESEA Bill Seeks a Pardon for Heavyweight Black Boxer Jack Johnson,” by Andrew Ujifusa. Blake Montgomery observes that “Revisions to No Child Left Behind Attempt to Define Education Technology.”

“More than two dozen House Democrats on Thursday implored Appropriations Committee leaders to resist lawmakers who would seize on the 2016 spending bill as an opportunity to block the Education Department's gainful employment rule,” Politico reports.

Richard Culatta, the head of the Office of Ed-Tech, is stepping down at the end of the year.

“Education Dept CIO comes under fire from Congress for major security loopholes,” says EdScoop, which notes the department had 91 data breaches this year.

“Education Department has received more than 1,000 filings on racial harassment in higher ed in last seven years. But only a fraction result in any findings,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

From The LA Times’ Howard Blume: “PAC shielded $2.3 million in donations by L.A. charter school backers.”

In Ohio, “Parma City School District bills the state for $46 million for ‘excess’ charter school funding.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The U.S. Department of Education announced Thursday that it has granted the requests for debt forgiveness made by more than 1,300 federal student loan borrowers who attended Heald College, a subsidiary of the now-defunct for-profit Corinthian Colleges chain.”

Also via Inside Higher Ed: “Three Senate Democrats are criticizing the Obama administration for settling a fraud lawsuit against Education Management Corporation last month without forgiving the loans of students who attended the for-profit college chain or holding the company's executives personally accountable.”

Education in the Courts

“Students’ Protests May Play Role in Supreme Court Case on Race in Admissions,” says The New York Times.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “The battle between a national accrediting organization overseeing many for-profit colleges and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is now making its way through federal court. The Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, known as ACICS, argued in a court filing late Tuesday that it shouldn’t have to turn over records to the CFPB because the agency lacks jurisdiction over college accreditors.”

Via the NSBA: “According to The Tennessean, the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee (ACLU-TN) has filed suit against Giles County Schools challenging the prohibition on students wearing pro-LGBT apparel at school.”

Testing, Testing…

Via Education Week: “The state of Maine, which pulled out of the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium earlier this year, awarded its newest assessment contract to Measured Progress, the state department of education announced Thursday. The $4.14 million contract is for the 2015–16 Maine Educational Assessments in mathematics and ELA/literacy for grades 3–8 and the third-year high school.”

Via NPR: “To Measure What Tests Can’t, Some Schools Turn To Surveys.”

Is New York’s algebra exam too hard?

“Responding to budget constraints and priorities for the NAEP program,” the National Assessment Governing Board has decided“to postpone the administration of grade 12 in four subjects and the next long-term trend exams by four years.”

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Research from Justin Reich and John Hansen in Science: “Democratizing education? Examining access and usage patterns in massive open online courses.” The Pacific Standard covers their research: “The Internet Isn’t Education’s Savior.”

“How Udemy Is Profiting From Piracy,” Rob Conery writes. Udemy responds. “Of course people are ripping off online courses,” says Sarah Jeong.

The University of Cape Town joins Coursera.

Via the Portland Press Herald: “Maine professor ensures course is taught, even after he dies.”

From The Plains Dealer: “Online schools are losing support, creating divisions in the national charter school movement.”

Meanwhile on Campus

“University of Chicago Cancels Classes After Online Threat.”

Via the Boston Globe: “Massachusetts Institute of Technology Police sent a notice to students this week asking them to put the brakes on various types of ‘wheeled devices’ when navigating the expansive hallways to get to class, citing a recent surge in such activity.”

Elsewhere at MIT: “The MIT grad students occupying the hallway outside President Reif’s office until MIT divests from fossil fuels have hit the 10000000000-hour mark (base 2 - in base 10, that’s a still-impressive 1024 hours). The sit-in began October 22.”

“Pizza Hut is investing in its future workforce by partnering with a UK university to offer 1,500 apprenticeships.” (The university in question: Manchester Metropolitan University.)

Via Mother Jones: “This Junk-Food-Funded Elementary School Curriculum Is Bonkers.”

“This is not a day care. This is a university!” says the president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University, and The New York Times is on it. Via Vox: “President of a college that won’t hire LGBTQ people: student protesters should ‘grow up’.”

Protests at Princeton continue, and “Woodrow Wilson’s Legacy Gets Complicated.”

Protests at Amherst.

“Campus Politics: A Cheat Sheet.”

“Chicago High Schoolers Launch Website Against School Food.”

“Newark Launching Community Schools with Facebook Money,” the AP reports. That’s another $12.5 million from the Foundation for Newark’s Future. Much more on Facebook money and politics below.

“Can a coding bootcamp replace a four-year degree?” asks Education Dive.

The Atlantic covers the inability of many highly qualified California students to get accepted into California’s universities.

Threats against Black students at Kean University turned out to be a hoax. .

Via NPR: “ExxonMobil, Columbia University Clash Over Student Journalists’ Reports.”

“Harvard to Discontinue Use of ‘House Master’ Title.”

Go, School Sports Team!

“Homeless and Mentally Ill, a Former College Lineman Dies on the Street.”

The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill has spent some $10 million on PR consultants and lawyers in order to deal with its academic and athletic scandals.

Rutgers has fired its athletic director and head football coach.

“There are currently only 75 bowl-eligible teams that can fill the 80 slots needed to complete the lineup for this year’s record-setting number of games, which has exploded in recent years,” Inside Higher Ed reports. Oh noes!

Via ESPN: “Davidson does not make exceptions to its rules for honoring former athletes. Not even for favorite son Stephen Curry. The school retires only the jerseys of players who graduated. And Curry, the most recognized and accomplished player in school history, has not completed his degree requirements after going to the NBA a year early in 2009.”

From the HR Department

“Underemployment rates for college grads have sharply declined since the 2008 recession,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Upgrades and Downgrades

“Penn State imagines a world where robots write the books.” Great.

“Carnegie Mellon Software Intends To Teach Kids Without Teachers.” Awesome.

Hypothes.is is partnering with “more than 40 publishers, technology firms and scholarly websites, including Wiley, CrossRef, PLOS, Project Jupyter, HighWire and arXiv” which will incorporate the startup’s annotation tools.

Via Infodocket: “The National Federation of the Blind and Scribd, Inc. have agreed to work together to provide access and make content available in Scribd’s subscription reading service and website accessible to the blind by the end of 2017.”

Edsurge has received funding from AT&T to write about ed-tech trends.

“Chromebooks Thriving in U.S. K–12, but Is Microsoft Poised for Global Growth?” asks Education Week.

Via Campus Technology: “The MIT Media Lab, Tufts University and PBS Kids have partnered to release a free app based on the ScratchJr coding language and designed to help kids aged five to eight learn coding concepts.”

Michael Feldstein writes that “Moodle Moves Give Hints of What a Post-Fork World Could Look Like.”

Via Edsurge: “A Look Inside Intel Education Accelerator’s First Demo Day.”

Funding and Acquisitions

Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan wrote a letter to their daughter and posted it on Facebook. In covering the news, the New York Times got the headline totally wrong: “Mark Zuckerberg Vows to Donate 99% of His Facebook Shares for Charity.” The paper later clarified that it’s not a charity but an LLC. Here’s the SEC filing. So many hot takes: “Mark Zuckerberg and the Rise of Philanthrocapitalism.” “Mark Zuckerberg Will Donate Massive Fortune to Own Blinkered Worldview.” “A primer for Mark Zuckerberg on personalized learning – by Harvard’s Howard Gardner.” “How Mark Zuckerberg’s Altruism Helps Himself.” “Mark Zuckerberg’s $45 Billion Loophole.” “The Surprising Math In Mark Zuckerberg’s $45 Billion Facebook Donation.” “You’re Not an Asshole, Mark Zuckerberg. You’re Just Wrong..”

CollegeDekho has raised $1 million from Girnar Software.

Tutoring marketplace Studypool has raised $800,000 in funding from unnamed investors.

College Select has raised an undisclosed amount of money from Brown Holdings.

Fastudent has raised an undisclosed amount of money from Ashish Gupta.

Blackboard has acquired predictive analytics company Blue Canary.

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

Via Troy Hunt: “ When children are breached – inside the massive VTech hack.” Via Boing Boing: “Bad toy security led to massive toy maker hack that leaked data for 4.8 million families.” “Vtech toy data-breach gets worse: 6.3 million children implicated,” Cory Doctorow writes in a follow-up. More coverage from The New York Times and ZDNet. “Privacy, Parenting, and the VTech Breach,” by Common Sense Media’s Bill Fitzgerald. “VTech vs EDTech,” by Tony Porterfield

“Google Deceptively Tracks Students’ Internet Browsing, EFF Says in FTC Complaint.” Coverage from Buzzfeed, The Wall Street Journal, and Techcrunch. Google responds. Google-funded Future of Privacy Forum responds. EFF responds to the responses.

“What happened when a parent fought for his kid’s privacy at an all-Chromebook school.”

Via Detectify Labs: “Popular Google Chrome extensions are constantly tracking you per default, making it very difficult or impossible for you to opt-out. These extensions will receive your complete browsing history, all your cookies, your secret access-tokens used for authentication (i.e., Facebook Connect) and shared links from sites such as Dropbox and Google Drive. The third-party services in use are hiding their tracking by all means possible, combined with terrible privacy policies hidden inside the Chrome Web Store.”

“A study from ID Analytics found that 140,000 identity frauds are perpetrated on minors each year.”

The Prince George’s County school system posted students’ disciplinary records on a Weebly site, “where anyone could see them.”

“The Elf on the Shelf is a surveillance-normalizing little creep.”

Data and “Research”

This report on the future of the LMS market in the US will cost you $2500, so no matter what 2015–2019 holds for learning management systems, the market for spendy research reports remains strong.

From the Center on Online Learning and Students with Disabilities: “Equity Matters: Digital and Online Learning for Students with Disabilities.”

From the GAO: “Federal Funding for and Characteristics of Public Schools with Extended Learning Time.”

According to a survey conducted by the National Coalition Against Censorship, trigger warnings are neither widely used by professors nor widely demanded by students, despite the media writing about trigger warnings again and again and again this year.

“Districts Struggle to Judge Ed-Tech Pilot Projects,” Education Week reports, drawing on a survey by Digital Promise.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Many educators have expressed concern about the findings in a new analysis from the American Council on Education, which note a significant drop since 2008 in the proportion of low-income recent high school graduates who enroll in college. But some analysts are raising questions about the analysis because it is based on data from the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau.”

Via Vox: “Stat check: Is 98% of research in humanities and 75% in social science never cited again?”

Larry Cuban examines biases in the Gates Foundation’s survey of ed-tech “Teachers Know Best.”

“Your Facebook Friends Who Post BS Inspirational Quotes Really Are Dumb, Says Study.”

“Should kids learn to code?”

This is the second in my series The Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

Standardized testing has a long history in the United States. But it’s become closely associated with– inseparable from, dare I say – school reform and accountability measures in recent decades, thanks in no small part to President George W. Bush’s signature piece of education legislation, No Child Left Behind.

As I noted in the previous post in this series, “The Politics of Education Technology,” Congress has made a concerted effort this year to try to update NCLB, the latest iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The House of Representatives passed the revision, the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015, this week, and the Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill next week. Students will still have to take standardized tests every year from third grade thru eighth, but the federal government will no longer use the results for accountability measures – that’ll be up to the states.

Standardized testing has a long history that connects it to education technology too. Both have roots in the early twentieth century alongside educational psychology – multiple choice tests, testing machines, and later, teaching machines. And to this day, standardized testing remains big business for ed-tech, increasingly so as testing moves online).

Recommended reading on the history and (perhaps) the future of testing: Anya Kamenetz’s 2015 book The Test.

The Common Core State Standards

One of the (many) major conflicts in US education policy revolves around the role the federal government can play. “Education is primarily a State and local responsibility in the United States,” the Department of Education says on its website. “It is States and communities, as well as public and private organizations of all kinds, that establish schools and colleges, develop curricula, and determine requirements for enrollment and graduation.”

And it’s from this division – federal versus state control – that much of the controversy over the Common Core State Standards emerges. Republican presidential candidates, for example, often repeat their contention that the Common Core is “federal overreach.” (Those who don’t blame the feds for the CCSS often blame the Gates Foundation.)

Even though the Common Core State Standards were released 5 years ago (and I’ve included the CCSS as a “Top Ed-Tech Trend” for the lasttwo), there seems to still be a great deal of confusion about what the Common Core State Standards actually are. So bookmark this from Vox: “The Common Core Explained.”

Because no, despite protests in Tennessee this fall, the Common Core does not require teaching Islam. It does not require teaching students how to use condoms. Repeat after me: the Common Core is not a curriculum. The Common Core is not a curriculum. The Common Core is not a curriculum.

Funnily enough, according to Vox (again), “The more people say they know about the Common Core, the less they actually do.” Perhaps that’s because so many people get their information about the Common Core from social media, which continued throughout the year to provide us with viral stories and images about math assignments and the like. “You’re wrong about Common Core math,” James Goodman recently wrote in Salon. “It makes more sense than you think.”

Forty-six states initially adopted the Common Core, but since then several have backed out of the standards themselves or have backed out of one of the two testing consortia, PARCC and SBAC. It’s been hard to keep track of this (much like it’s hard to keep track of which states have received waivers from the Obama Administration for NCLB. Because LOL, “standards.”) But here are some of the updates this year as states have taken legislative and sometimes legal steps to address the Common Core:

In January, Mississippi said it was withdrawing from PARCC. The Mississippi House of Representatives passed a bill that would “ban use of a Common Core-related test, end high school exit exams in biology and U.S. history and push the state Board of Education to adopt standardized tests published by the ACT organization.”

Also in January, Chicago Public Schools announced it would only give 10% of students the new PARCC exam, going against the state of Illinois’ decree that all students take the test. The Department of Education responded by threatening to withhold some $1.2 billion in funding for Illinois and Chicago.

In February, a legislative committee in Arizona moved forward with an effort to dump the Common Core (and its associated tests) in that state. In March, The New York Times noted that “Arizona Governor Seeks Review of Common Core Education Standards.”

In March, a bill in New Hampshire said it would require students to learn cursive and their multiplication tables – cursive is not part of the Common Core and if kids don’t learn cursive, Western Civilization will fall. Or something.

In June, the Missouri legislature“directed the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to sever ties with the test developer, Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, which provided 17 other states with exams aligned with the Common Core. The provision is part of an appropriations bill that Gov. Jay Nixon signed into law. It eliminates $4.2 million the education department needed to pay Smarter Balanced for next year’s tests.”

Also in June, Arkansas said it planned to drop the PARCC test and use the ACT instead. (This is a trend, I tell you, a trend. More on it below.) The vote to do so and and to use ACT Aspire tests instead occurred in July.

In October, in one of the few announcements of this sort, the Department of Defense Education Activity, which operates schools for children from military families, said it was joining PARCC.

By the end of the year, even Massachusetts – ah, the state at the pinnacle of standardized testing achievement – said it would develop its own Common Core assessments, dropping its plans to use PARCC’s.

Although the Common Core’s been around a while, 2015 marked the year that states implemented the tests associated with the standards. And results of the tests aside (more on that below), many struggled with that very implementation. That’s not a surprise, as a COSN survey found early in the year, “We’re Not Ready for Online Tests.”

There were worries about how the move to online testing might affect scores. There were worries that there weren’t enough computers for test-taking. There were worries about kids’ abilities to type. There were worries about Internet connectivity, particularly in poor and rural schools. And many of the worries were real. The problems weren’t just with district infrastructure; there were problems with vendors’ websites. There were technical problems in Minnesota, Florida, Colorado, New Jersey, Nevada, North Dakota, Montana, and elsewhere. While some blamed the vendors and some blamed IT (and some just told the press it was a “technical blunder”), several states blamed“hackers)” for their problems – the new “the dog ate my homework” excuse. The Common Core tests in one New Jersey school district were postponed as its entire computer network was held hostage by ransomware in exchange for 500 Bitcoins, approximately $124,000.

“The Agony of Taking a Standardized Test on a Computer” by 11th grader Rebecca Castillo.

Of course, technical issues just add to students’ stress levels: “When Testing Technology Fails, Students Fear They Will Too.” And the technical problems were so bad in some states, that they also prompted concerns about the validity of the scores and about states’ ability to meet the federally mandated levels of test participation (exacerbated too by the “Opt Out” movement. More on that below). Several statesaccused their testing vendors of breach of contract, and several switched vendors (again, more on that below).

And so… the results? Well, we were warned last year that test scores would go down, thanks to the new (and for many states, higher) standards and tougher assessments. And scores did fall in New York, for example (and of course The New York Times was on it) and at California charter schools. The scores nationwide also showed that achievement gaps between white, Black, and Latino students persist.

How do you obscure how bad the results are? Delete historical test data, I guess.

According to the Associated Press at least, “As Common Core results trickle in, initial goals unfulfilled.” And if nothing else, despite one of the initial promises of the Common Core – that it would end the inconsistency from state-to-state in educational standards – “Test Scores Under Common Core Show That ‘Proficient’ Varies by State.”

Here’s Education Week’s round-up of states’ results.

Blame whomever you want on the falling scores. (These sorts of things are always used to confirm people’s pre-existing beliefs about education.) Me, I’m blaming Zayn Malik and his announcement in May that he was leaving One Direction– I mean, who does such a devastating thing right in the middle of testing season?!

Even as the CCSS and its tests continue to be tweaked – shorter, fewer, more customizable (LOL, less standardized?), severed from accountability measures, and perhaps even increasingly opted out of – it appears that the education system remains committed to standardized testing).

The Business of Textbooks and Testing

And so testing remains big business, as it, along with the Common Core, has helped drive sales in hardware (calculators!), software, curriculum, and related services. That is, standardized testing drives the current boom in ed-tech.

“How compatible are Common Core and technology?” The Hechinger Report asked in March. Spoiler alert: very compatible.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the standardized testing craze, of course, is education behemoth Pearson. Although the company did become a little less big this year after losing its huge contract with Texas: for the first time in 30 years, the Texas Education Agency awarded its $280 million standardized testing contract to a company other than Pearson. (ETS won the bid to provide the STAAR tests for the next four years. Pearson will still get $60 million to develop a portion of the state’s assessments.)

I’ll have more details about “The Business of Ed-Tech” in an upcoming post, but let’s just go ahead about put this out here: “Everybody hates Pearson.” Fortune wrote that headline in January – one of my favorites of the year. Comedian John Oliver also took on Pearson in his news show Last Week Tonight.

Needless to say, Pearson was not amused.

Elsewhere in testing contracts: Ohio went with AIR as its test vendor. Indiana dumped CTB-McGraw Hill for Pearson. Pearson lost a testing contract in California and whined that it was totally unfair. New York state also dumped Pearson, a $44 million contract. Pearson had to shave $1 million off its contract with the state of Minnesota because of glitches in the online testing system. Nevada announced it would cut ties with Measured Progress, its standardized testing vendor, after it had troubles with online testing this spring, choosing Data Recognition Corporation instead.

McGraw-Hill Education decided to get out of of the testing business (almost) altogether, selling most of it to the aforementioned Data Recognition Corporation. “DRC will acquire ‘key assets’ of McGraw-Hill Education’s CTB assessment business, the organizations said. Those assets include McGraw-Hill’s existing state testing contracts, as well as a lineup of other assessment products, including TerraNova, LAS Links, and the Test Assessing Secondary Completion, or TASC, a high school equivalency exam,” Education Week reported.

Ed-tech companies that offer test prep and tutoring continue to receive sizable amounts of investment from venture capitalists (even though Khan Academy has promised to “disrupt” the test prep industry by offering its services for free. More on its partnership with the College Board below.)

So just how aligned is all this stuff to the Common Core? Spoiler alert: not very. And yup, textbooks – Common Core aligned or not – remain a (high-priced) disaster. Thanks, Texas!

But hey, as Marketplace contended, “you get what you pay for.” And as the Brookings Institution’s Matt Chingos argued, what we pay for testing is really not that much.

How the sausage is made: Pearson explains how tests are created. And The Plain Dealer explains how tests are graded: “ a very focused assembly line operation: Scoring 55 to 80 answers an hour is no problem for most.” Gasp! Graders are not teachers! (“A tradeoff,” perhaps. Or, the alternative: teachers do grade their students’ exams and lo, scores are higher.)

The “Opt Out” Movement

As I noted in my post on “The Politics of Education Technology,” President Obama announced in October that it was time for students to stop taking “unnecessary tests,” proposing that testing will be limited to just 2% of classroom time. Opponents of standardized testing were not assuaged.

But opponents were able to make plenty of news this year as the “opt out” movement spread. Students in Illinois and New Mexico walked out in protest of the new Common Core exams in March, for example. And in April, Education Week reported that nearly 15% of New Jersey eleventh graders had opted out of standardized tests this year. That same month, KING5 news in Seattle reported that 95% of students at the city’s Garfield High School had opted out of the Common Core assessments. In May, the movement had made it into the The New York Times: in New York State, “at least 165,000 children, or one of every six eligible students, sat out at least one of the two standardized tests this year, more than double and possibly triple the number who did so in 2014.” “Testing Revolt In Washington State Brings Feds Into Uncharted Waters” as more than 42,000 11th graders in the state did not take their mandated standardized tests this year, NPR reported in July.

(What do you do when you “opt out”? For some students, you just “sit and stare.”)

“What galvanized standardized testing's opt-out movement?” While some pointed the finger at teachers’ unions and some blamed parents, the “Opt Out” movement had support from politicians too, often tapping into more general displeasure with the Common Core. In January, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed an executive order allowing parents to opt their children out of the PARCC exam. “Opt out” legislation was passed in Oregon and Maine as well.

“The Rebellion against Standardized Tests is Exploding,” The Nation claimed. “Sorry, I’m Not Taking This Test,” said Mother Jones. “Standardized Tests Suck. But the Fix Is More Data, Not Less,” said Wired in typical Wired fashion.

All of this, as I noted above, raised questions about the validity of test scores and “hampered the analysis” of the results.

And if the results of the tests are murky so too were the results of many polls this year that tried to ascertain whether or not everyone really hates tests or only some people hate tests (where “some people” is code for middle-class white folks). Drawing on an NBC News State of Parenting Poll (sponsored by Pearson), the Hechinger Report asked “Does the anti-Common Core movement have a race problem?” According to a poll by USC and Los Angeles Times, “Majority of California’s Latino voters highly value school testing.” “Only 23% of Latinos said students were tested too much, compared with 44% of white voters.” “Why big civil rights groups think standardized testing is good for kids,” Vox reported. Also via Vox: “Parents think standardized tests are useless. Teachers agree.” Drawing on the results of a different poll, the NEA argued that “Americans Want Less Standardized Testing and More School Funding.” Making the results fit your politics, as one does…

Cheating

“The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” – Campbell’s Law

As the pressures from standardized testing increase, it’s hardly a surprise that cheating does as well. Of course, cheating pre-dates ed-tech, but ed-tech continues to get a fair share of the blame for facilitating it. OMG! Yik Yak! Smart watches! Social media! So truly, three cheers for those who still opt for the low-tech cheat: hiring someone to take the test for you or hell, just sharing the ol’ cheat sheet.

But on a serious note: the trial for the educators involved in the Atlanta public school district’s massive cheating scandal wrapped up this year. Former Atlanta public schools superintendent Beverly Hall passed away in March while the trial was still ongoing. In April, eleven Atlanta educators were convicted of racketeering for their role in the cheating scandal. They initially faced twenty years in prison. (Other educators charged with similar crimes elsewhere have been charged with fraud and forgery, and their sentences have been nowhere near as long as those faced in this particular case.) The Atlanta educators were led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, to remain in jail until their sentencing. At that time, two accepted negotiated sentences. Eight were sentenced to prison time, up to seven years. Their terms were later reduced from seven to three years.

This New Yorker article from last year paints the best picture, I think, about the pressures – political, administrative, and so on – in the district. Via The Atlantic: “What Really Happened to Atlanta’s Students When Their Teachers Cheated.”

From July: “The principal of a popular elementary school in Harlem acknowledged that she forged answers on students’ state English exams in April because the students had not finished the tests, according to a memorandum released Monday by the New York City Education Department. On April 17, the same day that someone made a complaint about the cheating, the principal, Jeanene Worrell-Breeden, of Teachers College Community School, jumped in front of a subway train. She died on April 25.”

Other Tests

While the federally-mandated standardized tests seems to get the lion’s share of attention and ire, there are lots and lots and lots and lots of other standardized tests out there – many, arguably, are quite redundant. A brief rundown of news from the other big tests this year:

ACT: While the SAT was long the popular college admissions exam, the ACT has become much more widely accepted. (Both the SAT and ACT are being used in some states as replacement for Common Core tests.) ACT expanded its computer-based testing this year, and like many testing vendors, it experienced a number of glitches. ACT also announced in June that it was phasing out Compass, “a popular but controversial college placement test that colleges use to determine whether students need to take remedial courses.”

“ACT scores in 2015 were flat,” Inside Higher Ed noted in August, “with a continuation of recent patterns of significant gaps in the average scores by race and ethnicity.” But ACT’s business continues to grow.

And bless their hearts, ACT made the case for multiple choice tests – they “can and do efficiently assess students’ higher-order thinking skills and reflect their real-world problem solving skills.” Keepin’ the dream alive.

SAT:There’s a new SAT, a Common Core-aligned SAT. Whee. (The head of the College Board, which administers the SAT is David Coleman, often described as the “architect” of the Common Core. So, in my best Church Lady voice, that’s convenient.)

The Bell Curve’s author tried to convince folks that the SAT doesn’t measure affluence. Yeah, right dude. Mmhmmm. Fighting the idea that that is precisely what the SAT has measured, a free SAT test prep website from Khan Academy (built in partnership with the College Board) went live this summer. There have been lots of predictions that this will “disrupt” the test prep industry and “level the playing field.” We shall see, right? Yeah, right…

Related: According to an investigation by ProPublica, “Asians Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Get a Higher Price from Princeton Review” for test prep services.

Meanwhile: “China’s Hot New Luxury Product: the SAT.”

The SAT suffered a number of securitybreaches this year, in one instance with the questions posted online a week in advance of the exam. It also had a printing error on the June 6 test, prompting the College Board to throw out that section and to waive the fee for those who wanted to retake it.

Panic at the disco: “SAT scores at lowest level in 10 years, fueling worries about high schools,” WaPo’s Nick Anderson wrote this fall, trying to fuel the panic, to which Vox’s Libby Nelson calmly responded with “The real reason SAT scores are falling.” “Is the College Board trolling high schools?” historian Sherman Dorn asked. And honestly, maybe this whole standardized testing thing is a giant troll…

Despite all the hullabaloo, more universities across the country have opted to drop their requirements for the SAT (or ACT) for admissions. Among them: VCU, Cornell College, Rivier University, UMass Lowell, George Washington University, The College of Idaho, and Salem State University. Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai will, however, be required to take the SAT if she applies to Stanford.

AP: Like the SAT, the AP is one of the College Board’s products.

There’s been a boiling controversy in the last year or so about the contents of the AP US History course (and subsequent test). In February, an Oklahoma legislative committee voted to ban the teaching of AP US History in the state, arguing that the curriculum was un-patriotic. The Jefferson County School Board, where students protested last year after it said it was going to review the AP US History curriculum to make sure it sufficiently promoted patriotism, said in February it that planned no such review. (For what it’s worth, those very board members were ousted in the mid-term elections this fall.) Caving to pressure from conservatives, the College Board said it would revise its AP US History curriculum in order to include more about the founding fathers, less about dead Native Americans, and to make Ronald Reagan and Manifest Destiny sound less horrible. As Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson suggested, after taking the previous new version of the AP, “I think most people, when they finish that course, they’d be ready to sign up for ISIS.”

I’ll look at the whole “learn-to-code” push in an upcoming post, but I will note here: “Nationally, 37,327 students took the AP CS A exam in 2014,” Mark Guzdial observed. “This was a big increase (26.29%) from the 29,555 students who took it in 2013.” “Barbara Ericson's 2015 AP CS demographics analysis: Still No African-Americans Taking the AP CS Exam in 9 States.” And Code.org teamed up with the College Board: because everyone needs to learn to code and then hand over money to the College Board for an AP test on the subject. Boom.

(Whispers: more students take the physics AP than the CS AP. Way more.) “10 most (and least) popular Advanced Placement (AP) subjects.”

“Is Advanced Placement’s Value in the Class or the Test?” Education Week’s Sarah Sparks looked at one study that suggests it’s the latter. So that’s good news for the MOOC-as-test-prep service launched by Davidson College, I guess.

GED: Like many other standardized tests, the GED has become Common Core-aligned. Like many other standardized tests, the GED is administered by Pearson. The recent changes to the GED continue to not be particularly beneficial for those who need the certification. The number of people getting their GED since recent changes to the test continues to decline. Nine times fewer people in Mississippi, for example, have passed the test.

This fall, The Pacific Standard reviewed the new GED: “Making the Case for a Good-Enough Diploma. Common Core and big business have combined to make the lot of the upwardly mobile high school dropout even more dire.” (“Could Your Pass the New GED Test?”)

Meanwhile, in what might be important trend to watch, more companies might once again decide to help fund their employees’ education: “Walmart, fast-food chains offer employees free GED program.”

NAEP: The “nation’s report card” is always an excuse to panic. Panic! Panic! Panic! Wring your hands! Speculate in order to confirm what you already believe about education and ed-reform! And/or read USC prof Morgan Polikoff for some sanity.

Starting in 2017, students who take the NAEP are supposed to be asked questions about their level of grit and their mindset. But now, “responding to budget constraints and priorities for the NAEP program,” the National Assessment Governing Board has decided“to postpone the administration of grade 12 in four subjects and the next long-term trend exams by four years.” It’s almost as though we don’t need NAEP scores, since we know how everyone will react, no matter the scores.

Exit Exams:In January, Arizona became the first state in the US to enact a law requiring high school students to pass the US citizenship test on civics before graduating. In October, California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that abolished the state’s high school exit exam and in turn awarded diplomas to thousands who’d failed the exam as far back as 2004 but had completed all their high school classes.

Instead of Standardized Tests?

OK, so this testing thing is big business. It’s political intrigue. It’s part of a long history of education research and psychometrics and ed-tech product development.

So what could schools do instead of standardized tests? Anya Kamenetz offers a whole list of things, surveys for starters.

Or: after we replace teachers with robots, we could just go on and replace students with robots too. After all, this year“an artificial intelligence software program capable of seeing and reading has for the first time answered geometry questions from the SAT at the level of an average 11th grader.” Think of how well we'll do on NAEP and PISA and the like if we just let the robots do the test-taking!

This is the third in my series The Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

Last year, I named one of the “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2014” “School as ‘Skills.’” By that, I wanted to refer to the powerful narrative that the primary purpose of education – at both the K–12 and university levels – is to prepare students for the workforce. This year, I’m looking at the continuation of that trend, borrowing a phrase that George Siemens used in a keynote this summer: “the employability narrative.”

Last year’s article included a number of updates about credentialing, competency-based education, and coding bootcamps – these have become important trends in their own right and warrant more in-depth discussion in separate posts.

It’s the Economy, Stupid

The US unemployment rate fell to 5% in October of this year, the lowest level in seven years. A closer look at those numbers gives you a slightly different picture: the overall unemployment rate for adult men is 4.7% and 4.5% for adult women. The unemployment rate for teens is 15.9%. For whites, it’s 4.4%, but for Blacks it’s 9.2%. For Asians it’s 3.5%, but for Latinos it’s 6.3%. The unemployment rate for those with no high school diploma is 6.8%. The unemployment rate for high school graduates is 4.9%, and the rate for those with a college degree 2.5%. (The latter constitutes “full employment.”)

The US economy added 271,000 jobs in October, “marking the strongest three years of job creation since 2000,” the White House boasted. Jobs were created in the following sectors: professional and business services, health care, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and construction. Employment in mining fell; employment in other industries, including tech, stayed the same.

(For what it’s worth, I’m using October’s figures as that was the latest dataset released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as I worked on this article. The November data has since been made available.)

Just to put things in perspective globally however, "about 39 million people ages 16 to 29 across the globe weren’t employed and weren’t participating in any kind of education or training in 2013. That’s 5 million more than before the economic crisis of 2008, a new OECD report stresses, and 2014 predictions don’t look much better."

I want to start this examination of the “employability narrative” in 2015 with a look at actual employment figures. I want to do so, in part, because of the steady drumbeat of stories that posit that schools are not adequately readying graduates for the job market and that graduates – particularly those who study the liberal arts – are unprepared for work.

Take the report released in January by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, for example, which found a discrepancy between how “career ready” soon-to-be college graduates describe themselves and how “career ready” employers think college graduates actually are. Or take the Gallup/Lumina Foundation poll from April in which just 13% of respondents “strongly agreed” that college graduates were prepared to succeed in the workforce. Or take the poll conducted by the Robert Morris University Polling Institute in June that found that only 49.2% of respondents felt colleges were paying enough attention to job market trends and just 54.8% thought there was enough emphasis in higher ed on job placement for graduates. Or take the Gallup/Purdue survey from September in which only half of college alumni ‘strongly agree’ that their education was worth what they paid for it.

So, the debate about whether or not college is “worth it” raged on in 2015, despite strong results on the job market for college graduates, including recent ones. Well, most graduates. As the Pacific Standard observed in February, “Elite University Degrees Do Not Protect Black People From Racism.”

Often when people refer to “most graduates” who do or do not succeed, it’s a statement not about racism but a judgment about which major the graduates selected. A study published this summer and covered by Inside Higher Ed noted that fears about unemployment and uneasiness with the job market do prompt students to select certain majors that they believe to be more lucrative, even if those majors – pre-law, for example – don’t actually offer strong job prospects and even if their switching majors doesn’t actually result in that big a shift in employment or wages. A survey of students attending the for-profit university Laureate Education also found that they want higher education to focus on “career outcomes.” But none of this should really be that surprising – particularly the findings of the latter survey. “Career outcomes” have long been the focus of for-profit higher education; and students do have to be realistic about how they prepare for a future that feels – is– quite precarious.

How does one defend against that precarity? It’s probably not just a “fix” for or by or through education – well unless you like invoking silver bullets as ed-tech entrepreneurs and politicians sure do. But surely it isn’t up to the institution of (higher) education alone to address employability and economic precarity. (Echoing a remark I made last year, I urge you to read everything Tressie McMillan Cottom writes– there are things, she has argued, that the “education gospel” cannot address.)

Nevertheless, employers have been happy in recent decades to wag their fingers at schools and to offload the responsibility of job training elsewhere, although in all fairness, a few companies did announce programs this year to subsidize their employees’ continuing education, perhaps marking a shift in their commitments: Chipotle, McDonalds, Starbucks, Chrysler, for example. Many schools in turn seem quite content to outsource job placement services too, along with so much of their ed-tech infrastructure, to third-party providers.

According to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in February, the US spends $1.1 trillion on college and workforce training. “However, the rate of increase for spending on formal training has been faster in higher education – an 82 percent increase since 1994 compared to a 26 percent increase by employers.” Those with college degrees receive the most formal training investment from their employers.

In March, President Obama announced a $100 million TechHire initiative that “aims to convince local governments, businesses, and individuals that a four-year degree is no longer the only way to gain valuable tech skills.” But four-year degree or not, post-secondary credentialing of some sort is expected. (Who are we kidding. Employers still specifically demand four-year degrees. I’ll explore this in more detail in the next post in this series.)

The So-Called Skills Gap

The “skills shortage” or “skills gap” is still invoked with great frequency, by politicians and tech entrepreneurs alike. This shortage has fueled a great deal of interest in “jobs training” and “learn-to-code” startups – more on those below – that promise to meet the (purported) demands of the job market. From an article I wrote this fall about coding bootcamps:

I write “purported” here even though it’s quite common to hear claims that the economy is facing a “STEM crisis” – that too few people have studied science, technology, engineering, or math and employers cannot find enough skilled workers to fill jobs in those fields. But claims about a shortage of technical workers are debatable, and lots of data would indicate otherwise: wages in STEM fields have remained flat, for example, and many who graduate with STEM degrees cannot find work in their field. In other words, the crisis may be “a myth.”

But it’s a powerful myth, and one that isn’t terribly new, dating back at least to the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and subsequent hand-wringing over the Soviets’ technological capabilities and technical education as compared to the US system.

It’s a myth that’s found some play on the presidential campaign trail as well, as several candidates have openly mocked those who major in the liberal arts (even though many of the candidates themselves have degrees in the liberal arts).

(I just want to observe in passing here that it’s probably not liberal arts majors who are the most disillusioned about their professional futures; it’s college athletes.)

At a Republican Party debate this fall, Florida Senator Marco Rubio argued that higher education “is too expensive, too hard to access, and it doesn’t teach 21st-century skills.” Graduates, he contended, end up with massive amounts of student loan debt but cannot find jobs. “I don’t know why we have stigmatized vocational education,” he also said. ”Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers.“ The droves of self-appointed fact- and grammar-checkers on Twitter quickly pointed out that 1) correct usage is ”fewer philosophers“ and that 2) philosophers actually earn more. Politifact also rated Rubio’s claims about welders as ”false."

According to Payscale, philosophy majors make an average first-year salary of $42,200. The average mid-career pay for philosophy majors is even better: $85,000 per year.

Additionally, the median pay for philosophy professors is nearly $90,000 per year, according to salary.com. The top 10 percent of philosophy professors make more than $190,000 a year.

Rubio will be hard-pressed to find a welder who makes a comparable salary. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median wage for welders, cutters, solderers and brazers is $37,420 – about $18 an hour. The top 10 percent of welders earn $58,590 or more. That's significantly less than the top 10 percent of philosophy professors, who earn $190,000 or more.

Of course, we’d be hard-pressed too to call welding a “21st century skill,” despite Rubio’s stump speech. Humans have been connecting metal with heat for, ya know, millennia. But nobody pays attention to the history of tech when you can slogan-ize the hell out of things.

And nobody pays attention to the history of ed-tech when you can act as though you’re the first person or first organization to support programming education. (Happy 35th anniversary to Seymour Papert’s Mindstorms!)

Everybody Should Learn to Code

Remember the Year of Code? That was Codecademy’s big push back in 2012 (and every year since) that “everyone should learn to code.” Even NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he was going to learn to code.

Hey, maybe that’s why he’s not running for President. He’s too busy working on his ruby-on-rails app. Or something.

Since I first started covering this renewed “learn-to-code” trend in 2011 and 2012, we have seen more and more people – government officials, educators, entrepreneurs – jump on the bandwagon.

In January, Kentucky legislators proposed a bill that would allow computer science courses to count as a foreign language credit. (Ugh.) Washington state passed legislation in June strengthening computer science education, thankfully rejecting an earlier attempt to allow CS classes to count as a foreign language credit. In September, NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a ten-year deadline for all schools in the city to offer computer science (although CS won’t become a graduation requirement). (Sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci’s response is well worth reading.) LAUSD also said it plans to expand computer science to every grade by 2020– the district’s billion-dollar iPad investment are going to be super useful for that. And here’s an awesome headline by Edsurge from February: “‘For the Preservation of Public Peace,’ Arkansas Students Will Learn to Code.” (That’s how the legislation framed the importance of programming: “immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health and safety.”) In March, the state also passed a law requiring students learn cursive. Regardless, Wired said that Arkansas is “leading the learn to code movement,” because good grief, ed-tech journalism is terrible.

Even worse: before he left office this year, Australia’s education minister Christopher Pyne approved a new curriculum that replaced the teaching of history and geography with the teaching of programming. “The new curriculum echoes successful programs implemented in the United States such as Code.org and ‘Hour of Code’, with the support of Google and Microsoft, including the United Kingdom who introduced coding in primary schools last year,” Business Insider reported, making me question what industry folks think “successful programs” actually look like.

As Georgia Tech professor Mark Guzdial recently noted, “Computing education is being discussed today because of the technology industry. We would not be talking about CS in K–12 without technology industry needs. It’s the NYC tech industry who pushed for the initiative there (see their open letter). It’s the tech industry funding Code.org (see funders here). That’s not necessarily a bad thing to have the tech industry funding the effort to put computer science in schools, but it is a different thing than having a national consensus about changing public school education to include computer science.”

While the legislative and school-based efforts to push the “learn to code” mantra ostensibly open up this skill to everyone, there are still many inequalities when it comes to learning computer science and joining the tech sector (more on that below), something that’s exacerbated, arguably, with the push to make “coding” into a consumer-oriented product. That is, it’s still something affluent parents can more readily offer their kids (even at the preschool level) through expensive hardware, software, toys, and private classes. For example, the learn-to-code startup Tynker announced it would be offering classes at some 600 Sylvan Learning locations.

The push for more computer science education has also become a nice marketing label for the educational toy industry. Disney’s all over it, of course, partnering with Google for a new cartoon series, Miles from Tomorrowland, that aims to inspire kids to code. Disney’s also pushing Star Wars branded learn-to-code stuff too. Disney’s pushing Star Wars branded everything though, let’s be honest.

More “learn to code” startups did release school-focused marketing and products this year: Sphero, MakerBot, LittleBits, and the Micro Bit, for example. But these “learn to code” companies’ business models don’t always make sense for schools or libraries, as librarian David Lee King wrote about this fall as his library struggled with its Treehouse subscription.

Nevertheless, the push for more computer science has been a boon for companies offering this sort of education. A small sample of the “learn to code” and “skills training” startups that have raised venture capital this year: Lynda.com ($186 million). LittleBits ($44.2 million). Thinkful ($4.25 million). CodeHS ($1.75 million). Globaloria ($995,000). Flatiron School ($9 million). Kano ($15 million). Wonder Workshop ($6.9 million). One Month ($1.9 million). Udacity ($105 million). General Assembly ($70 million). Andela ($10 million). Udemy ($65 million). (This doesn’t include the boom in funding for private student loan providers, many of which are targeting students attending coding bootcamps. I’ll write more about that disheartening trend in my upcoming post on for-profit higher ed. And I’ll have a lot more to say about these bootcamps, “the new for-profit higher ed,” in that post too.)

A sample of the “learn to code” and “skills training” startups that were acquired this year: Hack Reactor bought Makersquare. Pluralsight bought Code School. LinkedIn bought Lynda.com. The Apollo Group bought Iron Yard. And in a follow-up from one of last year’s big ed-tech acquisitions, it appears that Microsoft hasn’t fucked up Minecraft. Yet.

What Do We Mean by "Coding"?

What exactly do we mean when we say “everyone should learn to code” or “everyone should make”? (The latter question seems particularly relevant as, according to the latest K–12 Horizon Report, makerspaces (among other things) are “on the horizon.”)

Early in 2015, the Computer Science Teachers Association released the results of its 2014 high school survey. Among the findings, “participants applied the term ‘computer science’ to a vast array of topics and courses, many of which were submitted as ‘other’ courses in response to the topics that were provided in the survey. Participants classified studies in business management, yearbook layout, artificial intelligence, robotics, office applications, and automated design as computer science courses.” It’s not clear how, even with legislative support in some states for computer science counting towards high school graduation, schools will fit it into the curriculum. (And perhaps this explains why the “Hour of Code” is so popular. I mean, it’s just an hour.)

Recommended reading: “Why I Am Not a Maker” by Olin College of Engineering professor Debbie Chachra. Also recommended, this conversation between Garnet Hertz and Alexander Galloway on “Critique and Making”:

…To be a person in the modern world, one should know at least one foreign language and one computer language. So let’s learn how to code, but let’s also read Plato.strong>

Meanwhile, education industry behemoth Pearson is doing the “maker” thing now too – which just might be all you need to know about that particular buzzword and how it’s being wielded and co-opted by education and education technology companies.

Diversity, Employability, and the Meritocracy Lie

The technology industry continues to struggle with diversity, despite claiming that it’s working to hire more people of color and women. If, indeed, education is forced to bend towards the “employability narrative,” the discrimination and bias in the tech sector is going to be even more of a problem, as we’re pushing for a certain sort of skill-set for work in an industry that remains incredibly exclusionary.

Part of the problem is still the pipeline (and making things pink or “girly” isn’t going to fix things, thank you very much, nor is highlighting athletes from the least diverse of the big four professional sports). Female students and students of color remain underrepresented in computer science majors and classes, and many simply don’t see technology as a good career choice for them.

Even as the “learn to code” movement congratulates itself for its expansion and normalization, a report from the Level Playing Institute released this year “found that public schools with a high number of students of color are half as likely to offer computer science classes as schools with a predominately white or Asian student body.” (Level Playing Institute founder Freada Klein and her husband Mitch Kapor announced $40 million in funding for diversity initiatives to “fix the leaky tech pipeline.”)

Edsurge asked in July “Will Teaching New Computer Science Principles Level the Playing Field?” No. It won’t. Not until the culture of the tech industry changes.

See, the pipeline is just part of the problem. As The LA Times observed in February, women are leaving the tech industry “in droves.” And here’s a gem from The NY Magazine this summer:

A former Google diversity head decided he wanted to build a museum dedicated to women’s history in London’s East End, so he submitted a proposal outlining his goals last October. But after the proposal was approved and construction on the museum began, Mark Palmer-Edgecumbe promptly switched tactics, and instead decided to build a museum dedicated to the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper, who exclusively targeted female sex workers. His excuse? Jack the Ripper is less boring than exploring women’s history and accomplishments.

You sorta get the feeling that when people say “everybody should learn to code” in order to close that so-called “skills gap” that there’s an asterisk there: certain restrictions may apply.

Such was the case at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that announced in February that it would “no longer admit Iranian national students to specific programs in the College of Engineering (i.e., Chemical Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Industrial Engineering) and in the College of Natural Sciences (i.e., Physics, Chemistry, Microbiology, and Polymer Science & Engineering).” (It later changed its mind, reversing the new policy.)

Also running afoul of preconceptions about who should code and who should “make,” 9th grader Ahmed Mohamed, who was handcuffed and interrogated by police after he brought a homemade clock to school. (Pro tip: “How to Make Your Own Homemade Clock That Isn't a Bomb.”)

Support for Mohamed was overwhelming. Even the POTUS weighed in. (For what it’s worth, I think it’s important that we call out the injustice of the school-to-prison pipeline as it affects all students, particularly students of color, not just those students who are science whizzes.)

LinkedIn and the Employability Narrative

In April, on the heels of the news that it had acquired Lynda.com for $1.5 billion, MindWires Consulting’s Michael Feldstein wrote that “LinkedIn is the most interesting company in ed tech.”

LinkedIn is the only organization I know of, public or private, that has the data to study long-term career outcomes of education in a broad and meaningful way. Nobody else comes close. Not even the government. Their data set is enormous, fairly comprehensive, and probably reasonably accurate. Which also means that they are increasingly in a position to recommend colleges, majors, and individual courses and competencies. An acquisition like Lynda.com gives them an ability to sell an add-on service – “People who are in your career track advanced faster when they took a course like this one, which is available to you for only X dollars” – but it also feeds their data set. Right now, schools are not reporting individual courses to the company, and it’s really too much to expect individuals to fill out comprehensive lists of courses that they took. The more that LinkedIn can capture that information automatically, the more the company can start searching for evidence that enables them to reliably make more fine-grained recommendations to job seekers (like which skills or competencies they should acquire) as well as to employers (like what kinds of credentials to look for in a job candidate). Will the data actually provide credible evidence to make such recommendations? I don’t know. But if it does, LinkedIn is really the only organization that’s in a position to find that evidence right now. This is the enormous implication of the Lynda.com acquisition that the press has mostly missed, and it’s also one reason of many why Pando Daily’s angle on the acquisition – “Did LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda just kill the ed tech space?” – is a laughable piece of link bait garbage.

LinkedIn may well be at the very center of the “employability narrative” trend, and the acquisition of Lynda.com certainly underscores the importance of “skills training” as ongoing professional development and, as Feldstein notes, as signalling. As such, LinkedIn is helping to push for a changing notion of credentialing as well. (More on that in the next post in this series.)

Oh and some fun trivia for Marco Rubio: LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman has a master’s degree in philosophy.

This is the fourth article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

When I wrote about “Competencies and Certificates” as one of the major ed-tech trends of 2014, I noted that “Neither competency-based education nor alternative certification efforts have reached the frenzied hype of MOOCs. (Not much in education technology has, with the possible exception of Khan Academy.)” And while there was no frenzy, I did think that these could be poised to become such. So to be honest, I thought we’d actually see more happen this year with competencies and credentialing. This still feels to me like a trend that only certain folks are really pushing for. (Then again, you can probably say that about every trend I examine in this series.)

There was, no surprise, plenty of hype as publications continued to trumpet alternative credentials as hastening the end of the college degree. “If B.A.’s Can’t Lead Graduates to Jobs, Can Badges Do the Trick?” The Chronicle of Higher Education asked in March. “Corporations are turning to digital credentials instead of higher ed to train and educate,” Fast Company asserted this summer. Also from this summer, "“How Nanodegrees Are Disrupting Higher Education.” “Can a coding bootcamp replace a four-year degree?” Education Dive asked earlier this month. In an op-ed in Techcrunch, the CEO of skills training company Pluralsight argued that “Edtech’s Next Big Disruption Is The College Degree.”

As I wrote in the previous article in this series, it’s not clear that the college degree is actually in trouble, despite the increasing cost of obtaining one. It’s something that employers continue to value very highly, even for positions that have not traditionally required a Bachelor’s. Indeed, what we might be seeing instead of the end of the college degree is its spread – that is, a “credential creep,” the demand not just for more post-secondary education but for more certification. We can see this happening among the graduates from coding bootcamps and MOOCs, for example, many who are also college graduates; and while we can talk about these two trends in terms of “skills training,” the value of these programs certainly lies in the certification they offer as well.

What’s always striking to me is that alternate forms of credentialing are posited as a new thing, as a brilliant innovation (of course!) devised recently by tech and ed-tech companies. Here’s an excerpt from the aforementioned Fast Company article about Pearson’s badging platform, Acclaim:

Acclaim arrives at a time when traditional academic degrees are falling out of favor, in part due to their staggering cost, and online learning options are on the rise. Back when badges emerged on the scene in 2012, education pundits were optimistic that these new digital credentials could be a “fantastic bargain” by allowing students to bypass the expense of college tuition. “If digital badges infiltrate the credential market, they could shake the economic foundations of a higher-education industry that over the last 30 years has consistently increased prices much higher than inflation and family income, resulting in over $1 trillion in outstanding student loan debt,” Kevin Carey wrote in The New York Times. But so far, it’s been private employers, not universities, that have taken the lead.

The article, titled “Say Hello to the University of Microsoft,” notes that Microsoft was one of Pearson’s first clients for its Acclaim program. It does not mention that Microsoft has been offering a certification program since 1992. So remind me again: what’s new here?

Perhaps what’s important is not so much the (supposed) newness of alternative credentialing – I’ve written stories this year on the long history of “learn to draw” correspondence courses and of career colleges, for example – but in the political and economic power behind this latest push. That is, the repetition of narratives about education that run through this and many of the other trends I’m exploring in this year-end series: that education is “broken,” that it’s not sufficiently preparing students for “skilled” work, that private companies will do this better than public education, and so on.

One more excerpt from that Fast Company article:

“We’re going to see private companies creating their own education systems,” CEB executive Jean Martin, a human resources expert, told an audience of education insiders at a recent conference. Human-resources departments are increasingly borrowing from supply chain management practices, she said, as they look to custom-engineer their “suppliers” of people.

The Economist gives this trend a nod as well, so that’s something to look forward to.

The Promise of the Microcredential

As Fast Company observes, some education pundits were optimistic about badges’ potential for “disruption.” Well, mostly the pundits who are always giddy about such a thing. (A correction: Mozilla announced its Open Badges Infrastructure Project in 2011, not 2012 as the article suggests.)

But as 2015 comes to an end, there might not be much to cheer about when it comes to Mozilla’s work on that project. Or at least, that’s the argument Kerri Lemoie made in November: “Mozilla is Doing a Hack Job on Open Badges.” Lemoie observes that the team working on Open Badges has been disbanded, and she argues that the project lacks financial and technical resources, as well as leadership. Doug Belshaw, who left Mozilla earlier this year, responded to Lemoie’s article, contending that despite the “inflated expectations,” the “future remains bright” for Open Badges, in part because of the open source nature of the project.

Pearson’s badging platform is built using Mozilla’s framework, for what it’s worth, although it doesn't make "open badges" available to all its users. There are also several competing badging and certification platforms – proprietary platforms. (One of these, Achievery, stopped issuing badges this spring.) I don’t think it’s actually self-evident that open source will triumph here, in part because credentialing remains part of a powerful prestige market.

That prestige might be something working in the favor of some new credentialing programs, particularly within the tech sector. Or least, I think it could work for Udacity, whose founder Sebastian Thrun has the imprimatur of both Stanford and Google (along with some $160 million in venture funding). Udacity launched its “nanodegrees” last year and has continued to expand its offerings via partnerships with Google and other companies. Thrun says that 1000 students have graduated from Udacity and 150 have used the nanodegree to get a new job or move up in their current one.

“We can’t turn you into a Nobel laureate,” Thrun told The New York Times in September. “But what we can do is something like upskilling – you’re a smart person, but the skills you have are inadequate for the current job market, or don’t let you get the job you aspire to have. We can help you get those skills.” It might be “upskilling,” but it’s also “upcredentialing,” as many of these nanodegree holders are also holders of Bachelor’s and beyond.

(Never fear, I plan to write more about what’s become of MOOCs in an upcoming article in this series.)

So this “upcredentialing” begins to get at the heart of some of the problems of badges and nanodegrees and microcredentials and the like. We might pay lip service to the notion that we want a better way “support deeper learning” or to signal specific “skills,” but credentialing – particularly the college degree – is a signal for much more than that. We can see this in the relationship between Stanford grads and the tech industry, for starters, or between Wharton and Wall Street.

So when I hear people say “In a technical role in Silicon Valley, nobody cares about your degree if your GitHub account is solid,” I call bullshit. This attitude tries to obscure the privilege and power in tech culture – “exclusion and exceptionality in the pipeline,” in traditional and yes in alternative education programs, in hiring practices, and in management.

While the ed-tech industry has been touting the promise of microcredentialing and alternate certifications for quite a while now, a drumbeat that’s been echoed in the press, I noticed a significant uptick this year in stories about fake degrees. Priceonomics reported this year that a fake Harvard degree will run you $650 (and you needn’t sit through any MOOCs). In May the New York Times investigated the digital diploma mill Axact, which makes tens of millions of dollars a year selling fake degrees. Federal investigators in the US announced they would crack down on fake schools that are selling documents to foreigners trying to obtain student visas, and the British government also indicated that it planned to investigate websites offering fake degrees.

What “counts” as a “real” credential? Who decides?

Competency-Based Education

And what “counts” as a credit?

At the beginning of the year, the US Department of Education said it would let more schools experiment with competency-based programs.

Wait, what’s “competency-based education,” other than another education reform buzzword? Michael Feldstein wrote a helpful explainer last year if you still need clarification. But in a nutshell, competency-based programs enable students to progress through courses if they can show, via assessment, that they’ve sufficiently grasped a topic. This differs from how progression traditionally happens in schools, whereby students stay in a class for a set length of time – a semester, for example.

In related news, the Carnegie Foundation released a report this year on the Carnegie Unit (that’s what we call the contact time between student and instructor), “A Century-Old Standard in a Changing Education Landscape.” Among its findings, “our research suggests that the Carnegie Unit is less of an obstacle to change than it might seem.”

Recommended reading: “Asynchronous course hour – systemic impacts of the digital on higher education” by Dave Cormier.

Despite a push from the Department of Education at the beginning of the year for more schools to explore competency-based education, by mid-year, op-eds were being penned like this one from the New America Foundation: “Whatever Happened to the Department’s Competency-Based Education Experiments?” The problem, according to that op-ed’s author Amy Laitinen, “the Department of Education has been dragging its feet,” failing to offer guidelines for the schools interested in experimenting with CBE. “We’re flooring the accelerator and the brake at the same time,” “Dean Dad” Matt Reed observed in response.

In March, Southern New Hampshire University, one of the schools involved in the federal CBE experiment, announced that its president Paul LeBlanc had been hired by the Department of Education for a short-term appointment in order to focus on competency-based education and “developing new accreditation pathways for innovative programs in higher education.” And in September, the department (finally) released a CBE Experiment Reference Guide, announcing a few months later it would expand the very experiment.

While several accrediting agencies did say that they would work on a common framework for assessing and approving competency-based education programs, it appeared by the end of the year that accreditation would be a sticking point in these initiatives moving forward. In October, “The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Inspector General has pumped the brakes on competency-based education, partially due to concerns about the level of interaction between instructors and students in some of those programs,” Inside Higher Ed reported.

With or without the support of the Office of Inspector General, education technology companies, particularly learning management systems, have been working on various products that they can sell to cash in on what they hope will become a big trend. In April, for example, Ellucian, maker of the much reviled Banner system, acquired Helix Education’s competency-based LMS. Phil Hill looked at the deal with pragmatism; Michael Horn of the Clayton Christensen Institute was more dogmatic, pronouncing this the “new LMS wars.”

Also poised to benefit from competency-based education are testing companies, as CBE is assessment-heavy. Related: the recent revisions to the GED, one of the earliest examples of competency-based assessment, continue to prove problematic, “failing a large number of people who need a second chance to get ahead.” The number of people who are passing the new GED test, now administered by Pearson, continues to fall. Preliminary standardized test results from SNHU’s competency program, on the other hand, have been called “promising.”

But what “counts” as a “competency”?

Do Employers Care about Competencies and Credentials?

As I suggested in the previous article in this series on “The Employability Narrative,” the purpose of education is increasingly posited as “to prepare students for work.” We can debate whether or not the content and curriculum of traditional education does that, but we should also examine whether or not alternative paths do that as well. And the question here isn’t simply “what do students know” but it’s “what do employers believe job applicants can do.”

According to a report released by the American Enterprise Institute, very, very few employers are even aware of competency-based education programs. (I imagine one could say the same for nanodegrees and other microcredentials. But I’m only guessing.) And even though Education Week suggested this fall that “Competency-Based Education Gets Employers’ Attention,” it’s not really clear that’s the case at all, in part because many employers admit they haven’t really identified specifically what skills or competencies they’re interested in hiring for. It’s so much easier instead just to snarl and make vague assertions that schools aren’t adequately preparing students for the future. It’s so much easier to hire based on the signal of the college degree (and the prestige associated with certain colleges).

To echo what I wrote in “The Employability Narrative,” I do think that LinkedIn might be the lynchpin in any efforts to rethink credentialing. LinkedIn has continued to push for its users to include more formal and informal education information in their profiles. So while it probably cannot bust the prestige market of the college degree, it can offer more data to prospective employees and employers alike. (I say this recognizing that “more data” is often confused with better decision-making.)

Accreditation Issues

The next post in this series will turn in more detail to for-profit higher education, which has had its share of run-ins with accreditors and federal and state agencies this year. No doubt, the interrelationship among the trends in this series – the politics of ed-tech, standardized testing, job skills, credentialing, and for-profit higher ed – is really on display here. These all involve issues of power and policy, of who decides “what counts,” of how we measure what we purport to value in education, and of who profits.

Last year, one of the biggest accreditation stories involved the City College of San Francisco which was threatened with closure. In January, the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges voted to grant City College “restoration” status, giving it two more years to address its issues (which involved administrative failings and financial woes). As several other California community colleges faced sanction from the ACCJC – among them, Berkeley City College, College of Alameda, Merritt College, and Laney College – a taskforce convened by state’s community college system said that it would look for a new accreditor, releasing a report that “concluded that the structure of accreditation in this region no longer meets the current and anticipated needs of the California Community Colleges. Furthermore, the task force concluded that several past attempts to engage with the ACCJC to make the accreditation process more effective and collegial have yielded very little in the way of progress.” As Buzzfeed’s Molly Hensley Clancey pointed out,

The drama playing out in California is an example of the risks of relying on accreditors as the sole gatekeepers of federal funding – and of trusting that they will take action against failing schools. Accreditors are membership organizations made up of the colleges they are tasked with overseeing; this means they are funded with membership fees from the very schools whose credentials they have the power, at least theoretically, to revoke.

For its part, the Department of Education urged accreditors to be more than “watchdogs that don’t bark” and to be more transparent with data about student outcomes (typically code for “graduates’ wages”). But the department noted too that it has very little statutory authority in actually holding accreditors accountable (and let’s be honest, the chance that Congress gives the Department of Education more power are slim-to-none.) One change: accrediting agencies will have to submit “decision letters – which the department will then publish online – when they put institutions on probation.”

Almost in the same breath that it demanded more accountability for accrediting agencies, the Department of Education has also launched an experiment that would loosen financial aid restrictions for unaccredited education providers like MOOCs and coding bootcamps.

I’ll have a lot more to say in the next post in this series about that. But I’ll close with this: one of the applicants to become an “outside quality-assurance entity” as part of that experiment is Paul Freedman and his new company Entangled Solutions. Freedman’s last startup, Altius Education, ran into problems when, in 2013, accreditors shut down the Ivy Bridge College program that it had developed at Tiffin University. This year, Freedman filed a lawsuit against the accreditor that put Altius Education out of business, “alleging that the accreditor illegally ‘strong-armed’ the closure of Ivy Bridge College as part of a ‘witch hunt’ against nontraditional higher education.” Freedman also launched Entangled Ventures this year – described in a profile in the The Chronicle of Higher Education as “part incubator, part investment fund, part consultant, and part reseller of services.”

“It would be better to have more of an open marketplace,” Freedman told Inside Higher Ed about his plans to offer quality assurance for bootcamps. But even in a so-called “open marketplace,” let's be honest, there are powerful forces vying to accept whose credits and whose credentials will “count.”

Education Politics

The Senate approved the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act – the Every Student Succeeds Act, which will replace No Child Left Behind. President Obama signed the bill on Thursday. Via Vox: “How schools will be different without No Child Left Behind.” Via NPR: “How Poor And Disadvantaged Students Will Fare Under The New Education Law.” Computer science is now considered part of a “well-rounded education,” according to the new law. “Will Ed-Tech Companies Prosper From ESEA Reauthorization?” asks Education Week. Spoiler alert: yes.

The new National Education Technology Plan was unveiled on Thursday. Here’s Edsurge’s coverage of the new plan and its assessment of the previous one.

A bill in Florida would allow students to substitute computer science for the foreign language graduation requirement. (A terrible idea.)

“California politician wants computer science to count as math pre-req.” (Also a terrible idea.)

First Lady Michelle Obama raps that everyone should go to college.

“Chris Christie Wants Fewer Rock-Climbing Walls, More iPads in Education.”

“The CDC Gives U.S. Schools Low Marks In Sex Ed.”

Education in the Courts

Abigail Fisher was back at the US Supreme Court with her challenge to race-based admissions at the University of Texas. Via Vox: “Fisher v. Texas, the Supreme Court's big affirmative action case, explained.” The questions from some of the Justices were simply awful. “Chief Justice Roberts asked why diversity matters in a physics class. Here's an answer,” says Vox’s Libby Nelson. Antonin Scalia said he thought African American students should be kept out of the university and be poised towards a “less advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well.” He’s wrong on “mismatch.” Scientific American columnist Danielle N. Lee responded to Scalia, drawing on her own experiences in science. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce also weighed in.

“More than 100 students involved in a sexting scandal at a southern Colorado high school will not face criminal charges,” says the Fremont County DA.

Via the LA School Report: “A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge issued a preliminary injunction yesterday against Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, the latest development in the effort by the LA teachers union, UTLA, to unionize Alliance teachers.”

“The FCC Is Being Forced to Defend Net Neutrality in Court,” Wired reports. Observers said that the judge seemed to be okay with the new rules.

Testing, Testing…

“Are American students overtested?” asks OECD’s Andreas Schleicher, who insists they’re not. Confirmation bias in action.

“A task force Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo created is calling for changes in what New York State students learn and how they are assessed,” The New York Times reports.

From FiveThirtyEight: “How Arne Duncan Lost The Common Core And His Legacy.”

“New bill would end PARCC testing in N.J..”

Accreditation

American Council on Education, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Association of American Universities have asked the Department of Education for more flexibility when it comes to accreditation.

The Department of Education has recommended that the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges which oversees accreditation for California’s community colleges should lose some of its authority. More via Inside Higher Ed.

“Dean Dad” Matt Reed responds to talk on the presidential campaign trail and in think-tank-land about changing accreditation.

“The University of Tennessee at Martin has been placed on probation by its regional accreditor for falling short of standards related to evidence of institutional effectiveness and general education competencies,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

MOOCs and UnMOOCs

Market research firm MarketsandMarkets says that MOOCs will be a $8.5 billion industry by 2020 (up from $1.83 billion today). Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha. No.

“Charter Oak State College is the latest institution to grant college credit to learners in select massive open online courses offered by edX,” Inside Higher Ed reports. “In January, learners who take two computer science MOOCs offered by the University of California at Berkeley and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology can pay the college $100 a credit hour to receive credit – provided they score an 80 or higher in the course and pay to have their identity verified.”

Meanwhile on Campus

“The president of Liberty University, a leading evangelical Christian college in Virginia, urged students to apply for concealed-weapons permits and said that if more people did so, then ‘we could end those Muslims,’” reports The New York Times.

“Citadel confirms suspensions after cadets filmed in white hoods.”

An op-ed from Sara Goldrick-Rab and Katharine Broton in the NYT: “Hungry, Homeless and in College.”

Some 120 students at Boston College are sick after an norovirus outbreak at a Chipotle near the school.

“Meal Plan Costs Tick Upward as Students Pay for More Than Food.”

“Evangel University of Missouri announced plans to fire a group of faculty and staff. It looks like another queen sacrifice,” says Bryan Alexander.

Via The New York Times: “More than two dozen religiously affiliated colleges and universities across the United States have received exemptions from the federal civil rights protections provided under Title IX since 2014, documents show, waivers that activists said allow them to discriminate against students and employees on the basis of categories like sexual orientation and gender identity.”

Miller College will close.

“Virtual-Reality Lab Explores New Kinds of Immersive Learning.” The lab in question is at University of Maryland College Park, built thanks to money donated by Oculus Rift’s founder.

A love letter to AltSchool in The NYT.

Via The LA Times more on the LAUSD’s probe that led to the firing of Rafe Esquith: “The Los Angeles Unified School District’s internal investigation into celebrated fifth-grade teacher Rafe Esquith found that he allegedly fondled children in the 1970s and that in recent years he inappropriately emailed former students describing them as hotties, ‘sexy’ and referring to himself as their personal ATM, according to new documents.” The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews calls this a “witch hunt,” which to me is just a mind-boggling response.

“More Colleges Rescind Cosby Degrees.”

“Massive DDoS Attack Leaves UK Universities Without Internet.”

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Diversity’s Elusive Number: Campuses Strive to Achieve ‘Critical Mass’.”

Go, School Sports Team!

Via The Guardian: “Concussion expert says children shouldn’t play football until they turn 18.”

“College coaches are pushing the N.C.A.A. to end a largely hidden practice that has become increasingly common: the recruitment of young high school and occasionally even middle school students,” according to The New York Times.

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Steve Sarkisian, the former head football coach of the University of Southern California who was fired in October after he appeared to be intoxicated at a game and during team meetings, sued the university Monday, alleging that he was discriminated against on the basis of a disability.”

From the HR Department

Via The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Executive Compensation at Private and Public Colleges.” More on presidents’ salaries via The New York Times.

Via Politico: “Brian Jones was sworn in Friday as the 15th president of Strayer University, a for-profit with 78 campuses. Jones spent four years as general counsel of the Education Department during the Bush administration. Movement between the department and the for-profit industry tends to draw ire from sector critics. (One example is Sally Stroup, who left the department’s Office of Postsecondary Education for the for-profit college trade group APSCU.)”

“Erika Christakis, associate master of one of Yale University’s residential colleges, has decided to stop teaching at the university, in part because of the continuing controversy over an email message she sent about Halloween costumes,” reports Inside Higher Ed.

Non-tenured faculty at the University of Chicago have voted to unionize.

Michael Horn, formerly of the Clayton Christensen Institute, will head up a $25 million ed-tech fund, the Robin Hood Education + Technology Fund.

The Wall Street Journal profiles the training and staffing startup Andela. “Is Africa Hiding the Next Mark Zuckerberg? The Future of Tech Talent.”

Via Re/Code: “Economists Suggest Silicon Valley Startups Aren’t Really Creating Many Jobs.”

Upgrades and Downgrades

This week was Computer Science Education Week. I don’t think I saw as much excitement (on Twitter at least) about it or the Hour of Code. But maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the right thing. Perhaps it’s as MIT Media Lab’s Mitch Resnick told NPR: “We’re Making Computer Class Way Too Boring.”

“IBM Ends Its Boneheaded #HackAHairDryer Campaign After Backlash” Wired reports.

“Are Hardware Toys the Future of Kids’ Coding?” asks Edsurge.

According to Futuresource Consulting, Chromebooks made up 51% of devices shipped. It’s not clear to me if this was shipped to the K–12 ed-tech market or to the market as a whole, but hey there’s an infographic.

In an interview with Buzzfeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that his company won’t make “testing machines” like Chromebooks.

The Atlantic examines“Silicon Valley’s College-Consultant Industry.”

From Mike Caulfield: “Introducing Wikity.”

According to Phil Hill, the University of Phoenix is ditching its “homegrown” LMS platform and adopting Blackboard Learn Ultra.

Via Edutechnica: “Year in Review: Top LMS Developments of 2015.”

“Feminist Frequency launches practical guide to defend against online harassment.”

Funding and Acquisitions

The Noodle Companies, founded by John Katzman (who previously founded The Princeton Review and 2U), has raised $28 million. Education Week looks at its latest product, Noodle Markets, “a one-stop, Amazon-like source for K–12 schools and districts searching for educational tools.”

Everwise has raised $8 million from Canvas Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and the Webb Investment Network. The mentor-matching startup has raised $10.35 million total.

BrainStorm has raised $6.4 million from Kickstart Seed Fund and Jeremy Andrus.

GoNoodle has raised $5 million from Children's Health, Chrysalis Ventures, and SSM Partners (as well as debt funding from Gefinor Capital and Rand Capital). The company, which makes “brain break” exercise videos and whose questionable privacy practices have been explored by Bill Fitzgerald, has raised $10.9 million total.

Jigsaw Academy has raised $3 million from Manipal Global Education Service. The company offers data science classes.

Edsurge has raised $2.8 million in funding from 1776.vc and the Omidyar Network, as well as a $600,000+ grant from the Gates Foundation to expand its coverage to higher ed ed-tech. Edsurge has raised roughly $5.6 million total.

VLurn has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding so it can built a mobile app.

Open English has acquired Next University. Terms were not disclosed.

Via The Wall Street Journal: “Barnes & Noble Education Profit Falls 9.6%.”

Data, Privacy, and Surveillance

Via Motherboard: “Bugs in ‘Hello Barbie’ Could Have Let Hackers Spy on Children’s Chats.”

Via NPR: “At School And At Home, How Much Does The Internet Know About Kids?”

Via Re/Code: “When Personalized Learning Gets Too Personal: Google Complaint Exposes Student Privacy Concerns.”

Data and “Research”

From the Pew Research Center: “Public Interest in Science and Health Linked to Gender, Age and Personality.”

“A sting operation by the environmental group Greenpeace suggests that some researchers who dispute mainstream scientific conclusions on climate change are willing to conceal the sources of payment for their research, even if the money is purported to come from overseas corporations producing oil, gas and coal,” The New York Times reports. Researchers from Princeton and Penn State took the money.

Whiteboard Advisors asked ed-tech investors about ed-tech investments. 66% said they believe ed-tech companies are overvalued. (Meanwhile, “Investors at Ed-Tech Forum Offer Advice to Companies.”)

“What People Want to Know About the Payoff of Different Degrees.”

Via Inside Higher Ed: “Stability and modest growth. That’s what U.S. colleges and universities can expect over the next year to 18 months, according to a 2016 outlook by credit rating agency Moody’s Investors Service.”

Education loans increased in October.

“4 in 5 Parents Question Value Proposition of College,” according to a survey by Kaplan Test Prep.

According to a study by the National Education Policy Center, charter schools are a “gravy train.”

This is the fifth article in my series Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2015

Predictions about “the end of college” are hardly new. For its part, Silicon Valley has been forecasting “disruption” and doom for higher education for a while now. “The higher education bubble,” as Peter Thiel called it back back in 2011, is poised to burst, leaving just a handful of universities (well, and ed-tech startups, of course).

This year, predictions about “the end” weren’t (necessarily) about all of higher education. Maybe, some said, we’ll just see the end of small private colleges or the end of HBCUs. Or maybe we’ll see the end of for-profit universities. “Today, the for-profit-education bubble is deflating,” James Surowiecki argued in The New Yorker in November.

Whether the end is near or not, the for-profit higher education industry did have a pretty rough year, finding itself with both legal and financial troubles. Enrollments were down, revenue was down, and profits were down at many of these companies, and governmental agencies – state and federal – went after them with a vengeance. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the sector is in fact shrinking, with almost 100 fewer for-profit colleges operating in 2014–2015 than in 2012–2013. (For comparison, the number of public universities decreased by eighteen and the number of private nonprofits increased by three in that same time period.)

Despite the problems faced by for-profit universities, I’m skeptical that the industry is really on the verge of collapsing. Instead, I’d contend that it’s mutating into new forms and new markets. I recently wrote an article on “Coding Bootcamps and the New For-Profit Higher Ed,” and you can find a lot of my arguments there about these new alternate education providers as a continuation of older career colleges, antecedents to today’s for-profit higher ed.

The locus has not completely shifted from Wall Street to Silicon Valley – that makes for a nice shorthand, I think, to describe some of the changes – but I do see some of the power shifting. As I have repeated several times throughout this series, we can see evidence of that in the confluence of many important trends in education and ed-tech – “the employability narrative,” alternative credentials, testing and other data-oriented education technologies, online education, and so on.

Recommended reading: The Baffler’s “Cyborg Soothsayers of the High-Tech Hogwash Emporia” on Google-funded, unaccredited Singularity University.

Student Loan Debt

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, US student loan debt officially surpassed $1.2 trillion this year. And whether we look at that figure in total or whether we consider the amount owed by each individual, the student loan debt continues to drive many of the conversations about higher education:

Is it worth it?

Certainly the rising cost of college tuition and this growing amount of student loan debt fueled the calls this year for free college. (See the first article in this series for more on “The Politics of Education Technology.”)

But it’s important to drill down and see what that debt looks like and for which students. In September, the Brookings Institution released a report on student loan debt, examining records from 1970 to 2014:

These data show that to the extent there is a crisis, it is concentrated among borrowers from for-profit schools and, to a lesser extent, 2-year institutions. We refer to these borrowers as “non-traditional” because historically there were relatively few for-profit students and because 2-year students rarely borrowed. As a result, these borrowers represented a small share of all federal student loan borrowers and an even smaller share of loan balances. However, during and soon after the recession the number of non-traditional borrowers grew to represent half of all borrowers. With poor labor market outcomes, few family resources, and high debt burdens relative to their earnings, default rates skyrocketed. Of all students who left school and who started to repay federal loans in 2011 and who had fallen into default by 2013, 70 percent were non-traditional borrowers.

The default rate did fall slightly this year – from 13.7% to 11.8%. Colleges whose students have high default rates could face losing financial aid eligibility, but as Inside Higher Ed noted, the Department of Education tweaked how it calculated which colleges should be punished and as a result few were.

This underscores what could be seen as the contradictory approach to for-profit higher education undertaken by the Obama Administration this year. While it has pushed for “gainful employment” rules in order to demand more accountability from for-profit colleges – indeed, it has tried to extend “accountability” throughout all education institutions at all levels – it also launched an experiment this year to allow MOOCs, coding bootcamps, and other alternate, unaccredited providers be eligible for financial aid.

Financial aid for these new for-profit education companies raises all sorts of issues, in no small part because of the role that federal aid played in expanding for-profit higher ed in the first place. (It was this alongside the shrinking state budgets for public education.) The left-learning think tank The Century Foundation released a report this fall cautioning against the expansion of financial aid eligibility and arguing that this would flood the market with “low-quality programs run by charlatans.”

But as I argue in my article on “Coding Bootcamps and the New For-Profit Higher Ed,” without access to financial aid, these new programs will only serve the affluent – or at least those who can afford to pay out-of-pocket and those whose credit scores make them eligible for private student loans. (And that’s something that will help to perpetuate the monoculture of the tech sector.)

According to Course Report’s survey, 49% of [bootcamp] graduates say that they paid tuition out of their own pockets, 21% say they received help from family, and just 1.7% say that their employer paid (or helped with) the tuition bill. Almost 25% took out a loan.

That percentage – those going into debt for a coding bootcamp program – has increased quite dramatically over the last few years. (Less than 4% of graduates in the 2013 survey said that they had taken out a loan). In part, that’s due to the rapid expansion of the private loan industry geared towards serving this particular student population. (Incidentally, the two ed-tech companies which have raised the most money in 2015 are both loan providers: SoFi and Earnest. The former has raised $1.2 billion in venture capital this year; the latter $245 million.)

I’ve written a lot, in that article and elsewhere, about the so-called “skills gap” and the notion that coding bootcamps, learn-to-code MOOCs, and the like will lead to good, high-paying jobs. Perhaps they will; perhaps they won’t. But it’s important to remember that that has always been the promise of for-profit higher education, and the industry’s marketing practices have lured a lot of students into debt.

Loan Forgiveness

The movement to forgive student debt, particularly those with debt from for-profit colleges, did not start this year although it had several important victories in 2015.

Rolling Jubilee, one of the organizations leading the charge for loan forgiveness, has its roots in Occupy Wall Street, arguing that there’s a much larger connection between debt between economic injustice. By buying up debts on the secondary market and paying them off with donations, Rolling Jubilee announced last year that it had erased some $3.9 million in private student loan debt.

But tactics started to change this year. Rather than buy back and pay off these loans, some student activists started to refuse to pay altogether. In March, Department of Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell and officials from the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and the Treasury Department met with some of these student “debt strikers,” part of a group called the Corinthian 100. At the time, the government officials did not seem particularly open or responsive to these students’ demands, and the group canceled a later meeting with the Department of Education in May, saying they felt like they were being used as a “publicity stunt.” “They’re using us so they can pretend to care about students,” said the Debt Collective’s Laura Hanna, who helped organize the student protestors.

The Corinthian 100, as the name suggests, are students of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, which runs schools like WyoTech, Everest, and Heald. Wait. That sentence should be in the past-tense. Former students of Corinthian Colleges, which ran… The disaster – lawsuits, investigations, bankruptcy, closure – of the now defunct Corinthian Colleges warrants its own section below.

As the year went on, the Department of Education did respond to the requests to forgive these students’ loans. In April, nine states’ attorneys general urged the department to forgive the loans of students who attended Everest. In June, the Department agreed, announcing that students of Corinthian Colleges would apply to have their loans forgiven. “The department estimated that if all 350,000 Corinthian students over the last five years applied for and received the debt relief, that cost alone could be as much as $3.5 billion,” The New York Times reported. By September, it had forgiven the debts of some 3000 borrowers (out of 8000 who’d applied). In December, the Department of Education said it had granted the requests made by more than 1300 students who’d attended Heald College.

Debt forgiveness shouldn’t just be for Corinthian Colleges’ students. That was the argument of three Senate Democrats who criticized the Obama Administration earlier this month “for settling a fraud lawsuit against Education Management Corporation last month without forgiving the loans of students who attended the for-profit college chain or holding the company's executives personally accountable.” In November, the for-profit Westwood College agreed to forgive the student loan debt of graduates of its criminal justice program – about $15 million worth of debt – as part of a settlement reached with the Illinois attorney general. And EDMC agreed to forgive the loans of some 80,000 students as part of a settlement it reached with several states’ attorneys general.

Recommended reading: “These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they're getting even.” by Susie Cagle.

Investigating For-Profits

As the massive venture capital investments this year in SoFi, Earnest, and other private student loan providers suggests, this problem is not going away, even if the government reins in its own loan offerings. Indeed, people will continue to go into debt for college as long as the job market places such a high value on a diploma. A diploma will lead to a (better) job – although clearly not all diplomas are valued equally. Again, we have to ask: how do we know if the debt or the diploma is worth it?

The Obama Administration released the final version of its “gainful employment” rules late last year. These rules, which only apply to schools that are eligible for Title IV federal financial aid, would measure and monitor the debt-to-earnings ratio of graduates from career colleges and programs and in turn penalize those schools whose graduates had annual loan payments more than 8% of their wages or 20% of their discretionary earnings. Earlier versions were invalidated by a federal court in 2012, and while for-profit education providers did file a motion to block the new rules, a judge dismissed that challenge in May and another in June. Republicans in Congress, however, have added verbiage to a 2016 appropriations bill that would scrap the rules altogether.

The fight over “gainful employment” was just one example of the many, many efforts to crack down on for-profit higher education this year:

In February, graduate students at the for-profit Walden University (owned by Laureate Education) filed a lawsuit that “alleges that the school's rapid growth and focus on profit and marketing have created a dragged-out and misleading dissertation and thesis process, forcing students to spend more money on tuition.”

In April, a court ruled that “Trump University” (not an accredited university) must pay $798,000 in legal fees to a former student for filing an anti-SLAPP suit. “Tarla Makaeff sued Trump University and Donald Trump in 2010, in a proposed class action alleging deceptive business practices. Makaeff claimed she shelled out $60,000 for a real estate program that consisted of seminars that were little better than infomercials. Trump University countersued, accusing Makaeff of defaming it in online postings and elsewhere.”

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs announced in April an investigation of Berkeley College, Mandl School, and New York Career Institute and Technical Career Institutes over their recruiting practices and students’ loan default rates.

A federal appeals court ruled in April that a lawsuit against Western Educational Inc. which runs the for-profit college chain Heritage College could proceed, ordering the company “to defend itself on charges it defrauded the U.S. government by altering grade and attendance records in an effort to receive more federal student aid.”

In May, the Oregon Justice Department ordered for-profit Penn Foster College to pay more than $73,000 in order to refund a student’s tuition and to change its claims that it actually is an accredited school.

In May, the SEC filed a lawsuit against ITT “charging the large for-profit chain and its two top executives with fraud for allegedly concealing massive losses in two student loan programs the company backed.” That same month, the California Department of Veterans Affairs ordered ITT to stop enrolling new or returning students who plan to use GI Bill benefits.

The New York Attorney General announced in June a lawsuit against the College Network. The suit charges that the company duped students in Indiana into “thinking that the College Network had an affiliation with Excelsior College and then selling various services that were in theory designed to help with Excelsior programs. But the services were unrelated to Excelsior, and the College Network’s products did nothing to prepare students for Excelsior exams, the suit says.”

In June, Education Affiliates settled with the Department of Justice over false-claims allegations. “The Maryland-based company agreed to pay $13 million in response to allegations that it received aid payments from unqualified students, some of whom the for-profit admitted by creating false or fraudulent high school diplomas.”

In July, news broke that the University of Phoenix was being investigated by the FTC.“Regulators are looking into allegations of ‘deceptive or unfair’ marketing practices at the school, which is struggling to turn its reputation around.”

Kaplan Career Institute and Lincoln Technical Institute announced in July they’d pay $2.4 million in a settlement with the state of Massachusetts over allegations that the for-profits had inflated job placement numbers.

In August, California’s attorney general said she was investigating the University of Phoenix for deceptive marketing practices aimed at veterans.

In August, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau demanded records from the the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools, an accreditor that oversees many for-profits. The ACICS is fighting the CFPB in court, arguing that the latter does not have any jurisdiction over accrediting agencies. (It’s not clear if the ACICS is the target of the CFPB’s probe or if this is related to another investigation.)

In August, the FTC said it planned to investigate for-profit education provider Career Ed.

In October, the Department of Defense said it would bar the University of Phoenix from recruiting on military bases, and troops will no longer be able to use federal money to pay for classes at the school. The FTC also announced in October it was investigating the University of Phoenix.

The Department of Education announced “stricter oversight” of ITT Education Services in October.

Alejandro Amor, the owner of the for-profit college FastTrain, was convicted on twelve counts of theft of government money and one count of conspiracy in November.

In November, Buzzfeed reported that Xerox is under investigation by the CFPB for its student loan business.

The New York Times reported in November that “The nation’s second-largest for-profit college operator, Education Management Corporation, is expected to agree to pay nearly $90 million to settle a case accusing it of compensating employees based on how many students they enrolled, encouraging hyperaggressive boiler room tactics to increase revenue.” But as The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Goldie Blumenstyk observed, “Little for Students in ‘Historic’ Settlement of Education Management Case.”

But coding bootcamps and MOOCs are gonna be a totally different for-profit higher ed, right? Because the incentives are… yeah.

Corinthian Colleges (1995–2015)

The handwriting has been on the wall for some time, but in April, Corinthian Colleges announced that it was shutting its doors, effective immediately. The closure left some 16,000 students at its Everest, Heald, and Wyotech College schools without a school to attend. (The Department of Education posted a list of “viable schools” for these students to transfer to, including many for-profits listed above, under investigation for various violations.)

This particular chain of for-profit colleges had been under fire for a while, accused by the CFPB of predatory lending and fined by the Department of Education for defrauding students, among other things. Last year, the US Department of Education had reached a deal with the chain to close or sell off all of its 107 campuses and online programs. The Canadian government, for its part, had shuttered fourteen Corinthian schools in that country. In February, the Zenith Education Group (a.k.a. student loan debt collector ECMC) said it had finalized its acquisition of 50+ Everest and WyoTech campuses from Corinthian. Corinthian filed for Chapter 11 this spring, and while The New York Times said that its “lean business model” left little for creditors, the company did seek approval for a “fire sale of its remaining assets – including trademarks, furniture, and even old diplomas and typewriters.” The bankruptcy judge did earmark some of those assets – about $4 million– for a special fund for former students that could be used to pay off loans. Another judge ruled that the school was liable for about $530 million in damages to former students because of deceptive marketing and predatory lending.

Perhaps that sounds like it should have wrapped up all the various legal investigations, but nope. Last month, the Department of Education and California’s attorney general said they’d uncovered even more students who were ripped off by Corinthian, which made false claims about its job placement rates.

How does something like this happen?! It’s a special blend of lobbying efforts, dark money, accreditation oversight (or lack thereof), financial aid and financial motivations, deceptive marketing, “the employability narrative,” “credential creep” – you know, the politics of education and yes, ed-tech.

Closures and “Queen Sacrifices”

Corinthian Colleges weren’t the only schools who shut their doors, as financial and legal pressures prompted many to do so:

Globe University and the Minnesota School of Business announced in February they were shutting down programs– “the latest development for the schools, which have been under increasing scrutiny since Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson filed suit accusing them of using high-pressure sales tactics to mislead students about their job prospects after graduation.” In March, AIB College of Business said it was shutting down and donating its campus to the University of Iowa. In April, DeVry University said it planned to close some of its campuses and “rebrand.” That same month the online for-profit Jones International University announced its closure. In May, Career Education Corporation and EDMC Corp announced they would close schools – the former, closing all its “career colleges” and the latter closing a quarter of its Art Institute campuses. In July, Mount St. Clare College announced it would close its doors in 2016. Bridgepoint Education bought the college in order to secure accreditation for its for-profit Ashford University, and apparently it has now served its purpose. In October, Dade Medical College closed. In November, Westwood College, a for-profit chain with 14 campus locations, said it had stopped enrolling new students.

It wasn’t just for-profit universities that closed either, as a number of small religious and liberal arts colleges also shut their doors, including Clearwater Christian College, Marian Court College, George Wythe University, and American Indian College.

“Closure rates of small colleges and universities will triple in the coming years, and mergers will double,” Inside Higher Ed reported in September. “Those are the predictions of a Moody’s Investor Service report released Friday that highlights a persistent inability among small colleges to increase revenue, which could lead as many as 15 institutions a year to shut their doors for good by 2017.”

From The Washington Post: “How to spot a college about to go out of business.”

Education analyst Bryan Alexander continued this year to cover what he’s called the “queen sacrifice” – that is, moves made by university administrators to ax degree programs and lay off faculty. Again, this isn’t something that solely affected the for-profit sector; indeed, it’s just as much a reflection of what happens at publics as their funding shrinks. But while some of this is related to budgetary issues, the types of programs that are cut echoes what I’ve written previously about “the employability narrative” – that is, it’s the liberal arts and social sciences on the line most often, while technical, business, and engineering classes – the kinds that for-profits have long specialized in – remain.

A couple of other notable closure/non-closure, money/no money news items: Briar College announced in March it would close at the end of the school year; its students and alumni fought back; and the school announced this summer that it would remain open (for the time being, at least). And after its board of trustees voted last year to charge tuition for the first time in the school’s history, prompting a huge uproar from students, faculty, and alumni (and after an attorney general investigation), it appears as though Cooper Union might have found a way to remain tuition-free after all. (These examples both underscore the importance of having students and alumni who will protest and fight for your school; do for-profits cultivate that same loyalty?)

The Business of For-Profit Education

Despite the decrease in enrollments and revenue and an increase in layoffs at some for-profit colleges, there was plenty of business activity this year, including an IPO filing for the largest company in the business, Laureate Education. Or rather, it said it planned to IPO again, as it was a publicly traded company until 2007 when it was sold to a private equity firm.

In preparing for its IPO, the company announced that Bill Clinton would be stepping down as “honorary chancellor.” Or maybe that should read “in preparing for the presidential campaign…” Bill Clinton earned some $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 for the job. According to emails released by the State Department as part of the “email scandal,” Hillary Clinton had also pushed for Laureate to have a seat at a higher ed policy dinner hosted by the department during her first year as Secretary of State. It’s worth noting perhaps: the State Department partnered with Coursera to promote MOOCs globally. Laureate is an investor in Coursera.

But this section is about “the business of for-profit higher ed,” not the politics. (Ha.)

Some other business transactions in the for-profit higher ed sector: Education Corporation of America bought thirty-eight Kaplan campuses. Apollo Education Group, the parent company of the University of Phoenix, acquired the coding bootcamp Iron Yard. Like I said, for-profit higher ed isn’t collapsing; it’s just shuffling over to where it thinks the money will be.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t note here the business transactions in the for-profit K–12 sector. After all, the $100,000,000 invested in AltSchool, a private school startup founded by former Google exec Max Ventilla, was one of the largest VC funding rounds this year. Using the “chain” model of charters and for-profit colleges, AltSchool says it plans to expand out of Silicon Valley to newcities in different parts of the US.

The media covered AltSchool glowingly, sounding the “factory model of education” klaxon and repeating some fairly common marketing about “reimagining school.” I’ll have a lot more to say about AltSchool’s particular brand of “personalization” in an upcoming post – Mike Caulfield has described it as “Dewey plus surveillance.” But it’s worth noting that Ventilla was far from the only wealthy tech executive who decided to forego public education and launch a private (for-profit) school. Elon Musk, Sal Khan, and Mark Zuckerberg were among the others in the news for doing so this year – as Wired) put it, “The Tech Elite’s Quest to Reinvent School in Its Own Image.”

Other industries try to do the same, no doubt. This fall, The New York Times wrote about “High School Football Inc,” a look at private, for-profit schools that focus on sports.

When Laureate announced its IPO, it indicated its plans to become a public benefit corporation, a specific type of company that has the goal of “public benefit” in addition to maximizing profits. Stratford University also said it would become a public benefit corporation. A related trend among for-profit higher education companies this year: changing their tax status to not-for-profit. Herzing University and Community Care College were among those who made the switch this year. Responses from the media: “Some Owners of Private Colleges Turn a Tidy Profit by Going Nonprofit,” The New York Times reported. And in The Washington Post, “The rise of the covert for-profit college.”

Mapping (and Legitimizing) the For-Profit Education Sector

The tax status of education providers is just one example of where the clear line between for-profit and not-for-profit might be blurring. A similar issue also shows up at the K–12 level in the US with debates about whether or not charter schools are public or private. (This was certainly the question at stake when the Washington State Supreme Court declared charters unconstitutional this fall.) The explosion of ed-tech in recent decades and the propensity for schools to outsource various tech services to for-profit companies – course design, course “delivery,” learning management systems, assessment, and so on – muddies definitions here too.

I feel like accusations of “privateers” and privatization get bandied about in education debates rather carelessly. Then again, Illinois state senator Bill Brady did propose privatizing the state’s higher education system this year. And he wasn’t alone in suggesting that this might be the best path forward for the education system.

“The New American University,” at least as envisioned by ASU President Michael Crow, relies not simply on a model of reduced public funding but on technology, adjunct labor, skunkworks, “managerial autocracy,” and corporate partnerships. (“Terrifying.”) Elsewhere in terrifying visions of the future: from The Chronicle of Higher Education, An Online Kingdom Come: How Liberty U. became an unexpected model for the future of higher education– that’s Liberty University, founded by televangelist Jerry Falwell.

In other partnerships of the word: The Chronicle of Higher Education suggested that all this “disruption” was drawing universities and media companies together: “The University of Southern California is joining forces with Wired; Northeastern University with Esquire; the Financial Times with a group of business schools; and the University of Oklahoma with the History Channel.” Fortune teamed up with Cornell University for an online business certificate. Strayer University partnered with The Daily Mail for an “elaborate year-long branded content deal.” Strayer also partnered with Fiat-Chrysler car dealerships, whose employees will have their tuition covered.

But the most notable ed-tech partnerships – or rather the ones to keep an eye on in the future – began to blossom this year between coding bootcamps and universities. (I think this is slightly different than the partnerships between MOOC providers and universities, in part because of the focus on computer programming training from bootcamps as opposed to the more traditional university curriculum offered by, say, Coursera’s MOOCs.) These new partnerships are partly a result of the Obama Administration’s EQUIP experiment to extend financial aid eligibility to these alternate providers. That is, these providers have to have an accredited partner (that is, a college or university), but that partner in turn will be able to get around the rules that currently limit the amount of instruction that can be outsourced to a third-party provider. (Again, I’ll examine MOOCs, the other alternate provider okayed by the Department of Education’s EQUIP initiative, in the next post in this series.)

As I noted above, the University of Phoenix acquired the coding bootcamp Iron Yard. Last year, Kaplan acquired Dev Bootcamp. This year, the University of New Haven partnered with the coding bootcamp Galvanize in order to launch a master’s degree program in data science. SNHU partnered with the coding bootcamp Flat Iron School. Lynn University partnered with General Assembly to offer a 15 credit “study abroad” program facilitated by the coding school.

Meanwhile, the credit rating agency Moody’s said this fall that bootcamps would be a “credit positive” for institutions.

But it isn’t simply a nod from Moody’s that sanctions (or condemns) various education institutions, public or private or otherwise. How, in particular, are for-profit schools legitimized?– such an important question not just considering the fraudulent behavior we’ve seen from the sector but considering the contention that their credentials and the credentials from other for-profit upstarts will “count.”

Does legitimization come from the federal government, from the availability of financial aid, from the regulatory or accrediting agencies? Does legitimization come from marketing, from the drumbeat of advertising that insists these schools will cater to you? Does it come from having Wall Street or Silicon Valley behind you? Does it come from investors or from the media? Does it come from offering online classes or from using "the latest technologies"? Does legitimization involve a brand – the prestige of a school, the prestige of a partner corporation? Does legitimization come from having a sports team? I mean, the University of Phoenix doesn’t field a football team. But it does have its name on a football stadium, the site of the 2015 Super Bowl. Go team.

And whose credentials from for-profits, whether career colleges or coding bootcamps, are seen as "legitimate"? Which students benefit, and which students get exploited – past, present, and future.

I’m halfway through my year-end review of (what I think are) the important trends in education technology in 2015.

The word count for the series so far hovers around 34,000, and I have a lot more to say. (I'm sorry. You're welcome.)

This project is a substantial undertaking, but I think it’s worthwhile compiling an overview and analysis of “what happened,” particularly as the education technology industry and the ed-tech press seem prone to forget the past so quickly.

I learn an incredible amount in the process of writing this series, and I see things that I might not otherwise. I hope that, in turn, the series offers the same to my readers.

So with that in mind, I’d like to remind folks that you can support my work financially. You can do so by inviting me to speak (um, and paying me to speak), buying my books, and/or making a donation.

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