"Okay, so how would YOU spend $100M in education?"

And other follow-ups from last week's newsletter.

My post last week critiquing billionaire education funders and their enthusiasm for computer-based personalized learning (in spite of that model’s multi-decade record of failure) was the most shared post in the last two years of this newsletter. It generated a lot of thoughtful discussion on Substack, LinkedIn, and Hacker News where it hit the front page. I have a couple of follow-up newsletters planned in response to all of the thoughtful feedback and criticism and here is the first.

"Okay, so how would YOU spend $100M in education?"

Diana Laufenberg asked in the comments, “If you were given $100 million to have a positive effect on education, what do you think you would do with it?”

Let’s do this.

First, I tend to assume on reflex that vast sums of money are generally accumulated through some form of theft or extraction (legal or illegal) and so my first answer is “Figure out whose money I have and give it back.” Let’s assume the funds are licit for a second, though. I have several expensive questions I’d like to answer.

1. What would happen to teacher and student outcomes if we made some drastic improvements to teacher working conditions?

We know we’d like students to learn more. We know that lots of teachers feel overwhelmed by their work. Let’s peel off several bills and throw a substantial package of quality-of-life improvements at a randomly selected group of teachers—smaller class sizes, one fewer class to teach, more planning time, more collaboration time—and see what that does for everybody. We can tease out the effect of the individual improvements later. Let’s make it a mixed methods study with a quantitative study of teacher retention and student achievement along with some qualitative study of the teaching and learning in those environments.

2. How can we develop an asset orientation in teachers at scale?

Teachers have particular orientations towards learner variability that is often described as deficit-oriented (“here are the weaknesses of my students and what they don’t have”) or asset-oriented (“here are their strengths and what they do have”). Vanderbilt University’s Lani Horn describes in a lecture the powerful effect that an asset orientation has on students. In spite of the promise here, little is known about how to cultivate an asset orientation in teachers. Survey instruments don’t exist to study changes in a teacher’s orientation, for example, which makes it very hard to study the effect of different interventions. So I’d peel off ten or twenty mil or so, endow a chair or two, and create a center designed to study those orientations and how they develop.

3. How can we help teachers develop through their curriculum?

One outcome of the asset orientation funding stream might be a multi-year teacher professional learning program with twelve days out of the classroom each year for classroom observation, debrief, math learning, teacher PD, etc, all to help teachers move from deficit- to asset-orientations towards their students. I would have mixed feelings about that outcome, given the challenges and cost of scaling such a program. Instead, I would note that most schools and districts are already buying curricula, which we know can have a significant effect on student learning. What is the effect of curriculum on teacher practice? Can we help teachers develop an asset orientation through a curriculum?

4. What are models for personalized learning that are more inclusive of teacher and student community?

“You need both personalized learning and social learning,” said many commenters in response to my last newsletter. For example:

The correct future is a hybrid of digital and live learning with the journey personalized but not devoid of fellow travelers in smaller groups and teacher interactions for formal experiences.

I don’t think that’s wrong, but I would like us to imagine the possibilities for personalized learning more expansively. Typically, people imagine that students get their social needs met in whole-group learning (at the expense of their cognitive needs) and their cognitive needs met in personalized learning (at the expense of their social needs).

This is reductive, dualistic thinking and it absolutely dominates material and technology production in K12 education. You can fill two of these quadrants with hundreds of different companies. 

The whole group / isolated quadrant is a big mistake, incurring all of the costs of whole-group instruction and forsaking its main benefit. But the other quadrant—individuals working on a personalized learning program while also experiencing the presence of other students and their teachers—is underexplored.

What would it look like for students to work on different activities but see that “other people have been here” and learn from the residue of their experience? Or to see that “other people are here now” and benefit simultaneously? Or to experience the presence of a teacher as well? Generally, teachers are maximally involved in whole-group instruction and minimally involved in digital personalized learning. But what if we offered teachers more than those two modes of operation? What if teachers could be sort of involved in a student’s personalized learning experiences? If we could ask the teacher for one minute per student during personalized learning rather than effectively zero minutes, how would we invest that time and presence into a student’s cognitive and social development?

For all of my critiques, personalized learning is an interesting space to me. My main criticism is that the model of personalized learning most popular with billionaire funders generally treats children as though they are rows in a database waiting for software to write the correct data into the correct column. (This model seems especially popular with funders who derive their wealth from technology, by some coincidence.) My colleague Eric Berger points out, however, that children do not compile. The data in one student’s column interacts with data in other columns and both change spontaneously even at a time when the machine wasn’t supposed to be running!

We are all still a long way from answering the question, “What is the best learning experience we could offer students if they were alone on a laptop for 30 minutes a couple of times each week?” and we will not make progress as long as the people trying to answer that question understand human learning primarily through technological metaphors.

5. How many millions of dollars could I drive off with in my Honda Odyssey without wrecking the suspension?

This is an important research question that someone should fund and I will submit my findings from a tequileria in Tulum.

What am I missing here? What would you fund?