The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning
<i>The prospect of children surfing the Web and clicking through their lessons while teachers, or non-teacher chaperones, pace the room is an emerging reality, especially in states such as Louisiana and Mississippi, where personalized “ed tech” is offered as a balm for budget austerity. “There’s been hyperbolic claims about the ability of these new technologies to radically transform schools,” Matthew Kraft, an associate professor of education at Brown University, told me.</i><p>This is personalized learning at its worst. Startups are marketing themselves to districts as a means of achieving the same outcomes with fewer teachers. That&#x27;s harmful to society and will result in lower quality education for the poor.<p>Technology is a powerful tool for education but it is no substitute for teacher-student interaction. It&#x27;s best used for administrative duties such as segmenting students into groups, aggregating data for reports, facilitating collaboration by making longitudinal student information more accessible and digestible to teachers. It&#x27;s a useful replacement for textbook and handout based homework, and enables students to consume and information from a variety of sources. It&#x27;s not a substitute for interacting with teachers.<p>Also, there needs to be more regulation to protect student information. FERPA (the law that&#x27;s supposed to protect student data) makes student data less secure. Under that law, health records that pertain to the student&#x27;s education (such as the diagnosis of learning disabilities) are no longer protected by HIPAA. FERPA has no such security requirements.