A look at the practice of personalized learning, an individual-comes-first approach usually aided by tech, and how it is applied in many Rhode Island schools
Untangling the mixed record of the latest big-fix educational trend promoted by Silicon Valley. Tweets: @nancyflanagan , @dintersmith , @newyorker , @douglevin , @benjaminjriley , @jay_eitner , @chrisburkeshay , and @etammykim Tweets: @nancyflanagan : “My ability to motivate students depends on relationships with them, but that's hobbled by each of them being in front of their own screens.” https://www.newyorker.com/... Ted Dintersmith / @dintersmith : Interesting piece on personalized learning in Rhode Island that doesn't address the key question — what is personalized? Too often, PL is kids on laptops moving at their own pace thru material they have no voice in, won't retain, and will never use. https://www.newyorker.com/... @newyorker : Personalized learning, though premised on differentiating one student from another, has seemed to work best when it attends, first and foremost, to the needs of teachers. https://www.newyorker.com/... @douglevin : The Messy Reality of Personalized Learning: Untangling the mixed record of the latest big-fix educational trend promoted by Silicon Valley https://www.newyorker.com/... via @NewYorker @etammykim @hechingerreport #edtech #personalizedlearning Benjamin Riley / @benjaminjriley : Hard to believe it was only five years ago that I started to publicly speak about my growing concerns regarding personalized learning — a movement I once helped foster. My relatively lonely island of concern back then...is a lot less lonely now. https://twitter.com/... @jay_eitner : This isn't everywhere. Like everything else, there are great ways to implement and there are ways to turn a great idea / concept into a nightmare. -je https://www.newyorker.com/... Christopher Shay / @chrisburkeshay : “Skeptics warn that underneath the language of ‘student-centered’ pedagogy is a tech-intensive model that undermines communal values, accelerates privatization, and turns public schools into big-data siphons.” https://www.newyorker.com/... @etammykim : Here's a longread I've been working on for a while—about tech, student-teacher bonds, and philanthrocapitalist intervention in our K-12 schools: https://www.newyorker.com/... @NewYorker @hechingerreport
Context & Ripple Effects
This New Yorker piece lands mid-arc in the ed-tech accountability cycle: it follows Wired's account of how [[a:931090|tech-titan donations, a STEM curriculum, and gadgets everywhere failed to fix a San Francisco middle school]], and precedes the moment when [[a:940815|two Kansas towns soured on Summit Learning software funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative]]. Rhode Island is the case study where the movement's own vocabulary starts to crack.
The reporting gathers an unusual critic bench: Benjamin Riley reassessing his earlier support for personalized learning, Ted Dintersmith calling it poorly defined, Nancy Flanagan arguing screens erode the teacher-student relationships motivation depends on, and Christopher Shay flagging warnings about privatization and schools becoming big-data siphons.
First-order effects
- Districts running personalized-learning programs in Rhode Island face a definitional challenge from within their own coalition — Dintersmith's question of what is actually 'personalized' when students work alone on laptops — forcing educators to defend or restructure deployments already in classrooms.
- Silicon Valley promoters of the trend lose their framing advantage: the New Yorker's finding that these tools often succeed by serving teachers' needs rather than students' undercuts the student-centered pitch used to sell them.
Second-order effects
- Funders and vendors backing classroom software, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative among them via Summit Learning, inherit a harder sales environment as parent pushback in Kansas and critical coverage compound into a reputational discount on 'personalized' branding.
- Critics' privatization and big-data concerns give opponents of school-tech contracts a ready-made argument, pressuring procurement decisions toward scrutiny of what student data platforms collect.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ed-tech adoption keeps outrunning evidence of learning outcomes — later coverage of Byju's and Yuanfudao as innovations in test-prep delivery rather than learning, and Proctorio's client growth despite complaints and lawsuits, suggests demand is driven by institutional convenience, not measured results.
- The movement's core weakness — no agreed definition of 'personalized' — points toward a market where the label decouples from any pedagogical claim, leaving buyers (districts, parents) unable to evaluate products on anything but marketing.
The trend: Classroom technology is being adopted faster than its learning benefits can be demonstrated, producing a recurring cycle of promotion, mixed results, and public backlash that now extends from US districts to global test-prep platforms.