Top Highlights

• Machine teaching is euphemistically called “blended learning” or “personalized learning.” This is a peculiar use of the term “personalized,” because only a human-to-human interaction can be described accurately as “personalized,” while a student’s interaction with a machine is by definition impersonal and should be properly called computer-based in...
• In state after state, tens of thousands of teachers walked out of their schools and marched to their state capitols to protest low pay, poor working conditions, and the persistent underfunding of public education. The walkouts and strikes continued into 2019, spreading from district to district and state to state.
• This was the work of some of the richest people in the nation: the Walton family, Bill Gates, Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, Michael Bloomberg, Laurene Powell Jobs, Reed Hastings, Eli Broad, and a bevy of other billionaires, most of whom had made their fortunes on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, or in the tech industry.
• What I had come to understand was that the root cause of poor performance in school is not “bad schools” or “bad teachers” but poverty.
• They refuse to acknowledge the impact of poverty on students’ lives. They insist that poverty can be cured by “great teachers” or “great schools.”