Hello, Chicago. This is an apple. Some of you may look at it and think, that reminds me of the American public education system, or any education system for that matter.
Yet despite how red and juicy it is, it's still a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, and plump it is, it doesn't necessarily correlate with the realities of how American students are performing when you look at them and their performances compared with 71 other countries worth of students across the world. Journalists are the first ones to jump on this and try to figure out exactly what the reason is for this sort of performance, and typically they focus on teachers. Here are some examples. Rotten apples, cracked down on lazy teachers.
What the heck is going on in these schools? I can tell you from firsthand experience, because I was a 6th and 7th grade math and science teacher at one point, that there are some incredible examples of teaching out there. They just don't always make it to the forefront. And so...
And so, about four and a half years ago, I decided to put my money where my mouth is, figuratively, and join the education journalism world. But I chose to move somewhere very in particular, the Silicon Valley, woo, where all of a sudden an entirely new narrative was brought to my attention. Technology is going to solve all of our problems. Technology can fix education. The Silicon Valley billionaires remake schools.
Artificial intelligence is going to do everything we needed to do. Well, when I first heard that, I started to feel like Morgan Freeman in this meme, which is one of my favorite memes, and you'd be surprised how many PowerPoints I've put this in in my career, including when I had PowerPoints in my classroom. And, you know, I thought to myself, what is this pressure all of a sudden, I feel, to join this narrative, to write about how incredible technology is for our students? So over the next four and a half years of being an education I would endeavor to try to answer this question. Can technology really solve all of our problems?
I'm going to take you back to one of the most popular articles I ever wrote for the education technology journalism organization I used to work for, EdSurge. It was about a charter system down in Southern California, USC Hybrid High College Prep. The University of Southern California has a large school of education, and they wanted to run a bit of an experiment.
They decided that at this new charter school, they were going to put students on devices for 90% of the day. The teacher was there, but sort of put to the side. And they had a lot to work with because a number of these students were coming in without proficiency in math, science, or language arts.
So there was a lot riding on this. And yet, by the end of freshman year, 50% of that incoming freshman class... was credit deficient, meaning that they were worse than when they had first come in. It's almost as if the charter system took a page out of the book that Los Angeles Unified School District wrote, who around the same time had decided to reallocate a billion dollars in funding from the space in their budget that was supposed to go to remaking decrepit buildings in the district to iPads for all.
every single student in the district received an iPad. But there was a bit of an issue with this. Very little teacher input went into this decision-making, and very little professional development was provided to the teachers to help them understand how to incorporate the devices into the classroom.
Now, some of you may have read about this, and if you have, then I apologize for bringing up those negative memories once again. But approximately two years ago, the Super... of LAUSD John Deasy actually resigned.
And a major reason for that was because of the ultimate failure that the iPad initiative had been. Now, don't get me wrong. I actually recently joined Google, so I theoretically like technology.
But I don't think it's the main thing that we need to fix all of our problems. I think it can be a tool. But here's the thing.
that I saw lacking in a lot of the stories that I read about, that I wrote, that I interviewed people on, and that was the teacher factor. Because oftentimes, teachers are the ones that ask the best questions around tools that are used in the classroom, around the around how a student is feeling, they have those relationships that a piece of technology can't simulate. For example, Ricardo Elizalde is probably one of the best teachers I've ever met in my entire life.
He is a public school teacher and he spends his life teaching non-native speakers English. Now students in his class, even when they become proficient, sometimes lack something in particular. He noticed this with one of his particular Honduran students, who was doing very well, but when she went home, wasn't really able to speak with her mother because she lacked one crucial thing, confidence.
Now Ricardo, being the resourceful and innovative teacher that he is, decided, I think there's a way that I can incorporate technology into the scenario to help her out. So he created a student project that brought in Max and iMovie and wrote this story actually for us after the whole thing happened. The students created animated digital shorts over which they dubbed with the English that they had learned.
And the beautiful thing about it was that they were able to take those projects back home and demonstrate to their families just how much they had learned. And I'm going to take you back to Hybrid High because actually that story doesn't end as bad as you might think it did. I'll be honest with you, the charter school system did pluck a new leader actually from Chicago and drag him out to Los Angeles. But the second year the charter school system was around, thank God he was there.
Because he realized that the big missing element in what they had done up until that point was teachers in the classroom, working with students more consistently instead of having kids on devices 90% of their time. But that wasn't all he did. He also made it rain.
He gave every single teacher $3,000 at the beginning of every year. And the teachers could spend that on whatever software or technology they wanted. In addition to that, if they really liked something and wanted licenses for the whole school, if they got other teachers and students on board and the administrator saw that, then they'd buy licenses for everybody.
And I am happy to report that last year, that first freshman class made it to senior year and graduated. 100% of them graduated and 100% of them were accepted to four-year colleges and universities. It's funny to hear you clap because I certainly can't take credit for that, but I'm glad that I was able to share that information with you.
Now as I'm up here, you may be thinking to yourself, okay Mary Jo, these are a lot of California examples. I don't know if you know, but you're at TEDxChicago. We're a different place.
We have other problems to deal with, like when it's negative 10 degrees outside. And first off, I totally get it. I went to Northwestern.
Go Wildcats. I'm right there with you. Anybody at Northwestern? Yes?
This is why I didn't want to do TEDx San Francisco. But there's actually a similar example that I want to share with you that's something for you to be aware of, because I imagine that many of you have students in CPS. Some of you may be funders.
Some of you may be politicians that make choices that affect the district. So in 2016, the Chicago Sun-Times that summer reported that more than 1,000 positions were eliminated from Chicago public schools. just gone, some of which were teaching positions. Now, interestingly enough, simultaneously, that same summer, a position was posted on the jobs board for an executive director of personalized learning. And this six-figure salaried individual was going to be, amongst other things, bringing technology into the system.
Now, it would be unfair of me to say that there's a direct causation between these two things. But I think it's something to be aware of. Because in my line of work, I hear a lot of people talk and complain about the 1950s vision that we have of the classroom.
One teacher up at the front, students facing forward, you know, everything's focused on that one teacher, everything's right there. But at the same time, I don't know if this situation is much better. And I've seen this live, where students are sitting in desks, tapped in.
singular device, no collaboration, no project-based learning, no communicating, no soft skill development, and where's the teacher? That's why I fundamentally support what I consider to be the triangular relationship and that's where you have to have three individual pieces working together. The student, the technology, the teacher.
Technology is a wonderful thing. I'm not going to lie to you. I see it do wonderful things in schools all the time.
I've seen it offer access to students with disabilities. I've seen students that aren't able to travel abroad get access to incredible virtual reality experiences that open up new worlds for them. But before I leave today, I want to leave you with one last crucial question.
How do we as a collective figure out the best learning environments for our students that balance the utility of technology with the beauty of human nature? Because I'll be honest with you, my friends, and I've seen it firsthand, the relationships between teachers and students is sacred, and that should never, ever be eliminated. Thank you.