The Silicon Classroom — Trip: Day 2
Today, we began our week of site visits. We got up early in the morning and drove to Aspire Charter School, an elementary school in East Palo Alto. Aspire focuses on using blended learning to not only teach students content but also how to use technology and classroom interaction to augment their own learning process. Most notably, Aspire stresses close classroom interaction between teachers and students, and we saw this in great detail during our classroom observations. While talking with Maricela Wilson, lead teacher and head of curriculum initiatives at the school, this emphasis on giving students ample attention shone through. We then visited Eastside College Prep, a high school also serving students in East Palo Alto. While we also witnessed the same kind of close interaction between teachers and their students, we noticed that technology was more of an afterthought. As Helen Kim, Vice-Principal of Eastside said, edtech was a useful tool to aid the students’ education, but held no more importance than that. Besides a few tools here and there, like Google Classroom, there weren't any “edtech products” that dominated the classroom; the connection between teacher and student was the central and most prominent feature.
After lunch, we visited two non-profit organizations: Khan Academy and Digital Promise. Khan Academy was a highly anticipated visit — the non-profit continues to expand its library of videos, and is partnering with corporations to produce even more videos. One notable example: Bank of America sponsoring Khan Academy’s videos on financial literacy. Maureen Suhendra, user researcher and head of education partnerships, discussed what equity meant to Khan Academy, namely that it felt free, open access to knowledge was the best it could do for students around the world. Digital Promise had a much different history and mission than Khan Academy. Starting as a government initiative, it has since become an independent think tank heading a number of initiatives for educational equity and edtech. Its focus is data collection, data analysis, and advocacy for educational equity.
Based on the discussion afterwards, our visits made two major impressions on us. One, as useful as it sometimes was, edtech didn't play a central role in classrooms where students were engaged and actively learning. The single most important actor in the environment was the teacher. Two, there is a fundamental conflict between making a marketable product and focusing on closing the achievement gap. Digital Promise gathered data to better define social equity problems in education, but did not produce something to directly combat the problem. Khan Academy provided a way for any student regardless of their background (provided they had a good internet connection) to access educational material, but potentially only worsened the gap between well-off and underprivileged students using their site.
At the core of this issue are two conflicting definitions of what it means to address educational equity. First, equity could be about raising everyone to a baseline of skill and preparation. Every student benefits, and no student gets left below a basic standard. Second, equity could be about closing the gap between well-off students and students identified as underprivileged. Under this definition, a solution which raises the floor but also blows out the ceiling isn't enough — students who are already doing the best shouldn't improve any more than students doing the worst.
Khan Academy, and many organizations like it, are not equitable under the second definition because they do not make “closing the gap” their central focus. However, the service Khan Academy provides undoubtedly benefits students who wouldn't otherwise be able to access these materials, and most people would agree that Khan Academy is undoubtedly one of the leaders in educational equity. We will need to continue gathering perspectives and challenging these two definitions as we continue our site visits.
Finally, we ended the night with spotlights. Armando and Armin were up, and they shared everything from their spirit fruits (cantaloupe and rambutan, respectively) to how their families and backgrounds shaped their motivations in college and beyond.
