Thomas Ultican connects some dots in the push to sell kids-on-screens education. Reposted with permission.
Billionaires have enlisted the aid of Universities in their push to sell kids-at-screens education. The latest effort, dutifully reported in The 74, claims that Johns Hopkins University has shown “Done Right, Virtual Tutoring Nearly Rivals In-Person Version.” They say two new studies performed there show “how high-quality virtual tutoring can help struggling students.” In Massachusetts, they are testing virtual tutoring programs on 6-year old students, which is morally repugnant.
The 74 reports,
“In a quasi-experimental study published in December, Neitzel and her colleagues found that first-graders in Massachusetts who used Ignite Reading, a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, made substantial progress in reading, with the percentage of students reading on grade level rising from just 16% in the fall to about 50% by spring.”
Neitzel is Assistant Professor Amanda Neitzel, Deputy Director of Evidence Research at Johns Hopkins University. Ignite Reading is a for profit company specializing in science of reading (SoR) approaches to virtual tutoring. The bill for this program, which was run in 13 Massachusetts elementary schools, was paid by One8 Foundation (TIN: 04-6836735), a three-quarter-billion dollar Jewish centric foundation that regularly gives to privatizing organizations like Teach For America, KIPP and Success Academy.
The quasi-experimental study was published in December, 2024. Quasi-experimental research is research that resembles experimental research but is not true experimental research. While quasi-experimental designs don’t offer the same level of control as true experimental designs, they are still useful for studying situations where randomization is difficult or impossible. However, they can be misleading.
Page 4 of the study described Ignite Reading, as a one-to-one virtual tutoring program, fostering early literacy development. The paper states, “As part of the program, students attend daily 15-minute virtual tutoring sessions with specially paired Ignite Reading tutors who leverage a sequenced, research-based instructional plan designed to develop students’ early-literacy skills, related basic alphabetic knowledge, phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, and fluency.” The SoR curriculum was assessed using DIBELS’s basic early literacy skills test.
The DIBELS use throws some shade on Neitzel’s research. Many educators and scholars loudly detest DIBELS. Berkley’s P. David Pearson wrote, “I have decided to join that group of scholars and teachers and parents who are convinced that DIBELS is the worst thing to happen to the teaching of reading since the development of flash cards.” DIBELS focuses on phonics and sounds and not words and meaning. Many of DIBELS assessment phrases are purposefully gibberish.
While I question the assessment methodology, I would think first graders who were forced to participate with an on-line tutor 15 minutes every day of the school year would improve somewhat. Even a bad methodology will produce some results though it might poison a baby’s mind about reading.
Billionaire Funded Air Reading
The second Johns Hopkins research article cited is about San Mateo, California’s Air Reading which was founded in 2021. Crunchbase reports that Air Reading’s last two rounds (2023 and 2024) of funding were financed by Accelerate which highlights how billionaires are bending research to their liking.
They self-claim, “Accelerate actively builds the country’s knowledge of tools and practices that significantly advance student learning.” The reality seems quite different. Accelerate appears more like a pass-through portal for billionaire dollars. The 2022 tax form 990 (TIN: 88-3207484) shows CEO Kevin Huffman’s Tennessee company has just over $14-million in assets yet they seem to be Air Reading’s main funding source. Accelerate’s funds were recently augmented with $10-million from John Arnold.
Accelerate’s Posted Funders
Arrow Impact is a $60-million dollar non-profit established by wealthy Stanford financial professor, Mark Wolfson (TIN 83-1423625). In 2023, Wolfson added another $7.5 million to Arrow Impact and he seems to be the poor guy here. Former Tennessee Governor and billionaire Bill Haslam with his wife Crissy operate a $100-million tax free foundation (TIN 62-1867423). Griffin Catalyst belongs to billionaire Ken Griffin founder of Citadel Financial. John Overdeck is the billionaire founder of Two Sigma Investments. His Overdeck Family Foundation has over $850-million in assets (TIN 26-4377643). Arnold Ventures (TIN 26-3241764), Gates Foundation (TIN 86-1065772) and the Walton Family Foundation (TIN 58-1766770) complete the list of billionaires putting investments through Accelerate.
The Johns Hopkins report informs:
“Air Reading is grounded in the Science of Reading. Comprehensive, one-on-one diagnostics identify students’ learning needs and inform group placement and bi-weekly assessments to track student progress.”
“During the 2023-24 school year, six elementary schools in a district in Texas took part in a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the impact of Air Reading on reading outcomes for first through sixth grade students.” (Page 4)
The fundamental outcome is they once again showed that students getting extra tutoring outperform students who do not. The study was monitored using the corporate supported NWEA MAP testing scheme. Neitzel et al explain that based on these outcomes, “the control group who scored at the 50th percentile would increase their score to the 55th percentile if they participate in the tutoring.” (Page 10) The report admits it was, “comparing the reading achievement of students receiving the Air Reading intervention to those receiving the standard classroom instruction.” (Page 11) In other words, the study compared those receiving 40-minutes of tutoring four days a week with those who were not.
This result is so unsurprising that it is difficult to fathom why they bothered other than billionaires want to sell putting “those people’s children” at screens.
SoR is key to putting kids a screens. That is why billionaires are pushing it down America’s throats.
Insights
Before billionaire education reform, education research was much more honest. Typically, an education researcher would study some aspect of teaching or learning, gather data, write up the study and submit it to some journal for publication. The study would go through a peer-review process in which several experts in the field would review the paper and then at a large gathering the researcher would defend the paper. If the defense went well, the respected journal would publish the paper.
Billionaires have to some extent eliminated the peer review process when their organizations like TNTP publish a paper that is promoted by billionaire funded media like The 74. Once the paper is published other billionaire funded organizations cite the sham papers in their reports or like the University of Arkansas’s School Demonstration Project financed by the Walton family, just cite their own previous bogus work.
The 74, claimed that Johns Hopkins has shown “Done Right, Virtual Tutoring Nearly Rivals In-Person Version.” If a school can convince students to log on to tutoring and pay for the online tutors, this might be true. However, the demonstrations that virtual tutoring can “nearly” rival the in person versions were extremely well resourced and had the ability to force children to log in. Even if the downside health problems associated with kids at screens are ignored and “nearly” rival is a good enough goal for your schools and their parents, it is unlikely they will get an equivalently well resourced program.
Billionaires like Laurene Powell Jobs and Bill Gates want to put kids at screens in the worst way. Unfortunately, it is a method that seriously degrades education. Their kids will never be subjected to this kind of diminished education and no other American student should be either.