Developing new software for K-12 schools. Investing in hot ed-tech startups. Donating tens of millions of dollars to schools experimenting with fresh approaches to customizing the classroom experience.
All are part of a new, multi-pronged effort by Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, to use their massive fortune to reshape public education with technology.
“We think that personalized learning makes sense,” Zuckerberg told Education Week in an exclusive telephone interview last week. “We want to see as many good versions of this idea as possible get tested in the world.”
In December, the couple announced they will eventually give 99 percent of their Facebook shares—worth an estimated $45 billion—to a variety of causes, headlined by the development of software “that understands how you learn best and where you need to focus.”
The move set off seismic rumbles in both education and philanthropy.
First, it signals a major shift away from the long-dominant philosophy behind the national movement to improve education, which focuses on expanding charter schools, using standardized-test scores to hold educators accountable, and weakening the influence of teachers’ unions. In 2010, Zuckerberg closely aligned himself with such strategies, giving $100 million to a top-down effort to remake the struggling school district in Newark, N.J. Six years later, that work is widely regarded as a failure, and Zuckerberg is charting a new path.
The result is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative LLC, a limited-liability corporation that also embodies a major shift underway in the philanthropic world. Like a handful of other Silicon Valley tech billionaires, Zuckerberg and Chan decided against establishing a traditional foundation, choosing instead a more flexible organizational structure that allows for a mix of philanthropic donations, for-profit investment, and political activity.
For rich donors, the upside is more levers to pull when trying to change the world. For everyone else, the downside is that these new structures further blur the lines between business and philanthropy and partly circumvent the regulations that have governed charitable giving for decades.
Zuckerberg said he and Chan are committed to openness and will eventually streamline what is now a messy network of overlapping organizations.
Observers from the fields of education, technology, venture capital, and philanthropy are paying close attention.
“It’s hard to tell exactly what these new donors emerging from the tech sector are doing, because so much is in flux and they’re not very transparent,” said David Callahan, the founder and editor of the digital news outlet Inside Philanthropy. “But any time super-empowered people with lots of money try to influence how the rest of us educate our children, we have a right to know what they’re up to.”
What Is Personalized Learning?
In the world of K-12 educational technology, personalized learning generally means using software and other digital technologies to tailor instruction to each student’s strengths and weaknesses, interests and preferences, and optimal pace of learning.
The ed-tech sector has been focused on the notion for roughly half a decade. While companies have generated hundreds of products and a smattering of new school models are showing promise, there is little large-scale evidence that the approach can improve teaching and learning or narrow gaps in academic achievement.
Many in Silicon Valley, including Zuckerberg, don’t seem to mind.
“We don’t know for certain that it’s going to work,” he said. “All we can really hope to do is provide an initial boost and try to show that this could work as a model, and hopefully it gets its own tailwind that carries it towards mainstream adoption.”
Twelve years and 1.6 billion users after he first launched Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, Zuckerberg now controls a tangled web of overlapping entities through which he can provide that “boost.”
Start with the company itself. In 2014, Facebook assigned a team of its employees to work with a California charter school network known as Summit public schools. Together, the engineers and educators are developing a digital platform called the PLP, short for Personalized Learning Plan. Some observers describe the effort as akin to a law firm doing pro bono legal work, and Zuckerberg stressed that Facebook doesn’t have any business plans attached to the project.
But Facebook and Summit have also made clear they hope to eventually make the PLP available to every K-12 school in the country, and their contract leaves the door open for Facebook to commercialize the tool in the future.
Zuckerberg and Chan are also at the helm of two intertwined charitable-giving entities: a “donor-advised fund” at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, created with donations of Facebook stock valued at around $1.5 billion, and Startup:Education, a nonprofit that now receives most of its money from that fund. Startup:Education now guides all the couple’s education-related grantmaking.
On the venture-capital side, meanwhile, is Zuckerberg Education Ventures, an LLC that has invested more than $25 million in for-profit ed-tech companies.
And at the top of the pyramid is the newly created Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which could eventually serve as a central (and very, very large) pool of capital for the other entities, whose efforts it will help coordinate.
Zuckerberg acknowledged in the March 1 interview that the structure is confusing, and said he and Chan will likely “rationalize” and “rebrand” some or all of the various entities over time.
In the meantime, outside experts describe the couple’s giving network as murky.
“This web of entities, each with a different legal form and different transparency requirements, makes it very hard to follow what each organization is doing and to understand their collective impact,” said Sarah Reckhow, an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University who tracks philanthropic giving in education.
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from : http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/03/07/facebooks-zuckerberg-to-bet-big-on-personalized.html