LAUSD Teacher Strike, Schoology and the future of social media
I’m proud to have participated in the Los Angeles teachers strike last week. There are so many public education issues that now have their veneer of silence peeled off: immoral class sizes, absurd teaching conditions, and most importantly the stealthy moves to privatize and profit from the education public sector.
I want to address an aspect of the teacher struggle I rarely hear discussed: the impact of technology in the classroom. No adult who isn’t working in a classroom today can really understands how education has changed. Almost all humans now carry a computer on their persons at all times and the moment to moment attention and decisions each individual makes with their devices is shaping the world we live in. For a school to try and ignore this reality of how technology is quickly changing us would be foolish. But EdTech can also be a shiny toy that quickly loses its lustre in the classroom.
Our students seem to always be an app or two ahead of us with the social media they use. How can Facebook be cool if your parents are on it. However students don’t really want to be abandoned online by adults, falling into the black hole of Fortnight or whatever comes next. They need guidance and a kind of media literacy curriculum that does not yet exist. Turns out we all do. We are just starting to wake up to some of the horrific consequences of giving away the data of our lives to Facebook and other tech giants. Many people feel they have to detox out of Facebook but the rehabs don’t yet exist. I think they will soon.
As an LAUSD teacher on strike or worrying about the impending strike for months, Facebook is where the action was. Many of us who shy away from online political discourse just jumped in as if our lives and careers were at stake- because they were. That’s the reach of Facebook as a platform. We’d rather not reflect on how Facebook will triangulate every post we’ve made to create even more ironclad profiles of our digital identity to sell to whoever they want. Their algorithms are secret. It’s obviously driven by AI.
Algorithms are also at the heart of the debate over educational technology in two ways: 1. The quest for the “sacred” algorithms that can detect and measure student learning (and the real holy grail, teacher effectiveness). 2. The quest to disrupt and then “scale” the work of educators using algorithms that generate “actionable data”. There is a lot of money funding these quests! There is money to be made, obviously.
Working teachers in LAUSD are rightfully skeptical of our districts’ technology initiatives: even worse than the iPad fiasco was the botched rollout of the Misis system. Rather than buy a decent student info system (SIS) off the shelf, LAUSD decided they could build their own cheaper. They ended up needing a team of Microsoft engineers working around the clock to fix the nightmare glitches. Years later now it’s much improved but how much did it end up costing? Misis is how we take attendance- it’s relentless and unforgiving: in middle school you’re doing it every hour, OR ELSE! But Misis has our online gradebook as well.
Last year the LAUSD mandated that all middle school teachers use a Learning Management System called Schoology. There was a lot of confusion and not a lot of training. We were told that in year one of the rollout we had to use the Schoology Gradebook to report grades, although we still use Miss as well. My curiosity was piqued.
Last July I noticed that Schoology was having its national conference “Schoology NEXT” in the San Diego area. The cost was high but I could drive myself down and rent an AirBnB room and walk across to the swanky Omni La Costa golf course. While my school and district didn’t support me, the conference blew my mind and immediately began transforming my teaching practices.
I met educators from around the country who use Schoology and all kinds of tech innovatively. I sat next to one participant and shared how my district mandated use of the Gradebook in Schoology for year one. He looked at me with shock and said, “we’ve been using Schoology for six years and we have yet to get to the Gradebook”. It’s as if the district bought every teacher a new car but would only let them sit in the seat the first year, turn the key the second year, take a test drive later, etc.. Let’s not even bring up who builds the roads and if there are tolls along the way.
Before I was willing to jump all the way in with Schoology I had two big concerns, and I know other teachers had them too (or should): 1. Who owns the content you post in a district owned platform? The labor you do as a salaried employee actually belongs to your employer, including lesson plans. What if I build an awesome course in Schoology and then decide to leave the district? Do they get to keep all of that work? and: 2. I wondered if the district’s goal was to create a huge database of teacher created lessons and units that they could then mandate new teachers to use. No need to spend money on textbooks or curriculum when you can build it in house, right?
Chatting poolside with the developers of Schoology and teacher experts called Schoology Ambassadors gave me answers: 1. While it’s true that the district has and can reuse your content, there’s also a way to have your own copy. Simply make another account on the Schoology platform outside of the district and “connect” with that account so you can copy all of your course content. 2. I learned from the developers that Schoology is not designed or meant to replace the teacher or standardize instruction. It is not meant to be used as a top down mandate to control instruction. That would be a misuse of the platform.
With those answers I was pretty well sold and have since jumped all in using Schoology for any and everything I can. It’s a considerable amount of work at the beginning and requires lots of patience training myself, colleagues, students, parents, and yes administrators. But I’m convinced it will be totally worth it. The Gradebook is far from the best thing about Schoology. Schoology is incredible for the way you can organize and differentiate course content and move towards a “blended” model of classroom instruction. The way you can build authentic community with parents, colleagues, and like minded educators across the world could be revolutionary for education. I recently was accepted into the Schoology Ambassador program myself. Now I’m fortunate to get to network with inspired teacher leaders on the cutting edge of using Schoology and advocating for new features to benefit our students.
With possibly so much content and student assignments available online now, what should a teacher do during a strike? During the work stoppage I chose not to grade or review student work or post new lessons, or go on the LAUSD version of Schoology, even though it was breaking my heart to withhold from my students. Even with teacher curated access to lots of resources, self-directed and/or individualized assignments, our students will always need a teacher to help facilitate their learning process. We really will need more teachers! The students need the community of their peers as well.
Unlike Facebook, whose real mission seems to be to exploit our social connections for marketing purposes, Schoology is an example of a specialized social media platform that is closed and focused on creating and sharing learning tools. The feed of current activity in Schoology is of great interest and value to me. I feel safe there and I know the people are real. I get to control which groups go into that feed. Of course the company is private and needs to make a profit, but I was convinced at NEXT that much of the profit is being plowed back into the platform to improve it. If Schoology is eventually leveraged the way it could be at LAUSD, it will be worth every dollar spent on it.
We need something like Facebook to connect people together. But maybe we should replace it with multiple platforms that truly serve our needs and don’t exploit our data. People are willing to pay for that, right Apple? I expect the students of today will engineer that brighter future, using the AI promise of technology while balancing it at the truly human level. We owe it to our students to help and lead this effort with them.
