Summit Public Schools‘ personalized-learning model, which focuses on project-based learning and mentoring, is replicating rapidly, I write on Education Next in a follow-up to my story in the fall 2017 issue. The charter network’s Summit Learning platform and methods are now being used by more than 300 partner schools, most of them traditional public schools.
Mark Zuckerberg talked with Summit Learning students in Eastern Kentucky in September. Students demonstrated “games, robots, drones, and VR apps (!!) they were coding,” he wrote on Facebook.
The Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative is supporting Summit Learning as part of its focus on personalized learning. That funding makes it possible for Summit to continue to refine its curriculum-loaded platform and to offer it for free, along with teacher training, technical support and mentoring, to partner schools.
Of course, it also stokes paranoia about tech billionaires taking over education.
A Mother Jones story on Summit’s personalized-learning model has a paranoid headline — Inside Silicon Valley’s Big Money Push to Remake American Education — that doesn’t fit Kristina Rizga’s well-reported story.