Silicon States

by Lucie Greene

  Then there’s also the burgeoning mental health crisis driven by excessive use of social media and smartphones, particularly among today’s teenagers who have grown up with them attached to their hands. According to a headline-generating feature article published in The Atlantic, teenagers are more likely to commit suicide and experience depression than millennials, and their digital habits have been blamed for creating a sense of isolation from the real world. In “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Dr. Jean Twenge writes: “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.” As we all, collectively, interact with technology every day, it’s starting to affect our minds, with unknown or not yet known consequences.

  Yet Silicon Valley is already stepping into meatier spaces like education with new theories and business models. If we don’t even know what a lifetime of smartphone use does to our minds, what will it look like when Big Tech is baked into our schools and the way we learn?

  7

  “Fixing” Education

  Education needs are evolving faster than governments can keep up. Generations have graduated in record-breaking university debt. The job market is demanding new skills, every few years. Self-employment is on the rise. Technology is changing rapidly. New jobs arise while others become redundant or obsolete. (See: automation; among its biggest casualties are workers in the retail sector. In the UK, 62,000 retail jobs were lost in 2016 because of growth in online shopping and automated cashiers. According to the British Retail Consortium, another 900,000 retail jobs will disappear in the next decade. In the U.S., between 6 and 7.5 million retail jobs are estimated at “high risk of computerization” in the next ten years, according to a 2017 study by Cornerstone Capital Group.) The school system isn’t equipping people for jobs of the future. And the debate about state versus private responsibility for education continues. The future of education in this rapidly evolving world is a complicated and difficult puzzle. Increasingly, Silicon Valley thinks it has the answer.

  Historically, governments have addressed dislocation brought on by great change by radically reimagining education. During the Industrial Revolution, or any major shift in the way wealth was generated, school systems and curriculums were overhauled to equip nations with trained people for these new centers of wealth creation. The same happened with the explosion of manufacturing in the post–World War II era. But this time, for some reason, governments have not acknowledged the seismic changes created by the vast digitization of our existence, much less made the dramatic changes needed to prepare populations for what comes next. Perhaps it’s the speed of change. The speed of disruption. Or the pace at which gigantic sectors are being supplanted by platforms powered by five team members and an algorithm. Perhaps it’s impossible to mitigate against this entirely. Regardless, the way we learn, and what we learn, is in desperate need of more attention.

  “If you look at the first Industrial Revolution,” explains Thor Berger, “or perhaps more the second Industrial Revolution taking place in the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, what you see are huge overhauls of the education system.” Berger is a post-doctoral researcher in the department of economic history at Lund University and an associate fellow at Oxford University, studying technology and employment. He points out that the high school movement in the United States was a direct response by the government to prepare citizens for the new knowledge-based jobs created by a transitioning economy. “There was a consensus that to maintain employment in the future, you would need to invest a lot more in education and also really think about the kind of education you want to provide.”

  Ask him why government today is so slow to respond to massive changes in the workplace, and he observes: “Modern Western economies are good at identifying what’s going on but political systems are not designed to tackle longer-term challenges. They’re quite good at crisis management, over a two-year, three-year horizon, but here when you are talking about overhauling education and trying to tackle what we think will happen in the future, say in twenty years, today’s political systems are not equipped to deal with those time horizons.”

  In lieu of this governmental inaction, Silicon Valley is confronting the issue of education head-on. The tech world is looking at “broken” education not just from a philanthropic perspective but as a scalable industry. A new market to disrupt. It’s entering it at multiple stages, from primary and secondary education to adult self-improvement. As with all the sectors it’s moving into, its messaging is that education needs to be rethought, retooled, and engineered to create the workers of the future. And guess what? Student learning benefits from some forms of technology.

  Education is a major area where most tech philanthropists are focused, both in the U.S. and globally. In 2018 Apple announced investment in the Malala Fund, championing access to education for girls globally. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has launched the Primary School, a free private school in East Palo Alto for “underserved children” that offers education and health care. Oracle has launched the Design Tech High School on its campus in Redwood City, California, a public charter school. Access is via a lottery system. As well as an education, attendees will have mentorship from Oracle employees and receive classes on wearable tech. Salesforce has pledged $100 million to San Francisco public schools. According to CNBC, CEO Marc Benioff treats the fund like a VC when meeting with principals.

  Silicon Valley leaders are increasingly exploring how education works.

  The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s investments in education are well storied, as is its participation in the education reform movement. Mark Zuckerberg and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, are both investing in new education projects, and in education theory. Zuckerberg’s efforts started in 2010 with a $100 million gift to New Jersey to fix its failing schools. The endeavor is now widely seen as a failure, but it also saw early examples of Zuckerberg’s ideas for how education could be transformed—more competitive salaries to attract better talent being just one. More recently, like many tech leaders, he has started talking about individualized curriculum as a better way to learn. The common solution, according to the main Silicon Valley educational players, is that personalized learning is more effective than standardized tests. Here, technology is a means of lowering costs, or “scaling,” and of broadening curriculums. (More on this later.)

  Powell Jobs announced a $100 million investment in American high schools through a contest she helped design, titled the XQ: Super School Project, which awards funding to applicant high schools that are trying to find new and better models for learning. “People actually get excited about solving problems,” she told New York magazine. “I feel very strongly that the problems we get to solve are really hard, otherwise they would have been solved already. Now it’s our turn. We’re going to bring in people from all different disciplines who think about things a little differently. Sometimes they take it to the extreme so, if we were to do this—which is not plausible—but, if we were to colonize Mars, what would be our first step? And so you backwards map. After a couple of decades of living there you think ‘well, this shouldn’t be insurmountable.’ It’s a lot harder to have an early detection of all cancers than it is to give an excellent education to every kid in our country,” she said.

  There’s also a bigger-picture cultural angle to recognize when it comes to Silicon Valley and education. When it comes to higher education at least, they have criticized a person’s need for a university education to be successful. They even doubt the need to take part in traditional systems generally. Why work for an employer when you can be a founder? Why be beholden to government regulation at all?

  Peter Thiel’s criticism of universities continues. He claims they are elite and not equipping people for the future. He set up the Thiel Fellowship in 2011, offering budding entrepreneurs $100,000 to quit the classroom and turn to “building ne
w things.” His criticism was less about education itself and more about the outmoded university institutions and their way of teaching. The feeling is amplified by the fact that Silicon Valley’s most successful leaders, from Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, dropped out of college, while Sergey Brin left his PhD unfinished. It’s interesting that all were accepted into prestigious colleges (Harvard, Reed, Stanford) and then chose to leave—they didn’t shun the system altogether. Almost as if getting in was the proof point of their prowess and jumping ship straightaway carried some bragging rights.

  Is education broken? Silicon Valley may not be not entirely wrong.

  Despite living in an affluent economy, U.S. students are far behind other advanced nations in their abilities, according to research by Pew. The Programme for International Student Assessment put the U.S. thirty-eighth among seventy-one countries. Access to quality education varies by state (and family income). Which is why, perhaps, e-learning has been touted to nearly double in value as a market. (In 2015 it was valued at $165 billion, but by 2022 it’s expected to reach $275 billion, according to Orbis Research.) Then there’s what we are learning itself, and how. Megan J. Smith, the former CTO under Barack Obama, launched many programs to make tech literacy and coding accessible to lower-income citizens.

  The Pew Research Center has published reports of a national shortage of software engineers, and also shows that U.S. students fall far behind other countries in STEM achievement. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report outlines the new skills needed to be successful. In 2015, they were complex problem solving, coordinating with others, people management, critical thinking, negotiation, quality control, service orientation, judgment and decision making, active listening, and creativity. Fast-forward to 2020 and they predicted two significant new additions: emotional intelligence and cognitive flexibility. Is any of this featured in current curricula?

  “The Fourth Industrial Revolution is interacting with other socioeconomic and demographic factors to create a perfect storm of business model change in all industries, resulting in major disruptions to labor markets,” the report said. “New categories of jobs will emerge, partly or wholly displacing others. The skill sets required in both old and new occupations will change in most industries and transform how and where people work. It may also affect female and male workers differently and transform the dynamics of the industry gender gap.”

  Amazon has created a few initiatives to address changing skill needs in its workforce. It hired Candace Thille, an expert in learning science and open education at Stanford University, to be Director of Learning Science and Engineering. Her role is to “scale and innovate workplace learning at Amazon.” As with Amazon’s moves into health care and shipping, it starts out with self-interest, perhaps (needing to keep a large global workforce up to date in its skillsets; offering affordable health care to a massive employee-base also makes them more effective and functions as a de facto pay increase). But it could have commercial implications. The corporate learning market is estimated to be worth $130 billion. That grows larger if technology further accelerates the pace of change in the way we work and the number of careers we might have as a result. (Amazon has also been making commercial inroads into online education platforms and tools for children.)

  But will Silicon Valley actually make a difference? There is a reasonable argument for using technology to offer high-quality education more accessibly thanks to efficiencies of automation, and that education is a great equalizer. There is also a big argument for learning new things—such as problem-solving skills and critical thinking that can adapt to any new wave of demands and careers, not simply learning historical facts verbatim. There is also a good argument for prioritizing tech literacy as a core element of the curriculum.

  But there is the nagging idea that private companies would get more significant access to young people in their formative years, which could have lasting impacts. And, when it comes to the rise of charter schools in the U.S. (privately run and funded schools, more and more backed by tech), questions remain about transparency and accountability. Charter schools are a subject of hot debate. Once presented as a private alternative to the public education system, they’ve been criticized for high faculty turnovers, high student attrition, and cynical commercial behavior. They also receive government funding, which is, critics argue, eroding resources to existing public schools and putting further pressure on them. Yet charters do not face the same regulatory requirements. They’ve also been accused of racial and economic discrimination in their enrollment policies, driven by the need to maintain publicly high academic success rates.

  Tech’s mantra is that education is broken, but perhaps it isn’t, counters Megan Tompkins-Stange, assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan and author of Policy Patrons: Philanthropy, Education Reform, and the Politics of Influence. “That’s a nice clean narrative and it’s one that’s marshaled a lot of energy around education for the last fifty years,” she says, “but in reality things are getting better in the United States, slowly but surely. People look at the international rankings and go, ‘Oh, we’re number forty!’ but in terms of where American education started and where it’s come to, and the achievement gaps within racial groups, for example, which are closing, people are doing better. There’s a higher graduation rate. Generations of well-meaning philanthropists, who probably did not have a lot of exposure to public schools when they were growing up, see a problem from the outside. They say, ‘Let’s fix it, I have the expertise, I’ve been successful in business, I will bring that to the floor in terms of working for education’—and it doesn’t work because it’s a totally different system. There’s no silver bullet because it’s a twenty-year process to change education. Philanthropists don’t like that; they want results next year.”

  This is part of a widely held tech solutionist outlook, says Debra Cleaver, founder and CEO of Vote.org and Bay Area native. “In Silicon Valley they’ll often say the solution to education is technology. And it’s like, ‘No, the solution to education is paying teachers more money and then giving them more resources.’ It’s really comical the belief that only technology solves problems. No, money solves problems. Resources solve problems. If we gave public schools the same amount of money as we give these education tech startups, we would see better results.”

  “The longer I stay in education, the more nuanced my views become,” says Dale J. Stephens, founder of UnCollege, a gap-year startup in the Bay Area. “If you look at the stats, half of college students are dropping out—a full 50 percent of students. When you look at the people who are actually graduating on time, which is not most of them, and the fact that they’re racking up tens of thousands of dollars, if not hundreds, in debt, and they’re not necessarily being able to use [their education] effectively, you definitely have to start questioning whether it’s the right system.”

  Stephens also points to the wider culture of reverence toward traditional institutions. “We have stigmatized paths to apprenticeship, to trade schools, those kinds of things, whereas a lot of European models have multiple options after high school.

  “It can be hard to change people’s views when they’re very set in their ways. I think the elephant in the room here is that a lot of colleges are closer to the brink than they want to admit, and a lot of that is because they took out the loans in the early 2000s to build student centers and gyms.”

  That debt is being passed down to students. In October 2016, the California Aggie, the University of California, Davis’s student newspaper, reported a Board of Regents meeting discussing the management of the university’s $17.2 billion debt. Between 2002 and 2010, the total debt liabilities of public research universities increased by more than 50 percent, according to a study published in the Scholars Strategy Network.

  Of Peter Thiel’s famously scathing comments about universities, Stephens says, “The biggest thing the Thiel Fellowship did was to cause people
to ask the return-on-investment question around college.”

  Generation Z, the upcoming twelve- to nineteen-year-olds, might be at the forefront of seed change in this respect, too. The president of Northeastern University, Joseph E. Aoun, summed up Generation Z in a J. Walter Thompson study on the group: “A new generation of Americans is on the rise: highly entrepreneurial, pluralistic, and determined to take charge of their own futures. Those of us in higher education must listen to this next generation and enable them to chart their own paths, gain valuable experience, and become the leaders of tomorrow.”

  What’s clear is that, with mounting economic pressures, changing educational needs, and spiraling student debts, people are looking to alternative ways to make themselves employable. And that’s being met with a wave of new ventures from Silicon Valley. Udacity, Minerva, UnCollege, and AltSchool are among the many sexy new-model commercial initiatives coming out of the Bay Area backed by venture capitalists that are creating new approaches to education at every level. As with all Silicon Valley brands, their promises are rich and their rhetoric exaggerated. The familiar tropes abound.

  Should Harvard be scared?

  Netflix of Education

  A number of new concepts are offering alternatives to traditional education for all ages, as well as business development and personal and vocational training. The prevailing thread among these is the message that the current education system is not equipping people with enough future skills. The further message is that education should be personalized and active, not standardized, broadcast, and passive. Most of the new systems naturally make tech literacy a focus. They are leaner than traditional learning institutes, often moving beyond the idea of a campus to incorporate travel and online tutorials.

  Udacity, founded by former Google vice president Sebastian Thrun and backed by venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is aimed at adult professional education. Among other such organizations, Minerva is a new “active” learning institution and alternative to a traditional university; it pitches itself as the lean and superior alternative to Harvard. UnCollege, an alternative gap-year course in building core life skills, markets its offer as—apart from anything else—a way to focus students on their long-term career goals and find the right academic path, as well as build professional skills. There’s AltSchool, for children pre-K through eighth grade, founded by Max Ventilla, formerly of Google. AltSchool’s focus is on personalized learning as a more effective alternative to standardized education (this is rapidly becoming a mantra in Silicon Valley). AltSchool launched in 2014 and runs several small private schools in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Chicago. The company is planning to license its techniques.