A surveillance-state Montessori with a big data fetish and a bottom line doesn’t count as reform, sorry AltSchool. I was particularly struck by: > “It’s not ha

A surveillance-state Montessori with a big data fetish and a bottom line doesn’t count as reform, sorry AltSchool. I was particularly struck by: > “It’s not hard to model language acquisition if you can listen to every word a person is saying,” This is patently false big data hubris, which I’m afraid bodes poorly for the rest of the rest of their approach. I study early language acquisition and have worked on some very large datasets (e.g. Speechome, http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word), and there’s a lot you don’t know about the language system of a child even with a complete record of utterances and videos of everything that happens. Higher density/quality data is fantastic, but to understand language acquisition or to understand the progress of a single child you have to work out a complex system of latent variables. Education is similar— the biggest thing is that there is s different mixture of explicit pedagogy vs. observation. I’m all for school reform that leverages technology but this misunderstanding of data, in conjunction with the for-profit aspect, leaves me pretty convinced that this isn’t the right direction. The other thing that caught me off guard was: > “and wearable devices that help keep track of students off campus” I did a double-take. Why does this school track the kids off campus? The complete lack of criticism eliminated the last shred of credibility Wired had in my mind. I don’t care if you think this is a good idea or not, tell me who doesn’t think it’s a good idea and why.