Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

Show NLP summaries collection recirc on article pages

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Carolyn Hax: Fiancé plans to have a baby with someone else

Ask Sahaj: I live with my parents and generational trauma ‘runs the house’

Miss Manners: Co-worker lies to avoid doing her job

The Post’s choices in Northern Virginia’s U.S. House primaries

States see legalized sports betting as a tax windfall — but at what cost?

Haiti’s plight is a case study in the ‘responsibility to protect’

Look to the cloud to protect the life documents saved on your computer

Can you spot bad financial advice on TikTok? Take our quiz.

5 myths about Social Security as the program faces a funding crisis

Cruise settles with person dragged under one of its robotaxis

Google’s AI answers could come back to bite it

Senators studied AI for a year. Critics call the result ‘pathetic.’

Elections 2024 live updates: Biden campaign accepts invite to a vice-presidential debate 

David Trone and the history of candidates lighting their money on fire

Trump allies call trial a ‘sham.’ Public opinion isn’t cooperating.

Best Places to Work in the Federal Government 2023

Suspect in Slovakian prime minister shooting arrested

Frankie the colored bull terrier wins terrier group

Riots are flaring on a French archipelago in the South Pacific. Here’s why. 

Shooting leaves Slovakia’s Fico in serious condition, country on edge 

Who is Robert Fico, Slovakia’s prime minister who was shot?

Netflix will air NFL’s Christmas games, a major step for streaming service

Sam Feist, longtime CNN executive, will become CEO of C-SPAN

Michael Cohen testimony ties Donald Trump to hush money payment

Flying budget airlines might not be as cheap as it seems

Some cruise prices are about to get a little more clear

Cruise ships to return to Baltimore two months after bridge collapse 

Puppy abandoned with heart-rending note is adopted, named Minerva

Man, 91, shocks tiny firehouse with $500K gift: ‘Nobody knew how much I’d saved’

Retired cop meets abandoned baby he helped 23 years ago: ‘What are the odds?’

The 35 best things to do in D.C. this weekend and next week

Rating every game on the Commanders’ 2024 schedule

The 26 best new restaurants in the D.C. area

President Joe Biden Joint Chiefs and Combatant Commanders 

Peter Barreras

Students at a New York high school have protested in recent weeks an online education program developed with engineers working for Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the latest challenge to the growing “personalized learning” movement in U.S. education.

More than 100 students from Brooklyn’s Secondary School for Journalism left campus during school hours last week and this week. Protest leaders sent a letter to Zuckerberg questioning his support for the Summit Learning Platform, which is being used in some 380 schools in a number of states and the District of Columbia.

The students said they weren’t learning on the platform and are concerned about the privacy of personal information collected on it. Their demonstration was the latest in a number of states, including one in a Connecticut school district, where officials ended their collaboration with Summit.

The free platform, which offers online lessons and assessments, was developed by a network of 11 charter schools in California and Washington known collectively as Summit Public Schools, and Facebook engineers helped develop the software. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, back the learning platform<a href="https://help.summitlearning.org/hc/en-us/articles/222964687-How-does-Summit-work-with-the-Chan-Zuckerberg-Initiative-CZI-"> with engineering support</a> through their for-profit Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The Summit <a href="https://www.summitlearning.org/approach/learning-experience">website</a> says the platform is a “personalized, research-backed approach” to teaching and learning.

“Personalized learning” — one of the reform models being promoted by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, philanthropists and businesses — is the latest form of what used to be known as “differentiated learning,” or, simply, learning specific to the student. Today, online programs allow students to move at their own pace.

Though there is no consensus definition of “personalized learning,” and though it seems to make intuitive sense to enable students to move at their own pace, in practice, this has amounted to computer-based learning programs of varying quality that require kids to sit in front of screens for a good part of the school day.

Kelly Hernandez, 17, a senior at the Secondary School for Journalism, said she helped organize the protest because students felt their complaints about Summit were not being heard. She said students began using it at the beginning of the school year without background information.

“We weren’t asked for an opinion about whether we would want to do Summit Learning,” she said. “ ‘Just use the computer. Here’s your name and password. Enjoy.’ ”

Akila Robinson, 17, another protest leader at the school, said she had problems logging on to Summit for two months and couldn’t get help. Another student, she said, had the same sign-on information.

School officials declined to comment on the protest or issues with Summit.

After the protest, school officials told students the program would no longer be used for juniors and seniors, but that ninth- and 10th-graders would continue using it.

Hernandez and Robinson sent a letter to Zuckerberg, which says in part (see the letter in full below):

Unfortunately we didn’t have a good experience using the program, which requires hours of classroom time sitting in front of computers. Not all students would receive computers, the assignments are boring, and it’s too easy to pass and even cheat on the assessments. Students feel as if they are not learning anything and that the program isn’t preparing them for the Regents exams they need to pass to graduate. Most importantly, the entire program eliminates much of the human interaction, teacher support, and discussion and debate with our peers that we need in order to improve our critical thinking.

Unlike the claims made in your promotional materials, we students find that we are learning very little to nothing. It’s severely damaged our education, and that’s why we walked out in protest. . . .

Another issue that raises flags to us is all our personal information the Summit program collects without our knowledge or consent. We were never informed about this by Summit or anyone at our school, but recently learned that Summit is collecting our names, student ID numbers, email addresses, our attendance, disability, suspension and expulsion records, our race, gender, ethnicity and socio-economic status, our date of birth, teacher observations of our behavior, our grade promotion or retention status, our test scores and grades, our college admissions, our homework, and our extracurricular activities. Summit also says on its website that they plan to track us after graduation through college and beyond. Summit collects too much of our personal information, and discloses this to 19 other corporations.

What gives you this right, and why weren’t we asked about this before you and Summit invaded our privacy in this way?

Raymonde Charles, communications director for education at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said in an email:

We were very concerned to learn about the experience of students at the Secondary School of Journalism. The conditions described are unacceptable -- and not reflective of Summit Learning’s high standards that have led nearly 70 percent of Summit teachers to recommend the program to their peers and year on year 90 percent of schools stay in the Program. We understand that there were issues in terms of the implementation of the required elements of the Summit program, including participation in teacher training and infrastructure needs. The Summit team is on the ground meeting with the administration to see if they can help address these issues.

Charles also said the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative “partners with Summit Public Schools to help build tools that allow teachers to customize instruction to meet students' individual needs and interests.” She also said, “CZI is an independent philanthropic organization that is entirely separate from Facebook. We don’t own or sell student data — and have no intention to — and adhere to the <a href="https://studentprivacypledge.org/">Student Privacy Pledge</a>.” 

The pledge is a joint venture of the Future of Privacy Forum and the Software &amp; Information Industry Association, and it asks organizations to promise to “safeguard student privacy regarding the collection, maintenance, and use of student personal information.” 

Leonie Haimson, an advocate for public schools in New York, has been monitoring Summit for two years and said parents in 15 states have reached out to her with complaints. Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, successfully led the battle to stop nine states from disclosing personal student data to a <a href="https://www.studentprivacymatters.org/background-of-inbloom/">student database project called inBloom</a>.

<a href="https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2018/11/brooklyn-students-fight-against-summit.html">She wrote on the NYC Public School Parents blog</a>:

Parents have rebelled against Summit Learning in Boone County, in Kentucky; Fairview Park City School District in Ohio; Indiana Area School District in Pennsylvania; Clearwater County in Idaho; McPherson in Kansas and elsewhere.&nbsp;

Because of growing parent and student discontent, some districts have completely eliminated the use of the Summit platform, including in Cheshire, Connecticut; several others have rolled back the implementation of the program or made it optional for students and parents, including in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Last year, for example, the Cheshire Public Schools district in Connecticut ended use of the Summit platform after parents' complaints about some of the content and other issues, Superintendent Jeffrey F. Solan said in a 2017 letter to the community. <a href="https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-12-20-connecticut-school-district-suspends-use-of-summit-learning-platform">An EdSurge story</a> quoted a parent, Michael Ulicki, as saying he had seen no long-term data that the platform was successful in teaching students and that he worried the program was “an experiment on our children.” 

<b>Here’s the full letter from the students to Zuckerberg:</b>

Cc: &nbsp;Diane Tavenner, CEO, Summit Public Schools at dtavenner@summitps.org&nbsp;

Students at Secondary School For Journalism have suffered and faced many hardships because of the Summit Learning program. We urge you to cancel this program immediately for our 9th and 10th grade students now that it has been dropped for the 11th and 12th grades, and fundamentally redesign it before implementing it in any more schools. On the job postings for the Chan-Zuckerberg LLC, this statement is made:&nbsp;

“We engage directly in the communities we serve because no one understands our society’s challenges like those who live them every day.” &nbsp;

We would appreciate if you engage with us by meeting with us, as well with the students and parents in the other states who are fighting against the Summit Learning system, so you could hear our concerns before implementing it into any other schools.&nbsp;

Unlike the claims made in your promotional materials, we students find that we are learning very little to nothing. It’s severely damaged our education, and that’s why we walked out in protest. See the NY Post article from November 11 for more details: Brooklyn students hold walkout in protest of Facebook-designed online program.

After you meet with us, and improve the program with the input of students and parents, we urge you to conduct an independent evaluation of Summit involving students who have given their consent before re-imposing it on thousands of unwilling public school students. We also ask that you give all students the right to consent from now on before collecting their data. &nbsp;

This is important given all the revelations about the numerous times that Facebook has experienced major data breaches and users have had their privacy violated over the past two years. How do we know that our personal information will be any better protected than it has been by you and Facebook in the past?&nbsp;

As the NY Times recently stated, there is a huge class divide, with the children of the wealthy having small classes and real personalized learning in schools that minimize screen time, while public school students like us are expected to learn by a computer in front of our faces for hours at a time with an educators only there to “facilitate”. &nbsp;

As one parent said, “These [ed tech] companies lied to the schools, and they’re lying to the parents…Our kids, my kids included, we are subjecting them to one of the biggest social experiments we have seen in a long time.” We refuse to allow ourselves to be experimented on in this way.

Akila Robinson and Kelly Hernandez, student leaders at the Secondary School of Journalism

Bachelor's degree: University of Miami. Master's degree: Northwestern University

Valerie Strauss is an education writer who runs the Answer Sheet blog. She came to The Washington Post as an assistant foreign editor for Asia in 1987 and weekend foreign desk editor after working for Reuters as national security editor and a military/foreign affairs reporter on Capitol Hill. She also previously worked at UPI and the L.A. Times. 

Valerie Strauss

washpost

the-washington-post

Peter Barreras/Invision/AP

7th Annual Breakthrough Prize Awards

name

iptc-media/economy_business_and_finance

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/mass_media

iptc-media/education/school/higher_education/university

iptc-media/economy_business_and_finance/economic_sector/computing_and_information_technology/software

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media/mass_media/online_media

iptc-media/education/school/higher_education

iptc-media/education/teaching_and_learning/students

iptc-media/science_and_technology/social_sciences/psychology

iptc-media/science_and_technology/technology_and_engineering

iptc-media/education/school/further_education

iptc-media/education/teaching_and_learning

iptc-media/education

iptc-media/economy_business_and_finance/economic_sector/computing_and_information_technology

iptc-media/arts_culture_entertainment_and_media

iptc-media/education/school

iptc-media/economy_business_and_finance/economic_sector/media

iptc-media/science_and_technology/social_sciences

iptc-media/science_and_technology

iptc-media/politics

client-blocklists/Client List: Morgan Stanley KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Amazon KWs - EXCLUDE ALL 

client-blocklists/Client List: Becton Dickinson KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Boeing KWs 2021 - EXCLUDE ALL 

advertising/Client Topic: WebEx

client-blocklists/CLIENT LIST: Nomura KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

advertising/Johnnie Walker - Quality

client-blocklists/Client List: Exxon Mobil  - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/GEICO KWs - INCLUDES ANY_4.26.21

client-blocklists/Client List: Microsoft KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: T. Rowe Price KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/B2_Academic & Professional Education_legacyaux_1o8

client-blocklists/T. Rowe Price KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/HBO KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: ExxonMobil 03312021 KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Ford/Lincoln KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Bank of America KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/WaPo: Combined Disaster Keyword List - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Optum KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs 2 - EXCLUDES ALL - 12.23.20

advertising/B2_Collaboration and Teleconferencing_legacyaux_BI4

client-blocklists/Blockist: Capitol Building Mob

advertising/B2_Corporate Responsibility_legacyaux_FTM

advertising/B2_Data Center Buyer_legacyaux_80A

advertising/B2_Design Engineering_legacyaux_i6w

advertising/B2_Digital Authentication_legacyaux_c2u

advertising/B2_Education Methodology and Innovation_legacyaux_ydc

advertising/B2_Enterprise Mobility 10.14.14_legacyaux_ncw

client-blocklists/Client List: Purina KWs - INCLUDES ANY

advertising/Qualcomm Custom KW - 5G

advertising/Citrix Mindfulness

advertising/B2_Family Matter 2.12.15_legacyaux_lf3

client-blocklists/BP KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/ CLIENT LIST: AT&T KWs 2021 - EXCLUDES ALL

advertising/B2_K-12 Education_legacyaux_tpe

advertising/B2_Positive News_legacyaux_hlt

advertising/B2_STEM Enthusiasts_legacyaux_gx0

client-blocklists/Client List: GEICO KWs

client-blocklists/Client KWs : FBI

client-blocklists/Client List: Navy Federal Credit Union NFCU KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/WaPo: Human Disaster

client-blocklists/Client List: Verizon KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Novo Nordisk KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Siemens KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Cisco KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: AT&T ALT KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Mercedes KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/FX Excludes All Disney

client-blocklists/Client List: Boeing KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Inpixon KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: Aetna KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Google KWs - INCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Philip Morris KWs - INCLUDES ANY 

client-blocklists/Dupixent neg kws - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Capital One KWs 2 - INCLUDES ANY - 1.4.21

client-blocklists/Bank of America Merrill Lynch KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/CME KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Eli Lily KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Google PG KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Chase KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

client-blocklists/Client List: Office Depot KWs - INCLUDES ANY

client-blocklists/Client List: ETrade KWs - EXCLUDES ALL

prism://prism.query/site,/local/education/answer-sheet?limit=20

The Answer Sheet

A school survival guide for parents (and everyone else), by Valerie Strauss.

Answer Sheet

prism://prism.query/site,/local/education&limit=20

Local Education

The Washington Post Local Education section provides coverage and analysis of schools, home school and education policy for DC, Maryland and Virginia. With in-depth coverage and analysis of Washington, DC education and schools, including DC charter schools, DC Schools Chancellor, DC teacher contract news and map of DC schools.

Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.

D.C., Md. & Va.

The Washington Post offers breaking local news, weather and traffic information for the DC, Maryland and Virginia metro areas, plus information about school districts, crime, government, religion, the lottery,restaurant reviews and obituaries.

Answer Sheet;Local Education;D.C., Md. & Va.