Netflixing human capital development: personalized learning technology and the corporatization of K-12 education

Abstract

Advanced by powerful venture philanthropies, educational technology companies, and the US Department of Education, a growing movement to apply ‘big data’ through ‘learning analytics’ to create ‘personalized learning’ is currently underway in K-12 education in the United States. While scholars have offered various critiques of the corporate school reform agenda, the role of personalized learning technology in the corporatization of public education has not been extensively examined. Through a content analysis of US Department of Education reports, personalized learning advocacy white papers, and published research monographs, this paper details how big data and adaptive learning systems are functioning to redefine educational policy, teaching, and learning in ways that transfer educational decisions from public school classrooms and teachers to private corporate spaces and authorities. The analysis shows that all three types of documents position education within a reductive set of economic rationalities that emphasize human capital development, the expansion of data-driven instruction and decision-making, and a narrow conception of learning as the acquisition of discrete skills and behavior modification detached from broader social contexts and culturally relevant forms of knowledge and inquiry. The paper concludes by drawing out the contradictions inherent to personalized learning technology and corporatization of schooling. It argues that these contradictions necessitate a broad rethinking of the value and purpose of new educational technology.

Keywords:

• Personalized learning
• corporatization
• big data
• educational technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For a variety of research reports that show the shortcomings of the corporate reform movement in the United States, see the studies conducted by CREDO at Stanford University (http://credo.stanford.edu/), the National Center for Education Policy at the University of Colorado (http://nepc.colorado.edu/), and the Economic Policy Institute (www.epi.org).

2. While business interests have always had a hand in shaping educational policy in the United States, the economic goals of education now tend to overshadow progressive goals historically linked to public education, such as the development of democratic citizens (Katznelson and Weir 1985). This narrowing of educational purpose emphasizes the private domain and private gain, shifting control from public to private interests by transferring decision-making about public matters to corporations largely through federal and state policy-making, which is increasingly bought and paid for by private corporate actors (for instance by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, funded by the Koch brothers). Furthermore, within the corporate reform perspective, structural conditions such as class and racial segregation, child poverty, educational funding inequities, and declining economic opportunities for young people and communities are typically viewed as irrelevant, or they are said to derive directly from supposedly failing public schools and their teachers (Fabricant and Fine 2013; Means 2013).