Why Do So Many Parents Opt Out of Summit Learning? | Editor’s Picks - eLearningInside News

While their children turned in final assignments and took tests to wrap up another year of school, a group of parents in a Milwaukee suburb were busy working on a different project, as eLearningInside News reports.

Parents at an unrelated protest of Milwaukee public schools.
Photo: Charles Edward Miller, Flickr.

They had been drawn together after arriving at the same conclusion: a new personalized learning platform their school had implemented wasn’t a good fit for their child.'

Kettle Moraine Middle School, of Dousman, WI, had begun to use the Summit Learning platform, the previous fall. Kristina Vourax’s son began the 6th grade at the same time. “In the first couple weeks, he was kind of complaining about what was going on,” Vourax said. “At first I didn’t know whether it was something I should be concerned about or not. All kids complain about doing homework.”

That suspicion lingered. When Vourax started to do some research, she quickly found she was not alone...

What Is Personalized Learning?

Personalized learning has crested and broken as a new trend in K-12+ pedagogy. At it’s core, it marks an engineer’s solution to an inefficient system. The logic goes like this: a student learns best when they can benefit from a teacher’s near-exclusive attention. But in public school, a 1:1 teacher-student ratio is impossible with the current resources. Worse still, during a good chunk of a teacher’s time, they’ll need to give students who struggle the most individual attention. That means less attention is given to the students who manage to keep at or above proficient levels without the help of a teacher.
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Source: eLearningInside News