Findings from a CEPR impact study on DreamBox Learning are referenced in the following article by the New York Times.
In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants” and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats.
In Maryland, Texas, Virginia and other states, Netflix’s chief, Reed Hastings, is championing a popular math-teaching program where Netflix-like algorithms determine which lessons students see.
And in more than 100 schools nationwide, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, is testing one of his latest big ideas: software that puts children in charge of their own learning, recasting their teachers as facilitators and mentors.
In the space of just a few years, technology giants have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale, using some of the same techniques that have made their companies linchpins of the American economy. Through their philanthropy, they are influencing the subjects that schools teach, the classroom tools that teachers choose and fundamental approaches to learning.
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A report from Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research concluded that DreamBox use correlated with some improved math scores. But, the researchers cautioned, if those students had more effective teachers even without the technology, “then we might be falsely attributing” student achievement gains “to the software, rather than to the teacher.”
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Learn more about CEPR's research on DreamBox Learning