Among them was Rafranz Davis, executive director of professional and digital learning at Lufkin Independent School District, a public school system in Lufkin, Tex., where students regularly use DreamBox Learning, the math program
that Mr. Hastings subsidized, and have tried Code.org’s coding lessons.
The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools -
By NATASHA SINGERJUNE 6, 2017
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.
Tech companies and their founders have been rolling out programs in America’s public schools with relatively few checks
and balances, found in interviews with more than 100 company executives, government officials, school administrators, researchers, teachers, parents and students.
By hiring additional teachers, schools reduced the average class size across eighth-grade math to 24 students
from 33 — enabling teachers to give more individualized instruction, district officials said.
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.”
Even so, Ms. Woolley-Wilson, DreamBox’s chief executive, described the study as good news, saying it confirmed encouraging reports from teachers.
Mr. Hastings described DreamBox as a tool teachers could use to gain greater insights into their students, much the way
that physicians use medical scans to treat individual patients.