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<br />that Mr. Hastings subsidized, and have tried Code.org’s coding lessons.<br />The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools -<br />By NATASHA SINGERJUNE 6, 2017<br />In San Francisco’s public schools, Marc Benioff, the chief executive of Salesforce, is giving middle school principals $100,000 “innovation grants”<br />and encouraging them to behave more like start-up founders and less like bureaucrats.<br />Tech companies and their founders have been rolling out programs in America’s public schools with relatively few checks<br />and balances, found in interviews with more than 100 company executives, government officials, school administrators, researchers, teachers, parents and students.<br />By hiring additional teachers, schools reduced the average class size across eighth-grade math to 24 students<br />from 33 — enabling teachers to give more individualized instruction, district officials said.<br />But, the researchers cautioned, if those students had more effective teachers even without the technology, “then<br />we might be falsely attributing” student achievement gains “to the software, rather than to the teacher.”<br />Even so, Ms. Woolley-Wilson, DreamBox’s chief executive, described the study as good news, saying it confirmed encouraging reports from teachers.
