Giving Compass' Take:

• Matt Barnum explains that as personalized learning is adopted in a top-down push to reform schools, it will likely face the same pushback as Common Core. 

• How can funders develop school reforms with experts, teachers, and families to create reforms that are embraced? 

• Learn more about Common Core's failures. 

Major funders and the federal education department are promoting the idea.

Teachers are wary. Parents are perplexed.

Criticism is coming from both the political left and right.

It’s not the Common Core, though a few years ago, it would have been. Now, we’re talking about technology-based personalized learning, the latest, hottest, and best-funded idea to dominate the conversation about American schools.

The backlash to the Common Core standards, and their associated tests, was enough to get them revised or replaced in some states. Today, some teachers, political conservatives, and parents are beginning to mobilize against personalized learning, too. And in some cases, the very same people are taking up the fight.

Take Jane Robbins of the American Principles Project, a socially conservative group that vigorously opposed Common Core. One recent piece she co-authored: “The Same Folks Who Brought You Common Core Want You to Embrace ‘Personalized Learning.’”

What Common Core and personalized learning advocates certainly have in common are grand ambitions to reshape schools. That brings challenges, said Betheny Gross of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a University of Washington–based think tank.

“Once you start pushing for broader scale and scope, you leave the honeymoon phase pretty quickly,” Gross said. “Even Common Core had a honeymoon phase.” More schools and districts say they’re adopting personalized learning and more states are encouraging or even requiring the move.

It all suggests that personalized learning, whether or not it provokes a Common Core-sized debate, is entering the a boom-and-backlash cycle that often follows education trends.

Read the full article about personalized learning by Matt Barnum at Chalkbeat.