Giving Compass' Take:

• Emily Tate reports that a group of dissatisfied students protested Summit Learning, an online education tool funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

• Why are large-scale education philanthropy programs often failures? 

• Learn more about education philanthropy failures. 

In November, a group of high school students in New York City took to the streets to protest their school’s online program, Summit Learning. On Thursday, hoping to send a stronger message, they took it all the way to the top, with a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Students at the Secondary School for Journalism in Brooklyn had become increasingly frustrated with Summit Learning. Several told the New York Post that they would spend hours a day “staring at one screen” and had to teach themselves the material. Some described the content as too easy—and easy to cheat on.

They had tried before to address their concerns with the program, says Kelly Hernandez, one of the organizers of the protest. But no matter how many times they talked to their principal, or how many calls their parents made to the school to complain, nothing changed.

“We wanted to fight back with a walkout,” Hernandez, a 17-year-old senior, tells EdSurge, “because when we tried to voice our concerns, they just disregarded us.”

The Secondary School for Journalism is one of about 380 schools nationwide using Summit Learning, a personalized learning program that involves the use of an online instructional software, called the Summit Platform. This program grew out of Summit Public Schools, a network of 11 charter schools based in California and Washington, and soon caught the eye of Facebook, which lent engineers to help build the software. The platform was later supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Read the full article about students protesting online education tools by Emily Tate at EdSurge.