Reader D.L. Paulson is not impressed with the entrepreneurial strategy of profiting from public education funding:
The track record of GSV Capital, in terms of educational investments, is not very good. Perhaps its biggest dud: Coursera. But that’s the corporate wing. There are also “personal investments” by GSC Advisors (http://gsvadvisors.com/about/personal-investments/). Besides the obvious conflict of interest with this investment strategy—which should be no surprise for anyone following Deborah Quazzo’s career—it’s striking how poorly most of the companies are doing. If not for Japanese-like keiretsu (for example, a GSV-funded company called Clever partnering with other GSV companies), most would falter. It’s like a 1999 tech bubble waiting to pop. Or worse, GSV is fleecing investors with a pyramid scheme, complete with its own market research firm and cheerleading press (edsurge.com, also GSV funded).
For more on this, see http://hackeducation.com/2015/02/05/whos-investing-in-ed-tech and Mercedes Schneider’s Chronicle of Echoes.
All investment talk aside, it’s sad to think that GSV compares its corporate mission to the American revolution (see http://gsvadvisors.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/gsvadvisors/American%20Revolution%202.0.pdf). There is no lack of irony here. The extraction of profits from public schools is not democratic. It’s the reverse. It’s more control by corporations and less control by individuals over their own lives. It’s meant to replace the human endeavors of teaching and learning with machines, solely for the purpose of efficiency and maximizing profit. “Reform” is just a pretense to pull in more investors. (When your fund under-performs, it helps to fall back on some notion of social responsibility.) GSV’s mission is totally antithetical to freedom and self-fulfillment, two key ideas behind the real American Revolution.
Please read the following sentence from http://www.tealsk12.org/staging/wp-content/uploads/formidable/The-New-Role-of-Business-in-Global-Education_Final_1.8.2014.pdf. And before you read the sentence, know that the report comes from a kindred spirit of GSV Advisors. The subtitle is, “How companies can create shared value by improving education while driving shareholder returns”. The authors swoon over these companies, saying:
“They are transforming the education pipeline by reimagining education as a dynamic ecosystem in which companies are fully engaged from cradle to career.”
Cradle to career? That should make us shudder.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
If you mean “successful investment” in terms of paying dividends to stockholders, that’s one thing.
But “successful investment” in this case means siphoning public dollars into offshore accounts and getting out of town before they townfolks find the rail to ride you out on.
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Greedy people don’t care what is in the best interest of society or even providing good investments. They are interested in enriching themselves only. At whatever cost to others. Remember there are edupreneurs profiting off of the suffering children of the third world. Let that sink in for a bit. Those little starved, sickly faces are profit points for these people. Evil is just the category they dwell in most of the time.
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AGREE, Chris.
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Have posted about Revolution 2.0 and the “big hairy goals” of the investors. The report is super slick and dumb. Among other dumb things, they assumed the Common Core would be in place in every state, that they could add (at will) some requirements for high school graduation to guaranteed the success of their coding-skills portfolio, secure a tablet for every child pre-school to grade six. They are wildly enthusiastic about TFA, want to scale it up. It is in their portfolio of investments. The rhetoric is likely to be 100% offensive to anyone but investors.
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“The Department of Education may have misled the public when it cleared its favored student loan contractors of wrongdoing in their treatment of active-duty troops, a trio of Senate Democrats alleged on Wednesday. The three are calling for an investigation into the department’s internal audit, which ignored previous damning findings from the Department of Justice and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the senators said.
The issue threatens to further embarrass Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who has been accused of coddling the department’s loan contractors in spite of growing evidence that they routinely mistreat borrowers. The alleged mistreatment has worsened to the point that President Barack Obama has instructed the department to improve oversight of its loan contractors, rework their contracts and consider new rules to strengthen borrower protections.”
It’s really alarming to me because I think one has to start asking whether student borrowers can rely on information and advice from the US Department of Education. I’m not sure they can. If they can’t, someone should probably tell them, because their assumption would be it’s reliable. This is no joke. They’re taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt and they’re very young and probably not familiar with borrowing that much money. If they can’t trust that a federal agency is acting in their interest I don’t know what they do- hire someone to advise them?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/education-dept-troops-probe-panned-as-senate-democrats-demand-new-investigation_55c1f98de4b0f7f0bebaf0f2?kvcommref=mostpopular
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How can anyone ever argue with the MIchael Porter piece? He is well respected in business circles. I know that when I read “21st Century Skills” I find it to be a blanket term that is just used to allow permissiveness in giving up on democratic principles. But I imagine this will be hard to argue against and has already garnered so much momentum with the Common Core experiment (that still lingers even where it’s gotten rid of)—-what’s a parent whose child is just starting out in school to think?
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Involved Mom. Here are some little known facts about the “21st Century Skills .” This phrase is the name for a branded set of statements about “what students should know and do” formulated by a highly skilled lobbyist for the tech industry, Ken Kay. Everything in the “rainbow” of so-called 21st century skills is either not at all unique to the 21st century or it was lifted from handbooks from personnel managers, or it is there to press for technology in education.
The phrase and rainbow diagram and meager descriptions of skills came from Ken Kay. His lobbying savvy and marketing skills exceeded his knowledge about education but not his connections in the tech industry, K street, and halls of Congress.
I discovered that Ken Kay twice tried to get his “21st Century Skills” into federal legislation.
The developers of the Common Core were not at all happy with what they perceived as competition with the Common Core. So, they gave Kay a job of working with states on tech issues related to the Common Core. They also set up a bizarre website called EdSteps with some pretentious language about developing a scale for measuring creativity and measuring problem-solving plus global awareness and a few other phrases from Kay’s 21st Century skills.
I studied the EdSteps venture and concluded the method of rating examples posted on the website was no better than a beauty/vanity contest.
Ken Kay persuaded almost every national association to develop specific examples of HIS list of 21st century skills. Not many even blinked an eye at the faddishness. Why? Probably because a bunch of teachers were just overjoyed to hear anyone say that well…ideas like creativity and problem-solving and so on had a proper place in education, and in just about every subject. That rhetoric was in contrast to the strictly academic rhetoric pushed in federal and state policies. The last time I checked about 19 states still had something related to the 21st century skills fad. I use that term because there was no scholarship invested in the launch of the phrase, or for that matter, careful editing.
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Those were my hunches about the phrase (can’t stand the phrase–it drives me crazy). Thank you for explaining it well.
I want public schools to succeed. It gets so tiring reading things like this piece by people I know are respected in the business community who seem to have given up on the notion. It drains me.
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Thank you D.L. Paulson for hours of fascinating and terrifying end of summer break reading in your post, links, and links within links. That article by GSV Advisors could have gone with a Chris Cristie outburst — the article was so violent! I couldn’t believe the GSV’s graphic portraying teachers unions being blown up by weapons of war. The “Join Us Or Die ” choice of slogans was, er, interesting, too.
I’ve heard the GDV message before. The Emperor: “The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant… Good. Let the hate flow through you.”
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We continue to see the trend of Vulture Capitalists picking at the still living, but badly wounded body of Public education.
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