Leonie Haimson reports at the NYC Parents Blog that more than 2,000 parents and educators signed a petition calling on Mark Zuckerberg not to hire Campbell Brown because of her hostility to public schools and their teachers. Zuckerberg’s wife Priscilla Chan has often credited the public schools she attended and her teachers for her success in school and in life. Perhaps Mark Z. could talk to his wife about this important matter.
In addition, if you open the link, you will read the letter than Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the NEA, wrote to Mark Zuckerberg on the same topic.
The petition, which to date has 2045 signatures, says:
Mr. Zuckerberg:
Campbell Brown is the last person you should hire to head the Facebook news team if youwant to combat the damaging proliferation of fake news. She has relentlessly promoted the corporate takeover of education through her various organizations, and attacked public schools and public school teachers at every turn, by spreading misinformation. She is also extremely close to Donald Trump’s controversial appointee to head the Department ofEducation, Betsy DeVos, and has received funding from her. We urge you to hire a journalist instead who is trustworthy, non-partisan and objective — that is, if you want to ensure that Facebook becomes a respected outlet for real news rather than fake news in the future.
The petition is followed by the names and comments of those who signed. You can add your name too.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Why do people think that Zuckerberg and the entire tech world is somehow even remotely on our side or maybe even neutral!??? They are not! Tech is the epicenter of privatization and Ed reform!
Campbell Brown is a completely understandable pick for Zuckerberg.
The lines are very clearly drawn and sometimes I think it’s our side that really doesn’t get it.
Tech folks are not our friends and won’t be. Their whole vibe and image of social liberation, justice, and art creation is simply marketing. We have, perhaps, bought in to it.
This is ridiculous. A petition to what? Not be Ed reform-y? Drop Brown for another crazy privatizers/reformer?
It’s like we can’t admit what is plainly obvious.
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Exactly. It would be more effective to delete your Facebook account. Why participate in something you don’t believe in.
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Precisely. And I think that’s the major malfunction with our side in regards to seeing tech as really out enemy. Giving up one’s social media is beyond the pale. Beyond the possible. So, better to sign a nice petition and that’ll show em!
Ridiculous.
We will boycott LLBean (which is good) but Facebook!!!?? Twitter!!!!!?! Apple!!!??? They all told me I could be an artist and lead the next salt march!! They told me I will be part of something real big! I can’t let them go! They gave my life meaning!
Our side, A LOT of it anyway, thinks we can win this or even put up a solid fight by using the political engagement that was taught in a 1970s civics class. Call your congressman! Make and sign petitions!
Sorry, that is no longer the battlefield here.
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Yes-Tech has made billions from social media data-mining without much reprisal from their users. Their slogan should be -Sign up for Free-Come work for us without being payed. In simple terms– The education plan is to now data-mine students using Competency Based Learning. They want to tap into this market and unlock all the student data. Same idea—they will make $$$ selling student’s data without their consent and without any compensation to them. Deliver Education 24/7 on a tablet anyplace– anytime. BUT not for their children:https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/2015/dec/02/schools-that-ban-tablets-traditional-education-silicon-valley-london
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Petitioning is a great American tradition. The Framers thought it to be important to include the right of petition in the 1st amendment to the Constitution. We have many ways to make our voices heard. As one without a Facebook account, I was happy to sign it as I do with many causes in which I believe.
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I am don’t have a Facebook account either. I am not sure if Internet petitions make a difference, but I have signed more than one and thus provided profiling data to any quant who makes a living from data mining and analytics.
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Well stated NYSTEACHER!
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NYST,
Powerful argument. How about signing a promise instead of a petition? ‘I hereby renounce my willingness to visit Facebook. My personal information is my own. My friends are the people in my neighborhood.’
I looked up a “most hated companies in the world” survey yesterday. Facebook was one of them.
Personally, I never visited a social networking site, and I might just ditch this dumb “smart” phone when the contract is up this summer. How will I be active fighting for public education? With my pen. It’s mightier than the sword — and the tweet.
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Somebody please show this old timer a business model for facebook. Does anybody actually look at the adds. Perhaps I am delusional. I can’t recall clicking at an advertising link that I didn’t look up first in 20 years on the web. If those who advertise on the web had to survive off of sales they made to me they would starve. Which is not to say that I have not used the Web for a ton of purchases .
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You’re right. They can’t possibly turn that great a profit from ads. I do not believe they are collecting data for the purpose of targeting advertisements. It’s for credit ratings. It must have to do with banking. That’s where the money is. They’re selling the data to Big Banks.
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And it’s useful to see what they’re doing in other countries like personality survey click for credit China and paperless currency India.
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NYSTEACHER
Now now, you are being to harsh on tech. There is Nick Hanauer, of course he might be described as being in finance and not tech.
Then again what we call tech is not tech. These are merely the modern version of the Robber Barons that Teddy Roosevelt sought to curb. Empowered by a market system that is not free but specifically designed, “Rigged”(Baker) to ensure that income rises to the top. Protected by patents that discourage innovation and ensure revenue stream . Protected by labor laws which cripple labor. Protected by tax law that shelters most of their income……
And on another note if you did not read that analysis of organised labor here it is again.
http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/unions-facing-the-trump-era
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Joel,
As always you bring clarity and sense to the table.
You are absolutely correct that what we call “tech” is really just the modern/current version of hyper-predatory capitalism. They overstate their “innovation” and understate their profit motive on a grand scale.
I write this from an iPhone. (Which is 3 years past trading in, as I do not want to give apple more money) I am not advocating a Luddite position. Simply arguing for a repositioning of tech into the arena of “supplemental to human life and humane endeavors” rather than something that supplants human life and endeavors.
My criticism also extends to the tech leaders themselves who have no consequential understanding, knowledge, or training in the humanities, yet toss around shallow ideologies about social change, disruption, justice, etc. Again, a long tradition of the hyper-wealthy/capitalists here, but the tech folk have an outlet for their not-so-thought-through ideologies unlike any other former robber baron. These are not people that have much in the way of humanities in their backgrounds, even as core classes in college (high-end colleges are getting very shaky with providing solid core requirements in pure academic humanities fields.). 1930s CCNY history majors they are NOT! Yet they aspire to shape society in very deep and substantial ways. Their adolescence shows itself when they talk about anything more than algorithms, coding, or inside baseball tech stuff. Dangerous.
And the article was very good. Perhaps one of the clearer pieces of writing I’ve see in the topic of unions being in the existential fight they are in, and how union leaders are in many circumstances complicit. I will be sharing it.
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NYSTEACHER
Wholly agree and speaking of Luddites and Tech , A clear reason to ask what the purpose of education should be and how vital those core humanities are.
“Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.” … …
“the report suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot of “automation of knowledge work,” with software doing things that used to require college graduates. Advanced robotics could further diminish employment in manufacturing, but it could also replace some medical professionals.” ….
“Who will maintain our families, whilst we undertake the arduous task” of learning a new trade? Also, they asked, what will happen if the new trade, in turn, gets devalued by further technological advance?
And the modern counterparts of those wool workers might well ask further, what will happen to us if, like so many students, we go deep into debt to acquire the skills we’re told we need, only to learn that the economy no longer wants those skills? ” Krugman
(Who just made an ass out of himself arguing against more Keynesian stimulus, now that Republicans will forget about deficits. I can understand why he did it but it is based on political implications not economics.)
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Some knowns/givens:
1) Corporations/Factory owners/Bosses see $0 as the ideal figure for labor. Always.
2) Unions are the only known effective counter to the power of corporations/factory owners/bosses.
3) The prosperity of the US, 1945-1970s was absolutely and totally brought to you by Keynesian Economics. There is no rational way to disregard this. Counter-cyclical government spending and heavy-economic engagement created not only the American middle class, but also American global power. (That Dems don’t embrace this and state it as plainly as I just did, daily, is the source of their peril. They have allowed ahistorical, irrational, and nonsensical Ayn Randian, Trickle down Republicans to literally recast the story of American economic history. Like most things, the cure for what ails is simple and obvious….and avoided for a long time.)
4) Technology has been selectively chosen and crafted by corporate power to decimate organized workers. There is no natural course technology takes.
5) Public Education, one of the last frontiers to privatize and monetize, will be accomplished following the above blueprint. They have automated the factory and killed unions (death blown anyway) with machines and they will do the exact same thing to the public classroom. “Technology in the classroom” agendas are precisely that. We lose ourselves in the wonderment of its first wave, and set aside our minds in the process. We hear the term “efficiency” and embrace it uncritically, not realizing that it is corporate power’s time-tested anesthesia. Nobody asks: “why is efficiency needed in the delicate, dirty, and non-linear process of educating and making people susceptible to the enlightenment?”
6) Krugman, while usually very good, incorrectly believes, like many of his time and Ivy education, that in order to be “progressive” we must always have new ideas. He confuses nostalgia with history. He is afraid, inevitably, to fully embrace Keynesianism because it is an economic philosophy of the past. He is afraid of being conservative by suggesting an order of the past. Many progressives are afraid of this, which is another reason unions have had a very bad past few decades. Unsophisticated lefties are as much a problem as unsophisticated reactionaries. Not saying Krugman is unsophisticated, but his reluctance to fully embrace an updated Keynesianism has to be explained somehow.
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NYSTEACHER
It was political not economic decision. The same as he did with Sanders on healthcare. A complete reversal of everything he had said previous.
If Trump uses massive debt financed infrastructure spending. The economy will heat up. In order to get Republicans to go along he will do it in the form of Tax credits to developers privatizing “Public Goods” . In addition he will call for the repeal of Davis Bacon prevailing wage.and a National Right to Work law . The deficit hawk Republicans will turn into Daddy Warbucks tossing out cash for the payback of the destruction of organized labor and the privatization of public goods. . How many Democrats will stand in the way of an infrastructure bill bringing billions to their districts. . The sugar high will last a few years. When the party is over the American worker will be in a place not seen since the 1920s.
Krugman seeing the long term damage would rather do an about face and say now is not the time for Kayne’s . Touting the 4.7% unemployment rate while ignoring the other labor force dynamics that are far from rosy.
I agree with him, the thing that will nail this fascist is a sinking economy. The Republicans spent 8 years preventing infrastructure spending, no need to give them that weapon
Reagan blew a hole in the budget with military spending and tax cuts . Which enabled him to be portrayed as an economic success. A success the American worker is paying for to this day.
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Joel
That is a fantastic assessment.
My bet is that It plays out as you described and that Trump becomes the next Reagan…..and wins a second term. So long as we don’t have a nuclear war.
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Trump has made comments about recognizing Taiwan that have sent China into a rage–I heard this on BBC World News. The Chinese warned that they are a nuclear nation and Trump should butt out.
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I don’t see why Zuckerberg would be moved by our letters. He and Brown are cut from the same mud. We would probably lose more in the way of social communication that he would from a boycott from us.
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Mud indeed !
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Public schools, public school teachers and public school parents use Facebook to communicate with one another. A boycott of Facebook by these groups if Zuckerberg hires Brown is worth contemplating.
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I read that Facebook has 1 billion users. Tough to boycott when Mark won’t notice. He might notice bad publicity. He and Gates think they are saints.
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Oh, he won’t notice, but teachers, parents and schools might be better off if they didn’t depend on the platform Zuckerberg offers to hoover up their data. The bad publicity, that might make him notice.
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