I have posted a couple of times about the celebrity show that Mrs. Jobs is paying for tonight. Lots of stars. No educators. If you should watch, write in with a comment. I have other things I have to do.
Here is what Politico says:
“STAR-STUDDED EVENT LOOKS AT RETHINKING HIGH SCHOOL: A hodgepodge of actors and musical stars will come together for a one-hour television special tonight on rethinking high school, set for broadcast on four major U.S. networks. The special was put together by the XQ Institute, a project of Laurene Powell Jobs’ philanthropic LLC called the Emerson Collective, and the nonprofit Entertainment Industry Foundation. In 2015, the XQ Institute launched a call to “rethink” high school, arguing that the average American high school has failed to keep up with huge changes in society and technology. High schools were revamped to use technology in unique ways; to shed traditional grades, classrooms and subjects to look more like creative workplaces; and set in nontraditional locations, like public museums.
– Russlynn Ali, XQ founder and former Education Department head of civil rights during the Obama administration, said “fixing our educational system is one of the biggest problems there is. Regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, we all have a vital interest in preparing America’s young people for the opportunities of the 21st century. But change of this magnitude is extraordinarily difficult, and won’t happen unless we unite around this common cause. Tonight’s special will highlight some of those schools, encourage educators and the public to build on those efforts and feature musical performances.” Celebrities expected to be there include Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hanks and Viola Davis. The special will air at 8 p.m. ET on ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC.”
Open it for links.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is Laurene Powell Jobs paying for this infomercial? Check out some of the people involved in this effort.
https://xqsuperschool.org/about/meet-the-team
Michele Cahill is listed as the Chief Education Content & Practice Officer of XQ — Cahill was one of the people behind many of the top-down high school “reforms” during Joel Klein’s reign at DOE. While she was on the board of inBloom she was in charge of “governance” and showed herself to be particularly dismissive of parent concerns about their kids’ privacy.
I also note this member of the “team”: Marc Eckō, Interim Chief Branding Officer
Marc Eckō is an entrepreneur, fashion designer, angel investor, advocate for creators and education reformer. Once a graffiti artist with no connections or fashion pedigree, Marc left the safety net of pharmacy school in 1993 to start his own fashion company – Eckō Unlimited. He is also the Founder and Chief Brand & Creative Officer (CBCO) of COMPLEX, a media broadcast platform that creates and publishes content covering the best, most diverse and relevant voices in culture. COMPLEX has established one of the most sought after audiences of millennial influencers ever assembled.
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Omg!
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I had a bad bout of millennial influenza once 🤢🤧🤒😷
But I’m much bette now ☺️
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The chief of staff Ali Berry has the deep knowledge that comes from experience at TFA, Relay “Graduate School” of Education, KIPP, and Amplify.
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I wonder if a public school will make the cut. It’s an ed reform initiative- probably not.
They’re reinventing public schools without public schools or public school families. It’ll go over about as well as Common Core did.
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Ever since Reagan we’ve learned that People Who Pretend To Be Something (However Badly) are much better that People Who Really Are Something …
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Is it true that public schools haven’t changed in 100 years?
Oh, who cares if it’s true? It sounds dreadful and it’s about public schools so let’s just go with it!
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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/laurene-powell-jobss-mission-to-disrupt-high-school.html
This author of this article sees right through this charade.
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“On standardized tests, white 17-year-olds still outscore black 17-year-olds by 20 points or more — a stubborn gap, unchanged for 30 years.”
Whatever the hell that means!
YEP, 100% pure bovine excrement!
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Now, now. 100% pure bovine excrement can serve a constructive purpose. No need to denigrate it with standardized tests.
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I do remember some of the hay fields absolutely reeking after they were fertilized with 100% bovine crap. Unfortunately, I don’t think we could do the same thing with standardized tests even if we shredded them first.
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Tests used to make good paperweights. Now they’re all on computers. Computer screens make good chopping boards. And they still make good paperweights. Don’t try to fertilize or grow anything with tech, though. The oil, plastic, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and near slave labor with which they are made are the opposite of good for life on Earth.
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The manure is lovely, dank and deep
And I have testing fees to reap
And loads to spread before I sleep
And loads to spread before I sleep
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“(Duncan has recently relocated to his hometown of Chicago, where Powell Jobs has hired him to try to solve the problem of urban violence.)”
Man, what a brilliant stragedy* by Jobs, eh!
*stragedy = Strategic blunder resulting in tragedy
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Can’t read any more of that crap of a paean to Jobs.
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“She says, “I mean, if you think it’s easier to solve cancer, then you better tell me some stuff that I don’t know.”
Amazing. Why should she or the glitterati listen to educators, you know, the experts in learning & development? She has nothing to learn about educating children. Reforming public ed is the new playground of the wealthy. Maybe they’ll eventually tire of disrupting public ed & move on to something else.
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Here’s a critic:
“The first falsehood of the XQ narrative is the claim that a dramatically changed world requires us to rethink public education. Students today, they argue, need a totally different kind of education because, as the XQ website puts it, “we’ve gone from the Model T to the Tesla and from the switchboard to the smartphone.”
Do new technologies require us to rethink the purpose of American education?
If the primary goal of school is to teach students to build products, the answer might be yes. But interviews my research team has conducted with educators and parents show that Americans maintain broad and complex aims for education. They want students to develop interpersonal skills and citizenship traits. They want schools to teach critical thinking and an array of academic skills. They want young people to be exposed to arts and music, to have opportunities for play and creativity, and to be supported socially and emotionally.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/09/07/the-false-narrative-behind-a-glitzy-live-television-show-about-school-reform/?utm_term=.dde8f2343462
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If anything, modern life has raised demand for the type of education Diderot got and handed out in the Salons of Paris in the Enligtenment. Note that this was an era when reading books made it possible for many to self-educate. The new technology made it important to confront changing realities. Their solution? Women like mdms Geoffrin and de Stael, finding their intellect of low regard, brought conversation into the long evening meals of French tradition. There they questioned the various authorities of the day and spread the ideas that coalesced into representative government and modern science. These women did it with coffee, baguettes, and goat cheese.
Electronic connections today make for interesting places to exchange ideas. Like this one. But an education is the means to this end, not an end in itself. Our ideas should dictate how we reform schools. Ideas are the dog. All the rest of these things are tails that wag the dog.
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They should have to say that this show is a paid infomercial before the show starts. People should have the right to know this is a paid piece of propaganda. Just because billionaires can afford to buy prime time does not mean that its content is any more than Lauren Powell Jobs’ unsubstantiated opinion. It should have a disclaimer.
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Oh my God! Watching this now and not sure my television will survive the night. I’m getting sick.
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OK, it’s turning out to be a bunch fluff to make celebrities feel like they’re “doing something.” No one will learn anything of substance watching this. Just saw Randi smiling in the audience. Will the texting links lead them to DFER garbage? I’ve had enough.
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Total crap that the average American will buy because of the glitz and glamour. Depressing.
I have been teaching 18 years and this one will crush real education.
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She’s got Tom Hanks, a man America adores and trusts, shilling for her.
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Watching this show just now, after putting in a tough 11 hour day in my classroom.
My 15-year-old daughter heard the music and just came down out of her room….her verdict: “this is stupid”. And, she walked away.
There’s certainly a lot of fancy dancing going on, that’s for sure. Crap, I’m from the disco era.
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I loved the two young edu-preneurs who talked about how they learned so much about science in school…and had launched a disruptive science education start up that would obviate schools.
What a bunch of half-baked thinking!
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Thank you to all who gave an hour of your life to learn what Mrs. Jobs believes is needed to fix American schools.
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We deserve virtual combat pay! In other words, we’ll get nothing.
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I was busy on Twitter during the show, asking awkward questions about how many professional educators were involved in preparing the show, how the show seemed to be an infomercial, and what does the multi-millionaire widow of Steve Jobs know about high school education and why did she pay for the network time?
Gotta say, I had mostly positive responses form a wide variety of people. No one could answer my queries, or supply any information about why teachers were apparently never consulted about how to improve our high schools.
I mean, I teach high school science, and I’ve got some ideas on how to improve things. I surely don’t need more tech.
But no one bothered to ask me.
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It was a deliberate attempt to fix school board elections in favor of Reformers! And given who was elected president, this will work. Of course it was produced by an actress who stared in a movie written and produced by Walton.
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My wish would be that every celeb in that farce would sit down for 90 minutes with Diane and then see if they a) felt any shame for what they had done, and b) find out how they would do such a show differently. But the image that will stay with me is Randi’s smiling face. It was a knife in the back of every teacher she claims to represent.
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Looks like an alliance of cool minority kids and celebrities to overthrow the oppressive reign of us stultifying, inequality-perpetuating teachers. It’s George Lucas’s Edutopia turned into a TV special. Projects, real-world problems, and lots of tech beats the traditional curriculum and teacher-centered classroom, in their eyes. Jejune kids aping experts is the ticket –no need to toil at acquiring the basic knowledge. Start acting like Pixar project managers in 9th grade. These techie utopianists –Gates, Lucas, Jobs –think alike. Ironically, this dream is actually old (and sour) wine in a new bottle. Give my nephews and nieces a solid traditional education with low-key, intelligent, erudite teachers over this tried-and-failed flashy dreck any day.
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I watched the whole infomercial. Had to force myself to do so after the first 10 or so minutes. Overall take? Nothing fundamentally new. No “rethinking high school” of substance. Essentially just new, glitzy branding put on existing high school to promote, subliminally, “individualized learning” and technology in high school.
One thing there near the end did grab my attention, though: the “XQ School Board Kit.” So I texted to get info on how to get the kit, thinking it would be good to know what that’s about. Viola Davis replied: “Thanks for joining the movement to rethink high school! I’m proud to stand with you & help every student in America get the education they deserve.” Right.
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Ed Johnson – and ponderosa just above:
I just watched the whole “infomercial.”
Very Trump-like—celebrate the “winners” and forget about the “losers.” Provoke feel-good emotions about the brand being sold and avoid thoughtfulness and having the sorts of difficult and uncomfortable conversations that are really needed.
One unexpected irony: for those that are all in for rheephorm then the pep rally that passed for 1 hour of education about education was necessary precisely because of all the unrelenting negativity of those pushing, mandating and selling the eduproducts of corporate education reform.
With the proviso, of course, that all that old wine in new bottles is for others. See my comment just below.
Thank you both for telling it like it is.
😎
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In the category of “folks that don’t follow their own advice to others” as in “they don’t walk their own talk”—
Go to the Lakeside School website. Hint: Bill Gates. His children. And the peers of Bill Gates that send their children there.
Link: https://www.lakesideschool.org
Just for starters, I encourage everyone to look at the first few pages, plus click on “Arts” and “Athletics” and “Student Experience.”
Then, for those all in for corporate education reform for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN—
Explain to the rest of us why what is the gold standard for THEIR OWN CHILDREN isn’t on the table for the vast majority.
The silence, as usual, is deafening…
😎
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I stand in awe of all those who managed to watch the whole thing. I could only bear to click on it every few minutes. I can’t say I was wowed watching a bunch of kids basically stare at computers. Every time I caught someone singing some heartfelt song complete with light show, I had to turn away. Granted, I didn’t catch much of the sales pitch, but I did catch the school board hard sell. Seriously? Do they really expect people to run out and lobby their school boards after watching an hour long variety show?
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I would like to comment on the content of the show. I can’t. There was none. Catchy jingle, though. Real catchy.
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“Catchy jingle, though. Real catchy.”
They want to make sure that you don’t. Forget about them. Don’t, don’t, don’t you …
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Laurene Powell Jobs is a modern-day charlatan, little different from Bill Gates, and like gates, she has lots of moola to throw around. Sadly, lots and lots of public schools have tried to get some of it, following the outlines for “reform” that Powell Jobs set up.
Powell Jobs has been tied to the New America Foundation (funded by the Gates and Walton Foundations), and Teach for America (funded by a host of conservative foundations and big banks). She has helped to fund a “network of small private schools” that has extensive staff ties to Teach for America, and she helped to finance the purchase of Amplify from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It appears that Powell Jobs’ conception of “reform” is really not very different from that of Whitney Tilson, or Wendy Kopp, or the other ed “reformers.”
Powell Jobs also heads up College Track, which “provides tutoring, SAT and ACT preparation and college counseling” to low-income students, Interestingly, according to its tax filings, College Track “qualifies as a publicly supported organization.” It receives money from the Emerson Collective – another Powell Jobs education enterprise, which is organized as a LLC and does not have to publicly report its donations – and from JP Morgan Chase, venture capitalist John Doerr, and Summit 54, a Colorado organization conceived in the wake of ‘Waiting for Superman’ and dedicated to the proposition that “Our education system is not preparing our students for jobs of the future” and “this is having a detrimental effect on our economy.”
The “economic competitiveness” bogeyman has been employed as the raison d’etre for the Common Core. The US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable subscribe to it too.
Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum has the US listed as the third most competitive nation in the world, in the wake of cleaning up after the Great Recession, caused by goofy economic policies which were supported whole-heartedly by the US Chamber, and Business Roundtable, and the corporate entities that fund Teach for America.
This is what education “reform” has shaped up to be.
The fact that so many public schools and educators are willing to participate in it should scare the bejeebies out of anyone who genuinely believes in public education as a cornerstone of American democratic governance.
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My heartfelt thanks and gratitude for those who slogged and suffered through such an onslaught from the backside of the bullshit fan. And who were able to survive!
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There was no content other than rah rah for charters and rah rah for ed tech.
This is pretty consistent in ed reform- there’s very little mention of public schools. It’s as if they’re creating their preferred reality, and public schools are gone.
It’s definitely a professionally run campaign, though.
I wonder sometimes when people will get sick of this slickness, this constant selling of everything, how EVERYTHING is packaged and sold as a consumer good. They can’t just talk to people- they have to SELL them on something. It’s exhausting. It’s as if we have to be pelted with whatever “the message” is because we’re too stupid to pick it up unless someone is screaming at us.
I don’t “know” of course but my sense in our public school is there is ed reform fatigue. They don’t want any more “disruption”- they want some stability and an opportunity to put real sustained effort towards doing one or two things WELL. I hope they get it but for them to get it public schools will have to resist following these people. They will have to learn to say “no”. NOT all “ideas” should be tried. Not all experiments are worthwhile. There’s value in plugging away at something until you get better at it.
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It showed Randi Weingarten in the audience.
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Randi Weingarten is the obligatory nod. It’s like how they mention “traditional public schools” in the last paragraph of charter promoting editorials.
If they include her that means they are checking all the boxes and can’t be accused of favoring one set of schools over another.
I don’t know why she does it- allows herself to be used like this. Tech companies loathe labor unions. They are fanatically anti-organized labor.
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93% of charters are non-union.
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It scares me to think that Weingarten accepted their invitation. Unless she had a voice, standing up to point out serious problems, her silent attendance is endorsement. As always.
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Powell Jobs says the public school she attended didn’t “prepare” her for college.
I don’t know what this means. My eldest went from an ordinary, working class public school to a selective college and it’s true- it was different and he had to work really hard first year. I didn’t tell him the way to approach that was to blame his high school and I wouldn’t tell him that. I told him to work harder and ask for help, which he did. By 2nd year he was okay. What is college supposed to be if not challenging? I always assumed it was intended to be different than high school. I never imagined my kids would go to college and coast easily thru, having pre-learned everything in high school.
What is the colleges role? They expect to receive a set of good students who are fully “prepared” for everything? Has that ever been true in the history of the US? My father went to college on the GI Bill coming out of an ordinary high school. It was difficult. I don’t remember him ever blaming his public high school for every college adjustment. I suppose he could have been better “prepared” but since his parents didn’t even speak english at home and neither of them graduated high school he was probably going to have to adjust.
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She says her public school didn’t prepare her for college…
And yet she somehow got to college and graduated, apparently all on her own. She apparently believes her entire success was attributable to her attitude, what she taught herself, and not the investment her community made in her and countless other children who attended the public schools in her home town.
I wonder how she came to that level of self-awareness and the knowledge required to make that complex evaluation. She implies that it wasn’t her public school, iso t must have been something she taught herself. Right?
Her position today is a result, in part, of her public school education. The fact that she can’t see that or even understand it shows her arrogance and lack of true insight. The sad thing is that a person with with enough money who lacks that insight and understanding can cause great damage.
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Why would they have any actual educators when it’s pretty obvious we know nothing. About anything. Except how to hold onto a job we can’t do. #sarcasm
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And too many are not even allowed to hold on to those jobs as they are being replaced by an endless flow of greenhorns…
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Here’s an actual educator from today’s Akron Beacon Journal LTE:
As a 29-year veteran public school teacher, I have now dealt with 17 years of state and federally mandated testing.
That’s 17 years of tests which were promised to narrow the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged schoolchildren. As good educators know, our advantaged children continue to score well and improve on these tests, and our disadvantaged children continue to fall behind.
We know why disadvantaged children are struggling. Brain-based research indicates children cannot process information to thinking areas of the brain when dealing with chronic stress. Adverse childhood experiences — physical, verbal and emotional — affect learning, as do family-related issues of drug use, violence, poverty and neglect.
We have the firsthand experience of watching these children fight, avoid, withdraw and give up.
We know what the traumatized brain needs to heal and learn. The testing industry provides none of those solutions. The $16 billion spent on creating and administering tests can be far better spent by our public schools.
We should invest in the answers and not the test.
We can start by valuing a teacher’s expertise in meeting children’s individual needs and creating prescriptive assessments, rather than forcing schools to purchase and teach to a for-profit test company.
We can invest in curriculums that teach brain-based strategies to help children focus, cope and learn. We can build and provide safe neighborhood schools, increase physical education and the arts, use our guidance counselors more efficiently and offer family outreach, support and education.
So the next time you read the published state testing report card, ask yourself whether continuing state testing, rating and comparing schools and blaming teachers make the best use of your tax dollars.
Anne Aston
North Canton
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