When Peter Greene learned that Jeff Bezos and his wife planned to allocate $2 Billion to creating their own preschools and helping the homeless, he was appalled.
Greene has a better idea for the billionaire class: They should pay their taxes. More taxes.
“Jeff Bezos (and his wife) starting pre-K schools is stupid. Let me count the ways (in no particular order).
“This damn guy
“It’s a stupid small pledge on his part. Yes, $2 billion is a chunk of money (aka more money than any teacher will ever make in their lifetime), but it’s chump change to Bezos. As this piece points out, it’s about 1% of his wealth. It’s considerably less than some of his fellow billionaire dabblers have donated. This is the exact opposite of a “we’ll spend whatever it takes to do this right” pledge.
“His concept is stupid, as witnessed by the oft-quoted “the child will be the customer.” This is, in its own way, as stupid as the many rich amateur education “experts” who insist that the child is the product. In our current hyper-commercial environment, as exemplified by the cutthroat capitalism of Amazon.com, the customer is a business’s adversary, the mark from whom pennies must be shaken loose by any means necessary, in return for which, the vendor will provide the absolute minimum they can get away with. How is this a good model for schools? A business has no relationship with a customer (though it may serve the business well to dupe the customer into thinking there’s a relationship there). The interactions are purely transactional– you give me some money, I give you whatever goods or services the money was supposed to pay for. The rest of the customer’s life and concerns are immaterial. How is this a good model for schools? Schools should help create educated citizens, help students become their best selves, create the public for a country; none of this is the same as creating customers. And customers, it should be noted, have to earn the right to be served by showing that they can plunk down the money.
“The stupid keeps getting deeper because we already know about Bezos’s treatment of people with whom he has a transactional relationship– he screws them mercilessly. Amazon workers are notoriously poorly treated so that Bezos can make more money. Bezos has made cities dance and scrape and bow for the privilege of having him gift them with another amazon hq. A school should take care of the students it serves. When has Jeff Bezos ever taken care of anybody?
“It’s stupid because of the blinding hypocrisy. I know this has been said, but it deserves endless repetition– Bezos wants to give money to the homeless, even as his corporation helped kill a tax bill in Seattle designed to help the homeless. But this isn’t just hypocrisy– it’s a blatant example of modern fauxlanthropic privatization. It’s about doing an end run around democratic-style government and insisting on commandeering the project yourself, in the same way that avoiding taxes is not just greedy, but is the Bezos way of saying that he will spend his money on his own terms, and if he’s going to spend money on something, then he will by God own it himself.
“It’s stupid because of the sheer oligarchical privatizing balls displayed. If Bezos wants some of his money to go to improving schools, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “paying your taxes.” If Bezos wants a say in how schools are operated, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “running for school board.” The country is not served by having vital institutions dependent on the largesse of the wealthy. We are not served by falling back into a system in which cities get their schools or water supplies by convincing some rich patron to take care of them.
“It’s stupid because the poor Montessori people are once again having their “brand” co-opted by somebody who doesn’t even get it. Bezos’s schools will apparently be sort of Montessori-flavored, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean.
“It’s stupid because it is soaked in tech-giant arrogance. Note that Bezos says nothing along the lines of, “I will bring in the top education experts to don this right.” Experts, shmexperts. Bezos will just “use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession.” In other words, running a school or a giant internet-based mail order business is pretty much the same thing, so I already know everything I need to know. Even if Amazon weren’t built on a mountain of worker abuse aimed at working the customers over, this would still be an arrogant, stupid thing to say.”
Read it all.
Peter Greene’s crap detector is better than anyone else’s. Jeff Bezos should listen to him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This needs to be repeated over and over when we hear about the next billionaire who wants to take on education as a hobby.
‘It’s stupid because of the sheer oligarchical privatizing balls displayed. If Bezos wants some of his money to go to improving schools, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “paying your taxes.” If Bezos wants a say in how schools are operated, there’s a mechanism in place for that; it’s called “running for school board.” The country is not served by having vital institutions dependent on the largesse of the wealthy. We are not served by falling back into a system in which cities get their schools or water supplies by convincing some rich patron to take care of them.’
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Be is is not going to help young families living in poverty. He is going to give an award to groups that ” move the needle.” The Montessori thing is nothing more than a brand that he sort of likes. Put you armor. The last think we need is education that driven by the values of Amazon’s founder and others who think of students as not more than customers.
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Sorry for typos. iPad is at fault, not me.
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What Bezos likes about Montessori is self-directed learning. I see him having kids self-direct themselves toward Amazon products, just as the rest of his customers do.
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YES. Yet more specific interference into education as a means to sort out the haves (useful) from the have nots (disposable)
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Here’s an article about the disgraceful things Amazon does for customers. I wouldn’t want to work in one of Bezos’ schools.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/14/amazon-worker-cage-staff
When they open, they are going to need unionization immediately.
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Peter is right of course, but Bezos is a mere anecdote in the much larger landscape of empirical evidence that a predatory elite is out to destroy public institutions and especially public education: http://educationopportunitynetwork.org/wealthy-people-are-destroying-public-schools-one-donation-at-a-time/
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Yes, I agree. Privatization is a form of “dispossession”(David Harvey)where big money takes over any assets of value to increase its private revenue stream at public expense(“neoliberalism” for the past 40 years). The worst thing for those of us who cherish democracy and the public sector is to have policy directed by private wealth, which will engineer a massive looting of public goods. The public schools were a big fat target waiting for the billionaire class to conquer them in the absence of any militant teachers’ union leaders ready to organize a fight to protect them.
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THIS statement describing all in the “venture philanthropy” game as well: “…the Bezos way of saying that he will spend his money on his own terms, and if he’s going to spend money on something, then he will by God own it himself.”
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Greene wonders why Bezos is getting involved with education. It is not because he wants to help the poor, it is more about changing public perception that sees him a voracious “raptor capitalist,” which of course is the case. Bezos got together with his tax attorney and decided that a 501(c)(4), organization would allow him to reduce his tax liability and permit him to stay involved with politics.
These public-private “partnerships” are great tax reducing schemes for billionaires, but they are not much benefit to the public. Greene is correct when he states that these “partnerships” are often a means of allowing wealthy “patrons” to circumvent the democratic process in providing services to regular people. This is the government’s responsibility, and Greene points out that people should not have to rely on the largesse of a billionaire to get basic services. In many cases these “partnerships” wind up costing us the taxpayers more, which, everyone understands is how Bill Gates likes to operate. Moreover, every tax dollar that billionaires are free from paying is shifted on the tax burden of everyone else, or services will be cut. These “partnerships” are an elaborate form of more corporate welfare. The public does not really get what they need out of the arrangement. They get what some billionaire wants them to get while he/she provides the least in order to provide a greater return to him or herself. This is not democracy; it is a scheme to circumvent democracy.
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That’s right.
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Jeff Bezos has ties, through his mother Jackie who helps run the Bezos Foundation, to James Heckman. Heckman is a Nobel prize winning human capital economist from the University of Chicago whose lifetime work is on early childhood. This summer I researched the work he did with Art Rolnick and Robert Duggger to set up a global pre-k social impact investment market over the past decade.
Jackie and Jim shared a stage at the Aspen Institute last june to talk about ROI on pre-k investments. I will say it over and over and over. They are not stupid. They are not confused. They have built a machine that will run on the data of vulnerable children across the globe. This model will hook children to machines and use predictive analytics to label most of them useless in this world of automated labor.
Bezos’s $2 Billion Academies gift might be the grease that sets it all in motion. We should all be very, very worried. My blog post explains this and lays out a possible dystopian pre-k model that would best serve the needs of Bezos, ed-tech, and global finance. I hope you will read it: https://wrenchinthegears.com/2018/09/15/montessori-inc-pre-k-predictive-profiling-for-power-and-profit/
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Yes. Heckman’s speciality is behavioral economics. He is the “evidence” point person for financial products known as social impact bonds/pay for success contracts, including the preschool education SIB for Chicago.
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We should be scared because billionaires are colluding to surveille and socially engineer children’s futures. I cannot understand how this connects to Montessori which is hand-on learning. I’ve taught K-12. What I know is that some young people are “slow starters,” but they are smart and do well in life. Children are not widgets or something we can program. They develop over time like fine wine.
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You have to understand that children are being fed into global human capital impact investment markets. Look up the Wildflower Montessori franchise. They place IoT in the slippers to track the children. It is about turning children into data. The Montessori model is based in self-directed learning which the tech sector (with finance) has grabbed to inserted their digital personalized learning program into all sorts of educational spaces. Look up the Heckman equation. That is what this is about. They get their biggest bang for the buck on early childhood “investments” (aka data collection) and the goal is “character training.” I would love to see all the Montessori schools rise up in opposition. Sadly, on Twitter, I saw many hoping to get on the Amazon bandwagon and grab some profit for themselves. It is sickening.
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“Yes, $2 billion is a chunk of money (aka more money than any teacher will ever make in their lifetime),”
I think we really should feel these big numbers better so that our anger scales properly. Suppose a teacher works 40 years and makes $50K each year. That means $2 million during her whole life. Since $2 billion divided by $2 million is 1,000
1,000 teachers make $2 billion in lifetime
or
A teacher needs thousand lives to make $2 billion
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Glad you commented here, wrenchinthegears, because, on the earlier post, speduktr remarked that we needed to read your comment on the earlier link. I then commented, here, on your comment. (However it happened, both speduktr’s comment & my comment are missing). Anyway, what I’d said was that yes, you are spot in. This has all been in the works for–oh, most likely 40 years (ALEC’s birth) & then some (read Nancy MacLean’s book, “Democracy in Chains”). We most certainly should all work on stopping this, but the people most likely to stop it are parents, such as the father who is trying to save his son’s public school.
Tell them all to read this blog, to read these books, then, armed with the knowledge that “choice” leads to no choice (exactly what a group of parents–as televised–recently told everyone in New Orleans), resist. STOP.THIS.NOW.
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