Nancy Bailey warns us to keep watch for the vultures who want to use the pandemic to attack and control public schools and teachers. They see an opportunity, and they are ready to pounce.
She writes:
There’s a movement underfoot to end the way children learn. Look carefully at who says “we need to reimagine” or “this is the time to reassess” schools. These can be signals from those who’ve led the charge to dismantle public schools for years. Like vultures, they’re scheming how to use this pandemic to put the final stamp of success on their privatization agenda.
Most parents and teachers can’t wait for public schools to reopen. Children miss their teachers, friends and their public schools. Teachers tirelessly work to assist their students from afar. Heartwarming stories flood social media about how children and teachers are coming together.
Many, including me, have implied that due to the virus there will be a renewed appreciation of what’s been lost. Public schools and the teaching profession we hope will return stronger and more appreciated. It’s especially important to have hope.
It’s also important not to be fooled. A frightening, albeit not unexpected, reality has emerged. Those who’ve foisted their ideology on public schools for years don’t care about heartwarming stories of success. They don’t see teachers as professionals, but as worker bees to carry out their digital transition plans. Their end is not our end.
Here are some signs.
The Controversial Opinion Piece
Thomas L. Friedman’s New York Times opinion piece describes what the next presidential cabinet should look like. He says We need a political system that mirrors the best in us. His idea of the best are billionaires who’ve hated public schools for years. They include Bloomberg, Gates, and a new secretary of national infrastructure, Walmart C.E.O. Doug McMillon. Ask how much infrastructure funding would go to public schools with the CEO of Walmart in charge.
Friedman suggests Laurene Powell Hobs for Secretary of Education, despite the failure of her $100 million XQ Super School Project to reinvent the high school. Just what we don’t need! Another billionaire who was never an educator as Secretary of Education!
Then there is the money grab by the charter industry, which has decided that charter schools are really small businesses and should get a chunk of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief fund, intended for struggling employers.
And even more vultures. Watch out!
As usual, Bailey offers sage advice.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Some of those who want to “remain” schools to be all this tech stuff lead public school districts. Foxes are guarding the hen houses.
“Reimagine”
Yes, let’$ all
“Reimagine $chool$”
Reimagine $chool$
As technologic market$
Reimagine $chool$
As mean$ to turn the profit$
Reimagine $chool$
As moneymaking $cheme$
Reimagine $chool$
As monetary dream$
exactly!
Of dollar$ and scholars
Dollar$, like bookend$
$urrounding the $chool$
Scholars, like deadends
Are nothing but fools
The not-free markets of the tech industry-
U.S. PIRG posted a petition for signature. It’s addressed to Bill Gates’ company Microsoft.
“Provide access to the spare parts, tools…we need to fix the devices we own.”
We should not be surprised by the opportunism of the tech oligarchs. This pandemic gives them another foothold into public education. It is one more step closer to destroying our democratic public schools. It does not matter that all the evidence has shown that on-line instruction is ineffective for the vast majority of students. The tech people know it is cost effective. With an exploding debt, this will be the main consideration among many politicians that are in Silicon Valley’s pockets anyway. People that care about public education must unite and actively resist.
The real question is whether the powers that are trying to change the way we do education are interested in educating anybody. Distance learning is not even successful for my own daughter, who is highly motivated.
That might be a real question but only in a rhetorical sense.
The sense you stated was indeed the sense I meant it. Anyone suggesting that distance learning is the equivalent of real classes and personal interaction is fooling themselves. However, I would say the same thing about large classes with no opportunity for personal interaction with the teacher. I had classes in college that were 90 or so kids. My students report 300 in a lecture room. No learning here. Beam me up.
RT, It can be done. I remember– a half-century later– two such freshman classes delivered by lecture to hundreds at a time. I actually still recall the professors’ names. One [Child Devpt 101] was not only a prominent, published scholar in his field, but [unlikely combo] a good teacher & superlative performer. That doesn’t mean I did great in his class; I was a C+– partly because Soc Stud/ Soc/ Psych did not then come easily to me, but also by virtue of being in my first year learning how to study hard on my own initiative. [I lived at home that year which didn’t help]. But I learned a lot. The other [Freshman Comp Lit] was in my bailiwick, so “studying” was a breeze/ fun, & he was an even better teacher; I felt like I was in a small class. Sadly, tho one of the best educators there, he didn’t “publish enough,” & was denied tenure after I graduated, despite voluminous student petitions…
Bottom line: the sort of professor who can carry that off is a rare bird…
yes: highly motivated still craves human interaction….so many kids being asked about quarantine problems are simply saying that they miss their teachers
I don’t see the writing on the wall for us yet, but there are people, powerful people, sharpening their pencils. I would think that this re-imagining starts with legal challenges to district/educator contracts. CTU i think was in the process of ratifying a five or six year one. Not sure about the other large districts.
State Constitutional provisions, with respect to pension obligations, will also be re-examined with the hopes of finding a judge who invokes state “emergency powers” to immediately Ponzify our retirements.
You all on this blog know the playbook.
As Nancy Bailey states, trying to upend IDEA is a piece of the plan.
We probably need $/cts tracking on how well specially-educated do in the marketplace, as compared to all those dumped into slow classes [LD] or basement classes [devptlly-disabled] or physically-handicapped [unserved] before IDEA. I recognize the resistance to such tracking. But if it could be divorced from teacher-VAM/ accountability, it could be a real eye-opener when compared to costs to society of supporting the left-behind via unemployment insurance, SSDI, welfare etc. Even $40k/ yr for a special ed for 10 or 13 yrs pales in comparison to a lifetime on the dole.
No, bethree, we do NOT need to track special ed students earning power after graduation! How incredibly invasive of their privacy! Why is it any less repugnant to track special ed students than it would be to track “regular” students? Just like “regular” kids they are not this monolithic class that all have had the same struggles and/or successes. How do you compare the earning potential of a cognitively impaired child with one with a specific learning disability? Can you isolate their struggles from the rest of their lives outside of school anymore easily than any other child? Of course, it will turn not rating schools since the graduates of some will fare better than others. Sorry, Bethree, as a former special ed teacher I am obviously biased, but when I look back on my students it is hard for me to imagine that their lives are no better or more worthwhile having had an education that attempted to help them than if they had been subjected to years of invisibility, failure, and mistreatment. I know you are not advocating for such treatment, but it is not so very long ago that many of these children were denied any public schooling, and I would not be at all surprised how many of those who did attend public school ended up dropping out as soon as possible.
cx: it will turn into rating schools
Well I think you gather I’m a reluctant promoter of such a plan. And I speak as a parent w/2 out of 3 sons who benefited tremendously from full-fledged SpEd programs done as they should be done. And the 3rd, BTW, also floundered until he was placed in one of those now-rare alternative project-based schools for “underachievers” that were piloted in the ’70’s– in our hisch it’s run w/in the same bldg, which is a plus – another sort of special education well worth the tax investment.
I just feel that in this as in so many other education expenditures, taxpayers are easily manipulated into sales pitches for spending less & getting more [or at least the same] because they never get the results & hence never see the bigger picture of how ed investment pays off for society. It is not just about a utopian ideal of equitable enrichment. All such public-sphere matters can be translated to $ benefits to society as a whole. It is only the cynical, short-sighted accounting manipulations of the last 40 yrs– imposed in service to the powerful looking to grab biggest pieces of a shrinking global pie– that paint it that way.
I would never support tracking personal data, or any connection to rating of schools. Perhaps I’d step back to a simple accounting of how many SpEd students were able to grad hisch. & how many to go on to college. There’s plenty of data showing the relative fin benefits of both. But of course my concept is pie-in-the-sky anyway, as it would be difficult [impossible?] to make a clear comparison to how many phys handicapped & LD lost income potential &/or ended up on welfare rolls pre-IDEA.
“Most parents and teachers can’t wait for public schools to reopen.”
It’s true of parents. I suspect the virus emergency will make parents less likely to agree to online learning as a replacement for schools, rather than more likely.
It’s also weirdly clueless for ed reformers to insist that all parents are “working from home” and can supervise these online lessons.
“Working from home” is a white collar thing. A lot of the parents I know are incredibly stressed not because they’re “working from home” and co-teaching online lessons- they’re incredibly stressed because schools and daycares are closed, they have no child care, and they have to go to their regular jobs with no childcare AND supervise online lessons.
Very true. And even for those who are working from home, it’s ludicrous to assume that parents can supervise online lessons. There’s a reason it’s called work and there’s a reason they pay you to do it. It’s time and attention consuming. You can’t interrupt a client call or Zoom meeting to go make sure your child is attending and participating in and understanding their online “class”.
On target, Dienne: “There’s a reason it’s called work and there’s a reason they pay you to do it. It’s time and attention consuming.” Even the minority of parents w/a knack for teaching, who see pubsch as parenting w/a syllabus, have had to work minimum 2 FT jobs to make ends meet, as middle/ wkg classes have been hollowed out over last 30 yrs. Whether they could do it better is beside the point: it’s a service they have to “subcontract” via taxes.
Right on both counts, Chiara!
The idea that ed will magically be converted to online learning from home is especially delusional. Silicon Valley bubbleheads developing these programs can sell to each other maybe. [5% of workers in US were working at home pre corona]. Nope, it’s not even a pipe-dream, just an idle smoke-ring exhaled by paid dittoheads.
I’m a lot more worried by the spectre painted here of covid conversion to “personalized learning” colliding w/massive ed-budget cuts post-covid. I’m picturing shuttered schools replaced by cubicled warehouses for students in headphones, staffed by min-wage paras.
Oh and another thing that I realized last night. Netflix has gone interactive. Bear Grylls from Man vs Wild of a dozen or so years ago now has a “choose your own adventure” format program where you can pick your way through a story. Maybe I’m late to the game but Reed is definitely in on this game of ed tech.
“Vultures” pre-date Covid 19- Espinosa v. Montana
Yes. I am also fearful for a Biden bend that harks back to the damaging enchantments of Arne Duncan. I have no idea who has Biden’s ear on education. I hope it is not Obama and Duncan and the monies billionaires dabling in education.
If you read Biden’s education platform, it sounds progressive except for the statement about not limiting students based on their zip code, which may be a reference to more charters. Of course, there is no direct reference to privatization, if the corporate spin doctors carefully crafted this campaign blurb.
Don’t be fooled by anything Biden says or puts in some platform document. He’s already assured those who count that “nothing will fundamentally change”. He has a long term record of hostility toward public education: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/joe-biden-public-education-segregation-charter-schools
You mean “Biden barracking back to the damaging enchantments of Arne Duncan” ?
We are in a Mobius loop from which there is no escape.
I guess that should be “on” a Mobius loop.
Let’s not forget that a return to neoliberal Obama/ Duncan’s, granted, pro-charter ed policies is a tad better than Trump/ Obama school-choice/ pro-voucher/ destroy-pubic-ed libertarian boosterism. Baby steps, folks. Keep an eye to the future. Biden is forced to embrace some of Sanders/ Warren platform or risk losing the youthful pro-Democratic- Socialism position. It’s not much of a step from labor-friendly policies like minimum wage & equitable healthcare to anti-privatization pro-public-schools policy.
Er I meant Trump/DeVos’
“healthcare”- one in 6 hospitals are Catholic. Headline from Mother Jones research, 12-18-2013, “Charts: Catholic Hospitals Don’t Do Much for the Poor”.
Rhetorically, in a ranking of threats to democracy, in a ranking of the power to establish colonialism- where does American theocracy fall?
Catholic hospitals get the same 501(c)3 tax breaks as the rest of them; let them pay taxes if they’re going to deliver only church-approved healthcare. And individual workers going rogue get govt protection! “In 2018, HHS established a “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division with the stated goal of ensuring that health care workers and institutions are never forced to deliver medical services they object to.” (NYT). Interesting article here on how IRS rules since 1956 have underpinned the conversion of all hospitals from charities to “for-profit nonprofits” [my words] – just like charter schools! https://www.statnews.com/2019/03/05/irs-rule-changes-payment-driven-hospital-system/
Equal access to a system where inequality is baked-in won’t do it. Single-payer is reqd
An amicus brief on behalf of Montana, signed by Catholics and Evangelicals for Separation of Church and State (Espinosa case), …wait… where would the money to pay the lawyers come from?
$2.5 mil. from the bishops’ treasury funds a clinic that exclusively recommends ovulation charts for birth control (25% failure rate).
A separate church faction gave $2.5 mil. to a clinic that promotes pharmaceutical birth control…wait…where would the 2nd faction get $2.5 mil.?
Why ARE ed reformers so in love with online learning? They did lots of experiments with it- the State of Ohio sank tens of millions of public funds into a huge online school – the school collapsed into a mess of corruption and poor performance.
It’s not like they haven’t ALREADY conducted this experiment on the public- Jeb Bush pushed it for years and they all clapped along.
We have LOTS of information on online learning, thanks to ed reform experiments. Why do they continue to insist it’s a good cheap replacement for schools when it’s so clearly not, even by the measure of ed reform’s own experiments.
“Why” is about $ & marketing. Watch peddlers claim iron-clad measures preventing non-existent tech fixes to ECOT-style fraud– as Betsy eases accountability reqts & govrs spin cut-scores– all in service to Mammon, & ARand/ MFriedman politics.
Matt Taibbi pulls no punches.
Thomas L. Friedman
Historically, all oligarchs and despots have had their paid court singers.
Matt Taibbi had it right when he suggested that Thomas Friedman, with his “porn stache” is better suited to porno flicks than journalism.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/surprise-winner-in-thomas-friedman-porn-title-contest-91046/
Decades ago, I read a piece by Bill Gates, which I’ve looked for and haven’t found, in which he said that the big costs in schools were a) facilities and b) teachers’ salaries, and that both could be dramatically reduced through online learning from home. He was horrified that we were wasting all this money on schools for the rabble.
And, just coincidentally, of course, this new kind of schooling Gates was so excited about would involve using computers running software sold by Bill Gates. Such serendipity!!! Funny how these confluences of interest occur!!!
And so Gates paid to have a single set of national “standards” hacked together so that there would be one set to key depersonalized education software to. And don’t be fooled, most states are still using the egregious, puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list, but under new names to hide that fact (e.g., The Flor-uh-duh Violation of the Sunshine Law Somewhere Over the Rainbow the Gator Ate My Homework State Standards or the Ohio High as a Buckeye State Standards, aka The Common Core).
These people thought that online virtual school for K-12 and college classes would be the easiest to take over, so they concentrated there first. A former US Secretary of Education, Bill Bennett, even co-founded a company to offer virtual schooling, K12. NCLB had required that the schools of students not making “adequate yearly progress” toward 100 percent proficiency (LOL) be closed down and those students sent to new schools. Where were those new schools to come from? Well, they could be online schools, and Gambling Bill would be there to offer them. Again, such coincidence! Such serendipity!
But there were problems. It turns out that completion rates for online classes were abysmal, and so was the amount of learning done.
And most of the “personalized education software” companies and virtual schools failed and failed and failed. Investors lost lots and lots of money. What to do? Well, certainly not give up on the idea. Because, you know, Bill is always right. He has money. So he must be right.
So, in the face of all that failure, they switched to a model in which kids would continue to go to schools but be in a big room with 400 hundred other kids at computer screens and a single proctor walking around to make sure people were logged on and working gritfully and the computers were working. This is the goal, now, for K-12. Teachers as proctors, not teachers. Kids as continuously monitored galley slaves doing their online worksheets.
And Friedman and his ilk to cheer the whole process on.
Good enough education for the children of the Proles, aimed at training them to apply themselves gritfully to whatever inane, alienating task their distant superiors serve up to them next.
“And, just coincidentally, of course, this new kind of schooling Gates was so excited about would involve using computers running software sold by Bill Gates.”
There are more coincidences in the promotion of education reform than there are in a Dickens novel. We should stop teaching Great Expectations and just read the non-fiction that emanates from the reformist pen. I bet coleman would approve. He likes non-fiction
Haaaa!!!! Nailed it, Roy!
Is it possible you read it in Bill Gates book?– “The Load* Ahead”
*Of manure
http://Www.thelittleeducationreport.ca
This is one of the best overviews of online education I’ve read. Superb!!!! I hope that everyone who frequents this blog reads it. Thanks, Doug!
Thanks for the link.
Here is another of Nancy Bailey’s insightful blog posts on this topic from a few years ago: https://nancyebailey.com/2018/11/24/personalized-online-learning-fails-at-classroom-dynamics-and-socialization/ At that point no one could have imagined the current nightmare with ALL children sheltering at home and struggling with online lessons in isolation. And here was my comment: While technology can foster engaged learning as a group if directed by the teacher for that purpose, digital modules that adapt to individual students’ pace and progress are antithetical to deep learning, in my view. Another serious drawback to digital/adaptive learning is that there is no provision for students to ask questions–for clarification or curiosity. What does this teach subliminally? Remember Marshall McLuhan–the medium is the message.
Well said.
I wrote a verbose comment on another blog post, but when I selected “Post Comment,” it didn’t post. And no, it wasn’t a moderation issue. I learned my lesson. Copy and paste my comments. 🙂
Anyway, here is the gist of what I said. No one is calling for the end of grocery stores for Instacart, restaurants for takeout, church buildings for live streaming, physical stores for their online versions, theatre/sports/concerts for streaming, conventions for talking heads on video, clubs for solo dance parties on Zoom, renting office space for work at home, theme parks for Virtual Reality machines, etc. in the advent of COVID-19. But, so many think that this is a “great opportunity” to shift students away from school buildings.
“But education is broken.” Talk to people in any other industry, and they’ll tell you about the broken parts of those too. But they aren’t using COVID as a means to COMPLETELY change it. Yes, there will be a permanent uptick in grocery delivery, online shopping, a day or two a week to work from home, and videoconferencing as some people fall in love with the platforms and get used to them. There may even be a parent in a two-parent household where one was laid off, and they figured out that they could live on one income by getting rid of one of their car payments and so they decide to do virtual school.
BUT, society will be itching to get back into going to concerts, stores, conventions, theme parks, airplanes, sitting inside of restaurants, church, to the office, and SCHOOL!
Yup. As I said on a recent post [Sahlburg] about the need for play-to-learn in early grades, it’s as tho ed-reformer dittoheads have no clue that humans are animals– watch any Nature show to see mammals learn all through play. How? Through social interaction– humans are social animals who learn most everything theough socially-interactive play.
But OTOH… nearly all the examples you cite are about businesses and their consumers’ druthers (to which they cater if they want to stay in business).
Education is in a different category. A govt function, which if it were run everywhere by locally-elected boards (as it once was) would reflect community values, & parent/ student druthers to a fair degree. For decades now– reflecting Reagan & subsequent admins’ dereg/ consequent spiralling inequality & dominance of $clout over the public-goods sphere, ed policy does not follow the druthers of parents/ students/ educators. Of course that’s the reason Diane started this blog, & NPE.
We need to be ready to organize more (not less) public/ voting/ political pressure post-covid re: reinstating priority of brick&mortar IRL in-person, interactive ed. $clouty ed-reform actors– especially Gates& Bezos– will emerge from this stronger than ever, at a point when state budgets will be in tatters, & public ed will be thrown to the wolves, priority-wise.
So they would like to destroy the public schools AND the USPS at the same time. Let’s just privatize everything, because privatizing the prison system worked so well.
The Catholic Labor website reported a couple of years ago that, after Walmart and the US government, Catholic organizations rank as the nation’s 3rd largest employer.
a useful perspective on online teaching: