This is the scariest article of the week or month, not counting the violent rampage of Trump allies on January 6.
Dominik Dresel writes in Edsurge about Jeff Bezos’ entry into the education “market.”
He begins:
Bezos, more than any other tech entrepreneur, is known to play the long game, masterfully. In a now-famous 1997 interview, he candidly explained why Amazon started out by selling books. (Hint: It had nothing to do with Bezos’ love for literature. Books were simply a stepping stone, the “best first thing” to sell.) Less than three decades later, Amazon has become not just the world’s largest online retailer, but also a global leader in areas as diverse as cloud computing, home security and digital content production. And we’ve only seen the beginning—within the next few years, the company is poised to disrupt the healthcare market, become the market leader in online advertising, establish itself as a competitor to USPS, FedX and UPS, and provide global access to broadband internet through a network of satellites orbiting the planet… to name but a few examples.
It would be easy to think that Amazon’s rapid expansion into industry after industry is just the natural, opportunistic path of a cash-flush company seeking to invest in new, lucrative markets. But Jeff Bezos, himself a graduate of a Montessori preschool, doesn’t think in short-term opportunities. His early annual shareholder letters bear titles such as “It‘s All About the Long Term” (1997), “Building for the Long Term” (1999) and “Taking the Long View” (2000), and they are testimony to the fact that every strategic decision he makes is part of a larger, long-term plan.
Becoming a driving force in public education may, at first, seem like a long shot for Amazon. While Google, Microsoft and Apple have been pursuing their ambitions in K-12 and higher education for more than a decade, Amazon has mostly remained at the sidelines.
But foraying into the complex sphere that is public education is a matter of when, not if, for Jeff Bezos. To understand why, it is worthwhile to consider three principles that have guided Amazon’s strategic investment and growth decisions since its founding days.
Read the article to understand Bezos’ three principles and why he might see public schools as ripe for disruption, like the other billionaires before him. As I explained in my recent book Slaying Goliath, the tech billionaires love to disrupt the lives of other people’s children. They have had no success, only failure. But that doesn’t stop them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“His vision is for Amazon to become the underlying infrastructure that commerce runs on.”
“Less than three decades after its inception, almost one out of every two dollars spent online in the United States flows directly through Amazon.”
This is truly scary. I hope they are soon slowed down by trade laws.
I try so hard not to use Amazon unless I have a gift card. This year…. we have had to purchase so many extra supplies for the classroom, since children can’t move around and share materials. I have used the site more than I typically do. But I try to use other sites – even when Amazon would save me a little $.
“His vision is for Amazon to become the underlying infrastructure that commerce runs on.”
That’s actually very funny because Amazon is built entirely upon public infrastructure , specifically “highways” : both physical (roads) and virtual (www, the information superhighway).
If Bezos actually had to pay a fair price to use such infrastructure, he would certainly not have anywhere near the wealth he does.
But like somsny other billionaires ,Bezos not only does not recognize his debt to the American public, he actually has the audassity (not a misspelling) to believe that he is the one providing the infrastructure.
SomeDAM OR he means to take over the whole damn thing. CBK
From the article: “Yet, the world has had its first taste of the disentanglement of schooling from school buildings.”
It certainly has, and it hasn’t been pretty.
The U.S. has a serious monopoly problem. It cannot go on unaddressed.
Exactly. Our antitrust laws are a joke.
Standard Oil was nothing compared to The Everything Store.
Agreed
Watch out for companies with scam in their name.
Scamway
Scamazon
Microscam
Scambook
Scamagram
As the article points out, “Antitrust cases are made against corporations that artificially increase consumer prices, not aggressively lower them.”
The author if a graduate of the Broad Academy and currently works in school administration,
https://www.broadcenter.org/alumni/directory/profile/dominik-dresel/
Oh great, now they’re trying to spread the virus in Germany.
Jeff Bryant As much as I liked the article, it seems the author fails to understand what “public” means. In other words, the term “public” is thrown around in the article as if schools can be run by the Bezos monopoly and still be a “public” institution. A good article, though. CBK
Big tech has too much power and it endangers us for a whole range of reasons. Antitrust law needs to rise to this occasion.
That would be a novel and wonderful outcome.
I have been wondering what the purpose of an Amazon ad has been that’s been playing everywhere, from news to sports. After reading this article, I now get it. Insidious.
Yes, I too saw the Amazon ads and nervously wondered what the company was up to. Those ads are everywhere all the time.
LeftCoast Yes, the slime element emerges from the slick element when you understand just how “fox in the chicken-house” it really is.
This is a real question: Do you think Besos and Gates, etc., understand that they, themselves, are doing brinkmanship with democracy itself?
OR do you think they are just pursuing what they think is the end run of the so-called American Dream? (interpreted as a “business model”). . . unaware of the REAL long term implications of what they are doing? CBK
Do I think megalomaniacs think philosophically? They clearly do not. They were raised to think selfishly. This article is about Bezos thinking in the long term, but he really thinks in the short term. There have been people who thought of the long run, Plato, Locke, and Franklin, for example. Names like Bezos and Musk certainly do not belong on any lists of visionaries.
The genes for the human brain will not soon mutate in order to welcome screen-only education. Mirror neurons which tells us the other person’s intentions, teach us theory of mind, empathy, enable successful social interactions do not work well in front of screens.
Epigenetic changes will occur, in the meantime this country would be even further torn apart, evolve even more into tribes.
Public education, as we all know here, is important for more than teaching about subjects in a curriculum, it fosters social integration and unity.
I came back from breakfast, looked for my previous post about the brain and Jeff Bozos, didn’t see it so far down from the original ‘reply’, so wrote it again, not word for word, and resulted in a double post. My apologies.
Bezos basically stole the NiKe logo.
I am surprised NiKe did not go after them.
btw, Greg, what does that Amazon logo remind you of? Doesn’t it look a lot like the doodles that middle-school boys feel so daring about making?
I wouldn’t know. I was a model student in middle school and never even considering doodling in class! Or at least that’s what I try to fool myself into “remembering.” I see it as more of a Cheshire Cat grin.
“They have had no success, only failure. But that doesn’t stop them.”
And, their almost always profitable failures have hurt the ability of a lot of children to learn. As a rule, these tech billionaires all follow the horribly failed assembly line path that people are cattle/toasters, and VAM (ranking and/or punishing children and teachers through test scores) will create better-educated children and lead to a higher quality of teachers.
The brains that lead the tech industry are wired to think like computers, and they see the rest of humanity as robots that can be reprogramed to improve our ability as workers that will, in turn, increase their wealth and power.
We are only numbers to them, numbers that fatten their bank accounts and holdings. I read this week that Bill Gates now owns more private land in the U.S. than anyone else.
“The brains that lead the tech industry are wired to think like computers, and they see the rest of humanity as robots that can be reprogramed to improve our ability as workers that will, in turn, increase their wealth and power.”
This is so true …. ‘data’ is like a religion. There are school admin who think like that too.
We need to bring humanity back as central to education and life…. not programming.
Like having a full national freeways worth of automatic cars hacked by an outside source, the Russians, say, and no one has been taught to drive, or worse, the automatic system has no manual backup able drivers could switch to.
The techies are actually creating robots at this very minute to replace virtually everything that humans do.
I watched a podcast a few days ago in which a computer “scientist” (did) at MIT named Lex Fridman was waxing philosophically about the development of artificial intelligence, wondering if maybe humans were somehow merely acting as caterpillars to “birth”the AI butterfly.
I kid you not.
These people are nuts.
Fridmans “speciality” is so called “machine learning” which uses “neural networks” to do stuff like drive cars.
He calls what he works on AI but it really has little if anything to do with intelligence, at least not in the human sense. No one even knows how most of these systems make the decisions they do.
I was reading about one AI system tasked with identifying the dog species from a photograph. The system kept misidentifying dogs as wolves that were clearly (to any human) not wolves. It turned out the system was basing the identification entirely on the background and any image of a dog in a snowy background was misidentified as a wolf because the images in the training set with snowy backrounds were of wolves. So naturally, the system sees a rabbit in a snowy background and thinks it’s a wolf. Makes perfect sense.
Anyone who wants such a system driving their car is insane. There is no way I will ever get into such a vehicle. And worst of all, there is no way that such a system an be verified to be working the way it should because there is no way to know how it is working in most cases.
In another podcast, Fridman interviewed a former navy pilot who claims to have pursued what he implied was an alien spacecraft.
This sort of stuff makes for entertaining podcasts but it surprises me more than a little that it is coming from someone at what is supposed to be one of our best science and engineering schools.
SomeDAM The problem is not me or you getting into an AI driven car, but that they MAY end up on the road with us. (We could write a movie script about such experiences.)
The logical extension of driverless cars is to “realize” that driving gets messy when so-called AI has to deal with the details of driving. Insofar as details get in the way of AI- driven cars, the logical thing will to be to make everything about AI driving, including the roads, stopping places, whatever, meet the SYSTEMATIC PROGRAMMING “needs” of the banal, stunted, and dangerous-to-humans AI-reality.
What’s next for people who have no interest in self-understanding or of how history works and them in it, . . . that will influence other facets of human living? CBK
You are right.
Just having self driving cars on the road that can not be VERIFIED safe is insane.
Every other safety critical system must go through a certification process which normally involves not only extensive testing but inspection of the computer source code to ensure the system is functioning as designed.
There is no way of doing that with systems developed through machine learning and the outcomes are completely dependent upon the data that were used to train the system.
How the system will respond to situations that are outside the training data set is anyone’s guess.
Luckily, the self-driving vehicles have not taken off due to some software glitches, but it’s only a matter of time before they start producing driver free vehicles.
We the public should insist that the software be certified safe, which would effectively rule out autonomous vehicle systems which base decisions primarily on machine learning.
If humans can’t inspect the source code and review actual logic upon which driving decisions are based, the system should not be certified — period.
No system that is effectively functioning as a black box should ever be certified for driving a car.
It is extraordinarily disturbing that the rich and powerful believe in science fiction like the singularity.
Many of the people working on AI believe the singularity is inevitable.
But there is nothing inevitable about AI taking over. The only way it is going to happen is if humans facilitate it and the ones doing just that are the computer “scientists”.
Many of the latter are completely lacking in the ethics department and will work on anything as long as they think it’s “cool” and get paid for it.
Among their ranks are such “towering” figures as former MIT AI pioneer Marvin Minsky.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-sex-trafficking-island-court-records-unsealed
a KEY point: “the brains that lead the tech industry are wired to think like computers.” This is exactly why the coming age of gig economies is going to be increasingly de-humanizing.
They ARE computers..
The singularity already happened.
SomeDAM Their real problem is rooted in the fact that we can think wrongly about ourselves. CBK
Diane Thanks for posting this article: Perhaps it’s time for educators to educate our legislators, CEO’s, and writers about the HUGE difference between public institutions and capitalist corporations in a republic-democracy.
Here are two quotes from the article that both explore and embody problems with our understanding of that difference, with brief comments in bold:
QUOTE 1: “It has become a repetitive exercise for cities across the United States to enter into bidding wars for major corporate investments, most notoriously in the 2018 spectacle for Amazon’s second North American headquarters. There is little reason to doubt that cities would be willing to exchange 20,000 new jobs for a public-private partnership that would allow Amazon to innovate within, and ultimately run, a public school system.”
If a corporation is running a public school system, it’s no longer a PUBLIC school system.
QUOTE 2: “Or will Amazon, famous for its focus on innovation, execution and customer-centricity, help public school districts remain relevant in the 21st century? Will the company provide a desperately-needed model to remain competitive against charter schools that are increasingly embracing virtual instruction and can therefore operate from a cost advantage?”
Public education only needs to operate from a cost advantage over charters IF it’s no longer a PUBLIC INSTITUTION . . . insofar as public institutions are for the public good ALONE (they need to spend scrupulously, but their model of operation is NOT for profit) and are funded by our tax dollars, this quote reveals both the present failure of federal and state legislators in our neo-liberal ALEC-like age, Besos, AND the writer . . . again, to understand this HUGE difference between public and corporate institutions . . . whatever they call themselves. CBK
The genes for our brain are not going to mutate per Jeff Bozo’s requirements for screen education. Mirror neurons, which allow us to carry on socially, teaching the theory of mind, empathy, intention of the other person, can’t function as evolution intends them in front of screens.
Epigenetic changes may occur over time, but how many of our children will have been under educated by then?
Darrell Here, here. CBK
The genes for our brains are not going to mutate per Jeff Bozo’s requirements for screen education.
Nailed it. From time immemorial, education has been a human interaction in which older people who know and care about something pass this on, in personal interactions, to younger people who don’t and build the relationships that make those younger people care about it, too.
Years ago, Billy Gates articulated his vision for education. The cost, he said, is all in facilities and teachers’ salaries, and computers can get rid of both. This is why he paid to create a single sest of national standards to key depersonalized learning software to.
Just one problem: the revolution didn’t happen. At first, these folks like Gates thought that you could just do it all online. But the noncompletion rates and failure rates for online college courses and virtual K-12 schools were abysmal. So, they moved to model two: put 100 kids in a room with a proctor to make sure that they are gritfully attending to their online lessons. But schools run this way also had huge failure rates. So, now it’s the “hybrid model.”
Meanwhile, the kids of the wealthy go to beautiful, low-tech, schools with magnificent campuses and every amenity and highly paid teachers and low student-teacher ratios because all that stuff, above, is, in the minds of the oligarchical ruling class, “good enough training” for Prole children.
Amazon prices for various goods are insane and all over the map. When you enter the Amazon universe you have to be constantly on your guard against price shocks and nasty surprises when you finally get to the buy phase; sort of like going through a hedge maze during a dark winter night. Think of the movie, “THE SHINING.” Crazy Richards peanut butter, $17 for a 16 oz jar but a few entries away the same item for $6 which is still too much since I can get it for $3.99 at the local grocery store. Shopping at Amazon is like dealing with a sleazy tricky scam artist. I only do it if necessary to avoid in-person shopping because of the plague.
“Public education offers Amazon access to a unique resource—the consumers, and employees, of the future, along with their user behavior, preferences and countless other data points.”
The full blame for the state of public education goes to the government that chose to consider education a commodity instead of a community public asset. Entrepreneur amateurs have been lining up ever since to stake a claim for access to public funding. Without regulation and accountability, the free market fiasco will continue until the government somehow steps in and takes steps to stop the bleeding of public money. The government will only get serious about stepping in if the public demands it. Other than protesting parents, public schools have no way to defend themselves.
Money is power, and Bezos has more of it than most the other players. Like Gates Bezos has the money to weather the ups and downs of market based education. Like other entrepreneurs he smells the opportunity to make money off various ‘education products’ and student data. When no rules or regulations protect young people from capitalist disruption, business takes priority over what is best for our young people.
The Washington Post is owned by Bezos. Can we expect this major news source to fairly treat the subject of school reform? Similar entanglements make other information sources questionable, leading to the widespread distrust of information in general. Even more than the right wing attack on reliable information, this more subtle form of information erosion threatens the very source of democratic values: reliable truth.
The reason we need teachers and schools is to provide for a way for people to learn the difference between truth and falsehood. Modern concepts that want schools to give the students skills to use in a job market nonwithstanding, this is the most important mission we have. Bezos has no interest in this process. Anyone who has no interest in this process should be separated from it by design.
Montesquieu, as I have often stated, was all about the idea of power never growing big enough to dominate all other sources of power. Charles was right, and the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few powerful individuals will always produce what he feared. Can we ever collectively fight the influence of corrupt power engendered of a lare concentration of money? Some of the modern wealthy (think Billionaires Boys Club in the lingo of Our Diane) control money that exceeds the GDP of some foreign countries. Why should we not treat these people as foreign countries within our midst?
Roy “Why should we not treat these people as foreign countries within our midst?”
. . . because they pay our politicians? Apparently, most of our politicians spend buckets of time on the phone talking to campaign donors. If that’s true, what’s wrong with this picture? CBK
We can’t expect the Washington Post go be unbiased on anything that affects Bezos bottom line.
All the negative articles about Bernie Sanders during two presidential campaigns make that crystal clear.
The editors at the Post lick Jeff Bezos boots every day.
It’s really rather pathetic.
MY NOMINATION FOR BEST INSIGHT SO FAR THIS YEAR
from Roy Turrentine about the Besos Phenomenon:
“Even more than the right wing attack on reliable information, this more subtle form of information erosion threatens the very source of democratic values: reliable truth.”
When Besos bought the Washington Post, he claimed he would stay away from influencing content. . . . reminds me of Zuckerberg and his initial stated principles, which seem to have fallen away. Funny how that seems to work over time.
But there seems to be a migration of principles going on, which can occur unbeknownst to the persons involved: FROM the free air of what the establishment of public institutions is about, TO the closed rooms of personal and ultimately arbitrary . . . and question-resistant . . . desires and fears.
One could describe it as a new take on the old kind of tribalism. But where politics is concerned, a zero-sum game usually ends in murder, suicide, or some other kind of expulsion of the “winner”? CBK
Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have education editorial writers who are hostile to public education.
Neither was ever a teacher.
In the case of the W. Post, I believe she was there before Bezos owned the paper. She cheered on every mean thing that Rhee did.
Diane If the Department of Education doesn’t have a dedicated desk devoted to mediating THIS issue, it needs such a desk and person . . . one who really understands the difference between principles driving public institutions and those driving corporate-bought and influenced institutions <–as generally stated as I can . . . because reformers are so good at messing around with meaning, e.g., “private-public” partnerships that ended up with double-dipping from broad-brush economic bills. (Good Grief!) CBK
At least the Washington Post has Valerie Strauss.
The NYT seems to remove any education reporter who isn’t 100% charter friendly and the reporting in the NYT presents all criticism of charters as “something that the teachers’ union says” that is no more likely to be true than what is said by the people who run or support charters who are entirely dedicated to the education of low-income children.
What do you mean, going to control education? Bezos is already doing it. I teach computer science at college. Over a year ago, the school had some kind of deal with Amazon – I don’t know the details, I think Amazon gave some grant money and the school agreed to teach some Amazon stuff. Well, everything has gone nuts. The dept has flipped out over AWS Educate, which is the free educational version of Amazon Web Services. They’ve stuffed AWS in every course in the dept. I’m currently teaching one course which has nothing to do with cloud computing, yet in this one course I’m required to assign two (!) books on AWS which students must read, get an AWS account, write papers on AWS, answer quiz questions on AWS, and plow through hours – literally – of videos and other material on AWS. All of which, of course, is crowding out time students need to spend developing software skills. My head is spinning. This is such a ham-fisted attempt at building brand loyalty,.
Horrible, Phil. Sounds like a Twilight Zone episode.
Phil Carpenter . . . .sort of like hearing those broken-record insurance adds over and over again: Liberty, liberty-liberty . . liberty, liber-teeeee. They not only highjacked the term “liberty,” while I watch television, I puke in recurrent fashion. CBK CBK
I have a hard time explaining my emotional response to Phil Carpenter story of an attempt by Bozos to take over his class.
I have a hard time thinking back on something more tragic, more insulting, more threatening to our democracy by Jeff Bozos pulling it right out from under us.
I paused over the story, feeling a loss, as never before regarding the ebb and flow of educational circumstance.
Naked capitalism must not be allowed to shred public education into strips that rot in the sunlight of student needs.
Damn!
To be fair, I don’t know how much of this is Bezos’ work and how much is the school’s. We have a new guy in the dept responsible for course content, and he just goes bonkers over every shiny toy that comes along. Some neato Harvard course, or some kewl video, or whatever, and he just has to shove it into the courses. I have to plow through a bunch of non-Amazon junk in the course that doesn’t have anything to do with the course, but boss just feels like it. Amazon would be shocked at how much AWS we have, but it does show what happens when companies try to promote themselves and educators don’t know better.
I combined your story with the ad above. I still can’t explain the feeling of dread that hit me, in retrospect, worrying not only about a threat to our education futures, but our democracy itself.
The McGraw-Hill English textbook app my district bought contains Amazon (and Twitter) ads.
LeftCoast Do your kids’ textbooks come with a pair of scissors? CBK
I am scissors. More on that to come in a couple weeks…
LeftCoast Scissorhands
Watch out!
Remember all of the doom and gloom predictions about grocery stores like Kroger, Albertson’s, Safeway, Publix, Walmart and their smaller counterparts when Amazon bought Whole Foods?
Amazon hasn’t made much of a dent. They still haven’t scaled their non-organic/natural Fresh stores, so there’s still time, but it only drove the others to improve their in-store and online experience, typically via 3rd-party like Instacart and Shipt. Then COVID came along and accelerated those transitions. Amazon gets a LOT of positive press when they introduce something new, but unless you follow tech media, you may not realize the many projects they started that ended up being failures. Amazon Dash is an example.
I know the argument for charters and private school vouchers is that it will force the public schools to get better, but I don’t see how that would happen. Speaking from the perspective of someone in Florida, public schools are constrained by the mandates of the state while charters have fewer restrictions and many private schools that receive vouchers have virtually no restrictions.
Charter and private schools can mandate uniforms, play around with the order of curriculum, HAVE SELECTIVE ADMISSION AND/OR REMOVE STUDENTS WHO DON’T PERFORM WELL ACADEMICALLY AND/OR BEHAVIORALLY, experiment with different teacher evaluation systems, NOT TAKE STATE TESTS if they are private school, etc. Meanwhile, the public schools have to do what the state mandates, then the state says, “here’s a voucher to escape the ‘one-size-fits-all’ public education system.” The STATE is the entity making it a one-size-fits-all system.
I wholeheartedly believe that school districts can hold their own against the charters (including an “Amazon Charter School Network”), but they must be given the autonomy to implement strategies that will be successful for their populations.
Excellent comment. Just excellent.
The ad is weird propaganda. “I joined Amazon because I want to change education,” says the earnest woman, who then points to a teacher that inspired her — not a website or computer screen.
If Amazon really wants to change education, it would pay its workforce living wages so that employee/parents can provide secure, healthy home environments for their children.
Hello, AFT/MEA: educators need to loudly refute this garbage.
“I joined Amazon because I want to work long hours at low pay under unsafe conditions. I chose Amazon over Walmart because I like telling people I work in a jungle for dangerous snakes”
Ha!