Nancy Bailey believes that parents owe a debt of thanks to the valiant teachers who taught online and in person, doing whatever was needed during the year of the pandemic.
She reminds us that tech vultures are waiting in the wings, hoping that the pandemic has set the stage for “reimagining” education without buildings.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t know- as usual the ed reform position on this is incoherent.
For a decade they were telling us they would get rid of “buildings” and “seat time” and now they’re all slamming public schools for not being 100% up to capacity on seat time and buildings.
The one consistent, coherent ed reform position seems to be “opposition to public schools”. It’s the only part of the “movement” that is consistent.
“If public schools are doing it, it’s bad” with “it” changing daily. That’s the foundational belief, the only part that hangs together.
The largest charter in Ohio was an online school and every single prestigious ed reformer not only endorsed it, they actively sold and marketed it. Fast forward ten years, public schools go remote to a greater or lesser extent and all of ed reform slams them for it.
I thought remote learning was super fabulous? It was only super fabulous when it was a giant charter chain?
They wrote entire books fawning over Rocketship. The kids were sitting in rows at screens all day with 15 dollar an hour “aides” doing instruction.
Betsy DeVos slammed all public schools as “buildings” that we could free ourselves from and in the next breath she launched a political campaign against public schools because (some) of the buildings weren’t open.
They’re putting together “marketplaces” of eduproduct where people can spend public education funding on literally anything and call it “school”. So their rigorous policing of “seat time” only applies to the public schools they oppose?
I was in favor of schools opening, but I was consistent. I don’t make my living claiming public schools are unfashionable and not needed. I understand the value of “buildings” and I wasn’t lobbying to throw the whole concept of public schools in the trash and replace them with some list of junk contractors and eduproduct.
Now that ed reformers seem to agree that “buildings” are essential and students should be in school, in person, perhaps they could stop lobbying to replace our schools with lists of educontactors and low value vouchers?
Now that they see it’s a disaster for families and communities? Will we get an admission that they were wrong about “buildings” and in-person schooling? That public schools actually HAVE value? Or on this as on all things will they get away with having it both ways, and arguing one thing when it promotes the charter and private schools they prefer and another when it doesn’t?
Our schools closed for about 4 months and reopened but it was controlled chaos when they reopened- the quarantines were in many ways more difficult than closures.
I think the employees did a great job in a really difficult environment and I am grateful to them.
I also think (I don’t know) that the closures probably made people here value public schools MORE not less, since so much of this community revolves around public schools. Just the pausing of sports and musical performances at the school basically gutted the reason we all get together for anything in this town. Public schools were missed. In smaller rural places they really are the center of the community. I knew it, but even I didn’t know the extent of it.
Dismissing them as “buildings” was always silly on the part of ed reformers- it was never true. They are not now and were never just educational service providers. That was never the reality.
Another huge voucher bill promoted by the ed reform echo chamber:
https://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/state_news/signature-school-choice-bill-passes-legislature/article_a851018c-aeb9-11eb-a84d-07cd367a11fa.html
Ed reformers have a lousy track record for getting anything done on behalf of students who attend public schools and that will just get worse with their lock step embrace of vouchers.
They’ve never offer nothing of value to students and families who attend public schools and that will just accelerate now that they have their own set of publicly funded private schools.
Hire them or elect them if you want. but be aware they do no work on behalf of students who attend public schools, because they’re ideologically opposed to the existence of public schools. They contribute nothing to our schools. Never have.
I’ll never understand why public schools hire and pay ed reformers as consultants.
Charter and private schools would never hire consultants who lobby against their schools, yet public schools are supposed to hire people who spend their entire careers working against our schools.
Eva Moskowitz isn’t paying “consultants” who oppose charters, I assure you.
What if we started hiring people who support public schools and public school students to set policy and advise public schools? Would that perhaps work out better for the students who attend them?
Don’t public school students deserve people who support public schools? Why can’t they have them? Charters get them. Private schools get them. Only our schools get stuck with anti-public school warriors on the actual payroll. Why are we paying professional public school critics? Can’t Gates and Walton and Koch just pay them?
the key point: Why are we PAYING public school critics?
“David Osborne
Author Reinventing America’s Schools, Reinventing Government & others. Dir. of Progressive Policy Institute Project on Reinventing America’s Schools”
This is one of the many, many ed reform lobbying groups who seek to replace all public schools with contractors.
Would charter schools hire consultants who seek to eradicate charter schools? No, of course not. So why are public schools stuck with them?
They work to end our school systems. Replace them, lock stock and barrel. For this we should be hiring and paying them to set policy in our schools? That’s nuts. No other set of schools would ever do that. It’s suicide.
The reason they don’t return any value to public schools is they don’t value public schools. They have made this abundantly clear. The lousy track record on public schools? It’s the expected outcome of hiring people who oppose the existence of them.
You’re allowed to hire people who support your schools and students. That’s permitted. It’s not the exclusive right of charter and private schools. Insist on it.
I cannot understand how Jeb Bush has any credibility in education. He is a disruptor, but he offers no improvement. He oozes noxious false platitudes about education to undermine free, accountable, neighborhood public schools. He peddles cheap failed cyber instruction, and his ultimate goal is to detach education from brick and mortar educational institutions in order tol shovel more public money to the already wealthy class. If we have learned anything from the pandemic, it is that students need education in a social setting from dedicated professionals. Jeb Bush is the least talented Bush brother. At least GW can paint.
GW can paint what?
Certainly not people.
They all have twisted noses and mouths.
If he is going to paint people, he needs to take some lessons — a lot of them.
Until then, he should stick with abstracts which have no identifiable features.
He should have taken his father’s advice: read the lips.
That’s what differentiates someone who can paint portraits from someone who can’t.
Unfortunately for Dubha, everyone knows what people are supposed to look like.
The eyes and ears in his paintings are also twisted and weird.
So he can’t paint eyes, can’t paint noses, can’t paint ears and can’t paint mouths .
What’s left?
He needs to learn to draw before he does a single lick of painting.
Some might argue that Picasso’s later portraits had twisted features but that was on purpose. Picasso could actually paint realistic portraits if he wanted to.
Dubya can’t.
At least GW can paint. That’s A Good One!
A good example of Bush’s artistic talent.
Of course, he conveniently omitted the most disturbing part of the image– the electrical wires to the hands of the man in the infamous Abu Ghraib photograph — and replaced the wire to one of his hands with a rose.
You know, so everyone will remember what a loving, caring, religious man Dubya really was at heart.
What’s in a name, that which he calls a rose, by any other name would smell like torture?
We spent the past year “reimagining” teaching without buildings. Teachers were bullied, datasplained, and threatened with lawsuits by entitled white parents loudly demanding that schools must open, or else. So I guess all this “reimagining” is only for the POC schools.
The people that want to “reimagine” education are people like Jeb Bush and Bill Gates that would personally benefit from destroying public education. They can afford expensive private schools with small classes for their own children. Sitting in front of screen is fine for other people’s children according to them. However, all the research shows that online learning is inadequate for most students.
Google Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Education Excellence and look for its funders
When Biden uses the phrase “reimagine education”
it lets everyone know he hates public education. Yes, hates, the full hatred. He despises public schools, public school teachers, and public school students. If a child handed Joe Biden a heartfelt, crayon drawn birthday card, and the president handed it back and said he wanted the child to reimagine her drawing, that would let the child he didn’t like her, wouldn’t it. If Joe Biden told Jill Biden he wanted to reimagine their marriage, that would let Jill Biden know her husband hated her. You don’t reimagine people you love.
I am convinced that there are some tech vultures waiting in the wings, hoping that the pandemic has set the stage for “reimagining” education without buildings, teachers, or students, just a flood of public money to the CEOs of educational websites that do nothing but exist on the internet.
Want to “reimagine” education. How about fully funding democratically-governed public education for all? How about a living wage for parents and universal affordable health care and housing? We’ve never done that. It’s about time.
Several of my colleagues and I were discussing this just yesterday, and we all agreed that we are MASSIVELY retreating from tech after this year. We have been fully face to face since October (we were hybrid for first term), but we had to do a lot of tech as kids (and sometimes teachers) bounced in and out of quarantine. But we all agreed that we, and especially the students, are SICK of tech.
We will also use it somewhat, for research and things like that, but at least the colleagues I talked to are moving further away from tech than even pre-Covid because we see how much the kids have struggled to learn this year.
Computers are useful tools in the hands of competent teachers. They cannot “reimagine” education, That is simply a euphemistic slogan for the reform agenda. Young people learn best from a knowledgeable professional in a social setting.
In the beginning of the pandemic, Big Tech thought covid-19 would show everyone how wonderful their products were. They thought it was the disaster on which they could capitalize, and permanently “scale up” all their competency-based apps like Schoology and Google Classroom. They thought their frickin’ websites would be better than in-person interactions.
I have been told by insipid tech enthusiasts, even today, that online education is better than in-person, as if people have been getting more out of school during the pandemic than before. Ridiculous. I have been told by tech salespeople that online education might not take over, but it “has a place.” That is equally ridiculous. Dung does not “have a place” on my sandwich. I am tired of eating Big Tech’s droppings. When this is over, I am going to accept paper only from my students.
And it’s hardly a tug of war, in my case. It’s no contest. In my classroom, I am the strongest person alive.
By tug of war, I meant that teachers HAD to rely on tech due to the pandemic and the need to teach remotely for safety whether they like technology or not.