The Governor promised a wage increase of 5% and teachers agreed to end the statewide strike.

Teachers will return to work Thursday.

Governor agrees to pay raise ending West Virginia teacher strike
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/27/us/west-virginia-teachers-strike/index.html

This message was sent to all AFT members today from President Randi Weingarten:

“I don’t write emails to our full membership and activist community often, but the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case warrants it.

“The case is challenging the 45-year-old precedent that 23 states have used to determine wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of public employees’ jobs. As the Illinois solicitor general eloquently argued at the Supreme Court yesterday, these 23 states decided that, for labor peace and the efficiency of services, public employees can be represented by a union, and, as long as the union represents everyone, those who do not want to join may instead pay a “fair share” fee. This fee is meant to compensate the union for bargaining contracts and other services; nonmembers are not required to pay anything toward any political activity by the union.

“Yesterday, I was at the Supreme Court listening to the oral arguments in the Janus case. I listened as the right wing launched attack after attack on unions and on what collective bargaining gains for working people, those they serve and their communities. Indeed, Justice Sotomayor nailed the right wing’s argument, pointing out, “You’re basically arguing, do away with unions.”

“Stand with us and tell us why you’re “union proud.”

“This case isn’t about petitioner Mark Janus, it’s about defunding unions. It’s about who will have power in our country—working people or big corporate interests. That’s why it’s being funded by the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other wealthy and corporate interests. First, they pledged $80 million to “defund and defang” unions. Then, the Kochs, after getting the Trump tax cut, upped the ante with $400 million to undermine public education and “break” the teachers unions. And now, with the Janus case, they are pushing to prevent workers from having a union at all. Why? Because unions are our vehicle to fight for and win a better life for people, and corporate interests see that as a threat to their power.

“Study after study shows that union workers have higher wages, better benefits, a more secure retirement and a voice in the workplace.

“Yesterday was about fighting in the Supreme Court, but we’ve been fighting on many other fronts as well—speaking out in the court of public opinion and, most important, making sure our members, families, friends and allies know what we are up against. That’s why, this weekend, workers held rallies in 30 cities and counties throughout the country to fight for our fundamental right to union representation on the job. And that’s why our locals have spent the last year engaging members in one-on-one conversations. This recommitment to one another has been catalytic and transformative, and overwhelmingly, our members want to be part of our union, and they know how important it is for them, their families and their communities.

“Tell us why you’re “union proud” and what it is you care about and fight for every day.

“This is a “which side are you on?” moment. Our country must not revert to a time when workers were systematically denied even the most fundamental rights—a voice and a better life.

“Now’s the time. Stand with us.”

In unity,
Randi Weingarten
AFT President

P.S. Watch our video re-capping Janus actions over the last week.

Douglas Rushkoff is a professor media studies and a public school parent in New York. This is an adaptation of a presentation that he made to his local school board.

A SANE SOCIAL MEDIA POLICY FOR SCHOOLS

I am father of a 7th grader.

I am also the author of 17 books and four television documentaries about life in the digital media environment, a professor of media and society at CUNY, founder of its Laboratory for Digital Humanism, research fellow at Institute for the Future, and a frequent consultant on computers, education, and digital health to school districts, the US congress, the White House, the United Nations and governments around the world.

I am still enthusiastic about the promise of digital technology to enhance education and human potential. But I am also aware of who constructed our social media platforms, and for what purpose. Social media makes money by encouraging engagement – or what they call “eyeball hours” – by any means necessary. They employ advanced psychological tactics in order to make people – young and old – feel bad if they don’t check in regularly and worse if they try to leave a platform altogether.

The “streak” feature on SnapChat, for example, was developed in the Captology lab of Stanford University. Captology, as the name suggests, is the study of how to “capture” and maintain attention. The streak is simply a number corresponding to how many days in a row you chatted with a particular person. It’s also a way to turn socializing and posting into a competitive sport.

It will make anyone – even teachers and school administrators – feel terrible about missing a day of posting. It is just one of hundreds of techniques used by social media to make people anxious and depressed, such as adding pictures of your “ex” having fun to your newsfeed. Some techniques were drawn from Las Vegas slot machine algorithms, themselves based on decades of practice addicting gamblers to self-destructive behaviors.

My friends – the people who developed Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms – are now regretting what they did, but they are feeling powerless to change things. This is because the companies they work for are run by shareholders who simply want more hours, more posts, more engagement from us – by any means necessary.

Sean Parker, the ex-founder of Napster who guided young Mark Zuckerberg through the early days of Facebook, says the platform was built by “consciously exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology” focused on figuring out “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?'” Now Parker says he’s a “conscientious objector” from social media and worries “what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

These are America’s most powerful businesses, seeking to infiltrate our awareness. They are not only psychologically damaging, but intellectually compromising.

We multitask, assuming that – like our computers – we can do more than one thing at the same time. Study after study has shown that multitasking humans invariably get less done, less accurately, with less depth, and less understanding. This is true even when we believe we have accomplished more.

Other studies have shown that:

   – we function poorly and remember less if our smart phone is in the same room, even if it is turned off.

   – we read slower and with less comprehension if our email program is open in the background – even if the program’s window is completely covered.

   – the algorithms of social media feeds can not only predict our future behavior, but change it. They intentionally discourage creative outcomes that defy their predictions or stray from our big data classifications. They actively and intentionally reduce innovative and non-conformist behavior.

   – social media makes us less able to separate fact from fiction, makes us feel worse about our lives, lowers our self-esteem, and increases tribal, racial, and nativist divisions. It profits off polarity, sensationalism, violence, and impulsiveness.

As my friend, the inventor of virtual reality Jaron Lanier puts it, “The popular platforms are designed for behavior modification. Why would you go sign up for an evil hypnotist who’s explicitly saying that his whole purpose is to get you to do things that people have paid him to get you to do, but he won’t tell you who they are?”

A school district may have real reasons for resorting social media, but if they do so, they should at least be conscious of the compromise they are making, and the specific goals they are pursuing.

For instance, a district with poor community relations may seek to improve them by posting pictures on social media feeds. If attendance at school events is low, or if the town is too big for people to be exposed to schoolchildren, social media can be used to promote more enthusiasm for events, or passage of a school budget or bond issue. But in communities where people have face-to-face contact, social media does not improve relationships or institutional affiliations; research shows that it degrades them.

A famously bad school district can use social media to chronicle and publicize its turnaround to the world at large. This can help attract new families to the district, increase property values, and, in turn, increase the tax base. Again, most districts are not in need of such rehabilitation, and do better at fixing their problems when they’re not under a spotlight. 

Social media can help school administrators and employees promote their perspectives and careers. An educator may implement a classroom approach and want to publicize it – both to share best practices with other educators or to position themself for a better job somewhere else or even just better book sales. That’s fine, but it makes the classroom secondary to some other agenda, and turns the students into unwitting promotional tools. Better to do this on a website or blog than a competitive and manipulative social media platform, anyway.

Finally, when teachers or administrators are using social media in the classroom or at school activities, it models the addictive, life-negating behavior that we don’t want our kids to emulate. If teachers are looking for social media opportunities during the school day, then they are being distracted from the face-to-face, in-person contact that defines classroom education. Taking a selfie with a student, however well-meaning, conveys that the moment is less significant than the Tweet. Sad. I want my kid to feel that what she’s accomplished in class matters in its own right, even if it is not posted to Facebook!

Social media should not be mistaken for the internet. These platforms are categorically different than a school’s website. They are private companies, using black-box technologies to sell data about us and use it against us in ways they themselves are appalled by. Steve Jobs did not let his kids use an iPad. The Facebook employees I know will not let their kids go to schools that use social media.

Social media companies have spent billions of dollars developing algorithmically charged, adaptive mind control methodologies – as well as propaganda and government lobbying on why these activities make us stronger, smarter, more popular, happier, richer, and more loved.   It’s very hard to fight this psychological manipulation, and the more we use social media, the more we accept its premies.

Right now, those of us in the digital trenches are dealing with a problem named “Elsagate” – hundreds of videos targeting children that have been designed to pass through YouTube’s safety filters so that they appear in the pre-approved YouTube Kids’ Channel. They depict stories such as baby Elsa (from Disney’s Frozen) stealing her parents liquor, drinking it, turning violent, and killing her sister; another shows baby Spiderman being raped by his father; and other scenes calculated by their makers to inflict psychological trauma on American children. It’s a pediatric form of the same memetic warfare used against American adults in the last presidential election cycle. We still don’t know who is behind them.

They get through YouTube’s algorithms because those algorithms are not really there to help kids. They are there to help advertisers reach kids, and to make humans more predictable, less coherent, more anxious, and less genuinely social. This space favors the trolls, the abusers, and the marketers. It’s hard enough raising kids; now theres’ a multi-trillion-dollar industry working overtime to make our kids less cooperative, more irritable, and hyper-reactive. And we’re already required to surrender our kids to these companies, because so much education is happening online.

Making money is not bad. But making money by abusing people through intentionally addictive technologies *is* bad. The Internet is fabulous public utility. Social media are privately owned platforms operated so maliciously that they constitute public health crisis.

In short, social media really has no place in school. Sure, we can use it as an example in our media literacy classes. We can teach how the business model works, the attention economy on which it is based, the algorithmic logic of its choices, and the behavioral manipulation embedded in its interfaces. But we mustn’t post our kids pictures, promote our school activities, or start important policy conversations on networks entirely unfit for the purpose.

This shouldn’t stop schools from running their own websites, posting announcements and pictures when appropriate, and giving parents the ability to opt-out on behalf of their children.  The same goes for running articles and photos in local papers, which are our true media partners serving community interests.

We must not let our own addiction to social media cloud our judgment about how to educate our children and represent our schools or districts. Keep this stuff out of the classroom until you understand who’s behind it, how it works, and how it is influencing your choices. 

———

Douglas Rushkoff is the host of TeamHuman a professor of media studies, and the author of books including Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and Program or Be Programmed.