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Oklahoma: Should the Public Fund a Religious Charter School?

By dianeravitch
January 28, 2024 //
39

The big issue currently raising hackles in Oklahoma is whether a Catholic Church should be allowed to operate a publicly-funded virtual charter school.

Leave aside, for the moment, whether the state should be funding a religious school at all.

Leave aside, for now, the fact that multiple evaluations have reported that virtual schools get worse results than brick-and-mortar schools.

Leave aside, for now, the fact that Ohlahoma already has seven virtual schools already.

The state attorney general is opposed to it.

But Governor Kevin Stitt and the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual School Board approved the idea (3-2), so the issue will be resolved in court.

Governor Stitt just selected one of the Board’s members to be his top education advisor:

OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma official who voted in favor of founding the nation’s first religious charter school will serve as Gov. Kevin Stitt’s next education secretary.

Nellie Tayloe Sanders, of Kingfisher, is the third member of the Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board to join the Stitt administration. She is the second to do so after approving a Catholic charter school in a landmark 3-2 vote last year. Stitt was a staunch advocate of the school.

As education secretary, Sanders will serve as the governor’s top adviser on school policy. She will be paid $25,000 a year for the position, according to the Governor’s Office.

 Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board member Nellie Tayloe Sanders, left, pictured at an Oct. 9 meeting in Oklahoma City, is Gov. Kevin Stitt’s choice to be his education secretary. (Photo by Nuria Martinez-Keel/Oklahoma Voice)

“My goal is to empower parents with choices and support teachers in unleashing their full potential – moving beyond the constraints of politics and bureaucracy,” Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. “Governor Stitt’s commitment to educational freedom resonates deeply with me.”

Sanders resigned from her seat on the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board on Sunday in an email to Senate President Pro Tem Greg Treat, his office confirmed. The Senate leader had appointed Sanders to the board in February to oversee the seven Oklahoma charter schools that primarily teach online.

However, she won’t leave the board entirely. The education secretary holds a non-voting seat.

The board’s president, Robert Franklin, said the news of her appointment to the governor’s Cabinet caught him off guard.

“If you were asking me (about) a laundry list of colleagues that I thought had a seasoned background and a footprint in Oklahoma’s educational landscape, I wouldn’t have picked Mrs. Sanders,” Franklin said. “But I know she’s thoughtful. I know she’s kind. I know she’s an engaging person. So, I certainly wish her well.”

In other developments, the judge in the Catholic virtual charter school case stepped aside, because he had relationships with people on both sides of the issue.

Lawyers involved said the case was starting all over because the state board had entered into a contract with St. Isidore, and the board itself had new members.

One new board member said that the Catholic Church sponsoring the school would not provide a Catholic education, but the church disagreed.

Appointed Oct. 27, one of the new SVCSB members is Brian Shellem, a former Edmond mayoral candidate and the president of Advanced Automotive Equipment.

Shellem has also been appointed by Gov. Kevin Stitt to serve on the new Statewide Charter School Board, which the Oklahoma Legislature created last session to replace the SVCSB on July 1. It will become the new board overseeing virtual charter schools and other charter schools.

Shellem said that although he was not a board member when the SVCSB decided to authorize St. Isidore, he supports more educational choices for students, as long as those choices meet the right educational standards and requirements.

“The (St. Isidore) contract is not to provide religious education, it’s to provide education and a curriculum that the state requires, and I don’t think they should be disqualified because they are a Catholic school,” Shellem said. “I equate it to if you go to a car wash and you pay $20 for a car wash and then they go, ‘Hey, we’re gonna give you for free the wheel package and the air freshener,’ and they don’t charge you, [now you’ve got] a $5 value, but we’re not charging you for it. The state’s not contracting them to teach religious education, but it happens to be in that environment. They’re getting contracted to teach the curriculum that’s required by the state.”

Throughout their application process, St. Isidore leaders have indicated that the school intends to provide students with a Catholic education.

Shellem said he believes charter schools are public schools, so he could understand how including the proverbial extra car wash package that is Catholic education could create some legal questions to be dealt with in court.

[Note: You may have seen this article Friday. I moved it because it was supposed to appear today.]

Categories Disruption, Education Industry, Oklahoma, Privatization, Religion, Republicans, Separation of church and state, Technology, Virtual Charter Schools

John Thompson: The Most Important Lesson That Students Need Today

By dianeravitch
December 10, 2023 //
21

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher, write about what matters most to students today: learning to pay attention in a world of screens and distractions.

He writes:

D. Graham Burnett, Alyssa Loh, and Peter Schmidt begin their New York Times opinion piece, “Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can fight Back,” with an eloquent version of a statement that should have long been obvious:

We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market. Increasingly powerful systems seek to ensure that our attention is never truly ours.

Then Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt use equally insightful language to explain why “We Can Fight Back” against “the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.” They recall that “for two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy.” Today we face widespread complaints that reading is being undermined by “perpetual distraction,” due to commercial use of digital technologies. They add, “What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”

“Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can Fight Back” calls for a “revolution [which] starts in our classrooms.” They explain, “We must flip the script on teachers’ perennial complaint. Instead of fretting that students’ flagging attention doesn’t serve education, we must make attention itself the thing being taught.” They draw upon the work of “informal coalitions of educators, activists and artists who are conducting grass-roots experiments to try to make that possible. Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt call it “attention activism.

Due to these worldwide efforts, “common ground is rediscovered in the weave of collective attention.” They seek ways “to create, beyond the confines of our personalized digital universes, something resembling a shared world.” One set of starting places, museums, public libraries, universities, as well as classrooms, remind me of a time when I was a student, and the first half of my teaching career, when field trips were widely celebrated, and before critical thinking was subordinated to test prep.

“Powerful Forces Are Fracking Our Attention. We Can fight Back” recommends another practice that I’ve long struggled with, “observations of absolutely whatever unfolds in the world,” in order pay “particular attention to the supposedly mundane … events that might under normal circumstances have gone unnoted.” It reminded me of a conversation with a student where we agreed that we don’t want to depend on beer or marijuana in order to fully appreciate a sunset. It was hard for me to later realize that I also took that shortcut in order to slow down and fully appreciate such beauty.

Next, I left my computer, and my dog and I got into our complicated new hybrid car to take a short ride to the park for a walk. Of course, the irony of driving to the walk is obvious. Then I figured out how to push the buttons for defrosting the window, rather than scrape the ice off. But then, technology taught me a new skill for paying attention to “normal circumstances” that had “gone unnoted.” I became enthralled the bubbles that broke loose from the coat of ice as it melted and dripped down the windshield. (Perhaps due to that experience, the park’s beautiful fall colors were even more awesome.)

Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt also reminded me of conversations I had had as a young Baby Boomer with family members, neighbors and other mentors. So many adults coached me on developing “inner directedness,” not “outer-directedness,” and to not be “like the Red River, a mile wide and a foot deep.” I was taught that my real goal shouldn’t be higher grades, but “learning how to learn.” And I’ll never forget the elementary school principal who took us to the junior high to watch Edward R. Murrow interviewing John Maynard Keynes, about the real purpose of school – which was not getting a job. Our goal should be learning how to learn how to be creative after technology reduced the workweek into 15 hours.

Of course, that hopefulness seems laughable today, but it brings us back to Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt and their diagnosis of why today’s technology has become so destructive. They linked to ATTENTION LIBERATION MOVEMENTS(or ALMS) that resist the “powerful new financial, commercial, and technological system that is commodifying human attention as never before.” It promotes “RADICAL HUMAN ATTENTION” to nurture “unrivaled access to the goodness of life;” and second, “that present circumstances present new and imperiling obstacles to human attentional capacities.” For instance, these bottom-up efforts seek to educate young people how, “We operate in a world in which attention is increasingly bought and sold. Bought and sold by powerful interests, pursuing wealth — pursuing ‘eyeballs,’” on screens.

And, of course, the subsequent undermining of inner-directedness, social ties, and critical thinking paved the way to today’s rightwing assault on democracy.

Although I was never as eloquent as Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt, but I’ve unsuccessfully advocated for their type of approach for a quarter of a century. My first encounter with a cell phone occurred the day after a gang-related murder when my students affiliated with the “Crips” stared at a new student, a “Blood,” who was secretly typing into a gadget I’d never seen before, who was requesting armed backup. Given the way that cell phones, predictably, increased violence and, predictably, undermined classroom instruction, I lobbied for our school to commit to regulating phones and engaging in cross-generational conversations about digital literacy and ethics.

Although I personally communicated with my students about “using digital technology,” but “not being used by it,” our school system refused to touch these issues. Before long, watching students who were glued to their phones, it seemed obvious we were also facing a crisis of loneliness, made much, much worse by screen time.

My personal experience thus gives me reasons for both hope and pessimism. Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt build on the same human community strengths that were crucial for me, and embraced by students in our phone-free classroom. But I can’t ignore the three decades of refusals by the systems I’ve worked with to tackle the challenge.

Then again, on the same day that the New York Times commentary was published, National Public Radio reported that California “joins a growing movement to teach media literacy.” The next day, the Washington Post called on parents to support a ban on smartphones. So, maybe the time is right for the wisdom of Burnett, Loh, and Schmidt, who make the case for “what democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry — human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.”

Categories Education Reform, Students, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

Gayle Greene: Higher Education and the Triumph of Hype Over Experience

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2023 //
66

Recently, I have read alarming articles about state universities eliminating majors in the humanities as a cost-cutting measure while expanding departments that grant degrees in computer science, business, and other job-related fields. Just last week, The Atlantic published an article about the downsizing of foreign languages, linguistics, and other majors at the University of West Virginia, even though the state has a surplus of nearly $2 billion. Other universities are cutting majors in history, the arts, and political science in favor of majors that enhance immediate employability.

Gayle Greene, professor emerita at Scripps College in Claremont, California, contends that such actions are short-sighted. Today—in a world of disinformation, fake news, and Artigiani intelligence—we need the humanitities more than ever so we can discern and weigh facts and reality. In this essay , she shows how tech titans like Bill Gates have encouraged the destructive trend of favoring job-ready degrees.

Greene writes:

“College is remade as tech majors surge and humanities dwindle,” announces Nick Anderson in the Washington Post, May 2023. “Remade” is an understatement, when more students today are majoring in computer science than in all the humanities– English, history, philosophy, languages, the arts— combined. And what for? In the past year, tech has laid off more than 200,000 workers, with more layoffs predicted.

 

There was a chorus of Cassandras warning against this remake: do not whittle education down to preparation for jobs that might not exist in a decade; do not sacrifice the humanities to STEM. But the hype was so loud, it drowned out the warnings. The STEM skills shortage was broadcast by business leaders, lobbyists, politicians, think tanks, media, and especially by Bill Gates, who spread the word far and wide. He announced to Congress, in 2008, “U.S. companies face a severe shortfall of scientists and engineers with expertise to develop the next generation of breakthroughs.” Obama echoed him in his 2012 State of the Union Address: “I hear from many business leaders who want to hire in the U.S. but can’t find workers with the right skills.” Obama reiterated the message in his 2011, 2013, and 2016 State of the Union Addresses, announcing, in 2013 a competition “to redesign America’s high schools,” rewarding those developing STEM classes to deliver “the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”

 

The hype was hot air. “If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising” rather than staying flat as they have “for the past 16 years,” wrote Ron Hira et al in USA Today, 2014. Obama might have heeded him or Andrew Hacker, Ben Tarnoff, Matt Bruenig, Michael Teitelbaum, Gerald Coles, Walter Hickey, Michael Anft, who raised similar alarms. Or Paul Krugman, who warned, “the belief that America suffers from a severe ‘skills gap’ is one of those things that everyone important knows must be true, because everyone they know says it’s true”; it’s “a zombie idea… that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die.”

 

When an idea persists against all evidence, you have to ask: who profits? A 2012 Microsoft publication warned that the U.S. faces “a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating”—even though, in the summer of 2014, Microsoft laid off about 18,000 workers. Other companies,Boeing, IBM, Symantec, were also laying off thousands, sometimes rehiring them at lower salaries, even as they lamented the “lack of qualified applicants,” wrote Hacker.

 

The problem for a company like Microsoft has not been a lack of skilled workers, but that U.S. tech workers expect to be well paid. Foreign tech workers in the U.S. make about 57% what their U.S. counterparts make. Hence the tech industry’s push for easier immigration policies and H-1B visas, visas that allow U.S. businesses to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty work like IT. If we don’t ease up on immigration policies, Gates told Congress in 2008, “American companies simply will not have the talent they need to innovate and compete.” Hence Gates’spush for coding and computer classes in schools and colleges. “Nothing would make programming cheaper than making millions more programmers,” wrote Tarnoff, “and where better to develop this workforce than America’s schools.”

 

The STEM skills shortage was the PR of an industry wanting a large pool of workers ready to work for less, an industry with enormous lobbying power. The campaign has been so successful that now hundreds of thousands of trained workers are newly unemployed in a market flooded by as many as qualified as they. It’s succeeded in bending higher education to its purposes, re-directing it to training for jobs, with tech jobs the most hyped–even though tech comprise less than 8% of the economy. Colleges and universities direct resources that way, private donors pour enormous sums that way, and students follow the money and the buzz, whatever their interests and talents. Humanities enrollments have plummeted, courses, programs, departments have been gutted, and tenured faculty let go.

 

But what even the most dire of Cassandras failed to see, even those working in AI, was the seismic upheaval AI was about to create.

 

*******

Obama might have been more cautious about dismantling an educational system that’s served the U.S. so well, a system widely believed to have been the engine of this country’s power and productivity. The U.S. still has the universities that rank highest internationally and have world-wide draw, in spite of the assaults higher education has lately endured. But he went ahead and based his educational policies on the vision of a technocrat (Gates’ word for himself) who sees the purpose of education as making a workforce that will allow U.S. industries “to compete in the global economy,” as Gates said in Waiting for Superman, 2010, a public-school-bashing documentary film he funded and starred in. Obama turned his education department over to the Gates foundation, as Lindsey Layton documented in the Washington Post, 2014: “top players in Obama’s Education Department who shaped theadministration’s policies came either straight from the Gates Foundation in 2009 or from organizations that received heavy funding from the foundation.”

 

With K-12, Obama uncritically adopted No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the test and assess regime George W. Bush inflicted on public schools in 2002 in the name of “reform”—even though NCLB was an acknowledged disaster by the time Obama took office. Schools could be closed if test scores declined— many were closed, especially in underprivileged areas, where kids don’t test well—which left teachers no choice but to teach to the test and strip curricula of subjects not tested, including literature, history, philosophy, the arts, languages, social sciences. The panic about test scores made a boondoggle for new ventures supplying materials for test- prepping, test-administering, test-scoring, and assessing. In fact, what test scores most reliably measure is how well kids take tests, which penalizes students from disadvantaged backgrounds and makes a mockery of claims that testing levels the playing field, the rationale for so-called reform.

 

Obama tightened the screws on Bush’s program, requiring states to agree to certain conditions to qualify for federal funding, each of them high on the Gates agenda. States had to agree to make room for more charter schools, and they did—more charters were founded on Obama’s watch than Bush’s. Gates claims that charters will create “choice” and “competition” and incentivize teachers to raise test scores. In fact they have not raised test scores, though they have succeeded in routing public funding to private interests, as they were meant to. States also had to agree to adopt a standardized curriculum. This came in the form of the Common Core State Standards, Gates’ brainchild, which wedded teaching even more closely to testing, assessing, and technology, since standardized material is easily computer-administered and scored. The Common Core has reduced reading and writing to decontextualized skills — “find the main point,” “identify the figures of speech”— which has been a major turnoff for kids. The moaning we hear lately about declining test scores is beside the point: the point is that kids are massively alienated from school because “drill, kill, bubble fill” is all they’re fed.

 

Gates has admitted that transforming K-12 is harder than he’d anticipated: “We really haven’t changed outcomes” (i.e. test scores). But he should not underestimate his impact. His perpetuation of the broken-public-schools narrative, his attack on teachers and tenure, his imposition of mechanization and measurement on an enterprise he knows nothing about, have driven teachers out of the profession in record numbers, with few lining up to take their places. Teachers have written and spoken against the Common Core, forming advocacy groups to resist it, and tens of thousands of parents have opted their kids out of testing— but the machine rolls on. The foundation “has influence everywhere, in absolutely every branch of education…federal, state, local,” with politicians, journalists, administrators, think tanks, summarizes Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute.

 

Higher education has been harder to get hold of, on account of the respect it commands throughout the world. But harping on its failures to meet market needs has done much to skew it the Gates way. “The [Gates] foundation wants nothing less than to overhaul higher education, changing how it is delivered, financed, and regulated,” wrote Marc Parry, Kelly Field, and Becky Supiano, in a brilliant expose, “The Gates Effect.” It “would like college to be cheaper, more accessible, and more targeted towards the specific skills desired by employers. Instead of a broad education where a college student might take courses across a range of subjects, the new model has students demonstrating ‘competencies’ by passing tests in specific areas, and receiving a certificate upon completion.” Thefoundation “hasn’t just jumped on the bandwagon,” the authors conclude; “it has worked to build that bandwagon.”

 

And its stranglehold on mainstream media is murderous. As with K-12, “Gates buys up everyone and engineers the appearance of a consensus,” writes Diane Ravitch. Ravitch was in the first Bush education department and a proponent of No Child Left Behind, but turned against it when she realized its purpose was to route public resources to private interests; she has been a powerful advocate for public schools ever since. As with K-12, “the foundation has bought the research, bought the evaluations, bought the advocacy groups, and bought the media to report on what the foundation is doing. It has lavished support on education journals, while also saturating them with ads and ‘sponsored’ articles.” As with K-12, this creates the sense of a hue and cry from many quarters, of widespread agreement that higher education is broken, resists change, resists innovation, needs technology, needs to produce more STEM workers.

 

​**********

Fifty years ago, the humanities had a “national mandate,” writes Nathan Heller in a widely read New Yorker article, “The End of the English Major,” February 2023. The liberal arts had pride of place. Now the mandate has moved to STEM, with more than a little push from business interests keen to transform higher education to job preparation and right-wing anti-education agendas.

 

In 2013, Obama’s administration produced a “Scorecard,” an online tool to show “folks” where they can get “the most bang for the buck,” as he promised in his 2013 State of the Union address. The Scorecard has Gates’ fingerprints all over it. It ranks colleges according to number of graduates, speed to graduation, starting salaries, time taken to pay back student loans—which makes a college rise higher in the rankings for graduating a hedge fund manager than a teacher. And higher education has cooperated, inviting managerial administrators in to make education “more like business,” lean, mean, and cost effective. They’ve stripped away courses and programs with no “real world” value and cut back in areas they deem inessential— like teaching, which has been turned over to part-timers or online programs, while tenured faculty are let go, and with them, tenure. Administrators hire more administrators, offices and functionaries proliferate, and academia is saddled with a top-heavy bureaucracy that drains resources. Then along comes a pandemic that cuts into college enrolments and devalues any enterprise without immediate utilitarian value—and here we are. The humanities are beyond crisis; they’re “on life support,” writes James Engell, Harvard Magazine, February.

 

And the STEM bandwagon rolls on, powered by Gates lobbying, onto the floor of Congress, where the Higher Education Act, the federal law governing crucial policies such as accreditation and standards that qualify colleges for financial aid, is overdue for reauthorization. In May 2019, the Gates foundation established a new lobbying group, “Commission on the Value of Postsecondary Education,” to make sure Congress understands the “value” of postsecondary education, “value” defined in terms of graduates’ salaries and social mobility. Prior to this lobbying group, the foundation exerted its influence from behind the scenes, but launching a 501c (4) nonprofit enables them to “talk directly with legislators about laws,”explains Nick Tampio. In May 2021, the Commission published a 117-page report, Equitable Value: Promoting Economic Mobility and Social Justice through Postsecondary Education, which spells out elaborate systems of measurement and assessment to make sureschools render dollar for dollar return on investment. The foundation is now in a position to assure that federal funding gets routed to majors leading to jobs Gates sees as vital to the economy.

 

*********

In 2018, Benjamin Schmidt cautioned against remaking higher ed to meet alleged market needs because nobody could predict what jobs would look like in ten years. Now, with AI to do the work of many humans, we might ask what jobs will look like in ten months. In March, Goldman Sachs released a report estimating that “generative AI may expose 300 million jobs to automation,” work that “might be reduced or replaced by AI systems,” summarizes Benj Rfestfd in Ars Technica. An insider, “Scott,” comments on a NYT article, March 28, on likely effects of GPT (“generative pre-trained transformers” that produce human-like text and images):

 

As a software entrepreneur who is part of a think tank that studies AI, I can tell you that GPT is not overhyped… it impacts every job from manufacturing to knowledge work, and with some imagination even agriculture, food production and restaurants… People are focusing on a single job? You should start thinking of entire professions, industries and companies (thousands of which GPT will put out of business this year). Our politics are not ready for the disruption, deflation and unemployment.

 

“We have summoned an alien intelligence,” write Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin in the NYT in March. Our first contact with AI, they note, the relatively simple manipulation of attention by social media, was catastrophic: it “increased societal polarization, undermined our mental health and unraveled democracy.” What comes next is anybody’s guess, but a lot of people are worried, including more than a thousand tech leaders and researchers who signed an open letter in March calling for a six-month moratorium on the development of GPT, citing its “profound risks to society and humanity.”

 

“It’s a completely different form of intelligence,” says Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” who resigned from Google so he could speak freely; and it’s likely to be “much more intelligent than us in the future.” It has the capacity to flood the internet with fake images and misinformation so convincing that we may “not be able to know what is true anymore”—which is dire for democracy. There are calls for regulation, including from Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI, the company that created GPT-4: “the current worries I have are of disinformation problems, economic shocks, or something else at a level far beyond anything we’re prepared for.”

 

Meanwhile the titans, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, are out of the gate, racing for the spoils.

 

​*********

How to deal with an alien intelligence that’s faster and smarter than we are? Killing the humanities has left us a bit understaffed in this department. By eliminating subjects that might teach us about ourselves and our fellow beings, we’re exacerbating the problems confronting society. Misinformation and conspiracy fantasies flourish, racism and hate crimes are on the rise, along with mortality rates, not only from Covid but “deaths of despair.” Quality of life in the U.S. has plummeted.

 

Many people fear that the STEM craze may be turning out graduates ignorant of the past and their world, ill equipped for the challenges of an increasingly uncertain future. Spending one’s college years mastering the practical skills of a specialized field does not cultivate a broad understanding of the world. Minds need to be developed all around, if they are to “understand human behavior” and achieve “emotional intelligence and mental balance”— the capacities Yuval Harari says young people most need as they face dizzying change. They’ll need, above all, ”the ability to keep changing,” qualities of adaptability and versatility cultivated by the kind of education we’ve trashed.

 

“Major in being human,” David Brooks advises young people who are wondering where to turn with AI threatening to steal their futures. Ask yourself, “which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human?” Gravitate toward classes that will help you develop “distinctly human skills… that unleash your creativity, that give you a chance to exercise and hone your imaginative powers.” That would be the humanities, small, discussion-based classes where students learn about the past and creations of their kind, about what humankind has been and might be; where they learn to articulate their positions and see that others have positions too, that they can disagree yet get along—which goes a way toward learning to live in society. Find the human, urges Douglas Rushkoff in Team Human, and find the others who can help us resist the anti-human agenda and “restore the social connections that make us fully functioning humans.”

 

The stakes are high. A 2020 study, “The Role of Education in Taming Authoritarian Attitudes,” found that in all the countries surveyed, higher education correlated with resistance to authoritarianism, but it made the greatest difference in the United States, on account of our unique system of general education based in the liberal arts. Yet this is the system we’re letting go. Authoritarianism thrives on misinformation, on simplistic, us-them thinking. Democracy requires that people deal with complexity, think, question, interpret, inquire, sort out information from misinformation, push back against agendas being pushed on us, take nothing on authority. It requires that people know how to read their world, interpret, evaluate, inquire, consider context and consequences, and know how to seek sources other than social or corporate media. Decoding has a longer shelf life than the coding Gates is pushing. It’s crucial to democracy –and to employability, it turns out, since skills alone become rapidly obsolete.

 

To disinvest in the humanities is to disinvest in the human, to give up on the hope of a livable world and more humane future. Which is why it’s urgent to resuscitate the humanities and not outsource our humanity to Hal.

##################

Gayle Greene is Professor Emerita, Scripps College, Claremont, CA. Her most recent book is Immeasurable Outcomes: Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of the Algorithm (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023), which makes a case for the humanities by actually showing what goes on in a small discussion class.

Gaylegreene.org

Categories Budget Cuts, Curriculum, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Extremism, Higher Education, Technology

Matt Barnum: Mark Zuckerberg and the Failure of “Personalized Learning”

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2023 //
24

For several years, vendors of Education technology have promoted the bizarre idea that learning on a computer is “personalized,” as compared to human interaction with a teacher. Tech leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates believed that technology would make it possible to accelerate learning and raise test scores by standardizing teaching.

Matt Barnum reports in Chalkbeat that Zuckerberg’s efforts failed. He and his wife Priscilla Chan via their CZI Initiative realize that their support of Summit Learning failed. However they are now betting on artificial intelligence.

What’s clear is that they do not trust teachers.

Barnum begins:

Several years ago, Mark Zuckerberg had grand designs for American schools.

The Facebook founder and his wife, pediatrician Priscilla Chan, poured well over $100 million into an online platform known as Summit Learning that initially aspired to be in half of the nation’s schools. In 2017, Zuckerberg suggested that technology-based “personalized learning” could vault the average student to the 98th percentile of performance.

Fast forward to this summer: The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the couple’s philanthropic arm, laid off dozens of staff on its education team and announced a shift in strategy. “Our understanding of what’s possible in the world of education — and in our world more generally — has changed,” Sandra Liu Huang, CZI’s head of education, wrote in an August blog post. “And so, at CZI, our education efforts must change too. Navigating these changes is humbling and challenging, but ultimately, necessary.”

It was an acknowledgement that the company’s prior education strategy had fallen short of its hopes. Through a spokesperson, Huang declined an interview request, but noted in her blog post that the company is continuing its work in education, albeit with a different strategy. “This moment demands not just investment but innovation — and that’s why we are building a team of experts and partners to identify opportunities where technology and grantmaking can drive coherence,” she wrote.

CZI’s shift in approach marks something of a coda to an era when various advocates and funders believed that computer-based “personalized learning” could dramatically improve education. Summit, CZI’s pet project, has not spread as far as once hoped, and there’s little evidence that it or similar efforts have led to the large learning gains that Zuckerberg envisioned. This gap between ambitions and results underscores the difficulty of using technology to dramatically improve America’s vast system of decentralized schools.

“People keep hoping that our technologies are the Swiss Army knives or steamrollers that they can do everything,” said Justin Reich, a professor at MIT and author of a book on the limits of technology in education. “Instead, our best technologies are very particularly shaped ratchet heads and the landscape of education is millions of bolts.”

Please open the link and read the rest of this fascinating article. CZI has not given up on technology. Imagine if they had spent those millions on health clinics in schools. Or anything else human-based.

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Teachers, Technology

Steve Nelson: Kids Need a Real Life

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2023 //
21

Steve Nelson, retired educator, objects to the simulated experiences that young people are increasingly exposed to. Technology has become a means of depriving them of direct encounters with life. Life should not be a simulation. It should be real. For the reasons he describes, I do not write about ChatGPT or AI. Sometimes it’s inevitable, but I don’t consider these technological gimmicks to be educational.

He writes:

“This car climbed Mt. Washington.”

This bumper sticker is commonly seen in New England and refers to the highest peak in the East. As implied, there is a winding road to the summit. These bumper stickers never fail to irritate, as the “achievement” is remarkably unremarkable. It’s rather like having a CD player with a label reading, “This electronic device played the Brahms Violin Concerto.”

This long-standing pet peeve was rekindled by the explosion (one can wish) of the e-bike phenomenon. Many areas in Colorado are allowing the use of e-bikes on mountain bike trails and in wilderness areas. On my local single track trails it is now common to be passed on uphills by rather smug looking riders half my age and half again my weight.

There are legitimate benefits to the e-bike phenomenon, including emission-free commuting and expanded opportunities for the elderly or impaired. I suppose riding an e-bike is a notch above a recliner and a beer – but only a notch.

But I come to bury, not praise.

I admit to being a physical purist. There are certain experiences that should be earned, at least if the “earning” is possible. At the very least, if one chooses ease and convenience over commitment and effort, don’t brag about it, whether Mt. Washington or Brahms.

Most alarming, at least in my community, is the proliferation of e-bikes among young folks. Many riders are careless, helmet-less, and riding far too fast for conditions. I expect a rapid increase in head injuries. I suspect that the serious injury curve is lagging just behind the soaring sales curve.

The segue from e-bikes to AI or ChatGPT should be obvious. Like an e-bike, ChatGPT produces results that are disproportionate to effort. Perhaps the analogy is a bit tortured, but creating cogent prose demands conscious effort resulting in real satisfaction , just as pedaling with your own effort to the top of single track trails elevates one’s heart rate and spirit.

I worry that in these ways and many others we are denying children the experiences they most need. They can sit on an e-bike to get to school, use a calculator to calculate, write an essay with a few prompts, “paint” a picture on a computer screen, “play” music on a pre-programmed electronic keyboard, create a cinematic masterpiece on an iPhone and go home to a dinner prepared by scanning a QR code.

As an educator I often ranted about the digital representation of life. Such representations are not life, although advances in technology can make one hard to distinguish from the other. The conveniences and efficiencies of technology have benefits, I suppose, but technology can also deprive children (and adults) of the most valuable and meaningful learning experiences – and life experiences.

A central principle of progressive education is learning by doing. It is not merely a philosophical slogan. It is rooted in the most sophisticated understanding of neurobiology and cognition. A mathematical concept is better understood through using all senses. Truly making music is finding perfect bow speed on a violin string, adjusting lip position to turn futile blowing into a glorious tone on a flute or feeling the deep sonorities of a cello in your bones. The feeling of a brush stroke transmits emotion directly to the canvas.

The phrase “no pain, no gain” is trite but true, although perhaps more aptly phrased, “no effort, no gain.” My life and the lives of most people have been immeasurably enriched by striving. (It is a concept that should be untethered from its more toxic companion, achievement.) At age 76, partially impaired and slowed by age, I still feel great satisfaction from summiting a small peak or charging down a pump track on a mountain bike, knowing I earned the gift of gravity by investing effort. The pace and duration are irrelevant. The feeling is undiminished from decades ago.

Years ago, the cardiologist/writer George Sheehan wrote that we are, at the core, simply mammals and that our first responsibility is to be a good animal. That means running, playing, sucking air deep into your lungs, reaching a destination by dint of your own power and knowing the joy of exhaustion.

I am sufficiently self-aware to know that I may be seen as a strident romanticist. I plead guilty. But I fervently believe that children must be exposed to real things, not their convenient digital or electric doppelgänger. They should pedal bikes, not just sit on them. (And wear helmets!!) They should climb mountains, not ride up in the family car. They should play instruments, finger paint, and bake cookies.

When small humans have real experiences they will prefer them to technologically-enhanced imposters. Providing those experiences is our primary responsibility as parents, grandparents and educators.

Categories Creativity, Real Education, Technology

Paul Bonner: The Fundamental Fallacy of Ed-Tech

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2023 //
23

Retired educator Paul Bonner succinctly summarized the error at the core of education technology:

The principle fallacy of the Ed Tech movement is the supposition that input equals output. This bias is based on the idea that the human brain is merely a biological representation of a CPU. What contemporary brain science tells us is that the mass in our cranium is just a portion of the brain that is our entire body. We cannot simply plug information into our brain matter and get a preferred result. We are sentient beings. We have touch, feel, smell, hearing, and voice to interpret and act on various stimuli in our environment. We have to be in proximity to one another and various environments to adapt to the intellectual requirements needed to interact with everything around us. The various media that make up our technological tools create an incomplete data source that inhibits the developing mind if we ignore the emotional and physical aspects of intellect that bring about motivation and creativity. What we should have learned through the pandemic is that presence in a school community is critical for learning. Technological and digital tools are no substitute for human interaction.

Categories Creativity, Democracy, Education Industry, Ethics, Technology

Is It OK for Big Tech to Create AI by Using 183,000 Books?

By dianeravitch
October 3, 2023 //
71

Several authors have filed suit against Meta (Zuckerberg), Bloomberg, and other tech corporations for violating the copyright on their books. Alex Reisner has written three articles in The Atlantic about how the developers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) have used 183,000 books to train AI how to write.

Two of those 183,000 books are mine: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools. As an author, I am outraged that huge tech corporations used my books as training fodder for their profiteering.

Reissner writes:

This summer, I acquired a data set of more than 191,000 books that were used without permission to train generative-AI systems by Meta, Bloomberg, and others. I wrote in The Atlantic about how the data set, known as “Books3,” was based on a collection of pirated ebooks, most of them published in the past 20 years. Since then, I’ve done a deep analysis of what’s actually in the data set, which is now at the center of several lawsuits brought against Meta by writers such as Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay, who claim that its use in training generative AI amounts to copyright infringement.

Since my article appeared, I’ve heard from several authors wanting to know if their work is in Books3. In almost all cases, the answer has been yes. These authors spent years thinking, researching, imagining, and writing, and had no idea that their books were being used to train machines that could one day replace them. Meanwhile, the people building and training these machines stand to profit enormously.

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Meta did not directly answer questions about the use of pirated books to train LLaMA, the company’s generative-AI product. Instead, she pointed me to a court filing from last weekrelated to the Silverman lawsuit, in which lawyers for Meta argue that the case should be dismissed in part because neither the LLaMA model nor its outputs are “substantially similar” to the authors’ books.

It may be beyond the scope of copyright law to address the harms being done to authors by generative AI, and the point remains that AI-training practices are secretive and fundamentally nonconsensual. Very few people understand exactly how these programs are developed, even as such initiatives threaten to upend the world as we know it. Books are stored in Books3 as large, unlabeled blocks of text. To identify their authors and titles, I extracted ISBNs from these blocks of text and looked them up in a book database. Of the 191,000 titles I identified, 183,000 have associated author information. You can use the search tool below to look up authors in this subset and see which of their titles are included.

The article contains a search tool that anyone can use to see whether their copyrighted work was fed into the AI training process.

As an author whose works were used, I feel aggrieved. I think that all of us whose works were utilized without our knowledge or consent should be compensated.

AI is the latest iteration of big-tech’s efforts to make human beings irrelevant. AI may “learn” how to write well, but AI can never “learn” the wisdom, experiences, memories, fears, hopes, and emotions that lie behind every book.

Categories Education Industry, Technology

UNESCO Report: The Dangers of Ed-Technology!

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2023 //
33

This is the only post today. Read as much of it as you have time for. The report is a valuable reminder that Ed-tech is oversold and even dangerous. It has its uses, for sure. But it should never replace teachers or parents.

UNESCO released a major blockbuster report warning about the dangers of relying too much on education technology. The author of the report was Mark West. The title of the report is An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational Technologies and School Closures in the Time of COVID-19.

An alternate link: https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/2023_UNESCO_An-ed-tech-tragedy_Educational-technologies-and-school-closures-in-the-time-of-COVID19_EN_.pdf

The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.

Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?

You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.

The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:

[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.

The summary says:

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.

Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.

Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.

In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.

The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…

Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…

Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.

The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.

Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]

Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.

It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…

Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.

Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.

Categories Childhood, Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data and Data Mining, Democracy, Disruption, Education Industry, Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, Global Education Reform Movement (GERM), Hoax, Inequity, International, Online Learning, Privacy and Privacy Rights, Privatization, Propaganda, Technology

The Most Dangerous and Most Powerful Man in the World

By dianeravitch
August 24, 2023 //
12

The New York Times published a startling article about the increasing global dominance of one man. He may be the richest man in the world, but that’s not why he is the most dangerous man in the world. He currently is launching satellites into orbit on a weekly basis. He owns almost 5,000 satellites now, and the number in orbit increases regularly. If you can open the article, you will see graphic visualizations of the thousands of satellites owned by one man and unregulated by any government. That man is Elon Musk.

The article begins:

On March 17, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the leader of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, dialed into a call to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the secure line, the two military leaders conferred on air defense systems, real-time battlefield assessments and shared intelligence on Russia’s military losses.

They also talked about Elon Musk.

General Zaluzhnyi raised the topic of Starlink, the satellite internet technology made by Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, three people with knowledge of the conversation said. Ukraine’s battlefield decisions depended on the continued use of Starlink for communications, General Zaluzhnyi said, and his country wanted to ensure access and discuss how to cover the cost of the service.

General Zaluzhnyi also asked if the United States had an assessment of Mr. Musk, who has sprawling business interests and murky politics — to which American officials gave no answer.

Mr. Musk, who leads SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, has become the most dominant player in space as he has steadily amassed power over the strategically significant field of satellite internet. Yet faced with little regulation and oversight, his erratic and personality-driven style has increasingly worried militaries and political leaders around the world, with the tech billionaire sometimes wielding his authority in unpredictable ways.

Since 2019, Mr. Musk has sent SpaceX rockets into space nearly every week that deliver dozens of sofa-size satellites into orbit. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth, so they can beam high-speed internet to nearly every corner of the planet. Today, more than 4,500 Starlink satellites are in the skies, accounting for more than 50 percent of all active satellites. They have already started changing the complexion of the night sky, even before accounting for Mr. Musk’s plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming years.

A global satellite network

There are over 4,500 Starlink satellites orbiting Earth. What appear to be long lines here are recently launched satellites approaching their place in orbit.

An animation showing circles that represent Starlink satellites orbiting Earth as it rotates. Most of the satellites are spaced out and move in a gridlike formation between Earth’s poles, while a few are closely clustered and move together in lines. [You must open the link to see the animations that show the global reach of Starlink satellites.]

The power of the technology, which has helped push the value of closely held SpaceX to nearly $140 billion, is just beginning to be felt.

Starlink is often the only way to get internet access in war zones, remote areas and places hit by natural disasters. It is used in Ukraine for coordinating drone strikes and intelligence gathering. Activists in Iran and Turkey have sought to use the service as a hedge against government controls. The U.S. Defense Department is a big Starlink customer, while other militaries, such as in Japan, are testing the technology.

But Mr. Musk’s near total control of satellite internet has raised alarms.

A combustible personality, the 52-year-old’s allegiances are fuzzy. While Mr. Musk is hailed as a genius innovator, he alone can decide to shut down Starlink internet access for a customer or country, and he has the ability to leverage sensitive information that the service gathers. Such concerns have been heightened because no companies or governments have come close to matching what he has built.

In Ukraine, some fears have been realized. Mr. Musk has restricted Starlink access multiple times during the war, people familiar with the situation said. At one point, he denied the Ukrainian military’s request to turn on Starlink near Crimea, the Russian-controlled territory, affecting battlefield strategy. Last year, he publicly floated a “peace plan” for the war that seemed aligned with Russian interests.

At times, Mr. Musk has openly flaunted Starlink’s capabilities. “Between, Tesla, Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever,” he tweeted in April.

Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment. SpaceX declined to comment.

Worried about over-dependence on Mr. Musk’s technology, Ukrainian officials have talked with other satellite internet providers, though they acknowledged none rival Starlink’s reach.

“Starlink is indeed the blood of our entire communication infrastructure now,” Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s digital minister, said in an interview.

At least nine countries — including in Europe and the Middle East — have also brought up Starlink with American officials over the past 18 months, with some questioning Mr. Musk’s power over the technology, two U.S. intelligence officials briefed on the discussions said. Few nations will speak publicly about their concerns, for fear of alienating Mr. Musk, said intelligence and cybersecurity officials briefed on the conversations.

U.S. officials have said little publicly about Starlink as they balance domestic and geopolitical priorities related to Mr. Musk, who has criticized President Biden but whose technology is unavoidable.

The federal government is one of SpaceX’s biggest customers, using its rockets for NASA missions and launching military surveillance satellites. Senior Pentagon officials have tried mediating issues involving Starlink, particularly Ukraine, a person familiar with the discussions said.

The Defense Department confirmed it contracts with Starlink, but it declined to elaborate, citing “the critical nature of these systems.”

Other governments are wary. Taiwan, which has an internet infrastructure that could be vulnerable in the event of a Chinese invasion, is reluctant to use the service partly because of Mr. Musk’s business links to China, Taiwanese and American officials said.

China has its own concerns. Mr. Musk said last year that Beijing sought assurances that he would not turn Starlink on inside the country, where the internet is controlled and censored by the state. In 2020, China registered with an international body to launch 13,000 internet satellites of its own.

The European Union, partly driven by misgivings about Starlink and Mr. Musk, also earmarked 2.4 billion euros, or $2.6 billion, last year to build a satellite constellation for civilian and military use.

“This is not just one company, but one person,” said Dmitri Alperovitch, a cybersecurity expert who co-founded the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank and has advised governments on satellite internet. “You are completely beholden to his whims and desires.”

The graphics in the article are powerful. Please open the link if you can.

As I read the article, I could not help thinking of the super-villains in James Bond movies who wanted to control the world.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Democracy, Deregulation, Media, Technology

Big Tech Cashes In on Fears of “Learning Loss”

By dianeravitch
August 14, 2023 //
41

Alec MacGillis of ProPublica wrote recently in Raw Story about the feeding frenzy that accompanied Big Tech’s sales pitch: the tech industry claims that its hardware and software can cure learning loss. The salesmen dazzle teachers and administrators with promises and swag. The irony, as the story points out, is that “learning loss” was associated with remote learning, lack of personal interaction with their teachers. Why not more of the same that exacerbated the problem?

For the nation’s schoolchildren, the data on pandemic learning loss is relentlessly bleak, with education researchers and economists warning that, unless dramatic action is taken, students will suffer a lifelong drop in income as a result of lagging achievement. “This cohort of students is going to be punished throughout their lifetime,” noted Eric Hanushek, the Stanford economist who did the income study, in ProPublica’s recent examination of the struggle to make up for what students missed out on during the era of remote learning.

For the burgeoning education technology sector, however, the crisis has proven a glimmering business opportunity, as a visit to the industry’s annual convention revealed. The federal government has committed $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds to school districts since 2020, and education technology sales people have been eagerly making the case that their products are just what students and teachers need to make up lost ground.

“We’re huge in learning loss,” said Dan DiDesiderio, a Pittsburgh-area account manager for Renaissance Learning, a top seller of educational software and assessments. He was talking up his company’s offerings in the giant exposition hall of the Philadelphia Convention Center, where dozens of other vendors and thousands of educators gathered for three days late last month at the confab of the International Society for Technology in Education. For DiDesiderio, who was a school administrator before joining Renaissance, this meant explaining how schools have been relying on Renaissance products to help students get back on track. “During COVID, we did see an increase across the board,” he said.

Renaissance is far from the only player in the ed tech industry that is benefiting from the surge in federal funding, and the industry enjoyed a huge wave of private funding as the federal tap opened: The annual total of venture capital investments in ed tech companies rose from $5.4 billion to $16.8 billion between 2019 and 2021 before tailing off.

The largest chunk of the federal largess, $122 billion that was included in the American Rescue Plan signed by President Joe Biden in March 2021, requires that schools put at least 20% toward battling learning loss, and companies are making the case that schools should spend the money on their products, in addition to intensive tutoring, extended-day programs and other remedies. “The pandemic has created a once-in-a-lifetime economic opportunity for early stage companies to reach an eager customer base,” declared Anne Lee Skates, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, in a recent article. (Her firm has invested in ed tech companies.) The federal funds “are the largest one-time infusion of funds in education from the federal government with almost no strings attached.”

Five days before the convention, the National Center for Education Statistics had released the latest devastating numbers: The decline in math scores for 13-year-olds between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years was the largest on record, and for the lowest-performing students, reading scores were lower than they were the first time data was collected in 1971.

But the mood was festive in Philadelphia. The educators in attendance, whose conference costs are generally covered by their district’s professional development funds, were excited to try out the new wave of nifty gadgets made possible by the advances in artificial intelligence and virtual reality. “For a lot of us, it’s like coming to Disneyland,” said one teacher from Alabama.

One could also detect the slightly urgent giddiness of a big bash in its final stages. Schools need to spend most of their recovery funds by 2024, and many have already allocated much of that money, meaning that this golden opportunity would soon close. And summer is the main buying season, with the fiscal year starting July 1 and with educators wanting their new tools delivered in time for school to start in the fall.

Hanging over the proceedings was an undeniable irony: The extent of learning loss was closely correlated to the amount of time that students had spent doing remote learning, on a screen, rather than receiving direct instruction, and here companies were offering more screen-based instruction as the remedy. Few of the companies on hand were proposing to replace the classroom experience entirely with virtual instruction, but to the degree that their offerings recalled the year-plus of Zoom school, it could be a bit awkward. “A lot of people don’t like us, because we can do remote-school stuff,” said Michael Linacre, a salesperson for StarBoard Solution, before demonstrating one of the cool things a StarBoard whiteboard could do: He jotted 1+2= with his finger and up popped 3. “There’s a mixed feeling about that now.”

Most of the vendors were not about to let that awkwardness get in their way, though, as they cajoled teachers to listen to their pitch, often with the lure of free swag.

Categories Corporate Reform, Curriculum, Data, Disruption, Education Industry, Technology
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