What’s the most effective way to dumb down a nation?
Focus on How without Why.
That’s really the biggest problem with the pedagogical fad of STEM education.
There’s nothing objectively wrong with teaching science, technology, engineering and math – the disciplines that make up STEM.
In many cases, doing so is essential to a well-rounded education.
But therein lies the problem – you can’t have a well-rounded education if you purposely leave out some of the most vital aspects of knowledge.
Where’s the art? Where’s the literature? Where’s the social studies, government, citizenship, drawing, painting, music – heck! Where’s the philosophical understanding of life, itself?
STEM initiatives often involve creating two tiers of school subjects. You have the serious disciplines that will earn you respect and a job. And you have the soft, mamby pamby humanities that are no good to anyone.
The problem is one of focus not content.
Corporate-minded bureaucrats who know nothing of human psychology, child development or education look solely at standardized test scores and get hysterical.
The U.S. is falling behind other nations – especially in science and math, they say. So we must do whatever we can to bring those test scores up, Up, UP!
We started contrasting multiple choice assessment results for 13-year-olds in a dozen countries back in 1964. And ever since, America has always been right in the middle.
Yet for those five decades we’ve dominated the world in science, technology, research and innovation.
In that time we sent the first people to the moon, mapped the human genome, and invented the Internet – all while getting middling test scores.
Even reading and writing are only valuable if they let us guess what a normalized reader is supposed to comprehend from a given passage and if they allow us to express ourselves in the most rudimentary and generic ways.
This is exactly what they do in countries with the highest test scores – countries that are LESS innovative than the U.S.
Asian countries from Singapore to South Korea to India are not blind to this irony. While we are trying to imitate them, they are trying to imitate the kind of broad liberal arts education in which we used to pride ourselves.
“Many works of art and literature are the products of having fun. So, our entrepreneurs need to learn how to have fun, too.”
Ma worries that his country is not as innovative as those in the West because China’s educational system focuses too much on the basics and does not foster a student’s complete intelligence, allowing him or her to experiment and enjoy the learning process.
In other words, no matter how good you are at math and science, you still need to know how to learn, think and express yourself.
To be fair, these criticisms of STEM are not new.
Even global pundits like Fareed Zakaria have made similar arguments.
Most of the time, the arts component is either an after thought or merely a sweetener to get students interested in beginning the journey – a journey that is all STEM all the time.
There is still an education hierarchy with the sciences and math at the top and the humanities and social studies at the bottom.
This is extremely unfortunate and will cause long-term detrimental effects to our society.
For instance, we pride ourselves in being democratically ruled. Political power does not come from authority, it comes from the consent of the governed.
This requires a public that knows how to do more than just add and subtract. Voters need to understand the mechanisms of government so they grasp their rights. They need a knowledge of history so they don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. They need to grasp human psychology, anthropology, and sociology to understand how people work in groups and individually.
Moreover, as human beings, they need the humanities. People have thoughts and feelings. They need to know how to express those thoughts and feelings and not just by writing a five-paragraph essay. They need to be able to create works of art. They need to be able to write a story or poem. They need to be able to manipulate images. They need to understand and create music.
Without these things, it can be difficult to become fully actualized people.
That used to be the goal of education. Provide students with the tools to become the best version of themselves.
We have relinquished our commitment to students and replaced it with a commitment to business and industry.
The idea is that schools owe the job market workers. That could not be further from the truth. We owe our students the tools that will help them live the best lives. And employment is only one small facet of that goal.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t teach math and science. We should – we MUST. But those can’t be prioritized over and above other essential human endeavors.
We need to fund and encourage a broad liberal arts education for all students. As they get older and move on to post-secondary studies including industrial arts they will inevitably specialize in areas that they find most interesting.
But until then, it is our job to give them every opportunity to learn – not to mold them into future wage slaves or boost national pride with arbitrary and meaningless test scores.
She is in favor of evaluating teachers on student test scores. Just like them!
She is a booster for “holding schools accountable” through the use of standardized tests. Just like them!
And she loves putting public tax dollars into private hands to run schools “more efficiently” by disbanding school boards, closing public debate and choosing exactly which students get to attend privatized schools. Just like… you get the idea.
But perhaps the most striking similarity between DeVos and DFER is their methodologies.
Voters think something like – if this charter school advocacy group represents what Democrats are all about, I can’t vote Democrat. I need a new party. Hence the surge of Green and other third party votes that is blamed for hurting Democratic candidates.
Yet DFER tries to hide this fact with various forms of propaganda. In effect, they’re trying to convince us that their ideas are what we actually believe.
For instance, the group is now offering a nationwide poll from Benson Strategy Group as proof that Democratic voters agree with DFER’s goals.
However, the questions asked to about 2,000 people on the phone are laughably biased:
“Do you believe we have a responsibility to do everything we can to give every child a great education, and does that mean we need faster change in our schools to prepare students for the future?”
“Do you agree that we can’t go back to the way things used to be in schools? Do you think we need to keep bringing in new ideas and finding new ways to improve schools?”
“Do you think funding alone is enough to give our children the education they deserve? Do you also want to see new ideas and real changes to the way public schools operate?”
Of course schools need more than just additional funding. But let’s not minimize funding equity. Students of color will never get an equitable education until we pay for the resources they need to succeed. The poor will never catch up to the rich without money to provide the services they need to learn.
Moreover, blanket statements disparaging public schools before asking about school privatization invites bias against public schools and bias in favor of privatization.
When you couch privatization as “more options” and “choice,” who doesn’t want that? But it’s not what you’re offering.
Slashing funding at the public school because its finances got gobbled up by the neighborhood charter is not “choice” for me. It is providing alternative revenue for the corporations that run the charter school while my only option is to accept fewer resources for my child.
None of this is progressive. None of this is truly supported by grassroots people or organizations.
Yet DFER, these so-called Democrats, support none of this.
And they’re spending millions of dollars to convince our lawmakers not to support it either.
Politicians can’t keep accepting their dirty money and expecting grassroots voters to continue to support them.
To paraphrase Matthew, no one can serve two masters. If lawmakers are taking sacks of cash from billionaire hedge fund mangers, they aren’t going to listen to you or me.
They can serve their constituents or mammon. Not both.
So if Democrats want strong support in the coming elections, they need to do the progressive thing.
Stop accepting bribes from dark money influence peddlers like DFER.
This summer I sat down with my 9-year-old daughter and together we played the most popular Nintendo Switch game for hours, days, weeks.
And at the end of all that time, I came away victorious – something I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do when I started.
There are so many buttons to learn, two joy sticks, various info screens and menus.
But when it was all over, I had cleared all four divine beasts. I got all 18 captured memories. I completed about 80 shrines. I mastered about 45 side quests. I shredded guardians, lynols and bokoblins. And, yes, I opened a major can of whoop ass on Calamity Gannon.
As the kids say, I’m jelly.
My video game skills are lit.
You can’t handle me, bro.
And so on.
But I’m not a kid. I’m a grown man.
Didn’t I have anything better to do?
Couldn’t I have found a more productive use for all that time?
Maybe. Maybe not. However, beyond the sheer fun, I did learn something from the whole experience.
As a public school teacher, I learned about my students by following in their footsteps.
That’s really why I started playing in the first place – my middle school kids this year loved that game.
I got more Zelda doodles, more Hyrule poetry, more Link fan fiction than you might at first believe.
The world of the game was really important to my children and having even a passing knowledge of that world helped me relate to them.
I even asked for a few tips after class.
One of my best students took her Switch out of her backpack and showed me a prime location to pick hot peppers so I could withstand the cold of Mount Hyrule (Don’t ask).
It was worth doing just for that – I showed my willingness to be the student and for them to be the teachers. I showed them we were all a community of learners.
At least, that’s my hope.
But now that the dog days of summer are here and my video game victory is complete, I keep thinking of the implications of my experience in Hyrule on the world of education.
Specifically, I’m thinking about education technology or Ed Tech.
I’m thinking about how we use various software packages to try to teach students and how they invariably fail at the task.
Well-meaning administrators hear about this program or that classroom management system or an assessment app and they spend beaucoup bucks on it.
We’re instructed to give up valuable instruction time so our kids can sit in front of a computer while a digital avatar attempts to do our job.
Kids listen to a cartoon person instruct them in the rudiments of grammar or literacy, play loose skills exercises and earn digital badges.
Sure, there are lots of bells and whistles, but the kids catch on mighty quickly. There is no student as bored as a student forced to play an educational video game.
Or they could show why ed tech will never be as effective at teaching as flesh and blood instructors.
In any case, here is what I learned.
1) Focus on Fun
One of the biggest differences between ed tech and “Zelda” was the focus.
The games we make children play at school are designed to teach them something. That is their purpose. It is their raison d’être. The point behind the entire activity is to instruct, test and reward.
By contrast, the purpose of “Zelda” is fun.
Don’t get me wrong. “Zelda” can be very educational.
There are points where the game is actively trying to teach you how to do things usually associated with game play.
You have to learn how to make your character (Link) do what you want him to do. You have to learn how to manipulate him through the world. How to run, how to climb, how to heal, how to use weapons, how to cook and make elixirs, etc.
However, the point behind the entire game is not instructional. It’s fun – pure and simple.
If you have to learn something, it is all in service to that larger goal.
In the world of the game, learning is explicitly extrinsic. It helps you have more fun playing. Only the pursuit of winning is intrinsic or even conceptualized as being so.
In real life, this may not be the right approach to education, but it seems to be a rule of virtual experience. If it is superseded, the game becomes just another class assignment – lifeless, dead, boring.
If educational software is going to be effective in the classroom, it must find a way to bridge this divide. It must either put fun before pedagogy or trick the user into thinking it has done so.
I’m not sure this is possible or desirable. But there it is.
2) Logic and Problem Solving Work but not Curriculum
There are many aspects of “Zelda” one could consider educational.
However, when it comes to things that have importance outside of the game, the biggest would be problem solving and logic games.
A great deal of game play can be characterized under this umbrella.
The ostensible mission is to defeat the bad guy, Calamity Gannon. However, to do so you often have to solve various puzzles in order to have the strength and skills to take him down.
The most obvious of these puzzles are shrines. There are 120 special areas throughout Hyrule that Link needs to find and solve.
Each one involves a special skill and asks the gamer to decipher problems using that skill. For example, one asks you to manipulate fans so that the air flow makes windmills turn in a pattern. Another asks you to get a ball through an obstacle course.
In each case, the emphasis is on logic and critical thinking.
That has tremendous educational value. And it’s something I’ve seen done easily and well in many educational video games.
The problem is it doesn’t teach any particular curriculum. It doesn’t teach math, science, English or social studies – though it does help contribute to all of these pursuits.
Ed tech games are not nearly so coy. They often try to go right for the curriculum with disastrous results. Ed tech software, for instance, will have you find the grammatical error in a sentence or solve an equation in order to move on in the game.
That just doesn’t work. It feels false, extraneous and forced. It’s doesn’t seem like an organic part of the experience. It’s something contrived onto it from outside and reminds the gamer exactly why you’re playing – to learn.
3) Option to Seek Help
One of the most surprising things to me about playing “Zelda” on the Switch was how much of an on-line gaming community has formed around the whole experience.
If you get stuck in a particular area, you can find numerous sites on-line that will help you get passed it. You can even find gamer videos where YouTubers will show you exactly how they solved this or that problem. And they don’t all have the same solution. Some provide elegant, well-detailed advice, and others seem to stumble on it and offer you their videos as proof they could actually get the job done somehow.
It’s a lot different from when I was a kid playing video games. Back then (30 years ago) you had your friends but there were few other places to go for help. There were fan magazines and a few video game companies had tip hotlines. But other than that, you were on your own.
One of my favorite YouTubers this summer was Hyrule Dude. His videos were clear, informative and helpful. However, I didn’t always agree with his solutions. But they invariably helped me find things that would work for me.
It reminded me a bit of Khan Academy and other learning sites.
If kids really want to grasp something today, they have so many places they can go on-line. As educators, it’s hard to incorporate them into a classroom environment because there are certain things we want kids to find out for themselves.
For instance, as a language arts teacher, I want my students to do the assigned readings on their own. Yet I know some of them try to skip to the on-line summaries they can find and use that instead of reading the text. I have no problem if they access good summaries and analysis but I don’t want them to take the place of trying to comprehend the text on their own first.
I think there are ways to use this larger social media community to help support learning without spoiling the hard work kids need to put in on their own. But it’s something we need to think about more and find better ways to incorporate.
4) Open Ended
One of the most striking things about this new “Zelda” is how much choice the gamer has. In most games you have to complete the first board and then the second and so on until you win.
On the Switch, the world you’re thrust into is incredibly open ended. You can do pretty much what you want, when you want. Or at least you can try.
At first, your character is limited to one area of the world – a plateau. But once you complete a certain number of the challenges there, you get the paraglider which allows you to access most of the rest of the world.
It’s a huge area to explore – impossible to travel the entire length of it without spending hours of game play. And it’s entirely up to you where to go and what to do next.
The central mission of the game is to defeat Calamity Gannon in Hyrule Castle. However, that would be incredibly difficult early on. You’re advised to get the four Divine Beasts first. And you can do them in any order you want.
Moreover, I mentioned shrines earlier. When you complete four shrines, you can either increase your hearts (the amount you can be hurt without dying) or your stamina (how long your character can do something hard like climbing or swimming without having to rest). Technically, you don’t have to complete more than a few shrines, but doing so makes your character stronger and better able to get the Divine Beasts and defeat Gannon.
There are also side-quests (totally optional) that reward your character with money, items, etc.
Ed tech software is exactly the opposite. You must do section A before section B before section C. It’s little more than a multiple choice test with only limited possible answers of which only one is correct.
In “Zelda” there are often multiple ways to achieve the same end. For instance, I would assume the programmers wanted me to fight my way through every room of Hyrule Castle to get to Calamity Gannon. However, I simply climbed over the walls and swan through the moats – a much quicker and efficient method.
If we could recreate this freedom of movement and multifarious solutions within educational software, we might really be onto something. But, frankly, it’s something that even traditional video games have difficulty being able to recreate.
5) Choice to Play or Not
And speaking of choice, there is the choice whether to play or not.
Video games are one of the things kids choose for leisure. When we force kids to play them in school, that choice is gone.
They become a task, a trial, an assignment.
Moreover, not every child enjoys video games.
We can’t mandate kids learn from games – even the best of ed tech games. At best, they should be an option. They could be one tool in the toolbox.
In summary, I think the goal of the ed tech industry is deeply flawed.
At best, it could provide a tool to help kids learn.
To do so, games would have to primarily be focused on fun – not learning. They would have to be organized around critical thinking and logic – not curriculum. They would need to utilize the on-line community for help but not cheating. They would need to be open ended worlds and not simply repackaged standardized testing. And finally, students would need the choice whether to play them or not.
Cheaper commodities are better – especially when the consumer isn’t the student forced to play the game but the politician or administrator in charge of school policy.
Ed tech’s potential as a positive tool in a school’s toolbox has been smothered by the needs of business and industry. Until we recognize the harm corporations do in the school, we will be doomed to dehumanizing students, devaluing teachers and wasting our limited resources on already wealthy big business.
Democrats oppose it and there don’t even seem to be enough Republicans in favor to get it through Congress. It may not even have enough support to get a vote.
Moreover, the proposal is a definite step backward. The Department of Education was created in 1980 by splitting the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare into the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services.
At that time, its purpose was clear. It was a tool to increase funding equity and transparency while protecting students.
After all, the department was an extension of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, which tried to bring equity to America’s public schools.
“First, [the Department of Education] will increase the Nation’s attention to education. Instead of being buried in a $200 billion-a-year bureaucracy, educational issues will receive the top-level priority they deserve. For the first time, there will be a Cabinet-level leader in education, someone with the status and the resources to stir national discussion of critical education concerns.”
Unfortunately, those principles were never fully realized.
Sure, it provided targeted grants like Pell Grants that did offer opportunities to select groups of students. But it didn’t radically alter our outdated (even then) funding system.
Our schools are segregated by race and class – worse now than they were then. Since they’re funded primarily by local property taxes, that means the poor and minorities get less funding than richer whiter kids.
In the late 1970’s, it was hoped the creation of the Department would be the first step to increasing federal funding of schools to one third of the total cost, thereby leveling the playing field somewhat.
To return to the metaphor with which this piece began, the creation of the department was like handing a starving child utensils without much actual food.
As the years have passed, we’ve used those tools for everything except nourishing students.
We’ve fed the child by guiding an empty fork into her cheek. We’ve poked and prodded her mouth with a knife.
The child is still starving. It is still our responsibility to feed her.
You don’t do that by taking away her utensils.
Oh, you can feed her without them, but not very effectively. She can drink from the sink, but not as well as from a cup. She can eat with her hands, but not as easily as with utensils.
This latest proposed merger wouldn’t really satisfy anyone.
It wouldn’t do away with the department – it would hide it behind closed doors.
It would simply make it harder to see what was happening to it.
One can imagine a newly reorganized federal effort to cut anything from our schools that couldn’t be immediately connected with becoming a worker drone. And I don’t mean to imply this would be a new effort, because it’s already what President’s George W. Bush and Barack Obama were using the Department to achieve. But now it would be in the shadows and who knows what monstrosity could grow without the cleansing light of day?
This would help no one. It would be a continuation of the status quo (or possibly a doubling down on it) under a different name.
No one needs that.
What we need is to roll up our sleeves and meet students’ needs.
The child is hungry.
She has been sitting before us starving for decades and all we’ve done is give her the means to eat without the food.
Isn’t it time someone open the cupboard and get this kid something to eat!?
They’re mapping out a world where kids don’t even have to go to school to grasp the basics, where learning can be accomplished anywhere but instigated, tracked, and assessed on-line through various computer platforms.
Children would bounce from a few hours of Khan Academy videos here to a software package there and Voila! “Modern” education!
It’s a brave new world where investors hope to make a bundle by reducing the cost and pocketing the savings.
Since teachers are the biggest cost, they’re the first things to go.
Since their rights as workers and human beings are a roadblock on this learning superhighway, they’re the first to go.
And since they’re in a prime position to see exactly what’s going on and to object when this ed tech paradise exploits the students it ostensibly is being built for, they MUST go – now, as soon as possible.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Janus v AFSCME is part of that process. It’s another way to weaken labor and clear the path for business – the collusion of politics and corporations to steamroll the rest of us and swipe more of our money regardless of the children in the steamrollers way.
So when I ask “Are teachers necessary?” it’s not a purely philosophical question.
The answer will have a major impact on both the education of today and where we go in the future.
If teachers are not necessary, that removes one of the biggest obstacles to this frightening and uncertain future.
Unfortunately, no matter how much I want to answer in the affirmative that teachers are necessary, I can’t do so.
Even after thousands of years of recorded history, learning remains a mysterious process. Yet it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that it can take place without the presence of a teacher.
Estimates vary somewhat from study to study, but the basic structure holds. The vast majority of impact on learning comes from the home and out-of-school factors. Teachers are a small part of the picture. They are the largest single factor in the school building, but the school, itself, is only one of many components.
In short, teachers are not necessary to student learning.
But neither are doctors necessary to healing or lawyers necessary to acquittals.
Necessity is a very high bar.
To survive, you need food, shelter and clothing. However, having all three does not mean you have a good life. Slaves had all three – no free person would choose to trade places with someone in generational servitude simply because they had everything they needed to survive.
The same with medicine. If shot in the arm, you could provide me with all the medical equipment necessary to remove the bullet, but I would still have a difficult time doing it by myself. I COULD. A doctor is not NECESSARY for that operation. But without a doctor present, my chances of getting the best medical care drop dramatically.
Moreover, you could pop me in a courtroom without the benefit of legal counsel and it’s not impossible that I could argue my way to the dismissal of all charges against me. But the likelihood of doing so is infinitesimal – as undocumented youngsters are discovering when forced into the courtroom to defend against deportation without an attorney or even their parents present.
The same is true of education.
Though teachers are not necessary to learning, they are vital to it.
Having a teacher dramatically boosts a student’s chances, and the more disadvantaged that student is, the more he or she benefits from an educator.
The academic schemes of the corporate class amount to changing the field into the equivalent of an automated teller or a business robocall.
You can purchase your groceries through the self-checkout line. You can get your customer service from an automated list. But neither of these are the highest quality service.
They are cheap alternatives.
They are ways for the business to cut costs and boost profits. Neither have anything to do with making things better for the customer.
And when it comes to education, eliminating (or even drastically reducing access to) the teacher will decrease the quality of the service beyond recognition.
A 2009 report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, released by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice outlined several real world solutions to increase academic outcomes. None of them involve the elimination of teachers.
That’s how you cut class size down from the 20, 30, even 40 students packed into a room that you can routinely find in some districts today.
And if you want to improve the quality of the teachers in those classrooms, here’s an easy fix – pay them.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, teachers in the United States make 14 percent less than people from professions that require similar levels of education.
They can’t buy a home or even rent an apartment in most metropolitan areas. They can’t afford to marry, raise children, or eke out a middle class existence.
And finally, stop micromanaging everything teachers do and stomping on their rights. To do their job effectively teachers need autonomy. They need the ability to make decisions on the ground based on the empirical evidence gathered in the classroom.
To do that, they need their union protections. They need collective bargaining rights to give them the power to counterbalance the forces of greed and corruption that have always been at the schoolhouse door.
As a country we have taken our attention away from what’s really important. We’ve stopped focusing on how to make education better and instead equated it with how to make it more profitable for those who are already wealthy.
Teachers are vital to education. They are lifelines to struggling students. We should find ways to support them and not constantly undercutting their social standing, autonomy and rights.
The importance of teachers is beyond doubt. As is the importance of society in supporting them.
It had a heart on the front and the following message on the back:
“Happy Fathers Day! Dad, you are my superstar. You help me when I’m sad. And I love everything you do for me. That is why I wish you a Happy Fathers Day.”
It was a sweet token of affection from a 9-year-old to her sleepy daddy sitting at the kitchen table.
But it got me thinking.
All over this country fathers are probably receiving something similar from their children.
Hawaiian shirts, blotchy neckties and more finger paintings than you could fit in the Louvre.
But the sentiment is probably the same.
Thank you for being there for me.
But are we there for America’s children?
We may be there for our own kids, but where genetics end, are we there for others?
Two thousand children forcibly separated from their parents in our name and we dare to celebrate Father’s Day?
From April through May, the policy has separated 1,995 minors from 1,940 adults traveling with them who said they were the children’s guardians.
A country that doesn’t respect the rights of parents – even if those parents aren’t documented US citizens – has no right to pretend it values fatherhood or motherhood.
At best, we value WHITE parenthood, and that, my friends, is not good enough.
Look at what we subject our own children to in the public school system.
In the name of accountability we bestow upon them high stakes standardized tests to “prove” even those meager funds are wasted – yet we ignore the financial disparity, the social problems, the health issues and a host of other obstacles the underprivileged face.
Does a society that routinely treats its children this way deserve a thank you card? I think not.
Last month, the CDC released a report indicating that the U.S. birth rate ― the number of babies born nationwide ― is the lowest it’s been in 30 years and is below the “replacement” rate needed to sustain the population.
Various media sources were quick to blame women nationwide. Women put off having kids because they want to focus on careers. They aren’t sexy or submissive enough.
Yet few look at the responsibilities of men in this equation.
Who is it behind the salary gap between men and women? Who conflates women’s healthcare with abortion and communism? Who makes it easier to get a gun in this country than proper maternity leave, childcare or any adequate resources to make having a family sustainable?
We don’t even support men who want to have families. Men make more money than women, but salaries are down for them as well. If there’s little support for pregnant women, there’s little support for the fathers who impregnated them.
We pretend family values are the bedrock of our society but we don’t do much to support families.
And when we look to the future, it doesn’t appear to be getting any better.
Big business and huge corporations are salivating all over the prospect of further monetizing our children.
Investment bankers and hedge fund managers are funding these programs and more to create a priceless database on each individual child that can be used for lifelong marketing, job placement, even profiling by law enforcement.
These are not practices that are done in the best interest of children. They are in the best interest of investors and free market privateers.
No wonder fewer people are having children! They don’t want their kids to become helpless victims to a society that cares less and less about our humanity and more and more about our marketability.
It is us vs. them – where the us is significantly limited by race, economics and class.
So this Fathers Day, we need to do more than accept a congratulatory pat on the back.
We need to accept our responsibility for the status quo.
If we don’t like the way things are, we need to commit ourselves to doing something about it.
Call and/or write your Senators and Representatives about the policy of separating undocumented parents and children. Visit your lawmakers’ offices and demand fair funding and an end to school segregation, high stakes testing and school privatization. Get active in your local school district going to meetings and making your voice heard. Do everything you can to educate the powers that be on the coming Ed Tech scandal and remove or block it from your district.
No schools, no teachers, just gangs of students walking the streets, stopping along the way to thumb messages to each other on social media, play a video game or take an on-line test.
That’s the world many EdTech entrepreneurs are trying to build.
Normally, the federal, state and local government collect taxes to fund an individual child’s education, which is then spent at a public or charter school.
At a public school all that money must be spent on the student. At a charter school some of that money can be pocketed as profit by the private company who runs the school.
Public schools provide a better alternative because the funding must be dedicated to the student, living within a district’s coverage area guarantees enrollment, the school must be managed by an elected school board with open meetings and a plethora of other amenities you won’t find at a privatized institution. But at least the charter school is a school!
However, an ESA or other voucher would allow that money to go elsewhere. It could go to funding the tuition at a private or parochial school where organizers can use it however they like – pocketing some and using the rest to help the child as you’ll find in most charter schools.
Reading a book or an article gives you a badge. Answering a series of multiple-choice questions on a reading earns you more badges. And if you’ve completed a certain task satisfactorily, you can even earn a badge by teaching that same material to others.
It’s the low wage gig economy applied to education. We just transform a crappy job market where workers bounce from a few hours of minimum wage labor here to a few hours of minimum wage toil there – all without benefits or union protections – into learning. Children bouncing from a few hours of Khan Academy videos here to a software package there and Voila! “Modern” education!
The wealthy will still get institutions of learning. They will still be educated by the most qualified teachers in the world. They will still learn how to learn.
It is only the poor and middle class who will be released like chickens into the pasture of a learning ecosystem.
And as an added benefit, the badge structure creates a market where investors can bet and profit off of who gains badges and to what degree on the model of crypto-currencies like Bitcoin! So all the stability of the pre-crash housing market! What could possibly go wrong!?
Let me be clear – this is the ultimate goal of the school privatization movement.
Charter and voucher schools are only the tip of the iceberg. They still require real human beings to act as teachers (though they need not be as well educated or have as much experience as public school teachers). They still require buildings and grounds.
Then they can pocket all the rest of the money taxpayers put aside to educate children and call it profit.
And they can use the programs students access to “learn” as a way to gather valuable marketing data about our kids. Everything students do on the device is free market research – every word they input, every keystroke, every site visited down to the slightest eye movement.
This is the logical conclusion of the monetization of education and an economy that only sees value in others as human capital that can be bought, sold and exploited.
This is where the privatization movement is going. And they’re laying the groundwork in legislation being proposed in our state capitals today.
However, given a few years to strengthen the technologies and systems needed for a full learning ecosystem, the same law would allow taxpayer money to be used in this way.
And it’s something hardly anyone is talking about.
Even if school vouchers never take off to the degree necessary to scaffold the most robust learning ecosystems, EdTech lobbyists are trying to install as much of this garbage as they can into our existing schools.
Few people are sounding the alarm because few people understand what’s going on.
This is not conjecture. This is not a conspiracy theory. This is the goal the edtech entrepreneurs will gladly tell you all about hoping you’ll invest.
There are hours of videos, pages of documents, mountains of graphs, charts and graphics about how this scheme will pay off for investment bankers and venture capitalists. (See below)
The only true way to win this battle is a cultural shift away from dehumanizing runaway capitalism.
