A World Without (Much) Work: Building Sancturary Part 2

by Wrench in the Gears
January 7, 2018

 

This is the second of a seven-part series that outlines a potential future where online education is surveilled by authoritarian interests, and strivers, like Talia and her daughters, attempt to secure a precarious living within the constraints of oppressive “Smart” City policies. The introduction to the series and Part One: Plugging In can be read here.

Part 2: A World Without (Much) Work

As the Fourth Industrial Revolution got underway, automation wiped out more and more jobs. The disappearance of industrial work was grudgingly accepted. Then self-driving vehicles replaced truckers, bus drivers, delivery people, and car services. Even so, many were taken aback when digitization came for the service sector. As Artificial Intelligence hit its stride, teachers, nurses, therapists, paralegals, actuaries, financial advisors, film editors all found themselves cast aside, scrambling for new careers. It seemed everyone who could work switched to coding and cyber security. The threat posed by hacks to the vast Internet of Things had spiraled out of control, and they needed more and more people to build and maintain the simulations.

After tech and energy, the entertainment sector experienced some of the biggest growth from the shift to digital life. Talia supplements the family’s meager digital stipend working as a Mechanical Turk. She picks up gigs, small jobs, coding bits of virtual worlds when people go off the scripts prepared by the Entertainment Software Group. Having a background in art gives her an advantage. Talia’s high creativity ratings keep her near the top of the MicroWork platform where freelancers compete for short-term or even micro employment.

These days, though, it’s getting more and more difficult to earn hard digital credit. Many posted gigs are now issuing payment in skill points that can boost a person’s citizen score but can’t be exchanged for durable goods or used to pay down debt. If things don’t let up soon she’ll be forced to figure out some other way to meet monthly expenses that often exceed what’s deposited to their Global Coin account.

Click here to read the rest of the post.

 

Building Sanctuary: A Dystopian Future We Must Fight to Avoid

by Wrench In the Gears
January 4, 2018

The next wave of education reform is one part of a much larger societal shift that hinges on the use of Big Data, predictive analytics, and digital profiling to control populations in a world of growing economic uncertainty and unrest. What follows is a speculative dystopian scenario, a world that could very well emerge from systems being put in place right now. It centers on two sisters, Cam and Li, who live in a near future New York where authorities have come to view human life primarily as a source from which to extract financial profit. Many elements of the story read like science fiction, but they are not. I’ve included links to sources at the end of each post so you can explore this reality for yourself.

The future is uncertain and unlikely to play out exactly as described. Nevertheless, we must begin to comprehend how technological developments combined with concentrated power and extreme income inequality are leading us to increasingly automated forms of oppression. My hope is that communities will begin to incorporate an understanding of this bigger picture into resistance efforts for public education and beyond. Let us join together, embracing our humanity, to fight the forces that would bring us to “lockdown.” How can we preserve our lives and those of our loved ones outside the data stream? How can we nurture community in a world where alienation is becoming normalized? What do we owe one another? What are we willing to risk? I have divided my story into seven parts. I hope you’ll read along and consider sharing it with others.

Building Sanctuary

Part 1: Plugging In

Click here to read the entire post.

Ferebee, Edtech Billionaires, and Indianapolis

(by Doug Martin)

As IPS seeks to close three high schools and Indianapolis opens more charter/blended learning schools, Indianapolis parents, teachers, and community members should know a few things about IPS supt. Lewis Ferebee and the edtech players promoting the so-called personalized learning/computer-based movement in Indianapolis. 

IS LEWIS FEREBEE THE NEW TONY BENNETT?

Following in the footsteps of past Indiana and Florida state school supt. Tony Bennett, Lewis Ferebee, in May 2016, became a member of Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellent Education’s offspring, Chiefs for Change, the virtual, blended, and personalized learning promoting group where Tony Bennett, as a member, became known nationally before crashing after the Indiana grade-changing scandal.   

Like Bennett who championed school reform ideas his doctoral dissertation proved wrong (as I note in my book Hoosier School Heist), Ferebee  supports school choice, although for his dissertation, as Scott Elliott points out, “Ferebee had studied the effect of the promotion of school choice as a school improvement strategy in the federal No Child Left Behind law and concluded it had little impact on student learning.”  As a believer, Ferebee recently helped IPS land $100,000 from the Gates Foundation (a key personalized learning promoter) to partner with charter schools. 

With Chiefs for Change lately having an uptick of new members alongside Ferebee, the group last month received a personalized learning grant (amount undisclosed) from  limited liability company the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, led by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, for a “Transforming Schools and Systems Workgroup” to spread the “anytime, anyplace learning” of personalized learning across the United States, a plan which, by the way, the Mind Trust’s Education Cities has been selling the last few years through its Harbormaster Network.  

Zuckerberg, besides running Facebook, is best known for his $100 million “gift” to the Newark, New Jersey state-controlled schools to help expand charter schools as public schools collapsed and were closed down by supt. Cami Anderson.

THE NEWSCHOOLS VENTURE FUND

In May 2017, Ferebee joined a panel discussion on “ESSA opportunity” at the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit (sponsored by the Walton and Gates foundations and the Zuckerberg Initiative), where personalized learning was the buzzword since NewSchools, last year, released “an aggressive call” for corporate ed reformers “to direct $4 billion in philanthropy toward creating, studying, and promoting” innovative schools and personalized learning.  

NewSchools Venture Fund is a Silicon Valley nonprofit/for-profit investor in edtech startups and personalized learning and has its thumbprints all over Indianapolis, investing $200,000 in Phalen Leadership Academy and $105,000 in Mitch Daniels’s Purdue Polytech High School.  

Among the NewSchools Venture Fund board and its donors are several wealthy edtech leaders who also funded the IPS school board race in 2014 and Democrats in Indiana recently: 

• Lauren Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widow, who gave Mary Ann Sullivan $5,000 in 2012 and John Gregg and the Democrats’ ActBlue $5,000 each in 2016.
• Tony Bennett funder, edtech investor, and Oxycontin producer Jonathan Sackler, who handed Mary Ann Sullivan $2,500 for her IPS race.  Jonathan Sackler is a heavy investor in the blended learning edtech company Education Elements, which partnered with MSD Warren Township schools in Indy after it won  a $28.5 million Race to the Top grant.  
• Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, a NewSchools donor, who gave Mary Ann Sullivan $2,000 while she was a candidate for state office (see here,  here, and here).  Sandberg's late husband, Dave Goldberg, was a NewSchools Venture Fund board member. 
• Billionaire edtech investor and LinkedIn’s CEO Reid Hoffman and his wife Michelle Yee each gave $1,000 to Kelly Bentley (page 6), $1,000 (page 4) a piece to LaNier Echols, and $1,000 each to Mary Ann Sullivan’s IPS board campaigns (page 2). Hoffman, who has also funded Democrat Tim Delaney’s campaign, is a NewSchools Venture Fund backer.

   

The NewSchools Venture Fund has popularized the phrase “Innovative Schools,” which is very similar to IPS’s “Innovation Schools” term.  The Mind Trust’s David Harris was part of the NewSchools Venture Funds Entrepreneurial Leaders for Public Education Program in 2007, and former Indianapolis mayor, Bart Petersen, along with Michelle Rhee, is a past recipient of the NewSchools Change Agent of the Year Award. 

Rooted School, one of the new Mind Trust “seed investment” schools set to open in Indianapolis, has been praised by the NewSchools Venture Fund. 

Donors to the NewSchools Venture Fund include a who’s who of edtech/corporate reformers, including the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Walton Family, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (which gave $588,000 to support Enroll Indy and “school equity efforts”), and the Gates Foundation. 

 

Personalized learning is one step beyond blended learning and seeks to get rid of as many teachers as possible and even eventually school buildings themselves.  Indianapolis born Kevin Chavous, a main player in Hoosier School Heist and a board member of the DeVos and Walton American Federation for Children, recently said:  “The end game … is personalized learning.  We are going to get to this place where as opposed to every child being shepherded into a schoolhouse where they sit in a classroom and where a teacher stands and delivers, and then they regurgitate back … those days are not going to be the future.”

New Video on Hybrid/Blended Learning

If you think you know all you need to know about this efficiency scam now coming to a classroom near you, have a look at this.  There's lots of valuable info packed into this 9 minute video from Wrench in the Gearsl:

The gift no one wanted–how digital learning came to MA & Fair Test finally woke up.

from Wrench in the Gears
December 15, 2016

The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education announced yesterday, the creation of a new statewide personalized-learning initiative called MAPLE (Massachusetts Personalized Learning EdTech) Consortium. It is important to note that educational technology is specifically called out in the name. This public-private partnership is being funded by the Barr Foundation and the Nellie Mae Foundation, one of the primary advocates for Competency Based Education in New England. There are currently twelve pilot districts, but the plan is to add an additional thirty districts over time.

Updates on the program were given to Massachusetts’ Digital Learning Advisory Council in January 2016: http://www.doe.mass.edu/boe/sac/dlac/2016-0106minutes.pdf

Digital Learning Advisory Council members for 2015-16 included representatives of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, MIT, The Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, The Virtual High School, The Center for Applied Special Technology, The American Federation of Teachers, and the Massachusetts Teachers Association. Full member list here.

According to the Council’s September 2016 minutes, the contract for the program had been awarded to Learn Launch as of that time. Ann Koufman-Frederick, the Chief Academic Officer of Learn Launch, appears to be the project contact. She has ties to districts across the state.

Within 24 hours of MAPLE’s announcement, Fair Test came out with a cautionary post on the potential for personalized learning to lead to constant online testing. And in a bit of irony, actually cited one of Wrench In The Gears’ blog posts as a reference.

A number of education activists who were aware that the structure of the ESSA was designed to expand privatization and data-mining by giving preference and support to online digital learning reached out to Fair Test in months leading up to the passage of this bill explaining the dangers and asking them to withdraw their support of the bill (see below for examples). The response received was that it was more important to address NCLB sanctions than what might happen with Competency Based Education and performance assessing.

Click here to read the whole article.

Personalization or Profiling? Childhood in the Ed-Tech Era

from Wrench in the Gears
October 30, 2016

As states pull together their plans for ESSA (Every Student Succeeds Act) it's important for parents and teachers to understand what the next phase of education reform looks like. This slide share presented at the Movement of Rank and File Educators' Social Justice Curriculum Fair in New York City recently provides a good introduction. Click on the graphic above for the slide show and be sure to explore the links that are included.

Who's Behind the K-12 Online Learning Bonanza?

The International Association for Online Learning (iNACOL) is meeting in San Antonio in late October for a big symposium to advance all sorts of competency based personalized outcomes based blended online digital bullshit notions that have re-charged the dying batteries of the corporate education reformers.  

Who's behind these fads from the previous century now repackaged for another generation of back-to-basics mossback antiquarians?   

All the big paternalists, social efficiency zealots, and profiteers, along with a couple of new ones that have product lines ready to sell.  This is where the action is, and this where the resistance must focus:

Guest post: What could be wrong with a "community school" model?

By Alison McDowell
November 23, 2015

Alison McDowell

Alison McDowell is a Philadelphia public school parent and a member of the Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools. This article is an expansion of her testimony to the Philadelphia School Reform Commission on November 19, 2015. While it speaks to developments in Philadelphia, it has national implications.

If you read my SRC testimony it paints a troubling picture. Given that my testimony was limited to three minutes, I wanted to add some additional thoughts to the conversation. It’s particularly important to get these ideas out there, because Philadelphia’s mayor elect Jim Kenney and his new Chief Education Officer, Otis Hackney, just took a trip to Cincinnati with the express purpose of learning more about the community school model and how it could work in our city. While Oyler, the school they visited, is lauded for its program, the long term success of the model remains uncertain.

As I see it, two groups are working concurrently on community school initiatives. They hold opposing views about what community schools are. Reformers talk about eliminating the concept of "seat time,” instead they want to promote the idea that you can learn anywhere at any pace.  I see that line of thinking as potentially very dangerous if you’re someone like me who values real bricks and mortar schools as a cornerstone of civil society. At the same time there are an increasing number of people who are involved with community school initiatives on the local level. They see community schools as neighborhood anchors. The problem is that they have absolutely no knowledge that there is another powerful group, the corporate education reformers, including Tom Vander Ark, working to undermine all they are doing.

Click here to read the entire article.

For background on the election of Jim Kenney as mayor, see:

Common Sense in Philadelphia | Defend Public Education

Also see:
City leaders picture full-service schools
Philadelphia Inquirer – November 23, 2015

Newark’s Baraka to launch “community schools” in South Ward­–with Cerf’s blessing
Bob Braun’s Ledger – November 23, 2015

 

 

National Threat Alert: The Mind Trust’s CEE-Trust, George Bush, and Bill Gates

By Doug Martin

The Indianapolis-based Mind Trust plays a major part in my forthcoming book Hoosier School Heist, but many people don’t realize that the group founded by former Democratic mayor Bart Peterson and David Harris is a national leader in the school privatization movement through its CEE-Trust (Cities for Education Entrepeneurship). Loaded with Bill Gates/Joyce and Carnegie Foundation money, CEE-Trust actively works for charterization not only in Indianapolis but in Kansas City, Cleveland, Detroit, Memphis, Dallas, Denver, and New Orleans.  In fact, CEE-Trust boasts of 33 affiliates and members across the U.S.*

KANSAS CITY HERE WE COME

Joe Robertson and social justice group More2 recently exposed CEE-Trust’s secret political agenda in Kansas City, Missouri, where shady backdoor dealings, cronyism, an Edison Schools administrator, and government officials helped CEE-Trust land almost $400,000 to help privatize the  school district.

According to released emails, CEE-Trust, funded by the charter school promoting Kauffman and Hall Family foundations, connived with Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro and her operatives to get the gig, which Kansas City superintendent Steve Green rightfully calls a “conspiracy.”

Aware of a backlash over the inside deal, Nicastro even fed media talking points to Mind Trust-CEE-Trust’s Ethan Gray on how to downplay charter schools for fear that public school supporters would “try to paint" CEE-Trust “as the outsiders, funded with private money, determined to privatize all public education, yada yada.”

FORMER PREZ, CEE-TRUST, AND BILL GATES IN COLORADO

Besides being in bed with E3, whose Rochester, NJ, branch is now led by Rupert Murdock’s corporate buddy Joe Klein, CEE-Trust loves rightwing pseudo research groups like the Fordham Foundation, one of its main partners, which awarded former Indiana supt. of education Tony Bennett a major award a few years ago. 
 

The CEE-Trust/Fordham plan (besides eliminating local and democratically-elected school boards) is to breed Bill Gates-inspired for-profit blended learning schools across the country, as they discussed when the two groups met in December 2011 in Washington D.C.

In Colorado, CEE-Trust is spreading blended learning propaganda, bigtime. In a recent newsletter, the group praises how “Tony Lewis, Executive Director of the Donnell-Kay Foundation and Amy Slothower, Founder and Executive Director of Get Smart Schools this month co-published an op-ed in EdNewsColorado encouraging school leaders in the state to apply for Wave IIIa of the Next Generation Learning Challenges grant.” As I point out in my upcoming book, this is a Gates scheme to hire low-paid aides to watch kids play on school computers, so that CEOs of online schools can pocket more money. 

NCLB father George W. Bush is also involved in this CEE-Trust plot for Colorado, the former US president appearing at “Get Smart Schools (GSS is an affiliate of CEE-Trust member, the Donnell-Kay Foundation) during a visit to Denver in October.” 

CEE-Trust writes that “while President Bush is ‘out of politics,’ he still has a ‘great passion about educational excellence,’ and is working with groups such as GSS to ‘set up a collaborative effort of educational entrepreneurs’ at the Bush Center at Southern Methodist University.” This “collaborative effort” means that GSS signed a contract with George W. Bush Institute's Alliance to Reform Education Leadership (which is also involved in Indiana) to churn out corporate school rules for training and evaluating school principals.

TAKING FRIEDMAN'S DEATH-BED WISH VIRAL

In New Orleans, the CEE-Trust  met with several other corporate school leaders to discuss furthering Milton Friedman’s death-bed wish of turning every single school in America over to rich folk (most schools in New Orleans are, indeed, privatized, at this point: see my article on the Mind Trust's lies about New Orleans here). 

CEE-Trust desires (see page 5 in PDF) to use public money from federal i3 and Race to the Top grants (see page 10) to “incubate” cities with some of the most corrupt private school corporations in the country, including Green Dot, known for first promoting the fake parent trigger bill with the Heartland Institute and ALEC.  The parent trigger bill allows corporate school leaders to send operatives into local communities and dupe parents into signing a form to turn their community schools over to for-profit companies.

For the national job, CEE-Trust wants KIPP (notorious for mental abuse to kids and teachers) and Uncommon Schools, a favorite of Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos which didn’t have to be a part of the teacher evaluation scheme in NYC, when school commissioner John King let them slide out of it. 

 

IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

Yes, it’s not just the Mind Trust, folks, with celebrity spokesperson Jane Pauley onboard and mega-donors Eli Lilly.  David Harris (who makes almost $200,000 a year, as I’ve pointed out too many times in writings and on the radio) and Bart Peterson’s CEE-Trust is up to no good.  The question is, is anyone in Indianapolis or elsewhere listening?

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NOTE

Back in June 2012 in a very lengthy editorial in NUVO, I mentioned several other cities that CEE-Trust and Public Impact (who did the Mind Trust Opportunity Plan for Indianapolis) were threatening to invade.