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AntiSocial Media Should Be Shut Down

“. . .social media appears as something less newfangled and more familiar: a defective, hazardous product." Shut it down until it’s fixed. Explore this gift article from The New York Times. You can read it for free without a subscription. www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/o...

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— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) March 14, 2026 at 7:55 AM

NZ Privacy Commish: FB "morally bankrupt pathological liars"

From Huffington Post:

New Zealand’s privacy commissioner is holding no punches in his criticism of Facebook in the wake of the deadly mosque shootings in Christchurch, part of which was livestreamed by the gunman on the social media platform.

Calling the tech giant “morally bankrupt pathological liars,” John Edwards said on Twitter on Sunday night that Facebook “cannot be trusted.”

The social media platform “enable[d] genocide” in Myanmar, Edwards tweeted, referring to Facebook’s role in inciting violence and promoting discrimination in the Southeast Asian nation, aimed particularly at the minority Rohingya people.

Facebook also facilitates “foreign undermining of democratic institutions,” and allows the livestreaming “of suicides, rapes, and murders,” Edwards continued, according to the New Zealand Herald.

Facebook leaders “continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm. They #DontGiveAZuck,” Edwards concluded in a jibe aimed at Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Zuckerberg, The World's Richest Sociopath

From a highly recommended read at The Guardian by Julie Carrie Wong:

It can be hard to remember from down here, beneath the avalanche of words and promises and apologies and blogposts and manifestos that Facebook has unleashed upon us over the course of the past year, but when the Cambridge Analytica story broke one year ago, Mark Zuckerberg’s initial response was a long and deafening silence.

It took five full days for the founder and CEO of Facebook – the man with total control over the world’s largest communications platform – to emerge from his Menlo Park cloisters and address the public. When he finally did, he did so with gusto, taking a new set of talking points (“We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you”) on a seemingly unending roadshow, from his own Facebook pageto the mainstream press to Congress and on to an oddly earnest discussion series he’s planning to subject us to at irregular intervals for the rest of 2019.

The culmination of all that verbosity came earlier this month, when Zuck unloaded a 3,000-word treatise on Facebook’s “privacy-focused” future (a phrase that somehow demands both regular quotation marks and ironic scare quotes), a missive that was perhaps best described by the Guardian’s Emily Bell as “the nightmarish college application essay of an accomplished sociopath”.

Teaching Kids About Personalized Data Collection

The emerging story of Facebook's marketing of 87,000,000 users' data is finally beginning to register in the minds of Americans who, otherwise, have remained somewhat blase about the threat of personal data collection, archiving, and selling.  It is not ad sales or click counts that's driving social , or anti-social, media; it has finally dawned on a distracted public that it is their personal data that is the now and future currency of FB, Google, and the other Silicon Valley high priests who have no respect for the customers they would happily turn into compliant drones and make a profit at the same time. 

This other-worldly scheme is no less apparent in the personalized data business being pushed into schools under the banner of personalized learning and competency-based learning. Of most interest to oligarchs like Gates and Zuckerberg are programs to neurologically rewire children to make them assets for capitalists like themselves, and to collect and market data on individuals from pre-K through grad school.  Every man or woman with a comprehensive digital dossier immediately accessible to anyone for a fee.

One of the prime examples of this is Summit Learning, which enjoys massive infusions of public and venture philanthropists' dollars to build a demonstration project of how you can have education with a minimum of teachers, schools, or even books.  Just think of the savings, and think of the collected data when kids are handcuffed to their laptops and iPads.

Now small actions to counter the cyber-capitalist dystopia have begun, and WaPo has an interesting piece on an new emerging curriculum being implemented down the road from Seton Hall, where it was developed by law professors.  The goal is to re-establish some connections among people and to limit the connections between individuals and servers that dish up just what we seem to want even before we know we want it.  A clip: 

The classes are free, folded into kids’ daily schedules and taught in the classrooms where the fifth- and sixth-graders typically learn about the scientific method and the food chain. Gaia Bernstein, director of Seton Hall Law’s Institute for Privacy Protection, which designed the program, said each class includes about a half-dozen lessons taught to the kids over several weeks, as well as a separate set of lectures for parents concerned about how “their children are disappearing into their screens.”

Peanuts to KIPPsters, PR Bonanza for Facebook & KIPP

Since 1994, KIPP's few dozen segregated charter schools and the thousands that emulate them have been hawking a late capitalist version of the Horatio Alger storyline aimed to inspire the character rehabilitation of the defective minority poor: if black and brown children and their parents work hard enough and are nice enough and bow deeply enough, then they, too, can reach the same economic summits occupied by the privileged millennials who entered the Ivy Leagues through side doors reserved for the socially and economically fittest. 

This myth actually precedes Alger's 19th Century formulaic juvenile novels by almost 200 years.  After all, it was 17th Century Puritan scion, Cotton Mather, who prescribed work as the best medicine for the poor, whose poverty was a clear indication of a moral defect for which God's disapproval was made manifest in their economic plight.  Blaming the poor for their poverty was a foundational American value before there was an America, and so was, and so there remains, a cultivated blindness to the structural and discriminatory impediments in society that keep the poor oppressed, regardless of how much grit, persistence, and zest that they can manage to exude.

For years now, the KIPP Foundation has boasted about the thirty-something percent of the dehumanized students who finish 8th grade at KIPP getting college degrees, but they refuse to talk about the 50 percent of those children who start 5th grade at KIPP who never finish 8th grade at KIPP).  If they did acknowledge the fact that low performers and behavior problems are expunged from KIPP before they ever reach 8th grade, then there would nothing at all miraculous about the one-third of the one-half of KIPP students who actually gain college degrees.  

Even among this select group of college completers (most of them from second and third tier colleges), there is a growing awareness that the students who do manage to finish college are not getting the plum jobs that are reserved for the children of the affluent.  After all, KIPP college students have to earn money during the summers and can't afford the unpaid summer internships in Silicon Valley or Washington, DC.  Nor can KIPPsters afford the foreign travel and social networking that lubricate the relations of the elite.  

Now there is some suggestion that this realization has even crept into the consciousness of KIPP CEO, Richard Barth, and the widow of Barth's former Harvard classmate, David Goldberg.  A bold solution has been put forth:  Facebook's billionaire COO, Cheryl Sandberg, has established a scholarship in Goldberg's name that will give 15 of the 4,600 eligible students a scholarship worth $15,000 per year.  My god, this adds up to less than what Putin, alone, spend on Facebook ad buys each year.

In the end, both KIPP and Facebook get to pretend that they care about the problem of the black and brown shut out of high paying jobs, all the while gaining national media attention for their ridiculous and penurious gestures.  You might call it a win-win--for Facebook and KIPP, that is. 

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.”

Facebook Wants to Transform Education: What Could Go Wrong?

After turning Newark schools into charter cesspools of corruption, billionaire sociopath, Mark Zuckerberg, has a new plan underway out West to deprofessionalize teaching and to accelerate roboticized online learning. 

What could go wrong with the Facebook crew in charge of your child's privacy?

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook, which transformed communication with its social networking service, now wants to make a similar impact on education.

The Silicon Valley company announced on Thursday that it was working with a local charter school network, Summit Public Schools, to develop software that schools can use to help children learn at their own pace. The project has been championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, and one of his top lieutenants, Chris Cox.

“We’ve seen that there’s an opportunity to help apply our skills to the future of education, and we all wanted to find a way to help make an impact by doing what we do best — building software,” Mr. Cox wrote in a blog post announcing the initiative....

IPS and the National School Board Buyout

By Doug Martin

Although the local powers-that-be who funded the members who won the Indianapolis Public School board 2014 election are well known and mentioned in my book Hoosier School Heist (Al Hubbard, David Harris, Bart Peterson, the Chamber, Eli Lilly’s John Lechleiter, Anne Shane, and Christel DeHaan of Tony Bennett scandal fame, to name a few), some of the wealthy outsiders who bought the IPS board in 2014 are relatively new to Indiana.  These new funders last year loaded the campaign chests of IPS candidates LaNier Echols (Carpe Diem charter school’s dean), Mary Ann Sullivan (former lawmaker and present Democrats for Education Reform national board member), and Kelly Bentley (Democrat for Education Reform member), who were all elected. 

But the IPS board race was just one buyout for these newest IPS wealthy funders.  In fact, these same well-to-do out-of-staters have been buying mayors, governors, and school boards all across the US to further the school privatizing agenda. 

Some of these campaign donors, it appears, mean to cement in place Rocketship and KIPP Indy, which are both scheduled to open a dozen charter schools in Indy in the next few years. 

Another wealthy campaign contributor is surely hoping to plant his affiliated charter school francize, Achievement First, in Indianapolis in the near future. 

Many of these wealthy funders, too, are tied to Stand for America, a group which was not required to tell taxpayers the exact cash it dished out to buy the IPS board seats for Sullivan, Echols, and Bentley (see Amos Brown's excellent write-up on this here), although Alternet’s Anna Simonton claims that Stand for Children’s “nonprofit and political arm… together spent over $21 million last year in order to elect 78 state-level and 15 district-level “’education champions.’”

All in all, Simonton traces some of the out-of-state funders behind IPS’ 2014 election as part of a vast movement by the extremely wealthy to recently buy school boards in New Orleans, Denver, and Los Angeles.  Let’s look at a few other cities besides these that the IPS board donors have infiltrated.

BAIN CAPITAL AND THE BLOOMBERGS

Although I mention Bain Capital (started by Mitt Romney) and Stand for Children’s cozy relationship in Hoosier School Heist, it was the recently retired managing director of Bain, Mark Nunnelly, who helped elect school privatizers to the IPS school board and many other public school boards across the country. 

Mark Nunnelly gave $1,000 to Kelly Bentley, $1,000 to LaNier Echols, and $1,500 to Mary Ann Sullivan’s campaigns.  Nunnelly also has supported Stand for Children and funded the Black Alliance for Educational Options/DFER Newark mayor Cory Booker, all mentioned in my book.

Nunnelly is on the board of directors of KIPP charter schools with Emma Bloomberg, the daughter of former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg.  Emma is chairman of the board of Stand for Children’s national outfit.  With Mind Trust help, KIPP Indy is scheduled to open several new schools in Indianapolis. 

Emma Bloomberg played a role in the DC state board of education election, and she chairs the Teach for America-founded Leadership for Educational Equity, the group which gave $5,000 to LaNier Echols, the IPS candidate who also received $650 (see page 3) from TV show princess and major anti-teacher tenure operative Campbell Brown.  And if all of this were not enough, former mayor Michael Bloomberg, upset over lost money to Tony Bennett’s 2012 campaign, pulled through a few days before the IPS board election and gifted Mary Ann Sullivan $2,500.

BIG OIL GIRL TO THE RESCUE

The daughter of a rich Oklahoma oilman, billionaire Stacey Schusterman is the CEO of Samson Energy, a real estate leader, and a supporter of Stand for Children. She gave $500 (page 10) to Mary Ann Sullivan’s IPS campaign last year and $1,500 (page 6) to Bentley’s. 

Along with Walmart’s Carrie Walton Penner (whose husband Greg, as I point out in Hoosier School  Heist, helped buy the IPS board election of 2012), Schusterman sits on the board of the Charter School Growth Fund.  Besides dismantling public education in her own state, along with Achievement First trustee Jonathan Sackler, Schusterman funded Marshall Tuck for the superintendent’s office in California, the young and handsome corporate darling who, despite tons of money, lost the election.

Hedge fund manager Alan Fournier didn’t have to worry about funding the IPS board race last year, as he did in 2012.  Schusterman took his place, and they both worked together to influence the New Jersey school board race last November, too.

Schusterman also gave $25,000 to Stand for Children’s election campaign in Washington state in 2012.

LINKEDIN WITH FACEBOOK

Billionaire 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 campaign (page 2).

Hoffman and Yee funded Tobias Read’s campaign, an Oregon state representative who was one of the sponsors of a charter school bill which passed in 2011.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg helped Tobias Read, too, for he used to work with her and Larry Summers in Bill Clinton’s Administration.  Summers, if we remember, helped set the rules to deregulate Wall Street which led to the big crash of 2008. 

Sheryl Sandberg is a member of Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.  Along with Intel’s Arthur Rock, Sandberg funded a school board member for the Duval County Florida school board race last year.  And Sandberg, Rock, Greg Penner (Carrie Walton’s husband who helped buy the IPS school board in 2012), were behind the school board privatization movement in Atlanta recently, too, supporting four candidates who were elected.  As Alternet’s Anna Simonton writes:

[Arthur] Rock is not the only name on the reports with financial power and a less than obvious connection to Atlanta Public Schools. Greg Penner of the Walmart empire, Dave Goldberg of the Sheryl Sandberg empire (they’re married), and Kent Thiry of the DaVita kidney dialysis empire (it sounds inglorious, but he pulls in $17 million annually), are among the names that had some Atlantans scratching their heads this election season.

Billionaire Arthur Rock (a board member of TFA’s Leadership for Educational Equity), Greg Penner, and Alan Fournier (who gave money to IPS school board candidates in 2012), among others, poured money into a small town school board race in New Jersey recently.  

And Rock and Bain Capital’s Mark Nunnelly also helped buy school privatization during a school board race in California. 

Arthur Rock gave $5,000 to LaNier Echols’ campaign (page 3)

PUTTING SACKLER’S ACHIEVEMENT FIRST FIRST, REGARDLESS OF ZIPCODE

In 2014, investment manager and real estate mogul Jonathan Sackler handed Mary Ann Sullivan $2,500.

Sackler, a board member of the New Schools Venture Fund privatizing outfit, is the trustee at Achievement First, a nationwide charter school managing organization.  He is also a director at 50CAN, a corporate school group funded, in various states, by Bill Gates, the Bush Foundation, Arthur Rock, the Walton Family Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, and many others involved in privatizing Indiana schools. 

Along with Arthur Rock and other IPS board donors, Sackler threw money into the Minnesota school board race last year, as well.  Beth Hawkins, at MinnPost, writes that “The Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund has received $100,000 from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, $90,000 from Teach for America board member Arthur Rock and $25,000 from Jon Sackler, who sits on the boards of the education advocacy groups 50CAN and Students for Education Reform”.

Sarah Lahm, from In These Times, gives us a hint at what is going on here.  Keep in mind that Rocketship is set to operate in Indianapolis, and Arthur Rock, Facebook’s Sandberg, and others partner with that charter school company:

What do investors like Bloomberg, Rock and Sackler stand to gain by pouring money into the Minneapolis school board race? While national charter school chains such as Rocketship do not operate here, the city’s school district recently entered into the state’s first-ever “district-charter compact” with local charter school chain Hiawatha Leadership Academies. This compact was borne out of a 2010 District-Charter Collaboration Compact signed by Minneapolis Public School administrators, local politicians and charter school operators. In the future, Minneapolis Public Schools spokesperson Myrle Croasdale tells In These Times, the district is “open to developing partnerships with outside stakeholders.” Perhaps this willingness helps to explain how the Minneapolis Progressive Education Fund has attracted such big-dollar outside support for school board candidates.

Sackler, in fact, even bought the Providence, Rhode Island, Obama-supported mayor, giving over $25,000 to Democratic Jorge Elorza in 2014, who won the election.  Elorza “sat on the board of the Achievement First Mayoral Academy until he entered the race for mayor.” 

Sackler and others actually own Connecticut governor Dan Mallory, as Jonathan Pelto has noted time and time again, and 50CAN influenced the Bridgeport, Conn. Board of education election, too.

For the Austin, Texas, school board race, Sackler helped IPS board funders Schusterman, Nunnelly, Campbell Brown, and the Leadership for Educational Equity. 

As a side-note, Tindley charter school’s Marcus Robinson sits on the board of directors of the Achievement First Charter Network Accelerator.

MORE HEDGE FUND DEMOCRATS

The hedge fund manager front group DFER also played a role in the IPS race.  National board member Mary Ann Sullivan was helped by Democrats for Education Reform, which handed over $1,100 (page 10), and DFER’s Joe Williams (detailed in Hoosier School Heist), gave $250 (page 14).  Education Reform Now, which is closely tied to DFER, gave Bentley $600, and DFER gave her $1,100 (page 6).

For more insight and campaign funding details on the IPS board race of 2014, see Gary Welsh’s excellent blog post here.