As Data Becomes "New Oil," Your Mind is for Fracking

I urge you to read the results of Alison McDowell's latest investigations into the new Silicon Valley money fronts, as Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. angle to become the 21st Century equivalents of the early 20th Century oil barons.  As Alison points out, "[d]ata is the new oil and the electrical engineers and innovative financiers of Silicon Valley have teamed up to devise a plan to frack it from our minds and from our bodies while framing it as a social good."

Here's an example below of a patent request (click it to enlarge) that Microsoft filed this year.  I think it offers a pretty clear picture of efforts of a new capitalist model based not on "pay to play" but, rather, "get paid to play." Of course, the crypto-crumbs to be collected by human data-fuel sources will be insignificant in comparison to the real money saved by efficiency-seeking governments dependent upon Silicon Valley's social steering contractors. 

Certainly gives the term "social capital" a whole new meaning!

The Silicon Valley Assault on Children's Learning

For almost 200 years, snake oil salesmen have hawked their wares to schoolmen and to educators, hoping to cash in on the public dollars that taxpayers have intended to help educate the young.

Through the selling of textbooks, reading machines, TVs, test scoring equipment, audiovisual aids, and computer technologies, corporate America has been responsible for the creation of a massive and expanding educational dustbin, now chocked with lucrative "educational solutions" that, at some point, successfully located educational problems that fitted the need of their solutions.

Only in recent years, however, have education industry merchants expanded their marketing efforts to sell educationally-unrelated goods directly to children in school.  Wall Street's favorite bow-tied super-boy, Chris Whittle, broke ground in the early 1990s, when he brought TV news to the classroom with Channel 1, along with TV ads for Skittles, Snickers, etc.

Whittle even proposed the marketing of textbooks with these same ads and others that appeal to children.  Thinks of it: Turn to page 67, just under the Coca-Cola ad, and read along with me . . .

Now a generation later and with computer technology/cell phones accepted as essential elements of  life on Earth, the high priests of Silicon Valley have come up with a new story board for the future of corporate intrusion into schools and the exploitation of the most vulnerable humans--our children.

Google, Apple, and billionaires like Reed Hastings, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates have a multi-pronged strategy at work to capitalize on today's children and tomorrow's adults by turning learning environments into marketing research hothouses and massive data collection opportunities, which can be used now and later to laser target products and services to individuals who do not even know yet that they want them.

The new personalized learning empire that tech oligarchs are pushing represents a criminally-cynical abuse of corporate power directed at children to channel, contour, and shape the preferences, values, and neurological wiring of present and future consumers of information, goods, and services.  If allowed to flourish, the new "learning systems" will deliver the kinds of social control and efficiency that have been dreamed of for generations, along with unimaginable profits for the high priests of Silicon Valley.

This story in the Times should be shared widely by teachers, teacher educators, school board members, policymakers, and parents everywhere.  Here is a clip:

. . . . Unlike Apple or Microsoft, which make money primarily by selling devices or software services, Google derives most of its revenue from online advertising — much of it targeted through sophisticated use of people’s data. Questions about how Google might use data gleaned from students’ online activities have dogged the company for years. 

“Unless we know what is collected, why it is collected, how it is used and a review of it is possible, we can never understand with certainty how this information could be used to help or hurt a kid,” said Bill Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, who vets the security and privacy of classroom apps. 

Google declined to provide a breakdown of the exact details the company collects from student use of its services. Bram Bout, director of Google’s education unit, pointed to a Google privacy notice listing the categories of information that the company’s education services collect, like location data and “details of how a user used our service.” . . . .

Commentary on Recent SAT Recommendations

by Glen Ford for the Black Agenda Report:

There is a growing realization that standardized testing for college entrance does not serve the interests of educational excellence or reward merit. Rather, SATs, PSATs and their clones tend to freeze already existing societal privilege in place, allowing the already well-off to pass on that status to their children. The assessment comes from the National Association of College Admissions Counseling, and from no less than Harvard University's dean of admissions and financial aid, William Fitzsimmons.

Fitzsimmons says, "The test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment." In other words, the children of white parents who make good livings and had good educations, tend to do well in standardized tests. But the tests don't reliably predict how well the kids will do in college.

The educators note the vast differences that exist in life and learning experiences that are available to children in the United States. "No one who visits the range of secondary schools we visit," they concluded, "and goes to the communities we visit...can come away thinking the standardized tests can be a measure of someone's true worth or ability."

The admissions counselors also urged that PSATs not be used to decide who is eligible for scholarships.

"Real education is grinding to a halt at schools across the nation, under the weight of relentless, ruthless testing."

This is very good news, the logic of which would be to finally destroy the rule of standardized tests - not just for college, but throughout the educational system. There is a huge body of study that shows race and class privilege is further embedded in society through the use of these tests, which have become a bulwark of rigidity, not mobility, in the United States. And that most emphatically means breaking the classist, racist grip of hyper-testing in elementary and secondary education, through the stifling No Child Left Behind Act.

The Bush regime and the plutocrats it serves understand perfectly well that class and race structures reinforce the rule of...people like themselves. That's one reason they have imposed the draconian and educationally counter-productive standardized testing regime on the U.S. public education system. The other, related motivation is to "prove" public schools are failing, in order to boost private schooling and bogus theories of "marketplace education."

In ways that are only now being understood, real education is grinding to a halt at schools across the nation, under the weight of relentless, ruthless testing. In the process, teacher creativity, innovation and just plan caring fall by the wayside.

Standardized testing does not encourage the deepening of democracy. Instead, it rewards privilege. This outcome is cumulative, adding layer upon layer of culture- and class-biased test results to all the other burdens and assaults that children of non-privileged parents will endure in their school lives. That's not a meritocracy - it's a caste system.

There will always be a place for properly constructed testing in society. But tests should never be wielded as weapons against those born with less, to benefit the already fortunate.

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Drill and Kill Preschools

Here is a very good article, "A Dream of Preschool for All," from the New York Times News Service that deserves wide circulation, although Google has it only on AZ Central. Not only does it lay out a convincing argument for universal preschool, but it also provides an historical context for the predictable disagreement today on how those preschools should be conducted. Professor Zigler, Headstart's first director notes:

"Ever since Sputnik went up," recalls Zigler, decision makers have vacillated between emphasizing cognitive skills "and focusing on the whole child." The skill-and-drill mentality fostered by the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which represents the most recent swing of the pendulum, has reached preschool. Many prekindergartens now stress reading readiness. And because there are only so many hours in a preschool day, they devote less time to encouraging creativity or motivating 4-year-olds to work and play well with others. It is in Head Start that this shift - away from social-emotional development and problem-oriented learning, toward decoding language and numbers - is most fiercely contested. The stakes are high. The outcome will not only mold Head Start but also affect the nature of states' prekindergarten initiatives.

What is not addressed here is the historical precedent for two both models to be used, with the choice depending upon the family income of the children who are to be enrolled. In the early development of the kindergarten, we saw the use of the more harsh and demanding model in the poor urban areas, whereas the caring, whole child approach was reserved for the middle and upper classes.

The neocon traditionalists of today want nothing more than the elite, Protestant, captitalist-patriots of old. They want a controllable work force that doesn't ask questions, they want to maintain white privilege even with the inevitability of an emerging brown majority, and they want these things more than ever. Is there any doubt, then, why this round of back-to-basics appears more like a bare-knuckled assault on the poor and working classes than it does an education reform. The most disturbing part is that many of these "reform" advocates are so ideologically blinded that they cannot see the racism that is at the heart of their social engineering plans. The enraging part, of course, is that the cynical manipulators who are pulling the political strings know exactly what they are doing.