Social Impact Investors Eye Public Education Market in Philadelphia

from Wrench in the Gears
January 25, 2018

I would like to share a comment I made yesterday in response to this op-ed published in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook: “The city needs a transformation to improve education, not jut a new school board.” The piece was written by Paul Perry, a director with San Francisco-based Third Plateau Social Impact Strategies.

In the summer of 2016, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia published a white paper positioning the Philadelphia region as a “unique center for the impact economy.” That same year, an influential group of venture capitalists under the leadership of Ben Franklin Technology Partners launched ImpactPHL, an accelerator for social impact initiatives in the region.

Click here for a relationship map that shows the founding members.

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Deployment of “innovative” technological “solutions” is central to social impact investing, because profit is generated by combining predictive analytics with Big Data “impact” metrics. Services addressing social problems must increasingly be delivered through digital platforms that extract the data demanded for program evaluation and profit-taking.

Those receiving services, including public school students who spend their days slogging through benchmark tests and online modules and who are often tracked via classroom management apps, generate vast data-sets that can be used to profile them and inform future “impact” investments. “Success”=profit. Success is determined as meeting narrow, specific targets defined in terms of data points. The need to generate outcomes then shapes how services are delivered, more screen time and less face time. See the rise of ed-tech “solutions” forced on our public schools and on refugee populations.

We are seeing this dehumanizing shift in service delivery take place not only in public education, but also in healthcare, social services, and mental health treatment. Mr. Perry’s op-ed signals that Philadelphia is entering a new phase of the privatization battle, one that will be less about charters and vouchers and more about online learning and behavioral management systems and data-driven “wrap-around” services provided by non-profits working hand-in-hand with impact investors. These systems prioritize profit over children and will install data-driven interfaces that dehumanize students as well as the staff that is forced to provide the “innovative” technology-based “services.” If you read Mr. Perry’s piece you can see their plan is to sell it under the guise that they actually care about the poor, when in reality Philadelphia’s poverty is is just another investment opportunity.

Click here to read the the full article and Wrench in the Gears response to Mr. Perry’s op ed.

Surveillance Capitalism and Your Children

There are thousands of rapacious and predatory gatherers of data out there waiting to collect and sell your information and your children's information, whether it is behavioral, economic, intellectual, social, geographic, nutritional, and even emotional in nature.

Follow this link (hat tip to Alison McDowell) to read about this newest form of capitalist predation.  Here is a clip:

There was a time when we laid responsibility for the assault on behavioral data at the door of the state and its security agencies.  Later, we also blamed the cunning practices of a handful of banks, data brokers, and Internet companies. Some attribute the assault to an inevitable  “age of big data,” as if it were possible to conceive of data born pure and blameless, data suspended in some celestial place where facts sublimate into truth.

Capitalism has been hijacked by surveillance
 
I’ve come to a different conclusion:  The assault we face is driven in large measure by the exceptional appetites of a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that I call surveillance capitalism. Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the fruitful expansion of market democracy.

 And below is an intro to an innocent sounding  Google app called StackUp that collects and stores all your students' internet activity so that students can get "credit" for all their reading. Hey--it even claims to know if they are reading or if the page is just open.



Or have a look at this ad for Affectiva.  Sounds like a new child doping tool, right?  Well, it's a company that is using observational data via webcams to collect, analyze, and interpret facial expressions to "quanitfy emotion" and use this information to develop product lines.



Parents, teachers, and students can stop this massive intrusion, but it will take education and organization.