Essays

New Strip: Teaching Live in Lockdown Nation (with Max Rodriguez)

Cartoons, Essays

EPISODE #1: Face/Off

Please stay tuned right after this comic for a reflection on how a whole nation’s teachers are going remote for the first time, including me for the first time.

The last week has been a bit like building an airplane while it’s taking off. I converted all 4 of my classes online in the last week — and I’ve never taught online. Sure, I’ve used course management systems, and have students have online discussions, and upload their essays to the cloud. But I’d never taught online — and this was by design.

Since I started teaching in 2002, I’ve been a face-to-face instructor. I was drawn to teaching by the live energy of the classroom. Teaching has always felt a bit to me like jazz, a work of educational improvisation. I’d come to class with a plan, with a composition for the day, a script. But this script was only just a means to get to the real work of the day — the music, the music of students real, live voices actively engaging in learning. The sopranos, altos, the laughter, the silence, the scratch-skritch of pencils and pens. Every day is different, no lesson exactly the same, no music the same.

Will there still be this music remotely?

Sure, there are many fabulous online instructors, those who have chosen that medium, and worked on it as a craft. But what of the rest of us, those teachers whose craft and talents are working in a live community?

Right now, I write these words at the kitchen table next to my son, who would normally be at recess right now, running with his friends, together, face-to-face. Instead, he is on a laptop, doing a series of standardized math exercises, and blowing fart sounds in my face.

From my comic with Josh Neufeld “This School is Not A Pipe” (Truthout). Diane Ravtich and Bill Ayers were interviewed for it.

My wife and I are homeschooling, as all Californians will be now. We grieve this, as we love our son’s local public school, and its vibrant community. My wife is also a public school teacher, and for the first time is working online. (Right now, as I write, she is on Google Hangouts with her AP Euro students). We share our garage — which we hastily converted into an office — to work with our students remotely. We’re taking trainings from our tech-savvy colleagues who have been working online for years, all the while having Zoom meetings with our departments, sharing tips and tricks with each other, all while actually meeting with the students remotely (who themselves are often taking online classes for the first time). I imagine our son’s teacher, Ms. B, is doing the same thing in her own remote teaching bunker, as millions of teachers are across California, across the US, across the world.

We’re all working together to keep the music of the classroom alive, the music that has been silenced by this pandemic.

I leave you with these final thoughts from one of my comics, as we all consider what will be the legacy of this remarkable moment, when the world’s classrooms all went silent, and we all escaped into the cloud:

From my comic with Dan Carino “The Children of the Code” at Truthout (2015)

For the rest of my comic collaborations see: https://adambessie.com/2019/06/30/collected-comix/

Retiring the “Bad Teacher” Boogeyman

Essays

“I support our teachers, but my daughter was traumatized by an unfirable 1st grade teacher,” so read a tweet I received after expressing concern that Vergara v. California decision – which declared K-12 teacher tenure unconstitutional for violating the civil rights of students – had nothing to do with civil rights, little to do with students, and everything to do with the continued efforts to privatize public education.  If you publicly critiqued the Vergara verdict, you no doubt received a similar reply, which I’ve described by the following equation, dubbed VAM [Vergara Attack Method]:

Compliment of teachers in general [“I love teachers”]

–      [BUT] there are “bad teachers”

+  vague and/or extreme personal anecdote about “bad teacher”

=  you must be a “bad teacher” and hate children if you support tenure or any other rights for teachers.  Also, you are against civil rights, likely a socialist, and most definitely are destroying the economy.

Rhetorically, it’s almost impossible to respond to VAM – Who can disagree that there are “bad teachers?”  Who wants a child to be subjected to such a horrible person? Who wants a child to be traumatized?

VAM works especially well when coupled with civil rights rhetoric, as I wrote about in my last essay “A Tale of Two Vergaras: Of Stardom and the End of Teacher Tenure.” Who could be against civil rights?  And so, in a masterful rhetorical twist, if you’re for tenure, you’re also against helping impoverished minority children – you’re standing in the way of equality.  In more advanced versions of VAM, civil rights rhetoric is seamlessly connected with fixing the sagging economy as we see in an op-ed in USA Today claiming “There is no war on teachers.” The author assures us that there is “no such war,” and that if anything, the focus is on firing just a “very small minority of teachers” who are not just harming children, but according to his calculations, would actually fix our current financial crisis:

The gains according to historical economic patterns would be measured in trillions of dollars and would be sufficient to solve our national fiscal problems as well as the vexing income distribution issues currently being debated.

Yes, that’s right – firing this “small minority of bad teachers” will ultimately create trillions of dollars for the economy, along with solving civil rights.  It’s a magic bullet – one that just needs be fired in right direction, towards “bad teachers.”

In short, VAM rhetorically checkmates those who are critical of the Vergara decision.  This pervasive linguistic trick pins all of the nation’s problems not on teachers (who are wonderful), but on those “bad teachers,” who are destroying lives, destroying civil rights, and destroying the economy.   No wonder, in the exact same issue of USA Today, a shocking ad illustrates a teacher throwing a child into a garbage can – and this doesn’t seem an act of war, given the current zeitgeist.  After all, it’s only about “bad teachers” – not you.  You’re a good teacher – that is, unless you think tenure is acceptable.  In which case, what do you have to hide? Who are you protecting?

Outside of the outlandish, ill-supported leaps in logic which are now in the realm of “common sense”, the biggest problem VAM, though, is the impossibly vague term “bad teacher,” or the slightly more technical sounding, but equally meaningless “grossly ineffective teacher,” which Judge Treu used in his decision.    Since the propaganda documentary Waiting for Superman, the “bad teacher boogeyman” has been in heavy linguistic circulation, which I noted in my 2010 essay “The Myth of the Bad Teacher:”

The Bad Teacher is no one specific, but rather, a sort of free-floating, ill-defined stereotype: he is an inept, uncaring, self-interested bureaucrat waiting for his pension, not only disinterested in students, but actively engaged in standing in the way of student achievement, rather than encouraging it. I imagine the Bad Teacher as slovenly dressed, with stains on his shirt, showing up to class late, and once there, reading the newspaper while his students throw paper airplanes at each other. He looks up at the clock occasionally, waiting for his time to be up in order get out of school as fast as possible, so he can get home and watch “Glee” on his plump, faux-leather couch. Or he could be a really “Bad Teacher,” such as the one soon to be depicted in a 2011 movie of the same name, which is focused on a “foul-mouthed, junior high teacher who, after being dumped by her sugar daddy, begins to woo a colleague – a move that pits her against a well-loved teacher.”

In essence, the “bad teacher” is a not just a basic strawman, but a hologram, an insubstantial projection of whoever you want him to be, whatever you – or your child – perceives him to be.  He could be lazy; he could only lecture (or only use group work); he could be physically abusive; he could not know his content; he could take controversial positions; he could be a hard grader (or too easy of a grader).  Indeed, at the college level (where I teach), high teacher ratings are highly correlated with teachers that give less work and higher grades, according to a recent study.  In some cases – such as assigning “too much homework”, being called a “bad teacher” would be a compliment, in that the  educator might actually being doing her job.

“In hundreds of classrooms, I have never seen a ‘grossly ineffective’ teacher,” Dr. David Berliner says in a must-read Slate article, an expert whose testimony was primary evidence in Judge Treu’s decision.  “I don’t know anybody who knows what that means.”

And this is a professor who has spent his career exploring teacher quality, and was asked to testify on the other VAM – Value-Added-Measures, a statistical measure which uses standardized test scores to rate teachers.  VAM gives the comforting illusion of objectivity so cherished by education reformers.  But this method, also, has major limitations – the American Statistical Association cautioned use of this measure.  Further, even if these metrics work very well at showing growth in a particular area of learning in a particular subject, they don’t show a lot of the attributes that educators – and lay-people – would associate with “good” teacher.   Berliner observes (as paraphrased by reporter Jordan Weissman) “low test scores [don’t] qualify somebody as a bad teacher. They might do other things well in the classroom that don’t show up on an exam, like teach social skills, or inspire their students to love reading or math.”  Indeed, a teacher can have great test scores – but could have earned them through abusive methods, ones which make the student great at test taking, but not learn anything about the subject, and hate it to boot.

Thus, a “grossly ineffective teacher” could be inspiring, could be challenging, could be wonderful.  In short, this “bad teacher” could be any of us – especially those of us who believe that the current set of reforms that are focused on standardized testing and curriculum are harmful to students.  Indeed, our very best teachers – those who stand up to the intense pressure from parents and students to be “easy,” those who refuse to submit their students to the testing regime that kills the love of learning – could be labeled as our very worst. As a case in point: one of the teachers accused of being a “bad teacher” in the Vergara case was Pasadena Teacher of the Year, and received numerous teaching awards.

What message is Vergara sending to committed, competent educators, those who love children, and who hate what NCLB and Race to the Top is doing to those children?

Now, don’t get it twisted: this is not a defense of child-molesters or otherwise horrible people; it’s not a defense of poor practices, such as giving worksheets to students every day (which is encouraged under the standardized testing regime).   Nor is it a defense of the “status quo” – which, need I remind readers, is No Child Left Behind, which most teachers abhor.     To defend tenure – due process in a highly-politicized workplace – is not to defend whatever horrible projection of “bad teacher” the reader has conjured.

Please, don’t VAM this essay.

And please, as the post-Vergara dust settles, as we’ve gotten our rants out of the system, let’s retire the “bad teacher” – in all its euphemistic forms.    Rather, let’s work to foster constructive, explicit discussions about what it means to be an excellent educator – not just in terms of outcomes (which are framed in the most limited, unimaginative way under the current regime), but in terms of the actual practices that happen in the classroom, and as critically, the environment in which our teachers teach and students learn.  Keep in mind, California is first in poverty (and in billionaires) in the nation –  and discussions of “bad teachers” allow us to avoid substantial conversations about the impact of inequality on our children.

In letting the “bad teacher” go,  we’ll find educators and the public – which are one in the same, remember – have shared interests and goals, despite the best efforts of corporate reformers to undermine public confidence, and put us in conflict with each other. In this fashion, we will repair the damage done by Vergara, and more broadly by the corporate reform movement, which has used VAM (both of them) to disrupt and destabilize the public commons to maintain the real status quo – of massive economic inequality and top-down elite control, which is the primary cause of the civil rights and economic emergency in our schools.

Originally published as a guest essay on Anthony Cody’s “Living in Dialogue” blog at Education Week.

A Tale of Two Vergaras: Of Stardom and the End of Teacher Tenure

Essays

Type “Vergara” into any search engine – as I was repeatedly this morning – and you’re likely not to find what I was looking for. Instead, you’ll find supermodel and actress Sofia Vergara – best known for her role in the sitcom Modern Family.   An immigrant, and before she was famous, a single-mother in her early twenties, “Vergara is certainly the embodiment of [the] American dream,” notes one magazine – famed not just for her beauty, but her talent and determination to overcome hardship.

Another Los Angeles based Vergara – Beatriz – is who I was actually looking for. And her story, too, is about the American Dream; while this story will be on the cover of newspapers and is already trending on Twitter, it’s not a pretty.   There is no glitter, no glamour, no red carpets – rather, it’s about pink slips and broken dreams.

Beatriz Vergara (along with the other student plaintiffs) filed and won a lawsuit against the State of California and the California Teachers Association claiming that teacher tenure and other protections (around dismissal and seniority) are unconstitutional.   Invoking the seminal Brown Vs. The Board of Education case, Judge Rolf Treu of the Los Angeles Superior Court released a decision June 10, finding that California students – especially in poor and minority schools – are deprived of their right to an equal education, and thus, an equal opportunity to achieve the American Dream.    Indeed, according to Politico, Treu “adopt [ed] the language and legal framework of the civil rights movement” delivering his verdict as part of the long march to justice.

Just how did dismantling worker rights become part of Civil Rights? How did teachers – those like my wife and myself, who have devoted their lives to working with children and adults in public schools – become their greatest enemy?

The answer, in part, has to do with the other Vergara – Sophia. But I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, let’s go back to the late 1990s, when Diane Ravitch, a distinguished professor of education history and reformed “reformer” who blew the whistle on the corporate takeover of public education in her best-selling book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, worked at the Manhattan Institute, a New York based conservative think tank. They were having difficulty selling the public on vouchers, and realized that their policies needed to be reframed. Because “vouchers” didn’t have popular support, they decided to throw their weight behind charter schools, “because they achieved almost the same result as vouchers–a transfer of government dollars from government to private control.”   But changing from “vouchers” to “charters”, by itself, wasn’t enough. Nobody really knew about charters, then, nor could they personally relate to the sterile economic theories and language which informed their philosophies.

And therein, a new strategy was born – co-opting progressive language to sell privatized education policies to the public.

“There was explicit discussion about the importance of presenting the charter idea as a way to save poor minority children. In a city and state that was consistently liberal, that was a smart strategy,” Ravitch recalled in an email. Conservative think-think American Enterprise Institute scholar Rick Hess has noticed these strategies used throughout the country, observing that “the case for school choice was thus not argued in terms of efficiency or deregulation, but instead presented as a moral imperative — an obligation to give poor, black inner-city parents the kinds of educational choices taken for granted by suburban home owners.” Indeed, the heart-wrenching propaganda documentary Waiting for Superman ­­­­ relies on this “social justice” narrative, while selling the audience on charters, and against unions, and teacher tenure. Today, co-opting liberal language, values and morals appealing to “social justice,” “civil rights,” and “equality” has become standard. Ravitch, herself a life-long Democrat who become such a reformer, lured in by similar promises, concludes: “In retrospect, it seems strange that so many liberals bought an idea that emanated from conservative think tanks and conservative thinkers.”[1]

In much the same way that vouchers and charters have been sold via civil rights language, so too was Vergara v. California argued in court and marketed to the public as a moral imperative, with a solidly social justice lexicon, composing a compelling narrative which is attractive to liberals, while at the same time, appealing to economic conservatives who have long worked to abolish teacher tenure.

Like Sofia Vergara, the Beatriz Vergara case has massive cross-over appeal – and, the most powerful PR team money can buy. Indeed, Vergara is a significant milestone in the corporate reform effort, one that demonstrates that the multi-million dollar marketing campaign to rebrand privatization of public education as part of a larger civil rights movement has worked.

It’s no longer funny when Mitt Romney, or another plutocrat, snidely claims “education is the civil rights issue of our generation,” and blames unions and poor teachers for creating inequality (which he did, right after calling half of America lazy). No, today it’s now common sense to blame teachers for inequality in our schools – and, if Vergara is upheld, a matter of law.

Beyond carrying the burden for the very real inequality in our schools, teachers have now been legally pit in opposition to students and parents – this is the most concerning outcome of Vergara.   Corporate reformers – StudentsFirst, most notably – have worked hard (and successfully) to convince the public that teachers and students are at odds – that the rights and interests of teachers are fundamentally in conflict with those they serve. Vergara legitimizes this false division between teachers and the community, straining critical relationships needed to support children – especially in those communities facing the worst learning (and living) conditions.

More broadly, Vergara situates teachers outside of the fight for social justice – indeed, it describes us as barriers to equaility, on par with racial segregation.   Yes, yes, I know the verdict is focused on “grossly negligent teachers,” whom I too don’t want teaching my students, nor my two-year old son, who will attend public school.  But with the rise of high-stakes standardized testing, the poor quality of evaluation based on that testing, the increasing top-down management styles that dismiss teacher opinion, the constant drum of the “failing schools,” and the generally hostile attitude towards public workers, it’s not hard to feel that we’re all targeted – that any of us could be a “bad teacher.”

In the 1990s, it was just conservative think tanks on the edges of the debate that would invoke the bad teacher boogeyman – now, the Executive Branch of a “liberal” administration agrees: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has hailed the verdict a victory, employing the same civil rights framing he has used in selling President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top. In other words, Vergara doesn’t just represent the point of view of billionaire businessmen, conservative scholars, nor an isolated, “activist judge” – it now reflects the perspective of my Department of Education, and the President himself, who now believe that “bad teachers” are the root of our educational challenges, rather than the wide-spread poverty and systemic racism which the original civil rights leaders fought against, and which still exist today.

As angry and frightened as teachers are of more scapegoating, we must refuse to be cast as villains in a very well produced fictional drama staged by the elites, one that distracts us from looking at the very real causes of inequality of opportunity, of broken dreams, and lost chances. The Vergara verdict must push teachers to make stars of themselves, by reclaiming their role as public servants working on behalf of social justice, working on behalf of students, working on behalf of communities and the country for the public good, working towards civil rights, and better opportunities for all students – or, it will signal the concluding act in public education, and a shot at the American Dream for all students.

[i] This interview with Ravitch was published in my two-year study of corporate media coverage on education reform.  Further citations can be found there, as well.  Adam Bessie.“GERM Warfare: How to reclaim the education debate from corporate occupation.” Project Censored 2013. Ed. Mickey Huff. Seven Stories: New York. 2013.

This School is a Musical Masterpiece: The “Four Rs” to Reclaim Public Education from Corporate Colonialism

Essays

KHR 

This is Karran Harper Royal, a real parent of a teenager in the New Orleans public school system, whom I interviewed for the second part of the  Disaster Capitalism Curriculum (with graphic journalist Dan Archer for Truthout), about the “New Orleans Miracle,” as its been dubbed by corporate education reformers who believe Hurricane Katrina,  which killed nearly 2,000, and displaced 400,000, was “The best thing to happen to the education system in New Orleans” (And yes, that’s a real quote from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan). In 2012, amidst the polarized presidential election between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, New Orleans was solid ground:  they both argued that the free-market, privatized model that Royal has seen replace the public school system represents a model for the country.   For Royal, a prominent, nationally recognized public education activist, the “New Orleans Miracle,” also represents a model for American education – a bankrupt one, a well-funded “fairy tale” that purports to be about empowering kids, but is really about unleashing the market to dismantle the “government monopoly on education.”

While Royal speaks with unrivaled passion,  hard evidence, and personal connection to the community, her voice is largely marginalized.   Royal’s experience is not an isolated one, as those who are closest to children – the parents, the teachers, and especially the children themselves – have the smallest voice in education reform debate, which has been colonized by the language, ideologies, and policies of outsiders – politicians, think-tankers, Wall Street funded non-profits, and CEOs who have no direct connection or personal interest in the communities they seek to mold in their image.

Previously, I’ve dubbed this phenomenon the Gates Paradox: the power of your voice in the education reform debate is proportional to the distance from the classroom multiplied by the amount of money you earn. Of course, each additional media outlet owned increases the influence by a factor of ten. Or, expressed in the native language of the refomers, the Gates Paradox is: VαDsv*$ [MSNBC/]10 = INFLUENCE][1]

Indeed, the corporate colonists control the education debate, imposing the terms and language of the discussion, as they largely control the medium in which the debate takes place: it doesn’t take a complex algorithm to demonstrate that corporate media favors corporate education policy, especially when the media channel is funded by the same billionaire also funding the education policy (as is the case with Gates and both NBC and PBS).

How does a parent like Royal fight against this corporate colonialism, which floods in her hometown of New Orleans, displacing local schools, dismantling local communities, and imposing foreign values and policies?  How do we get Royal – and other real parents, children, and educators – heard over the “fairy tale” of reform?

How do we overcome the Gates Paradox?

By going back to basics: The Four Rs – Recognize, Resist, Reframe, and Reclaim.[2]

RECOGNIZE:  Education reform is trending right now in popular culture – and not towards a progressive, grassroots vision. While the agit-prop documentary Waiting for Superman started the pop culture assault on public schools, there is a cottage reform media industry devoted to putting out stories which support the reform vision of education, pumped out of the big screen, the TV, the radio, the newspaper, and underwritten by reform friendly billionaires like Gates, who have spent millions on messaging.[3]  This propaganda arm of the reform movement propagates stories like the “New Orleans Miracle,” that float about in the public consciousness, supporting these policies throughout the nation.

Less obviously and more perniciously, these reform “fairy tales” provide a language for discussing education that reinforces this worldview: phrases like “failing schools” and the “cradle to career pipeline” are normalized, and in doing so, unconsciously frame the issue for a reader or speaker, as I observe in my comic with graphic journalist Josh Neufeld “This School is Not a Pipe.” (for Truthout.org). Thus, the first step towards reclaiming public education is in seeing through the propaganda, in even recognizing the stories and language of reform.

Duncan
RESIST:  It’s not enough just to see that the propaganda of reform doesn’t fit the reality of schools that most children, parents, and educators experience.  Indeed, I became passionate about advocating for public education upon seeing such an astonishing chasm between what the media said about my profession, and what I saw every day as a teacher in a community college.  Thus, I began to call out these false stories – much like Royal has (and of course, Diane Ravitch), to expose both the “fairy tales” of reform and the drum-beat of public school failure.

But this is not enough: further, it’s important to resist not just the reform stories, but the reform language itself, which is drawn largely from the lexicon of the business world, and not education.   Once starting a conversation around “failing schools,” the debate is already lost; this term implies an entire worldview, one suggesting that public schools themselves are solely responsible for the struggles they face, much like a failing business. Logically, the “failing school” should be shuttered – much like failing business, with old management and employees fired, and new ones installed to secure “success”. In this way, there is a clear, unwavering line from a single phrase to an entire ideology, and specific policies, such as school closures.   Thus, we must not just avoid exposing the stories of the colonists, but their misleading language – which reinforces these stories, and favors the underlying corporate ideology.

REFRAME:  For the first few years of writing about education, I primarily focused on these first two steps – on pointing out the astonishing flaws of the reform propaganda.  But this, too, is not enough: indeed, reformers rightly point out that while many of us decry their  agenda, we don’t as readily point to our own vision.  I know that I’ve been guilty on this count – even as I’m working in my own college to develop new methods of teaching, and new programs to serve students.   Thus, instead of just pointing out the flaws in the corporate agenda, we must fill in the gap – to share our own stories, and our own language, through traditional media channels, and moreso, through social media.

“Public education is like producing a musical masterpiece,” Royal told me, in providing her own vision of an ideal public school system, one that would improve upon the privatized, two-tiered system that has taken over her hometown.  “[You need to provide] each instrument with the right sheet music to get the best performance from that particular instrument. Each instrument is different and can not be standardized, but with the right music, each can reach its highest heights.   When children are given the kind of educational support they need based on who they are, they can produce beautiful music,” she concludes, reframing schooling with a fresh metaphor, a new language, a new vocabulary of reform, one that highlights the inherent humanity and individuality of children, while still imagining a harmonious, yet diverse community.

Imagine: What kind of policies would our politicians produce if they imagined the classroom as a musical masterpiece rather than a business, or even worse, a pipeline?  What kind of classroom experience would children have immersed in metaphors of music, rather than spreadsheets and oil?

RECLAIM:   To reclaim the promise of public education, to develop policies that are more musical than monotonous, we must reclaim the conversation from the educational colonists.  We must find ways to mitigate the Gates Paradox, to render this algorithm of inequity obsolete, to tell the stories of what we see, in the language that we use, and get the public to hear it.

This is easier blogged than done.

However, as I attend the Network for Public Education Conference March 1 and 2nd in Austin, TX, (along with Karran Harper Royal, Diane Ravitch, and many others) we will not just resist, but work proactively and collectively towards a more humane, democratic, truly public school system.

The music has just begun…

npe-conference-2014-poster-2

[1] See my essay at Truthout:  “The Answer to the Great Question of Education Reform? The Number 42”  for an extensive discussion on the technicalization of education – and its dissidents.

[2] For extensive evidence on reform propaganda see Adam Bessie.“GERM Warfare: How to reclaim the education debate from corporate occupation.” Project Censored 2013. Ed. Mickey Huff. Seven Stories: New York. 2013.

[3] For documentation, see my essay at The Daily Censored: “Ms. Reform: Education Reform as Starlet of NetFlix’s “House of Cards”

School ™: Resist the Feed, Feed the Resistance

Essays

“School ™ is not so bad now, like back when my grandparents were kids, when the schools were run by the government, which sounds completely like, Nazi, to have the government running the schools?”

So proclaims what sounds like a Twitter tirade by angry, futuristic teenage reincarnation of Milton Friedman.   Rather, it is Titus, the wired teen protagonist M.T. Anderson’s prophetic 2002 Young Adult (YA) novel Feed, who lives in a world in which Friedman’s neo-liberal economic philosophies have been taken to their dystopian extreme: America’s environment is so spoiled by consumption that everyone must live in hermetically-sealed bubbles, in which the public commons have been so privatized, that even the clouds are trademarked.  Titus – and most Americans – also live in a hermetically-sealed bubble of their mind, each plugged into the “feed” – a chip which connects his brain to a corporate controlled internet, which is constantly bombarding him with marketing, even in dreams.

Sound familiar?

While many have commented on how accurate the 11-year old Feed is in its predictions of social networking and mobile technology, its dire predictions on the corporatization of education are no less accurate – and certainly, no less frightening.  Published in the same year as the No Child Left Behind was implemented, Feed takes Friedman’s anti-government belief on education to its logical conclusion: that of a corporate monopoly on our children’s minds.

In Titus’ description of his “feed” – which is no utterly normal to him, beyond the point of question – we hear echoes of corporate reformers and technological utopians, who say our public, government run-school system is outdated, in need of “disruptive innovation” – or, to put it more plainly, corporate management and products.   In Titus’ future America, the “feed” is the ultimate disruptive invention for education, putting online education, MOOCs, and teaching machines to shame:

People were really excited when they first came out with feeds.  It was all da da da, this big educational thing, da da da, your child will have the advantage, encyclopedias at their fingertips, closer than their fingertips, etc. That’s one of the great things about the feed – that you can be supersmart without ever working. Everyone is supersmart now. You can look things up automatic, like science and history, like if you want to know which battles of the Civil War George Washington fought in and shit.

While Titus may say that the feed makes everyone “supersmart,” he can’t read, he isn’t informed on any world events, and uses the feed primarily to m-chat (mind chat), watch TV programs, and most of all, to buy the latest things – things that, somehow, the corporate-run feed knows before he does – a marketing strategy we now call “predictive analytics”:

But the braggest thing about the feed, the thing that made it really big, is that it knows everything you want and hope for, sometimes before you even know what those things are.  Everything we think and feel is taken in by the corporations, mainly by data ones like Feedlink and On Feed and American Feedware, and they make a special profile, one that’s keyed just to you…so all you have to do is want something and there’s a chance it will be yours.

Again, sound familiar?

School ™ is perfectly designed for the “feed” – for the constant consumerism required of the hermetically-sealed corporate state he lives in.  Indeed, School ™ is essential in training children for how to use to feed, to make sure its hardwired not just in their minds, but their spirits:

Now that School ™ is run by the corporations, it’s pretty brag because it teaches us how the world can be used, like mainly how to use our feeds… now we do stuff in classes about how to work technology and how to find bargains and what’s the best way to get a job and how to decorate our bedroom.

Ultimately, just as schools in a fascist nation are indoctrination sites, critical investments by the ruling class to ensure its continued rule, School ™ cultivates loyalty to corporate bubble in which Titus lives:

Also, it’s good because that way we know that the big corps are made up of real human beings, and not just jerks out for money, because taking care of children, they care about America’s future.  It’s an investment in tomorrow (Emphasis added).

In shockingly accurate parallels to post-NCLB corporate media narratives, Titus sees the public school system as a “failure,” its bad teachers destroying the moral fiber of the youth, and his corporate masters as philanthropists, providing his salvation:

When no one was going to pay for the public schools anymore and they were all like filled with guns and drugs and English teachers who were really pimps and stuff, some of the big media congloms got together and gave all this money and bought the schools so all of them could have computers and pizza for lunch and stuff.

And while Titus might be swayed by free pizza, faux-philanthropy, and discounts for the Watts Riot inspired pants from Weatherbee and Crotch, he still knows something is wrong, something worse than pimp English teachers:

Of course, everyone is like, da da da, evil corporations, oh they’re so bad, we all say that, and we all know they control everything.  I mean, it’s not great, because who knows what evil shit they’re up to.  Everyone feels bad about that.

But for Titus, the corporate takeover has happened – generations ago.  His life is “normal,” and beyond normal, it’s pleasant.  Most of all, it’s the only way Titus knows how to live, as School ™, his parents, his friends – everyone, really – tell him the feed is all there is and should be:

But [corporations] are the only way to get all this stuff, and it’s no good getting pissy about it, because they’re still going to control everything whether you like it or not.  Plus, they keep like everyone in the world employed, so it’s not like we could do without them. And it’s really great to know everything about everything whenever we want, to have it just like, in our brain, just sitting there.

Titus’ tale, his resignation to the blind pleasures of consumerism on which he was raised and schooled, could be many of my students – heck, Titus probably was me at some point in time, or any of us who grew up in the hermetically-sealed suburbs of post-modern America Feed so poignantly reflects.  Our public school system – while increasingly consumed by corporate America – still presents education as an economic service, part of the “cradle-to-career pipeline,” or worse yet, a consumable product, like a pair of Kent State inspired jackets from Weatherbee and Crotch.

Thankfully, though, Titus has hope, in the form of an unlikely flower growing in their dead world: Violet.  And hopefully, she teaches Titus – and all of us, working and learning at School ™ – to “Resist the Feed. Buy an Oxcart.”

See Paul Thomas’ wonderful work on Speculative Fiction, including a recent essay on Fahrenheit 451.

“The Circle” of Education Reform

Essays

My latest essay at Truthout “The Great Answer to Education Reform? The Number 42” was released last week, and it was exciting to see the dialogue on Truthout, Facebook, and Twitter, as readers debated the role of automation, corporatization, and technical progress in our schools, and our culture more broadly.

In writing the essay, I was most inspired by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s prophetic and hilarious first novel Player Piano, which vividly imagines a completely technicalized society (Thanks to Paul Thomas for recommendation).

dave-eggers-the-circle

But if it’s possible to be reverse-inspired (as I’m sure Dr. Who would agree it is, given the right kind of temporal flux), then Dave Egger’s latest novel The Circle –which I read immediately after the essay was published – vividly depicts what I was trying to express, extending upon it significantly.  Egger’s novel – set in a world perhaps just a few years away – imagines quite vividly and frighteningly what will happen once Big Data dictates all elements of our lives . In one section, he explores a new data system The Circle has created called YOUTHRANK, which compares all students across the country against each other,  using their standardized testing scores and other quantitative metrics.  Indeed, once it’s fully up and running, with “full participation from all schools and districts, we’ll be able to keep daily rankings, with every test, every pop quiz incorporated instantly.”  That way, “soon we’ll be able to know at any given moment where our sons or daughters stand against the rest of American students, and then against the world’s students.”

YOUTHRANK may be a prophetic warning, but it’s also already here in nascent stages, in the form of the  InBloom student database, funded by the Gates Foundation and built by Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp.  And certainly, the competitive, data-driven ethos underneath YOUTHRANK is already encoded in federal law, in the form of Race to the Top – if The Circle existed, it would no doubt get the $3 billion grant it was given by the (fictional) Department of Education in Egger’s novel.

More broadly, though, The Circle provides important answers to the questions raised in my essay: What kind of world is Silicon Valley leading us to? And do we want to live there?

A Model T Education: Public Schooling on the Assembly Line

Essays

One of my essays from earlier this year, which links well into an upcoming media appearance…

Mass production is a problem the auto industry solved over 100 years ago,” veteran education reporter Jonn Merrow narrates over grainy images of Model Ts being rolled out of a factory in his most recent PBS NewsHour report. He observes that with the Model T, Henry Ford’s innovation was not in creating a quality car, but in constructing an assembly-line which could mass-produce them, providing this once cutting edge technology affordably to the public. “But it’s an issue our education system has yet to figure out. Nobody has figured out how to mass-produce high-quality, cost-effective schools,” Merrow mournfully concludes – public education has yet to discover its “Model T.”

In other words, Merrow – who has been reporting on education for forty years – is saying public education should aspire to the assembly line of the 1920s.

Perhaps the Mayans were right.

The last few years have felt like the beginning of the end of public education: it’s not just neo-con think tanks and billionaire industrialists calling for the end of public schooling as we know it, even our Public Broadcasting System is airing reports that our public schools aren’t acting enough like productive, efficient, and profitable factories[i]

Read more @ Truthout

http://truth-out.org/news/item/13732-a-model-t-education-public-schooling-on-the-assembly-line

The Gates Paradox – teaser

Essays

Here’s an excerpt from my upcoming essay!

Call it the Gates Paradox – the power of your voice in the “education reform” debate is proportional to the distance from the classroom (and your proximity to Silicon Valley), multiplied by the amount of money you earn.  Of course, each additional media outlet owned increases the influence by a factor of ten.

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