No matter your viewpoint on the coronavirus, for those who care about democratic public schools, our fears merge when it comes to worrying that technology will replace teachers and end those schools. Covid-19 is the perfect storm, and Prenda micro-schools are the prototype. These are schools that focus on commercial tech programs without real teachers. Students learn by screens. Getting rid of teachers is a massive goal of the privatization movement. It’s not a new goal, either.
In 1992, The Nation published a report, “A small circle of friends: Bush’s new American schools.” President H. W. Bush, then Education Secretary Lamar Alexander, and Fortune 500 C.E.O.s launched the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC).
The report says, It was the centerpiece of Bush’s education plan and was supposed to mark the emergence of corporate America as the savior of the nation’s schoolchildren.
The NASDC didn’t become the revolution they planned, but it’s easy to see their fingerprints on the corporate push for school privatization today, including the influence of technology.
Here are some excerpts of The Nation’s report.
Perhaps most chilling, many of the plans approved by NASDC use technology, along with low-cost, nonprofessional classroom assistants, as a way of radically reducing the authority and presence of teachers. In Bensenville, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, teachers will be little more than part of the technological apparatus: “The teacher’s desk will be replaced by an Electronic Teaching Center” that will provide the main connection between teachers and students. Bolt Beranek and Newman, an engineering conglomerate and military contractor, will run two elementary schools in Massachusetts built around “pervasive use of the computer.”
All these high-tech plans implicitly disregard the power of teachers as professionals and students as thinkers. In these schemes, teachers are conduits and cops, carrying information and enforcing rules. Children are little more than receptacles, whose ability to contain the prescribed information can best be measured in an objective national knowledge test. Such plans ignore decades of recognition by social scientists and classroom teachers alike that a child’s consciousness is built not just through the ingestion of information but through the subtle day-to-day interactions among teachers, students and parents.
All the Presidents and many leaders after this time relied on corporate America instead of teachers for school reform. President Clinton focused on standardization, and President G.W. Bush promoted No Child Left Behind. Governor Jeb Bush is still stumping for online learning. And remember Jeb Bush’s Cyber Attack on Public Schools? President Obama’s Race to the Top did public education no favors. With President Trump, we’re watching the ultimate destruction of America’s democratic public education system, with a corporate shill running America’s schools!
Enter micro-schools like Prenda. As public school teachers struggle against odds to reach out remotely to help children through this challenging time, while districts ponder signing on to commercialized tech programs like those Prenda embraces, we wonder whether the pandemic will be the final end to public education.
Will K12 Inc., Connections Academy, Khan Academy, and the Clayton Christiansen Institute, Knowledge Works, Digital Promise, and the many groups and commercialized tech programs that seek to remake democratic public education become the new norm?
Does society recognize the danger?
When tax dollars fund public schools, we get reports on how those schools are functioning. We may not like those reports, but through local school boards, Americans should have the power to do something about improving schools which they are supposed to own.
No one knows what students will learn in Prenda schools. There’s no accountability to the taxpaying public. No teachers. Tech programs are beholden to no one. The State of Arizona cannot even determine how to regulate whether Prenda is a school but still funds them like a charter or private school. Who’s checking to see if the students are learning anything in any of these schools? Prenda has grown from 80 to 341 micro-schools since Covid-19. That’s 341 small groups of children learning by screen without real teachers to guide them.
Despite this focus on technology, there’s no independent, peer-reviewed research to indicate that this is a better way for children to learn. There’s also no discussion about this issue on the campaign trail.
Schools like Prenda give parents and teachers reason to fear. While the school hasn’t yet turned a profit, that’s their focus.
The push for screens to replace teachers began a long time ago. The question now is whether this is technology’s moment to replace schools and teachers altogether and to ultimately place schools into the marketplace? Does profit over children rule?
Or will teachers rise to more excellent professionalism democratically, with technology as a tool that they control? Will America demand outstanding democratic public education, or will they sell themselves and their democratic school ownership to the highest bidders?
Will democratic public education rebound when it is time to safely remove the masks?
If America gives up on its democratic public schools, their schools, and Prenda-like schools reliant on unproven technology are all students have to learn, what will America look like in the future? That’s the question we should be asking.
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References
Spilane, M. & Shapiro, B. (1992). A Small Circle of Friends. Bush’s New American Schools. The Nation, 25(8) September 21, 1992.
Bush, J. (2020, May 3). It’s time to embrace distance learning — and not just because of the coronavirus. The Washington Post, Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/03/jeb-bush-its-time-embrace-distance-learning-not-just-because-coronavirus/
Como siempre bien dicho.
Gracias!
Totalmente de acuerdo!
( =
I wrote this blog post over four years ago. My heart is breaking for what has been happening and is happening to public education, to children, to teachers, to families, and to our democratic society. https://resseger.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/story-telling-species/
Thank you for sharing, Sheila. You are another who saw this coming.
In my district we are being required to use Edgenuity as a supplement to our teaching. It sounds good but is a very dangerous step towards removing the live teacher in public education. The way this works is the classroom teacher chooses an Edgenuity lesson. It is all scripted. There is an “instructional coach” inside the lesson for the kids to use! An instructional online coach not employed by the district! Lessons not created by the classroom teacher! Online grading and sorting of students by the progrsm! What could possibly go wrong?
Public education as we knew and loved it is almost in the coffin!
My cynical guess is that professional teachers will be more common in affluent schools and screens will be more common for “other people’s kids.” Parents with the finances will remove their children from public schools altogether for the kind of education all kids deserve. So we’ll have the same stratification as we do now.
“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely. Acted upon, it destroys our democracy.” John Dewey, in School and Society
Thank you, Carrie. I think some of the private schools are turning to online learning too due to Covid-19. But I appreciate your point and the Dewey quote.
Thank you Nancy for the information. I have never been exposed to children or education until I have my own children. Throughout the 12 years of parenting, I have been observing the absurdity of using apps and electronic sources in schools. I have had many meetings with administrators and teachers requesting serious educational resources for my children. As a reponse, I got them staring at me like I was crazy, And then they try to sell me the idea that this is the way it is heading to implement technology, as I observe children not been able to write or know very basic knowledge. Classrooms full of tablet and laptops never connected with me. This pandemic has given me the opportunity to pull my children out of schools and homeschool with pen and paper. It is disheartening to see the deficiencies in education our children are having due to using these ridiculous apps. And seeing parents thinking that their kids are doing well, without recognizing that watching a video of a robot on “Brain Pop” and clicking answers to questions is NOT EDUCATION. I hope these plans of eliminating real teachers crumbles soon. This is horrific. Nancy, I really appreciate the information you present which confirms my observations and materializes them. Now next time, I meet with administrators and teachers, I will have a stronger argument on how this is ridiculous and it only fulfills my suspicions of money making at the expense of education. I really appreciate you and your site full of valuable information and your constant and tireless effort to educate society on education. Without education, there is no future. Thank you very much!!
Well said. Tech is a tool, but there’s no research to show it is better than the kind of learning you describe.
A teacher I know whose name I won’t mention so as not to embarrass recently reminded parents and teachers of the importance of books.
It is troubling to see so many parents of young children relying so much on online instruction. I think parents getting helpful suggestions from teachers would be a better use.
Thanks, Monica. I appreciate your comment.
As an educator of 38 years, Principal of 13 years, it has been crystal clear that the physical presence of a teacher with professional supports and funding is crucial to student learning. This relationship is critical in developing motivation, empathy, and the value of networking as a means to negotiate through life. None of these tools can be adequately covered through remote learning. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Human Kind, Yuval Harari indicates that homo sapiens could soon be overwhelmed by Artificial Intelligence brought on through the devaluation of human contact. Covid should not be made as the accelerator in this process.