The New Corporation by Joel Bakan

Author:Joel Bakan [Bakan, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2020-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

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Using technology to de-professionalize teachers, and thereby reduce costs, is not unique to Bridge. It’s become a veritable movement among education reformers worldwide. Bridge’s tablets, and the pedagogical approach they represent, mirror a major trend. These days, the most vocal school privatization advocates come from the tech sector, and their express aim is to replace teachers with technology. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Reed Hastings are just a few of “The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools,” according to The New York Times, and a large part of their mission is to automate classrooms. As described by Emmett Carson, then a manager of many of these billionaires’ philanthropic portfolios, what they are attracted to, and want to support, are “models [that] can produce better results…given the changes in innovation that are underway, with artificial intelligence and automation.”

“In the tech industry’s dream,” says Ravitch, “if the teacher is removed from the equation, then you can cut costs dramatically.” What the industry and its billionaire philanthropists want, she says, is “to have teacherless classrooms”—to develop and deploy technologies that, like Bridge’s tablets, allow companies to hire nonprofessionals and sometimes replace teachers altogether. To that end, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft, among others, are developing a bevy of technologies—virtual classrooms, interactive teaching software, digital marketing strategies (to insert in online lessons), machine testing and continuous assessment, digital behavior management, and social and emotional development tools—that, together, constitute a rapidly expanding tech sector estimated to be worth more than $45 billion.

While many of the new technologies obviate the need for professionally trained teachers, others allow small numbers of instructors to reach large numbers of pupils remotely. Corporate-run virtual “schools,” for example, provide students with computers on which they follow lessons at home. Now operating in numerous states—they are particularly widespread in Pennsylvania—“cyber-charters” have become cash cows for their corporate operators, because despite not having expenses associated with brick-and-mortar schools, per-student funding from public coffers remains the same. Cyber-charters are notorious for cheating scandals and enrollment inflation, among other kinds of scams and fraud, but the real problem, says Ravitch, is that they don’t work, as reflected by “low test scores, terrible graduation rates, and tremendous attrition.”

Conservative school reformers cheer alongside liberal Silicon Valley moguls like Gates and Zuckerberg as new technologies take over teaching. “New computer-based approaches to learning simply require far fewer teachers per student—perhaps half as many, and possibly fewer than that,” say the conservative commentators John Chubb and Terry Moe in their book Liberating Learning. Which, an added bonus, dilutes the power of teachers’ unions. “Technology,” as Chubb and Moe explain, “is also destined to help resolve the political problem that has prevented reformers from taking effective action. To put it simply: the seepage of technology into the system—which cannot be stopped and will continue—works slowly but inexorably to undermine the political power of the teachers’ unions. With their power to resist weakened over time, the floodgates will then be opened.”

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