Advocates for public education are denouncing the plan by the New York governor and the billionaire founder of Microsoft to “reimagine” the state’s school system, Julia Conley reports.
Governor Andrew Cuomo tours Northwell Health Core Lab in New Hyde Park, N.Y., April 19, 2020. (Kevin P. Coughlin, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, Flickr)
By Julia Conley
Common Dreams
Public education advocates on Wednesday rejected New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s pledge to work with billionaire entrepreneurs like Microsoft founder Bill Gates to “reimagine” his state’s school systems once the coronavirus pandemic subsides.
In his daily press briefing Tuesday, nearly two months after ordering schools throughout the state to close and millions of children began attending classes remotely from home, Cuomo said New York must “take this experience and really learn how we can do differently and better with our education system in terms of technology and virtual education.”
Cuomo said the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with the state of New York to develop a “Blueprint to Reimagine Education.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, the governor said, offers an opportunity to “revolutionize” New York’s schools in ways that Gates, a school privatization proponent, has promoted for years.
Bill Gates, wearing his LSE cap, waves to students as he leaves the London School of Economics after speaking at the inaugural Global Poverty Project 2012 conference. (LSE in Pictures, Flickr)
“Bill Gates is a visionary in many ways and his ideas and thoughts on technology and education, he’s spoken about for years,” Cuomo said. “But I think we now have a moment in history where we can actually incorporate and advance those ideas.”
Critics including New York State Allies for Public Education, Class Size Matters, and the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy were wary of handing the state’s education system over to Gates, who previously launched — among other “education reform” projects — a $1 billion initiative in three states to improve “teacher effectiveness” which policy think tank RAND found did “more harm than good” for students.
“Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have promoted one failed educational initiative after another, causing huge disaffection in districts throughout the state,” wrote the three organizations in a letter to the governor. “Whether that be the high-handed push by the Gates Foundation for the invalid Common Core standards, unreliable teacher evaluation linked to test scores, or privacy-violating data-collection via the corporation known as inBloom Inc., the education of our children has been repeatedly put at risk by their non-evidence based ‘solutions,’ which were implemented without parent input and despite significant public opposition.”
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Cuomo’s announcement of his partnership with the Gates Foundation came two weeks after the governor warned that without the federal funding New York State needs to confront the Covid-19 pandemic, school budgets could be cut by 50 percent next year. Earlier in April, legislators passed a state budget in which education spending was flat compared with last year’s budget.
The Education Law Center wrote in 2018 that Cuomo had spent his entire term as governor proposing “woefully inadequate” aid increases for public school students.
Jamaal Bowman, a former middle school principal in The Bronx and a congressional candidate in New York’s 16th district, suggested Cuomo “try fully funding [schools] for once” rather than “reimagining” them.
Other progressive advocates in the state, including longtime public education activist and former gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon, also spoke out against Cuomo’s proposal on social media.
Diane Ravitch. (Czar, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)
Education historian Diane Ravitch wrote at her blog that Cuomo’s interest in enlisting powerful billionaires to remake New York’s public systems in the wake of the pandemic does not end with Gates. The governor has called on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to advise him on “technology utilization” for schools while former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will oversee a large-scale contact-tracing effort. Schmidt has also been named to lead Cuomo’s Blue Ribbon Commission aimed at “reimagining New York State’s current systems of health and education.”
“The pandemic is turning into a grand opportunity for the foxes to raid the hen house under cover of darkness,” wrote Ravitch. “Parents, teachers, and students want a safe and orderly return to real education taught by real teachers in real schools.”
The governor, Ravitch added, “seems oblivious to the eagerness of parents and students alike to return to real live teachers in real school buildings. Parents want to return to work, students want to see their teachers and their friends, and they want to return to their activities and sports. Teachers want to see their students. No one but Cuomo—and probably Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt—wants remote learning to become permanent.”
Since remote learning became commonplace across the country in March, children’s advocates have warned of the safety and privacy risks associated with students spending several hours per day using online learning programs.
“Since the schools were shut down in mid-March, our understanding of the profound deficiencies of screen-based instruction has only grown,” wrote the three groups in their letter to Cuomo Tuesday. “Along with many other parents and educators, we strongly oppose the Gates Foundation to influence the direction of education in the state by expanding the use of ed tech.”
“Instead, we ask that you fund our schools sufficiently and equitably, to allow for the smaller classes, school counselors, and other critical services that our children will need more than ever before, given the myriad losses they have experienced this year,” they added.
Julia Conley is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
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I don’t trust Gates but for me personally I know I would have done a lot better in school if I could have done at least 50% oof my classes on-line and remotely and at my own pace. I did a few classes like that as well as my electrical apprenticeship. Certain topics were much easier on a computer by myself, others truely require physical hands on classroom time. Give kids/families the option, let them decide what works best for them.
One of the most important tasks of schooling is socialization with peers and adults. You can’t do that with remote learning. Gates is into charter schools; let us mention that he prepped from the most ritzy private school in the Seattle area, Lakeside. His experience with public schools is quite inadequate.
As a former school therapist, a much under utilized role, it is impossible to do that with remote learning.
Online classes, with no friends and teachers degrades the learning experiences for kids. In actual classrooms, students get to meet students from different backgrounds and find that in life, happiness in learning very often comes from a great teacher, or team of teachers. Students get to see different ways of thinking about things, along with different ways of creating. Besides, having actual human beings with different personalities and ways of learning helps kids to realize that the idea that there is only ever one way to do something is false. Very often disabilities are recognized by teachers in the classroom, and learning only on line is very tiring for all eyes, especially young eyes.
Sometimes you’ll have wonderful teachers, and sometimes not—-but that is the way of the world, and don’t forget, everyone learns about the world in different ways—how sad if those with great wealth thought that their plants were the only way .
Remote learning is a joke. I’m taking care of my 11 year old grandchild and she’s not “learning” anything. She can barely focus on the 1 zoom class a day, it’s a challenge to get her to complete work (and the work she does have to complete is a total joke, 2 questions for an assignment). It’s irresponsible to consider taking students ability to interact physically with teachers, parents, other kids and a physical place to go to every day away, permanently. I can’t even imagine a world where children would have no social contact, sports, learning, class and playtime with peers. Would be a most dreary and impoverished world. Like living in isolation in a prison. No joy for the Gates model. Just a way to train hampsters on a wheel. I bet his kids will have real schools, art, culture, sports and the rest of what Gates and Cuomo want to take away from America. Nope!
“Instead, we ask that you fund our schools sufficiently and equitably, to allow for the smaller classes, school counselors, and other critical services that our children will need more than ever before, given the myriad losses they have experienced this year.” As a former teacher, Amen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Businessmen have always been the poorest managers of education, because their only goal is profit.
As college trustees, they push marketing concepts and follow the money, impoverishing their curricula.
In recessions they take unreasonable risks in hope of profit, and then bankrupt their colleges with no regrets.
They cut liberal arts programs as less profitable, and get rid of faculty to cut costs instead of part-timing them.
Educational administrators must be more cost-conscious than the faculty, but must advance education over profit.
Large corporations are dishonest and marketing-oriented in every move, always to the customer’s disadvantage.
I cuss at Microsoft every hour, for its fake “upgrades” that mess up my work so often with fake conveniences.
Some digital programs are great, for advanced or special needs students, but centralized tracking is undesirable.
Give those to large corporations, and kids will see nothing but smiley-faces and fun-ratings and advertising.
Teachers form one of our largest professions concerned with the well-being of society; no wonder the rich hate them.
They are also the largest group of persons in competition with mass media and able to contradict oligarchy narratives.
With the US economy moving inexorably toward monopoly, extortion, and fraud, honest services must be increased.
We should be training millions of teachers and doctors and sending them to developing nations, as Cuba does.
Sam F – lots of excellent points in your above-comment on this good article. People need to constantly remind themselves that for-profit entities are just what they call themselves — for-profit. Ultimately they’re not FOR nor AGAINST an ethical society, they’re oblivious to it… it’s irrelevant to the business model. They’re amoral organizations, only doing minor ‘good works’ for PR & advertising benefits, and in the US there’s actually a law prohibiting public corporations from engaging in nonprofit activities that would negatively affect the shareholders’ return.
An economic system centered around the for-profit system may or may-not be good/desirable, but letting government be co-opted by this ethos is just plain wrong.
It’s the same old question – Which aspects of life work best under PUBLIC control, and which are best left to PROFITABILITY ? Making monetary profit out of schooling our children seems as wrong to me as a privatised police force, prison, or profit driven hospital.
That said, there are still plenty of activities, functions, and industries that DO function best if left to the most efficient or profitable operator. I’m thinking more along the lines of PRODUCTION rather than SERVICES. The most urgent service to be restored to public control is BANKING !
“…Ravitch added, “[Cuomo] seems oblivious to the eagerness of parents and students alike to return to real live teachers in real school buildings. Parents want to return to work, students want to see their teachers and their friends, and they want to return to their activities and sports. Teachers want to see their students. No one but Cuomo—and probably Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt—wants remote learning to become permanent.”…”
Amen! Thank you Ms. Ravitch for your eloquence in hitting the nail on the head here.
One of the tragedies of the Covid hysteria is that all the kids from about 5 y.o. to 25 y.o. are missing out on very enjoyable formative experiences and memories that will last. I feel so sorry for them.
Billionaires never stop meddling. Masters of transferring wealth away from the public and into their own pockets they want total control over every aspect of our lives – all the better to continue fleecing us. We need to take the stolen wealth back and return it to the public coffers where it can be put to good use. People like Gates, Bezos, et al, should be prosecuted for all the damage they’ve done to the commons. Some for all the politicians of both parties who enable this continued theft and desecration.
It’s not meddling. It’s philanthrophy. It makes them feel good. (rolling eyes)