(Screenshot: Fox 5, 5/5/20)
This week on CounterSpin: One teacher described it as a “gut punch” hearing New York Governor (and current media crush) Andrew Cuomo talk about “re-imagining” education in the wake of the pandemic, without what he called the “old model” emphasis on teachers and classrooms. Cuomo announced an initiative with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—who’ve been behind decades of education interventions in this country—all of which have failed to deliver on their promises, but have drained funds from public schools and undermined public school teachers.
One Gates project that activists fought off was a cloud-based system called “inBloom” that collected millions of students’ detailed personal information—a massive intrusion Cuomo called “necessary.” Maybe that could spur some questions, particularly now that Cuomo’s added Google head Eric Schmidt to the Re-Imagining team?
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University and author of, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools. We talk with her about the latest scheme for rich folks to decide what’s best for schools their children don’t attend.
Transcript:‘The War on Public Schools Continues, Only Now It’s Considered Reinvention’
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at press coverage of China and the oil industry in the time of Covid-19.
Cuomo has his head up his ass along with wealthy investors.
This is only “counter spin” in that it spins the information to an extreme degree the other way of whoever the enemy is instead of presenting a balanced approach. As a public school teacher for 18 years, Ravitch is completely wrong in lauding the “do as we have done” educational policies and practices of the last 50 years. We are among the lowest-performing industrialized countries in the world. Gates has not always been successful, but who else is trying to fix the system? This story ran on the same day as a story about the government cutting state education budgets by 14%-35%. That’s 1/3 of a school’s budget of government dollars GONE. Who is going to fill that gap? Probably the same people Ravitch bad-mouthed here. She was only right in that teachers play a significant role and we can’t just educate from home, but much of her argument is extremely short-sighted if not flat out wrong and the interviewer just egged her on with equally misplaced ideas. Pushing charters is against public schools??? CHARTERS ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS!! They use the same funding as public schools, they accept students freely through fair systems, they are approved by the same school boards and Public Education Commissions as others, and they are often built right in the heart of public school systems that have failed kids for generations and have done nothing about it. I know this can change state-by-state, but charters are not private. Ravitch is just wrong. I like how she wants “reformer” replaced with “disrupter” yet disruption is exactly what we need. A change to the status quo is the only way to improve education. The same with the opening commentary about oil and going back to a system that is “killing us.” Right, I agree, but education is also killing us. Universities too expensive, 70% of high school graduates unable to read (that’s NAEP results! – a standardized measure), math scores in the pits, student debts in the trillions, class sizes in K-12 so large that teaching and assessment are fundamentally flawed, buildings falling apart, and students across the board so underserved that parents will send their kids across the city to a charter school just so they receive REAL special ed services, genuine one-on-one coaching, and teachers who actually know their names and the needs of the families. Ravitch and the interviewer are just so out of touch, it was cringy to listen.
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