On March 1, 2012, uplifted by the spirit of Occupy, a group of us picked a fight with the largest private foundation on the planet.
Two years later, we are now facing the very real possibility that in addition to reproducing the education pipelines that lead to prison, precarious labor, or privilege, Bill Gates is encouraging his fellow billionaires to railroad highly explosive Bakken shale oil and Tar Sands bitumen through the middle of our city.
“The 99% Challenges the Gates Foundation to an Education Policy Throwdown”
Back in 2012, we challenged the education policy experts at the Gates Foundation to a street-style debate as part of a coordinated National Day of Action for Public Education. (We even delivered a fancy engraved invitation .)
We joined together to protest the outsized influence that the Gates Foundation wields to push its neoliberal education model. To our amazement, their staff actually came out to debate with us when about 300 or so of us descended on their palatial headquarters in Seattle.
Frankly, considering that this was their full time job, the Gates Foundation policy experts were woefully unimpressive in this General Assembly style interaction. The parents and teachers in our crowd gave them quite a drubbing over some key issues that these “experts” are clearly getting wrong:
Standardized Testing and Teacher Pay – the Gates Foundation was (and still is) one of the major players in the push to tie teacher pay to standardized test results. A member of the crowd (an editor at Rethinking Schools magazine) nailed them over the numerous studies that showed the volatility of test scores from year to year. Teachers with stellar scores one year are painted as failures the next. Gates Foundation experts sheepishly agreed.
Racist Origins of Standardized Testing – Another participant stumped them completely by asking about the origin of standardized testing. The Gates Foundation experts were not aware that the tools they promote were originally designed by the Eugenics movement to apply assembly line models to classrooms in attempt to prove the ‘genetic superiority’ of whites. Standardized tests continue to do what they were designed to do — maintain a system of racially segregated education.
Charter Schools – the Gates Foundation was (and still is) one of the major players in the push to advance charter schools. As we have pointed out repeatedly in words and actions, the public schools are failing youth of color and working class youth. It is understandable that many parents, communities, and progressive teachers will want to build alternative schools that have some degree of autonomy – ability to develop their own curriculum, to set their own schedules, etc. Many people start charter schools thinking that they will offer such freedom; Bill Gates, on the other hand, wants charters in order to help take capitalism to a whole new level.
The charter movement may have started with good intentions but it has rapidly become a tool of corporate privatization rather than a viable laboratory where new forms of teaching can blossom and spread throughout the public system. Charter schools become just as bureaucratic and authoritarian as public schools – some even more so, because charter-ization often paves the way for military academies or militaristic, heavily disciplined forms of teaching. Many charter schools have admissions requirements, which makes it easier for elitist schools to maintain class and race segregation; this can also lead to discrimination against students with disabilities, which federal public education legislation was designed to prevent (whether it actually does that effectively is another whole conversation, but charters can make it worse).
Many charters are non-union, which means their teachers are more stressed out due to longer hours and lower pay. This can make it harder for them to focus on building relationships with students. It can also mean the teachers have less academic freedom and can be fired more easily for teaching something that the administration doesn’t like.
When Bill Gates and his foundation push for charter schools they are not pushing for the dream of parents and teachers who want to opt out of an oppressive public school system. They are pushing for their own dream – a corporate controlled education system with fewer public roadblocks in the way of billionaires who want to fashion education to suit their own goals.
The crowd made these criticisms of charter schools perfectly clear to the Gates Foundation.
People over Experts
At the “Education Policy Throwdown” we learned firsthand that what these “experts” are doing is not driven by observation or science. They are paid pseudo-scientists who are paid to go find facts that support the preconceived ideology of Bill Gates. They manipulate public policy behind the scenes by selective funding of research and by creating an atmosphere where everyone in academia is afraid to point out that the 800-pound gorilla has no clothes.
We also learned that they are vulnerable. When called out into the streets to actually explain themselves to the public that they foist these policies upon, the Gates Foundation is simply defenseless.
Gates’ Policies Are Still a Train Wreck
So, what else have they gotten wrong regarding education?
Small Schools Initiative: The Gates Foundation spent over $2B convincing school districts to break their large schools into smaller “academies”. Gates later admitted that the results were “disappointing” AFTER districts spent their OWN capital dollars physically re-architecting their campuses around a rich guy’s baseless hunch. (BTW, ask the folks at Seattle’s Cleveland High School about this one.)
Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project: The Gates Foundation spent years trying to validate their preconceived belief that teacher effectiveness can be scientifically measured. They were wrong. According to the National Education Policy Center, their “…results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems”. (This study even won the NEPC’s 2013 Bunkum Awards, recognizing lowlights in educational research).
Bill Gates and his foundation get it wrong because their policies are based on the neoliberal belief that the most important dimension of a human being is their contribution to the economy. This ingrained belief expresses itself in systems that make the role of education to simply prepare workers for the labor market.
In fact, this is the explicitly stated goal of their post-secondary education program: “Our goal — to ensure that all low-income young adults have affordable access to a quality postsecondary education that is tailored to their individual needs and educational goals and leads to timely completion of a degree or certificate with labor-market value.”
Hypocrisy, or something darker, must motivate the investment portfolio of the Gates Foundation. According to an analysis of their 2012 tax returns by Mother Jones Magazine:
They preach nutrition, but invest billions in MacDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Burger King, etc.
They preach support for the working poor, but invest billions in Walmart
They preach about fighting climate change, but invest billions in fossil fuels like Exxon Mobile, Arch Coal, Peabody Coal, Baker Hughes, etc.
WORST OF ALL, they preach that they will not invest in companies with “egregious corporate activities”, but invest in private prison companies like GEO Group and G4S Corporation, which operates 19 juvenile prisons in the US. (GEO Group publicly stated that their profits would suffer from “reductions in crime rates” that “could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences,” along with immigration reform and the decriminalization of drugs.)
The Gates Foundation directly profits from maintaining the School to Prison Pipeline and from maintaining the dysfunctional economic status quo.
However, as we have written about on this blog before — our struggle is not JUST against the School To Prison Pipeline, but against ALL of the pipelines that systemically strip people of power and possibilities. The pipelines to prison, to precarious employment, to overworked technology labor, or even to the stressed managerial class* are ALL BAD for the people in them. (*Note that suicide now kills more 40-60 year old white males than car accidents).
Next Target, Higher Education
Bill Gates and his foundation continue to build the pipelines that perpetuate privilege for some and prison for others. Their latest target is now the university system, which they seek to destroy and rebuild in their own techno-capitalist vision.
The Chronicle of Higher Education released a detailed report that sharply criticized their new approach, which they state is “designed for maximum measurability, delivered increasingly through technology, and…narrowly focused on equipping students for short-term employability.”
One structural change promoted by the Gates Foundation is the channeling of Federal Student Financial Aid toward schools that do not require ‘credit hours’, instead allowing students to demonstrate competency by completing online training.
According to the Chronicle’s report, the tremendous financial power wielded by the Gates Foundation creates an atmosphere of fear and intimidation within the administration of colleges and universities. Few are willing to speak out against Gates’ vision of education as job preparation. If schools follow this vision, we all lose the many other critical roles that colleges have played in society. The university will no longer be a place for reflection on the meaning of human existence (or other such “non-productive” activities).
Automation and Education in the Era of Robots
The Gates Foundation goals are shaped by Gates’ plans for the next era of capitalist accumulation. As Gates, Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com, and other tech company titans push for increasing automation of the workforce, more and more workers will be replaced by robots. As this happens, society could be increasingly divided into new classes – those who own the robots, those who manage them, those who serve these two groups, and everyone else who is deemed a “surplus population” and targeted for mass incarceration and other forms of social destruction.
If this stratification proceeds, the corporate owners would need to reproduce it in the schools. Since charter schools make the education system more flexible, their presence might help speed up this process. Gates and his technocrats might push for elite, holistic, creative schools for the future robot owners, heavy STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) schools for the future robot operators, discipline-based job training programs for the future servants, and prison-like schools for everyone else. Some teachers might become highly-paid professionals training the global elite and their programmers and engineers. Others might become low-paid service industry workers who deploy automated “teacher-proof” online curriculum, punishing students who don’t pay attention to what Bill Gates wants them to see on the screen in front of them.
The Gates Foundation is already deploying electronic bracelets on students’ arms that measure their arousal levels in the classroom; they could use this data to help automate teaching, creating online and cybernetic technologies to replace teachers. This might seem far-fetched, and it is admittedly decades away at least. But the world we live in today would seem extremely far-fetched to early 20th century auto workers. Little did they know that the time-study researchers watching them do their jobs would use this data to replace them with robots.
Bill Gates Might Just Blow Us All to Hell
Clearly Bill Gates has been wrong about many things before and will be again.
However, one his miscalculations may cause immediate searing and painful death to some and will likely accelerate the death of all of us through climate change.
You see, according to Forbes Magazine, Bill Gates is the person that convinced his friend Warren Buffet and his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, to invest in Burlington Northern Sante Fe (BNSF) and Canadian Railway (CN).
Bill is pretty clever, and he saw that all of that Tar Sands and Bakken Shale Oil might not be able to get to market in China, ESPECIALLY if the Keystone XL pipeline was not approved by the Obama administration. So, Berkshire Hathaway invested heavily to increase the capacity of these rail systems so that they could carry more of these petroleum products.
The cruel irony is that last month, the State Department ruled that Keystone XL will have no impact on CO2 emissions because, even if it not approved, the oil/tar in the ground would get to the market anyways via the newly expanded rail capacity. The result is that the staggering amounts of Canadian Tar Sands will now be strip-mined and sold overseas, accelerating the pace at which the planet will become a climate-ravaged hellscape.
The Gates Foundation holds more than $10B worth of Berkshire Hathaway. They took a minimal risk in the railway investment — even though the rail lines may have profited more without Keystone XL, they win. They can afford to take risks and lose a few.
However, folks in the pathway of their rail cars filled with these highly explosive materials are not so lucky. Perhaps Bill Gates should have educated himself on one of the key themes of Greek literature – Hubris. His unwarranted self-confidence puts our schools, our communities, and our climate at extreme risk.
where: Garfield High School, 400 23rd Ave, Seattle, WA 98122
when: Mon, Jan 20th, workshop from 9:30 – 11:00 AM
march begins at 12:30 – if you want to march with us, we’ll be meeting right across the street from Ezell’s Chicken.
what: The workshop will expose and analyze how the system stratifies the population through a set of “pipelines”. While some students are channeled into futures in management and the professions, and some into a working class, however insecure, still others are left to expect the least opportunities plus the threat of incarceration in the largest prison system in history.
Teachers, students, former inmates, and activists, will share how this is all fitting into a pattern of especially insidious racism, as well as other forms of discrimination.
You are invited to discuss these perspectives, and your own, with us. We will also discuss how we can inform, agitate, and organize together, to undo and overcome this oppression.
We will be marching together in the larger march, with posters and chants against the school to prison pipeline. Look out for us across from Ezells at 12:30 if you want to march with us.
One of the teachers speaking in the workshop is the author of this piece, about how she and her students turned the isolation room in their classroom into an art project.
Check out the links for more information, and check out those groups or others if you’d like get involved in struggles against the school to prison pipeline here in Seattle. There are lots of ways to get involved, from organizing and fighting back, to educating and creating art and music on the subject. We’ll see you out there!
The following is a press statement released yesterday from the More4Mann Coalition. It concerns a public hearing today, Dec. 12th, at 3 PM. Readers of this blog are encouraged to attend as supporters and witnesses.
According to the press release, organizers expect that they will encounter a talking-to, not a genuine hearing. Have the district officials already made up their minds to approach their so-called “community partners” with coercive discipline instead of genuine dialogue? Have they already decided to expel these activists from district buildings without due process?
If that’s the road they choose to go down, all I can say is that they will have chosen to treat parents, teachers, and community activists the way their schools all too often treat Black students. And that would simply highlight the importance of the More4Mann coalition’s original demands, the demands that folks were arrested while trying to make. It would also highlight the need to resume the culturally responsive programming that the coalition was doing in the Horace Mann building before they were interrupted by the arrests.
In any case, this whole situation is far from over.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE! / FROM: THE MORE 4 MANN COALITION
SEATTLE PUBLIC SCHOOLS
CONVENES KANGAROO “HEARING”
AGAINST THE MORE 4 MANN ARRESTEES of Historic Africatown
Seattle Public Schools appears to continue doing everything it can to pretend that African Americans in Seattle don’t exist.
For several years now, a broad coalition of Seattle’s African American community and its supporters have been (alongside the Federal Justice Department) calling out this School District for its over-50-year-long record of absolute failure to serve the educational needs of its African American constituents. The More 4 Mann coalition even mobilized volunteers, free of charge, to activate an impressive array of programs in the public Horace Mann School Building, which the District had not used since 2009.
This August, the District claimed that it wanted to embrace and enter into partnership with this pro public education grassroots civil initiative, and engaged the More 4 Mann Coalition in several months of dialogue. The District and the Coalition convened a community task force that issued a progressive set of recommendations in favor of African American inclusion and involvement, both intellectual and manual, in the renovation of the Horace Mann Building, as well as in the curriculum and programming to be provided in that building when its renovation is complete. The task force also recommended a series of mitigating measures to prevent any complete displacement of the Africatown community from that historical address, either during OR after renovation. The District then signed a letter of its intent to adhere to these task force recommendations.
Apparently, an old guard faction within the District then proceeded to reassert power, countermand the pragmatism of the Superintendent from LA, and to dictate his next actual moves as well as those of the Seattle Police. Electricity to the building was unilaterally shut off on November 9th, which interrupted many of our programs. Those programs which managed to continue were then also interrupted on November 19th, when Seattle Police raided the building without eviction notice or search warrant, unilaterally arresting three programmers (including a task force member) and one member of the general public who happened to be visiting the building at the time.
While under arrest, these four were all handed an “Exclusion” flier by a representative of the District, which claims that they are forbidden to attend any School District meeting or set foot on any District property for one year, but that they may appeal this decision to an internal hearing process under “Board procedure F44.01”. This is clearly an attempt to prevent the More 4 Mann Coalition from presenting public grievances to our government, especially as it came only six days after another SPS “Admonishment” flier, which threatened to exclude a More 4 Mann task force member from School Board meetings if he made any more public criticisms of the District´s powerful and influential, but apparently incompetent General Counsel Ron English.
Naturally, our coalition and its attorney have appealed these SPS fliers and demanded a public hearing. The District agreed to set this hearing for3 PM tomorrow, Thursday December 12th, at the John Stanford Building.
However, the District has just informed us this evening, the night before the hearing, that not only have they already, in effect, rendered their decision as to its outcome, but that…
THE PERSON WHO WILL RENDER THIIS HEARING’S DECISION IS THE SAME PERSON WHO AUTHORED AND SIGNED THE SPS FLIERS THAT WE ARE APPEALING!
While we cannot consider this to be a legitimate hearing under such conditions, we shall still attend it to show our respect for civil procedure as community volunteers behind the School District’s stated mission of education and opportunities for all.
We therefore encourage all members of the press and the public at large to show up and witness this kangaroo court in action:
Tomorrow, December 12th, 2013, 3PM
Safety and Secuity conference room on the first floor of the
Police making arrests at Horace Mann today; photo by Alex Garland
Today the Seattle p0lice arrested four members of the Africatown / Central District community in the Horace Mann school building; they also took steps to prevent community members from retaking control of the building. One of the arrestees told me the police arrested them at gunpoint.
While the mainstream media is presenting these men as “occupiers“, as a violent threat, or as some splinter group, they are, in fact, part of the broad-based More4Mann movement: a coalition of predominantly Black parents, teachers, students, and community activists who want the Horace Mann building to be a public resource for the Africatown/ Central District neighborhood and for students across the district. They want to use the building to create a school that can support Black students who are facing disproportionate suspensions and lack of culturally relevant education in the Seattle Public Schools.
As I wrote here, I was worried that the media and school district officials would try to separate the educators in this coalition from the people remaining in the building, splintering the broad-based nature of the movement. But those divide and conquer tactics didn’t work; the entire coalition held a rally on Nov 8th to support those who remained inside the building after district and police threats had made it unsafe for the educators to continue holding classes there. The coalition put out a unified press release, which you can find at the end of this post. The media was there interviewing people at the solidarity rally, but they didn’t actually publish what they saw, probably because it looked like this:
And this clearly doesn’t fit with the narrative they’re trying to push.
People inside the building reciprocated this solidarity with their own public statements, like this one:
LET THIS BE KNOWN: I am a More for Mann Coalition Task Force member, seated to discuss the future use of the Horace Mann building with the school district, as are two of my co-workers, Gabriel Prawl and Purnell Mitchell. My two co-workers have asked me to post the following on behalf of all three of us: WE HAVE NOT AGREED TO MOVE, AND WE ARE ANGRY THAT MANY OF OUR TEACHERS HAVE BEEN PUSHED OUT INTO THE COLD BY DISTRICT THREATS AND INTIMIDATION! We don’t think it’s right that they were forced to shut down their classes or face the threat “tresspass” charges from the district. It isn’t right that the school district refused to sign the lease on the interim space it offered them. It isn´t right that the school district hasn´t cleaned the mold, filth and birds nests out of that space. It isn´t right for them top make our teachers teach in the rainy streets. It isn´t even right that the school district attorney Ron English and the board members who listen to him are bullying Superintendent Banda into threatening to throw the cops at our community, and are punishing Banda for even convening our task force at all.
So the mainstream media is either too lazy to investigate or too corrupt to tell the truth. It is crystal clear to anyone paying close attention, that those inside the building and those outside in the community are on the same team. This means that Seattle Public Schools officials will not be able to make all of this go away by arresting a few people inside – today’s raid will probably galvanize the broader coalition to keep fighting against racism in the schools in general, and for community control of the Mann building in particular.
This afternoon, supporters of the movement rallied outside the East Precinct where the people arrested were released.
Upon release, they called for everyone to mobilize tomorrow at the school board meeting at the John Stanford Center, 2445 3rd Ave S., Seattle, WA, 98134.
This could get really interesting, because supporters of the Indian Heritage School and AS1/Pinehurst are already planning on rallying at 3:30 before the board meeting, to prevent the closure of their programs. On Facebook, leaders of the More4Mann Movement and leaders of the indigenous Idle No More movement have been exchanging statements of solidarity, supporting each others’ causes. Thinking they just crushed a marginal opposition, school district officials may have just helped consolidate a multi-racial movement against them.
The media is, as usual, missing all of this context. By calling the men arrested “occupiers”, they fail to see that trying to use a public building for the purposes of publicly educating youth in your own neighborhood is not an act of occupation. That’s like saying you are occupying a neighborhood park by allowing your kids to swing on the swingset. But I guess this is how the pro-gentrification Seattle establishment views the remnant of the Black community in the Central Area – as squatters in their own ‘hood.
And yet, this is the same Seattle whose politicians like to make a public show of engaging in “dialogue” with communities of color. In fact, the people arrested are part of the same exact More4Mann coalition that Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Jose Banda has been calling “community partners”. It is the exact same coalition that Banda and his staff are currently negotiating with to lease space in another district building while the district renovates the Mann building.
Contrary to the Seattle Times’s sloppy reporting, the district has not signed this lease yet, for the reasons outlined here. At least they hadn’t by Nov 10th, the date of the last post on More4Mann’s blog. Neither the district nor the movement has announced any finalization of the lease, so my assumption is the Times is going off of outdated promises that Supt. Banda had made publicly but the district never followed through on. The deal was that the Africatown educators would move out of Horace Mann as long as the programs they were doing in the building continue elsewhere. But no satisfactory place for these programs was every guaranteed in writing. Also, the Africatown workers’ demands that Black folks have equal access to the school construction jobs were also not met. These are the reasons why people were still in the building today.
So by asking the police to raid them, SPS is responsible for a raid on the very same coalition that has been running programming for Black youth in the Mann building for months, programming that Banda and other SPS officials recognized for its cultural relevance and its alignment with the district’s strategic goal of overcoming what they call the “achievement gap” between Black students and white students.
In fact, at least one of the people arrested is actually part of the very task force that Supt. Banda set up to negotiate with the Mor4Mann coalition and to work toward this goal. This means that Seattle Public school staff worked with the Seattle Police to arrest at gunpoint someone who they claim to be negotiating with, during ongoing negotiations over a new lease and new partnership. I guess that’s what “dialogue” looks like to them.
It seems to me like one of two things is going on here. Either 1) the district leadership’s behavior is dangerously erratic and it’s policies around racial equality are completely incoherent or 2) the district is sending a clear message to all of its “partners” that negotiating with politicians might involve them calling a group of people to kidnap you at gunpoint in your own neighborhood during the middle of the negotiation process. What a way to solidify a partnership!
But all of this is getting obscured by the sensationalist media narratives. Kiro TV claims that one of the people inside the Mann building called them and suggested they were prepared to snipe cops from the rooftop. But nowhere does Kiro prove that this call actually represents anyone in the More4Mann coalition, or that it even came from within the building. According to Seattle Weekly, Omari Tahir Garrett, one of the people arrested today, “claims the call was a prank from someone trying to make them look bad, and vowed to press on.”
All of us should press on, despite all this negative media and and the police raid. The issues that MOre4Mann has highlighted are still unresolved. The community’s refusal to relinquish control of the Mann building has pushed the district leadership to talk about these issues, but I don’t think we should take their words seriously since they also just coordinated the arrest of someone on their own task force.
Let’s learn from Africatown, and start taking matters into our own hands. Let’s organize in all of of our schools and neighborhoods, against racist discipline policies and in favor of culturally responsive education. We could take direct action, such as campaigns to reinstate students who are unfairly suspended, or efforts to replace aversive discipline policies like isolation rooms. And, most importantly, we should support Africatown and the Indian Heritage program tomorrow at 3:30 at the school board meeting.
More4Mann press release (Nov 8th 2013, coinciding with a rally outside the Mann building):
Imminent Eviction of Black Community Education Center by SPD
The Seattle Police Department has issued a notice to the Africatown Center for Education & Innovation to remove this needed community resource from its location at the Horace Mann School as soon as 6pm tonight, November 8, 2013. The Seattle School Board has refused to negotiate in good faith with Seattle’s Black community to preserve necessary programming at Horace Mann, Africatown’s only location, which benefits cross-cultural communities of color in Seattle’s Central District.
The Seattle School District has, in spite of comment from Seattle’s Black community, chosen to return the NOVA Alternative School to Horace Mann. Overwhelming community support in the Central District and among the Black community for continuing ACEI’s mission has been ignored by the Seattle School District’s push to relocate NOVA from its current spacious and sufficient location central to its student body on 20th Ave E.
ACEI has put down roots in reclaiming Horace Mann School *for* the Black community and has brought in cross-cultural programs that benefit many Seattle children, from bilingual Spanish/English education for grade schoolers through the Seattle Amistad School’s summer program at ACEI to fostering shared community responsibility through the Africatown Center Children’s Collective where we bring the proverbial village together to promote an Afrocentric curriculum for young minds.
It is imperative for Seattle’s Black community that we retain this resource and that the School Board speak to us in good faith about discussing future possibilities for Africatown at Horace Mann. We can work with the Seattle School District to create a better, Afrocentric focus for Horace Mann School, a school in the very heart of the Central District and we are more than willing to do so. However, the Seattle School District has given ACEI nothing but bad faith and now impending eviction.
There is going to be a protest to save the Indian Heritage program, Weds at 3:30 before the school board meeting. The organizers state “it is unconscionable that resources been completely withdrawn from Native programming and services, while SPS acknowledges the statistical facts illustrating disproportionate academic performance, disciplinary action, and highest dropout rates for Native learners.”
I agree. I’ll be there, and I encourage everyone to come. Between this and the fact that the district still hasn’t signed a lease with the Africatown educators (and are still threatening a police raid instead), the district is looking mighty callous in how it relates to communities of color.
This also seems to be part of the ongoing standardization of curriculum and undermining of alternative education, which we also see with the suppression of the race and social justice curriculum at the Center School, and the closure of Pinehurst/ AS1. I’m still learning about this, but the sense I’m getting is that supporters of AS1/ Pinehurst are advocating that the district create a new, combined AS1- Indian Heritage Program with culturally responsive services and Native-focused instruction, instead of closing both programs. This also seems to be a demand that Idle No More organizers from the Native community will be raising at the rally on Weds (see the list of demands below).
At the school board meeting on Weds, Supt. Banda will be proposing the closure of Pinehurst. But this amendment and also this one propose merging AS1 and Indian Heritage instead.
It should be another very interesting and heated board meeting. Hope to see ya’ll there.
——-
The facebook page for the protest is here. Here is the call to action, from WA state Idle No More:
There will be a rally for the Indian Heritage Program
Wednesday November 20, 2013 from 3:30 – 6:30 pm
John Stanford Center
2445 3rd Ave S., Seattle, WA, 98134
Seattle Public Schools HAS CLOSED the Indian Heritage!! Please come and support our Native youth! If you are available to come and give public testimony of your support on Wednesday you need to CALL IN MONDAY 11/18/13 at 8 am (206) 252-0040 to get on the agenda.
Please WEAR RED SHIRTS at the rally in a show of unity and solidarity as a collective voice opposing closure of Heritage and in support of new k-8 ‘Native Heritage ‘ ASI school and Indian Heritage at Ingraham/West Seattle school ( Fall 2014).
**************************************
After nearly 40 years of operation, the Seattle Public Schools (SPS) announced the closure of the American Indian Heritage Middle College High School, a.k.a. Indian Heritage, located at 1330 N. 90th Street, Seattle, WA.
José Banda the Superintendent of Seattle Public Schools presented a public statement last July 2012 expressing commitment to consult with the Native community on ‘next steps’ in consideration of revitalizing the Indian Heritage, the pending BEX Levy, demolition of the Indian Heritage facilities, and the preservation of the murals created by Andrew Morrison. Instead the Indian Heritage and Native students suffered continued decline in 2012-2013 being reduced to digital learning, no Native-focused instruction, no Native-infused curriculum, and a new instructor unfamiliar to Native students, parents, and community. The Native community proposals and concerns addressing these drastic changes have been ignored by SPS.
After the May rally to save the Indian Heritage program SPS had met with Native community members and said the Native students would be temporarily relocated to Lincoln High School during construction of the new school, that SPS would work with them in revitalizing Indian Heritage, that the murals would be preserved, and Indian Heritage would come back to the new school. Instead SPS claims the Indian Heritage was eliminated because there were ‘not enough kids’, but SPS never contacted the students about the plan and made no effort to recruit new students, the Native students have now been forced to assimilate into an entirely different program and relocated to Northgate Mall.
It is unconscionable that resources been completely withdrawn from Native programming and services, while SPS acknowledges the statistical facts illustrating disproportionate academic performance, disciplinary action, and highest dropout rates for Native learners. We want SPS to address why 30% of Native students are in Special Education, we want to know why SPS fails to comply with Individualized Education Program and 504 Basic Plan, and why Native students are underserved and over represented in this area of education. The trajectory for Native learners in SPS is of tremendous concern given the districts decisions to eliminate Indian Heritage and displace current programs functioning at the Indian Heritage facilities.
At this time we will again initiate and voice our opposition with Seattle Public Schools plan to eliminate Indian Heritage. We as a community will invite SPS to listen to our viable plan that includes our recommendations to revitalize the Indian Heritage program by:
• Temporarily relocate the Indian Heritage program to Lincoln High School as planned NOT to Northgate Mall until the new site has been completed in 2017.
• Revitalization of Indian Heritage program at Ingraham H.S. and West Seattle H.S. location
• As SPS is a recipient of Title VII federal funds for enrolled Indian, Native Hawaiian, and Alaska Native students, we ask that they comply with regulations that include:
(1) meeting the unique educational and culturally related academic needs of American Indians and Alaska Natives;
(2) the education of Indian children and adults;
(3) the training of Indian persons as educators and counselors, and in other professions serving Indian people; and
(4) research, evaluation, data collection, and technical assistance.
Thus as Title VII Part A states, “ensuring that programs that serve Indian children are of the highest quality and provide for not only the basic elementary and secondary educational needs, but also the unique educational and culturally related academic needs of these children.” Currently there is absolutely no demonstration of this in SPS relocation program.
• We recommend that all the murals that were made by artist Andrew Morrison (Apache/Haida) be preserved and incorporated in its original form into the new school (and not be replicated as Mr. Morrison requests).
• Rename the Wilson-Pacific School ‘Robert Eaglestaff School thereby keeping a promise made to the Native community in 1996 by John Stanford and echoed by Norm Rice.
• Provide support for new a ‘Native Heritage’ AS-I school with Native focused instruction/curriculum and culturally responsive services.
• Preserve the Sacred Site of the Duwamish Licton Springs.
Also, there is a petition to investigate the elimination of the program.
Following up on Veryl’s post about coaching yesterday, I’d like to share this article from the Nation about how jock culture supports rape culture, as well as this article about sexual violence at Notre Dame, my alma mater. Both report stories of young women who were raped by members of school athletic teams, and then faced terrifying retaliation for speaking out. Between these atrocities and the notorious Steubenville case, it should be increasingly clear to the public that America’s schools are breeding grounds of misogyny and rape culture, and that we need to put an end to this.
Our comrade Kloncke has written some insightful and practical analysis of the struggle against rape culture in Steubenville, emphasizing the need to seek justice outside the court systems which perpetuate patriarchy and white supremacy:
One thing is certain: none of the steps toward legal justice, halting and probably insufficient though they may be, would have happened without the bold interventions of ordinary people. If Alexandria Goddard hadn’t grabbed those horrific tweets before the cretinous creators had a chance to delete them; if Anonymous and KnightSec had not continued releasing media to the public; if people of Steubenville, Wierton, Pittsburgh, and other surrounding towns had not come out to protest LOUDLY, over 1,000 strong in a town of 18,000; the police and the courts would have dampened and silenced the story of the assault, and Jane Doe would never have received support from all over the world — Malaysia to Minnesota, Warsaw to Wheeling.
Having spent some years in the activist scene of the Bay Area and other places, I’ve seen a lot of rallies and protests. But the February 2nd protest in Steubenville was one of my favorites. For one thing, it felt truly “survivor centered,” without losing touch with the political context — a difficult balance to achieve. Brave people stepped up to the mic to tell their own stories or read aloud the stories of others: for some, this meant breaking a silence of 20, 30 years, or more. It was breathtaking.
I also admired the rally because the audience would just shout out their opinions, unsolicited! It was a call-and-response with the emcee; it was a conversation. In an era of progressive NGOs in bed with politicians, or top-down protest styles that expect only two responses from the audience — cheers or silence — this protest was a refreshing example of mass participation, though still in small, nascent form.
We need more of this. We need democratic, mass organizations linking up rural, exurban, and urban areas so that when shit goes down (and it will, again and again), we can decide, through organized bodies of people, how to take action. When it comes to that democratic participation, and weaving together of neighboring towns, the Steubenville area could really get ahead of the curve.
At the same time, Kloncke points out that we need to move beyond simply responding to flashpoint crises: “Support is clearly necessary, but the problem is rampant, so the danger of burnout looms large… In addition to supporting survivors of sexual assault, we must ask ourselves how to drain those stagnant pools: how to intervene in the conditions that allow rape culture to thrive.”
I agree. Education organizing and feminist anti-violence organizing should not necessarily be separate “issues”; the struggles we are waging in our schools should challenge rape culture on a day-by-day basis, as I wrote here. Kloncke lays out some suggestions for the kind of demands and goals we could fight for in our schools:
Sports. A focus on sports institutions as locations of rape-enabling power and authority would be great. This is not to vilify organized sports, or lump all athletes together as domineering scumbags. But statistically, athletes are shown to have more rape-supportive attitudes. And let’s remember: playing on a sports team, especially in high school, is a PRIVILEGE, not a RIGHT — even if the football team is the biggest social or economic game in a deindustrialized town. It’s a little mind-numbing that Big Red has yet to exact any penalties on other players associated with the Rape Crew. Why should they leave it up to the courts? The Ohio High School Athletics Association specifies penalties for playing on unauthorized teams, for using drugs and alcohol, and other infractions. NO MENTION OF SEXUAL ASSAULT. That needs to change. Parents, teachers, staff, students, and supporters, together, can make it change.
It says something profound about our economy and prospects for young people, as well, that commentary on the Rape Crew includes hand-wringing about whether the case will ruin Mays’ and Richmond’s chances at a decent future. If their prospects are so bleak, what about other young people who would never qualify for an important sports team? Throughout the country, as sports maintains its role as an economic juggernaut (from high schools to colleges to the pros), we need to demand decent resources for everyone, according to need — not just for the MVP’s.
Accountable Coaches. The second reason a school-and-sports-based strategy is useful is because it reminds us that we, the people, ought to be able to demand high-quality, well-trained anti-rape role models, educators, and resources in public schools. Young people deserve nothing less. And while the intention of the NFHSA reform is commendable, it’s also naïve. A single mandatory course is not going to significantly shift the attitudes of those coaches (not all, but many) who’ve believed their whole lives that “boys will be boys” and sluts deserve what’s coming to them. Again, these misogynist views are opinions held by a significant proportion of our society. Why wouldn’t we demand more of our public figures, our educators, our mentors? Instead of offering education to incumbent coaches, why not make them prove they are capable of upholding the anti-rape responsibilities that (should) come with their position? An exam or licensing process, with a certain Pass/Fail ratio and follow-up training to support even those who pass, might not be out of the question. (Hey, a girl can dream, right?) And it’s weird that we’d even have to say this, but here goes: any coach who allows something like a “Rape Crew” to form among their players, under their watch, is clearly incapable of doing their job properly, and should be relieved of their duties.
Meaningful Education. Finally, in addition to demanding accountability from educators and coaches, working-class people can demand relevant and meaningful education for students — including education about rape (tellingly, many of the witnesses on the stand today didn’t seem to know what it is), rape culture, and the failures of the criminal justice system to address the root causes and conditions that allow sexual assault to flourish. When public school teachers in Seattle, Washington recently organized with students and parents, refusing to waste precious life energy on useless standardized testing, the struggle awakened people’s imaginations to all the important knowledge that could be created in the classroom, instead of teaching to a test. Rather than perpetuating a culture where survivors are shunned and silenced, we could be supporting students, young and old, in developing their own brilliant responses to sexual assault independent of the legal system.
Rape culture is so pervasive that it can seem overwhelming and impossible to confront. I think Kloncke’s suggestions provide some concrete starting points for possible struggles in the schools. They highlight the kinds of demands we might be able to win if we develop our capacity and build a broad-based and militant teacher-student-community alliance.
Kloncke’s point about accountable coaches also gets at a core issue in teacher/ educator/ staff organizing that I’ve written about here. In reaction to the corporate ed reformers’ emphasis on teacher evaluation and accountability through standardized testing, a lot of Leftist and liberal teachers have fallen into the trap of trying to defend the public schools as they currently exist. This is not tenable, because our schools are breeding grounds of white supremacy, patriarchy, and class stratification. We need to transform the schools, and this means being accountable to working class communities, NOT corporate think tanks and hedge funds. Teachers and coaches should welcome working class feminist efforts to fire coaches who condone “rape crews” and to replace them with coaches who can serve as anti-sexist role models. In fact, we should join such efforts, and look for moments in our schools where we can initiate them ourselves. No amount of seniority and no union contract should protect a coach if there is clear evidence that he is complicit in encouraging rape.
As a long term goal, I think we should fight for the power to make hiring and firing decisions that affect all teachers , coaches, and anyone else who works with youth, instead of leaving these decisions up to unelected administrators. Teachers, students, and community members should be able to decide who teaches and coaches our youth. Port workers demanded and won control of hiring and firing on the docks in the 1930s, ending the racist and humiliating shape up system (similar to the process by which day laborers are hired at Home Depots today). However, over time these hiring halls became nepotistic and exclusive because they were run by the union itself as a private club, not as a public organization run by the working class as a whole. Hence workers had an incentive to try to get their brothers, sons, and inlaws onto the job, which in Seattle has resulted in discrimination against Black workers. To avoid this kind of outcome, a teacher/ coach/ education worker hiring hall would have to be run democratically with input not only from teachers but also from students and their families.
Ultimately, this would be a revolutionary demand, because it would point the way toward a society of popular councils, assemblies, and committees instead of one that is run by professional classes above society. In the meantime, we can prefigure this goal by organizing ourselves and taking direct action to push the administration to fire individual misogynistic coaches and to hire coaches who know how to challenge rape culture.
There has been talk among the Badass Teachers Association about organizing a mass action in Washington D.C. Mark Naison, one of the founders of BAT, asked for suggestions on what we would demand if we were to mobilize like this. I’m writing this post to share my suggestions.
Mark proposed the following:
1. End Race to the Top and eliminate all financial incentives to states and localities to use student test scores to rate teachers, close allegedly “failing” schools, and prefer charter schools over public schools.
2. End Federal support of the Common Core standards, and leave the decision of whether to use them to states and localities without pressure from the US Dept of Education.
3. Use federal funds currently directed towards testing and data collection to lower class size and fund libraries, school counselors and the arts
4. Remove the current Secretary of Education and replace him with a lifetime educator who has at least 10 years classroom experience
5. Call a White House Conference on Education where 50 percent of the participants are teachers, and the rest administrators, parents and students.
I like some of these, especially 1-4. However, I think they are still within the framework of defending public education from corporate education reformers. While this is important, I don’t think it’s enough. I think we also need to organize to transform public education ourselves. With that in mind, I’d like to propose we also make demands like this on the federal government:
Let’s demand that congress peg prison funding to eduction funding, so that every time they increase funds for prisons they must increase funds for education, and every time they cut funds for education, they must also cut funds for prisons. Let’s follow up to make sure this is not co-opted by making sure our schools themselves do not function as prison pipelines, which means positive behavior interventions instead of surveillance, cops, isolation rooms, etc.
Let’s demand that federal regulations require all employers to give family members of school aged children paid time off to support their kids’ education. This could look like volunteering in the classroom, becoming active in setting school policies, and especially intervening when kids are in crisis, as an alternative to suspensions and expulsions.
Let’s demand that Congress repeal any legal limitations that prevent collective action on the job or that limit collective action to issues of wages of benefits alone. In particular, remove any limitations of labor law that would prevent teachers, parents, and students from controlling hiring and firing of teachers, curriculum development and adoption, and school policies. Repeal the Taft Hartley Act and other anti-labor laws.
These demands might help us cultivate a unified teacher-parent-student movement; they might help us prevent a situation where teachers are treated as simply another special interest group in competition with other groups. Let’s make it clear: we are badass workers, and an injury to one is an injury to all.
Mexican teachers occupy the Zocalo, the central square in Mexico City. Image from Fox News Latino.
To even come close to winning demands like this, we’d need to engage in a mass struggle that breaks from scripted, predictable forms of protest and pushes the limits, just like the Mexican teachers are doing. As Jim Horn asks,
How much abuse, derogation, impugning, hostility, and professional savaging will it take for American teachers to respond like those in Mexico, where teachers have been engaged in civil disobedience on an unprecedented scale during the past week.
What do you think of the demand I suggested? What would you be wiling to fight for? What kind of strategies and tactics do you think we’d need to engage in to creatively transform learning and teaching?
This week people have taken to the streets in mass protests across the country, furious that George Zimmerman was acquitted after killing Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager in Florida. High school students in Seattle are moving this struggle forward by organizing their own rally on Tuesday, the 23rd, at 1:30 in front of the King County Courthouse. They are pointing out that Trayvon’s death is part of a racist system, the same system that denies them a meaningful education. By taking action they are learning through practice, and making history instead of just taking tests about it. They are also teaching the rest of us that this generation is tired of being imprisoned, miseducated, and gunned down. Like the prison hunger strikers, they are showing it is possible to come together across racial, communal, and neighborhood lines.
Here is the call to action they posted on their Facebook page:
We the youth are deciding to come together in solidarity to protest on the behalf of trayvon martin and against the other injustices of the system. We the youth of color are profiled by police, we are more likely to get arrested and go to jail then finish high school, and our families are scared for our safety. We are tired of every obstacle that stands in our way. We are looked down on as the minority but together we are the majority. We are asking for other youth and adults to come together in solidarity to help protest with us. Not just for trayvon martin but for other youth that may have lost their lives. All races, ages, and neighborhoods are welcome to come!! We were inspired by the strike at the California and the Green hill prisons and we participated in the rally at the King County prison.
It is significant that students are making connections between the West Coast prison hunger strikes and the struggle against racist vigilantes like Zimmerman, seeing both the prison system and violence by individual vigilantes as obstacles to their growth. I have been surprised that more people are not making these connections. One of the students involved in organizing this rally also did her own hunger strike last week, in solidarity with the striking prisoners.
One student also wrote:
Youth in my community are devastated about the many injustices of our system. people think that just because we are young we have no say or even care about what goes on in our justice system, we are labeled as a minority but together we are the majority. I believe that if we come together and make our voices heard we will make a bigger statement of how serious we really are. Treyvon Martin, john t Williams these are not the only injustices. if you want to stand up for human rights don’t be afraid to fight. There is going to be a cypher session and poetry will be read. This page is for youth to organize, adults we would like for you to stand with us because this is not over we demand justice. come support us justice for everyone.
Please spread the word, and if you can, please print out the flyer above and pass it out. Thanks!
Creativity Not Control 
Bill Gates’ Pipelines to Hell: Reflections on the 2012 Education Policy Throwdown
10 FebOn March 1, 2012, uplifted by the spirit of Occupy, a group of us picked a fight with the largest private foundation on the planet.
Two years later, we are now facing the very real possibility that in addition to reproducing the education pipelines that lead to prison, precarious labor, or privilege, Bill Gates is encouraging his fellow billionaires to railroad highly explosive Bakken shale oil and Tar Sands bitumen through the middle of our city.
“The 99% Challenges the Gates Foundation to an Education Policy Throwdown”
Back in 2012, we challenged the education policy experts at the Gates Foundation to a street-style debate as part of a coordinated National Day of Action for Public Education. (We even delivered a fancy engraved invitation .)
We joined together to protest the outsized influence that the Gates Foundation wields to push its neoliberal education model. To our amazement, their staff actually came out to debate with us when about 300 or so of us descended on their palatial headquarters in Seattle.
Frankly, considering that this was their full time job, the Gates Foundation policy experts were woefully unimpressive in this General Assembly style interaction. The parents and teachers in our crowd gave them quite a drubbing over some key issues that these “experts” are clearly getting wrong:
Standardized Testing and Teacher Pay – the Gates Foundation was (and still is) one of the major players in the push to tie teacher pay to standardized test results. A member of the crowd (an editor at Rethinking Schools magazine) nailed them over the numerous studies that showed the volatility of test scores from year to year. Teachers with stellar scores one year are painted as failures the next. Gates Foundation experts sheepishly agreed.
Racist Origins of Standardized Testing – Another participant stumped them completely by asking about the origin of standardized testing. The Gates Foundation experts were not aware that the tools they promote were originally designed by the Eugenics movement to apply assembly line models to classrooms in attempt to prove the ‘genetic superiority’ of whites. Standardized tests continue to do what they were designed to do — maintain a system of racially segregated education.
Charter Schools – the Gates Foundation was (and still is) one of the major players in the push to advance charter schools. As we have pointed out repeatedly in words and actions, the public schools are failing youth of color and working class youth. It is understandable that many parents, communities, and progressive teachers will want to build alternative schools that have some degree of autonomy – ability to develop their own curriculum, to set their own schedules, etc. Many people start charter schools thinking that they will offer such freedom; Bill Gates, on the other hand, wants charters in order to help take capitalism to a whole new level.
The charter movement may have started with good intentions but it has rapidly become a tool of corporate privatization rather than a viable laboratory where new forms of teaching can blossom and spread throughout the public system. Charter schools become just as bureaucratic and authoritarian as public schools – some even more so, because charter-ization often paves the way for military academies or militaristic, heavily disciplined forms of teaching. Many charter schools have admissions requirements, which makes it easier for elitist schools to maintain class and race segregation; this can also lead to discrimination against students with disabilities, which federal public education legislation was designed to prevent (whether it actually does that effectively is another whole conversation, but charters can make it worse).
Many charters are non-union, which means their teachers are more stressed out due to longer hours and lower pay. This can make it harder for them to focus on building relationships with students. It can also mean the teachers have less academic freedom and can be fired more easily for teaching something that the administration doesn’t like.
When Bill Gates and his foundation push for charter schools they are not pushing for the dream of parents and teachers who want to opt out of an oppressive public school system. They are pushing for their own dream – a corporate controlled education system with fewer public roadblocks in the way of billionaires who want to fashion education to suit their own goals.
The crowd made these criticisms of charter schools perfectly clear to the Gates Foundation.
People over Experts
At the “Education Policy Throwdown” we learned firsthand that what these “experts” are doing is not driven by observation or science. They are paid pseudo-scientists who are paid to go find facts that support the preconceived ideology of Bill Gates. They manipulate public policy behind the scenes by selective funding of research and by creating an atmosphere where everyone in academia is afraid to point out that the 800-pound gorilla has no clothes.
We also learned that they are vulnerable. When called out into the streets to actually explain themselves to the public that they foist these policies upon, the Gates Foundation is simply defenseless.
Gates’ Policies Are Still a Train Wreck
So, what else have they gotten wrong regarding education?
Small Schools Initiative: The Gates Foundation spent over $2B convincing school districts to break their large schools into smaller “academies”. Gates later admitted that the results were “disappointing” AFTER districts spent their OWN capital dollars physically re-architecting their campuses around a rich guy’s baseless hunch. (BTW, ask the folks at Seattle’s Cleveland High School about this one.)
Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project: The Gates Foundation spent years trying to validate their preconceived belief that teacher effectiveness can be scientifically measured. They were wrong. According to the National Education Policy Center, their “…results do not settle disagreements about what makes an effective teacher and offer little guidance about how to design real-world teacher evaluation systems”. (This study even won the NEPC’s 2013 Bunkum Awards, recognizing lowlights in educational research).
Bill Gates and his foundation get it wrong because their policies are based on the neoliberal belief that the most important dimension of a human being is their contribution to the economy. This ingrained belief expresses itself in systems that make the role of education to simply prepare workers for the labor market.
In fact, this is the explicitly stated goal of their post-secondary education program: “Our goal — to ensure that all low-income young adults have affordable access to a quality postsecondary education that is tailored to their individual needs and educational goals and leads to timely completion of a degree or certificate with labor-market value.”
Bill Gates is also wrong because he is a hypocrite. He brags about the quality of his own relevant and relationship-based education at Lakeside, yet funnels everyone else into the pipeline that creates worker bots.
Preach One Thing, Invest in Another
Hypocrisy, or something darker, must motivate the investment portfolio of the Gates Foundation. According to an analysis of their 2012 tax returns by Mother Jones Magazine:
They preach nutrition, but invest billions in MacDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Burger King, etc.
They preach support for the working poor, but invest billions in Walmart
They preach about fighting climate change, but invest billions in fossil fuels like Exxon Mobile, Arch Coal, Peabody Coal, Baker Hughes, etc.
WORST OF ALL, they preach that they will not invest in companies with “egregious corporate activities”, but invest in private prison companies like GEO Group and G4S Corporation, which operates 19 juvenile prisons in the US. (GEO Group publicly stated that their profits would suffer from “reductions in crime rates” that “could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences,” along with immigration reform and the decriminalization of drugs.)
The Gates Foundation directly profits from maintaining the School to Prison Pipeline and from maintaining the dysfunctional economic status quo.
However, as we have written about on this blog before — our struggle is not JUST against the School To Prison Pipeline, but against ALL of the pipelines that systemically strip people of power and possibilities. The pipelines to prison, to precarious employment, to overworked technology labor, or even to the stressed managerial class* are ALL BAD for the people in them. (*Note that suicide now kills more 40-60 year old white males than car accidents).
Next Target, Higher Education
Bill Gates and his foundation continue to build the pipelines that perpetuate privilege for some and prison for others. Their latest target is now the university system, which they seek to destroy and rebuild in their own techno-capitalist vision.
The Chronicle of Higher Education released a detailed report that sharply criticized their new approach, which they state is “designed for maximum measurability, delivered increasingly through technology, and…narrowly focused on equipping students for short-term employability.”
One structural change promoted by the Gates Foundation is the channeling of Federal Student Financial Aid toward schools that do not require ‘credit hours’, instead allowing students to demonstrate competency by completing online training.
According to the Chronicle’s report, the tremendous financial power wielded by the Gates Foundation creates an atmosphere of fear and intimidation within the administration of colleges and universities. Few are willing to speak out against Gates’ vision of education as job preparation. If schools follow this vision, we all lose the many other critical roles that colleges have played in society. The university will no longer be a place for reflection on the meaning of human existence (or other such “non-productive” activities).
Automation and Education in the Era of Robots
The Gates Foundation goals are shaped by Gates’ plans for the next era of capitalist accumulation. As Gates, Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com, and other tech company titans push for increasing automation of the workforce, more and more workers will be replaced by robots. As this happens, society could be increasingly divided into new classes – those who own the robots, those who manage them, those who serve these two groups, and everyone else who is deemed a “surplus population” and targeted for mass incarceration and other forms of social destruction.
If this stratification proceeds, the corporate owners would need to reproduce it in the schools. Since charter schools make the education system more flexible, their presence might help speed up this process. Gates and his technocrats might push for elite, holistic, creative schools for the future robot owners, heavy STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) schools for the future robot operators, discipline-based job training programs for the future servants, and prison-like schools for everyone else. Some teachers might become highly-paid professionals training the global elite and their programmers and engineers. Others might become low-paid service industry workers who deploy automated “teacher-proof” online curriculum, punishing students who don’t pay attention to what Bill Gates wants them to see on the screen in front of them.
The Gates Foundation is already deploying electronic bracelets on students’ arms that measure their arousal levels in the classroom; they could use this data to help automate teaching, creating online and cybernetic technologies to replace teachers. This might seem far-fetched, and it is admittedly decades away at least. But the world we live in today would seem extremely far-fetched to early 20th century auto workers. Little did they know that the time-study researchers watching them do their jobs would use this data to replace them with robots.
Bill Gates Might Just Blow Us All to Hell
Clearly Bill Gates has been wrong about many things before and will be again.
However, one his miscalculations may cause immediate searing and painful death to some and will likely accelerate the death of all of us through climate change.
You see, according to Forbes Magazine, Bill Gates is the person that convinced his friend Warren Buffet and his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, to invest in Burlington Northern Sante Fe (BNSF) and Canadian Railway (CN).
Bill is pretty clever, and he saw that all of that Tar Sands and Bakken Shale Oil might not be able to get to market in China, ESPECIALLY if the Keystone XL pipeline was not approved by the Obama administration. So, Berkshire Hathaway invested heavily to increase the capacity of these rail systems so that they could carry more of these petroleum products.
The cruel irony is that last month, the State Department ruled that Keystone XL will have no impact on CO2 emissions because, even if it not approved, the oil/tar in the ground would get to the market anyways via the newly expanded rail capacity. The result is that the staggering amounts of Canadian Tar Sands will now be strip-mined and sold overseas, accelerating the pace at which the planet will become a climate-ravaged hellscape.
The Gates Foundation holds more than $10B worth of Berkshire Hathaway. They took a minimal risk in the railway investment — even though the rail lines may have profited more without Keystone XL, they win. They can afford to take risks and lose a few.
However, folks in the pathway of their rail cars filled with these highly explosive materials are not so lucky. Perhaps Bill Gates should have educated himself on one of the key themes of Greek literature – Hubris. His unwarranted self-confidence puts our schools, our communities, and our climate at extreme risk.
Tags: Automation, Berkshire Hathaway, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, BNSF Railway, Charter Schools, Corporate Ed "Reform", current-events, Gates Foundation, Microsoft, Occupy Seattle, politics, Protest, Robots, School to Prison Pipeline, Standardized Testing, Street level debate, Tar Sands, Teacher Evaluation, union, Warren Buffet