then you're on the wrong freakin blog.
It was a headline in one of those "daily briefing" kind of things I get in my email at work:
News Corp. begins developing education-technology strategy
No, I thought. That can't really mean what it sounds like it means.
UPDATE: I was not expecting this response. Went to bed shortly after writing this, got up 4 hours later to find almost 150 comments. Sorry I have absolutely no time to respond to them right now; will probably not be able to get to it till this evening. I will come back and read/respond as soon as I can. Meanwhjile, thank you to everybody who shares my fears and concerns about the corporatist agenda for school reform.
It was a particularly discouraging day in my life as an educator. My students spent the day taking district-mandated standardized tests. The tests are administered via computer 3 times per year. Unfortunately, our aging computers are not up to the task. While there is plenty of money to implement additional "teacher accountability" systems, there is no money to upgrade our computer labs or to replace the document projectors (an essential teaching tool) that are dying all over our school. So we spent much of the morning switching students from computer to computer in an effort to find enough working machines as the computers kept freezing or otherwise malfunctioning. (I'm sure changing computers a couple of times during the test had no effect on the students' test results.)
And it's been a week and a half since there has been a functioning printer anywhere on my floor that I can print to. It started with a districtwide breakdown of the student server, but it spread from the student server to the connections between the teacher computers and the printers. Drastic cutbacks in our district tech staff mean long waits when problems like this arise.
Then there was the news about the emergency budget cuts that our legislature just enacted -- $200 million cut from the state education budget. There will be additional cuts when the legislature goes back into session in January. We are already up to ludicrous class sizes; my 7th-grade math classes have 30 students each, which is about 5 more than my average class size in previous years. Professional development funds? Forget it. When I attend a professional development conference in February, I will be paying the $400 registration fee, the travel, and the hotel bill out of my own pocket.
This disastrous budget cut was done in the face of a court order stating that the legislature is in violation of the state constitutional provision mandating full funding of basic education as the state's "paramount duty" and ordering the state to increase education funding. Neener, neener, neener says the legislature, we will decrease funding instead.
As my colleague down the hall said, almost in tears when she heard about the budget cuts, "I really don't understand what's left for them to cut."
So this was the context when I saw the headline quoted above. I went to the linked article, and it was every bit as bad as I had feared.
With two moves over two weeks, News Corp. has become one of the biggest players in the increasingly crowded field of corporate investors chasing the next technology to transform American education. . . .
Company executives say the foundation of the media conglomerate's push will be Wireless Generation, a Brooklyn, N.Y., maker of software and other tools to help schools evaluate and monitor student performance and tailor teaching plans accordingly.
People familiar with the matter said News Corp. is interested in making other acquisitions and investments in technologies designed to change the way children learn. . . . The company, which also owns The Wall Street Journal, will likely consider technologies aimed at improving how teachers teach and how educational materials are distributed. . . .
And for those who doubt the role of the profit motive in the surging interest in education reform among the corporatocracy, here's your evidence:
Mr. Murdoch has described Wireless Generation as a gateway to a kindergarten-through-12th grade education market worth about $500 billion a year in the U.S. alone.
Exactly.
That $500 billion will obviously do more good for children if it is in the pockets of News Corpse, rather than in the pockets of all those union teachers who are such failures at teaching our kids. Thank God Rupert Murdoch is riding to the rescue of all the children the teachers are leaving behind.
