A war on schools, teachers, and children threatens to create a Zombie nation in the United States. We need to “connect the dots” and fight back if we want to prevent this miseducation future.
Dot 1: Adjusted for inflation, twenty-five states spent less on public education in 2016 than they did a decade ago. Low-tax Republican states are guilty of the worst underfunding The American Federation of Teachers estimates that state governments shortchanged public K-12 education by about $20 billion. All fifty states opened the 2018-2019 school year with teacher shortages. The problem is at both ends of the career spectrum. Under financial pressure because of low wage scales and benefit cutbacks, discouraged by mandated test prep that sucks the joy out of learning for both teachers and students, and blamed for everything by rightwing politicians and wealthy self-proclaimed “philanthropist reformers,” record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession, two-thirds before retirement age. At the same time, nationally, enrollment in teacher education programs declined by almost 40% between 2008 and 2015.
Dot 2: Kids are even bigger victims than teachers as states, in an effort to save money, and tech companies hoping to enhance online-screen addiction, push computerized learning programs as replacements for qualified teachers. The New York Times recently highlighted an anti-tech rebellion in McPherson and Wellington, Kansas, where middle school and high school students walked-out or sat-in in protests against Summit Learning, a web-based platform and curriculum designed for use on Chromebooks that is financed and promoted by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. Zuckerberg and Chan currently offer the system free to school district, but the districts have to purchase the computer hardware.
About 380 schools and 75,000 students nationally use the Summit Learning system. Students spend the entire educational day on their Chromebook laptops completing online lessons and quizzes. Teachers no longer teach in schools using Summit but are relegated to marginally skilled classroom helpers. The pay-off for the Facebook duo comes as brain-addled students spend more and more time online using other Facebook products like Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, Boomerang, Oculus, and of course, Facebook, providing the company with data that they sell to advertisers.
After eight months online, Kansas students were coming home after school with headaches, hand cramps, and increased anxiety. One student was suffering a recurrence of seizures. Another wore hunting earmuffs to school in an effort to block out the outside world. Kallee Forslund, age sixteen, a 10th grader in Wellington, captured student frustration with Summit. “I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore.”
In a survey conducted at the McPherson middle school, more than three-fourth of the parents and 80% of the students complained about Summit. Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, visited his ten-year-old son’s fourth-grade class. His response: “We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies.”
There has been other scattered resistance to Summit across the country. One hundred students at the Secondary School for Journalism in Brooklyn, New York walked out of classes last November in a protest against the use of Summit. Students complained it was “annoying” just sitting and staring at the computer screen all day. The students reported that teachers told them their new role was to just be mentors as students worked independently. The Journalism high school students outlined other major problems with Summit. Students were playing video games instead of working on assignments; instead of learning about the subject they re-take tests until they pass; or they just copy and paste quiz questions into Google to find the answers.
Dot 3. Hypnotizing, online, on-screen, and addicting miseducation is a worldwide phenomenon, promoted by companies like Pearson, and it is spreading like a viral epidemic. Pearson just announced that it plans to invest $50 million over the next three year through its Pearson Ventures sub-division to finance “next-gen” tech learning and assessment tools.
A just released Education International Research report highlights Pearson’s 2025 corporate goals including digitalizing and privatizing education. According to the report, if successful, Pearson would bring “disruptive changes to (a) the teaching profession, (b) the delivery of curriculum and assessment and (c) the function of school, particularly public schools.” Pearson’s “next generation” of teaching and testing platforms, implemented through a partnership with Google Classroom, would replace teachers with Siri and Alexa. As a side benefit for Pearson and Google, children would be new sources of data to be mined and sold and become lifelong customers wedded to their products. Pearson is already implementing its educational “vision” in “private schools in sub-Sahara Africa, India, and parts of South-East Asia,”
Student headaches, hand cramps, anxiety, and seizures, teacher deprofessionalization and unemployment, the Zombie Apocalypse brought to you by Facebook, Google, and Pearson is coming to a school near you.
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