Garn Press Chapters: The Educator and the Oligarch by Anthony Cody
Garn Press Chapters: A new series from Garn Press. Featured in this post, Chapter 20 of The Educator and the Oligarch, which is available in paperback on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and as an ebook on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, andiBooks.
It takes courage to challenge the decisions made by the richest man in the world about the U.S. public school system, but that is exactly what Anthony Cody has done. He received the NCTE 2015 George Orwell Award for The Educator and the Oligarch for speaking truth to power. Anthony continues to speak truth to power and is consistent in his message that not only is Bill Gates wrong, his educational reforms are dangerous.
Anthony Cody leaves us in no doubt that the educational reforms forced on teachers, children, and their parents by Gates and the corporate elites with whom the billionaire keeps company are risking both the future of our kids and the opportunities they will have of living and thriving in the rapidly changing world we now inhabit.
At Garn Press we applaud Anthony Cody for the consistency of his educational reporting and his indomitable courage. Here is a link to his Living In Dialogue blog site and to a recent post that builds on Chapter 20 of The Educator and the Oligarch, which Garn is featuring here.
Chapter 20
The Classroom of the Future: Student-Centered or Device-Centered?
A basic question is emerging as our schools are urged to embrace the Common Core State Standards and the computer-based learning systems aligned to the standards. Are these digital devices becoming central to the classroom—and coming to dominate the way we teach and learn? And how will this serve our students?
In March, 2014 we heard from Bill Gates the virtues of the Common Core explained this way:
If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn’t be available and would be very expensive,” he said. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers, he said.[1]
In the classroom, these “appliances” are the tablets and other digital devices now being aggressively sold. In 2012, Gates explained this model of device-centered “personalization”:
Teachers have not had these tools before. Fragmented standards that differ from state to state and district to district have made it hard for innovators to design tools to reach a wide market. The common core will help change that. In the classroom of the not-too-far-off future, kids will have computer devices with phenomenal interactive content. This will allow teachers to do what they call “flip the classroom.” Instead of learning a concept in class and applying it at home, students would learn the concept at home, on video, and apply it in class, where they can get help from the teacher. When students learn a concept on video, they can take as much time as they need and learn at their own pace. They can pause the video, rewind it, or just listen to it all over again. Then the students can use class time to do the problems. The teacher sees instantly on the dashboard which kids are getting it, and steps in if someone is stuck. The students move on when they master the material, and not before. This is very different from the old method where every student moves on to the next topic after the test, whether you got an A or a D.[2]
Iwan Streichenberger, the CEO of the now-defunct Gates-funded inBloom data-storage project used a slightly different analogy:
Our purpose is to remove the friction in the deployment of technology in the classroom. It’s not very exciting, but if you don’t have plumbing you can’t have appliances.[3]
In (now defunct) inBloom’s view, the “plumbing” is the system that will allow data from all these devices to be collected and used by all the appliance makers. Our classrooms are being re-wired and standardized to allow the proliferation of appliances that will transform education.
What do these appliances look like? What does this transformation entail?
At Austin’s SXSWedu, in March of 2014, I attended the product launch for one such appliance. Rupert Murdoch’s Amplify has produced a new tablet for the classroom market, which comes with a complete ELA, math, and science curriculum. The program promises:
With an e-library stocked with more than 300 books and educational games, and tools for immediate, in-class student assessment, Amplify ELA aims to help students read three times more and write three times more, and to help teachers provide three times more meaningful feedback.[4]
As the students work, the device keeps track of what they have read and written. Words that were misspelled are Garn Press Chapters: The Educator and the Oligarch by Anthony Cody - Garn Press:
