Is Wall Street About To Take Over Public Education Once And For All?
Across the country, teachers are being asked to collect, record, and slog through mountains of data that “experts” insist is meant to improve their practice.
There are pre-assessments and post-assessments, habits of work rubrics, writing prompts, social and emotional screeners, standards-based grading systems, RTI data, student learning objectives, professional growth goals, student surveys, self evaluations, administrator evaluations, office discipline referrals, results from progress monitoring programs …the data demands go on and on, and all of it must be entered and stored in learning management systems.
Recently, a few brave teachers have begun to publicly state the obvious: that we don’t need all of this data to do our jobs well.
Unfortunately, no one seems to be listening, as there is a far more powerful entity that does need all this data:
Wall Street.
As Pay for Success schemes – also known as Social Impact Bonds – sweep the country, data collection in schools is reaching new heights.
“[It’s] an approach that has come of age,” Andy Sieg, Managing Director and Head of Global Wealth and Retirement Solutions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch said of Pay for Success contracts. “We see the confluence of investor demand, government innovation and access to data leading to the dawn of this new market.”
Here’s how they work: private investors provide upfront capital to start a program (a pre-K, for example). If the program meets a set of agreed-upon metrics of “success” (reducing the number of children receiving special education services, for example), investors get repaid with interest.
Despite ethical concerns and doubts about the actual public benefit of these contracts, they are rapidly advancing nationwide due to promises of big payouts for lenders. Goldman Sachs, for example, put up $16.6 million to fund an early childhood education program in Chicago, yet it is getting more than $30 million from the city. According to The Rockefeller Foundation and Merrill Lynch, the impact investing market will reach between $400 billion to $1 trillion by 2020.
And they don’t intend for the profits to stop there. Investors also have plans to package these bonds up and turn them into a derivatives market. Using performance-based data to inform risk, investors will be able to gamble on these bond-backed securities just as they Is Wall Street About To Take Over Public Education Once And For All? | PopularResistance.Org:
