What Could Be Wrong With The “Community School” Model? Revisiting A November 2015 Piece, Post-FEPA
I wrote the piece below in November 2015 during the lead up to the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which passed the following month and cemented into place “Pay for Success” finance of education delivery in the United States. The Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools hosted that post, since I had not yet started my own blog. I am thankful for the hospitality they extended to me then. I want to re-share it here on Wrench In The Gears, because yesterday Trump signed the bi-partisan HR4174 bill, “Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act” (FEPA).
This legislation will advance the pay for success model by requiring extensive data collection with delivery of all public services. As a result, all those receiving services, including public school students, will be sucked into a never-ending cycle of micro-data collection for analysis of program “efficacy” in a world where neoliberal austerity, predictive analytics, and digital surveillance has come to rule. It is exactly what the tech, finance, and non-profit sectors have been setting up for many years.
We will soon seen more and more “wrap around” services ushered into schools where student data has much weaker protections under FERPA, which Obama gutted, than under HIPPA. Non-profits will be incentivized to see students as potential interventions to be churned through systems of data-collection, offered up to justify their existence and maintain their payrolls. We will see more and more instruction delivered online so that “data” can be captured as “evidence.” This “evidence” will document not just the cognitive skills of children, but their social-emotional states and behavioral “competencies” as well. Of course the venture capitalist “social entrepreneurs” hold all the money and pull all the strings. “Pay for Success” is their game. They will remake the world, including our schools, to deliver the digital “evidence” needed to keep them in yachts and champagne. This will happen against a backdrop of grinding poverty, economic precarity, and militarized policing of low income communities.
At the time, some criticized my analysis. They couldn’t see it three years ago. Re-reading it today, it is clear we are much father down this road. ESSA and WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act) and SIPPRA (Social Impact Partnerships Pay for Results Act) and IIOA (Investing in CONTINUE READING:
What Could Be Wrong With The “Community School” Model? Revisiting A November 2015 Piece, Post-FEPA – Wrench in the Gears