Diane Ravitch on Pandemic School Privatization
COUNTERSPIN
This week on CounterSpin: One teacher described it as a “gut punch” hearing New York Governor (and current media crush) Andrew Cuomo talk about “re-imagining” education in the wake of the pandemic, without what he called the “old model” emphasis on teachers and classrooms. Cuomo announced an initiative with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—who’ve been behind decades of education interventions in this country—all of which have failed to deliver on their promises, but have drained funds from public schools and undermined public school teachers.
One Gates project that activists fought off was a cloud-based system called “inBloom” that collected millions of students’ detailed personal information—a massive intrusion Cuomo called “necessary.” Maybe that could spur some questions, particularly now that Cuomo’s added Google head Eric Schmidt to the Re-Imagining team?
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University and author of, most recently, Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools. We talk with her about the latest scheme for rich folks to decide what’s best for schools their children don’t attend.