Worlds of Education: "The Edtech Pandemic Shock", by Ben Williamson & Anna Hogan
The Covid-19 pandemic was the context for two major disruptions in education. The first was the disruption to schooling for millions of students worldwide, and a rapid shift to remote learning online. The second, closely related disruption was the entry of the commercial education technology sector into public education at worldwide scale, and its attempts to profit from the shock of the pandemic.
In our recent project for Education International on commercialization and privatization of education in the context of Covid-19, we mapped the range of ways in which the private sector and commercial businesses capitalized on the crisis of school closures. Our findings suggest that commercial companies were not only seeking short-term profit during the pandemic. They were active participants in multisector networks that are fundamentally committed to ‘reimagining’ and transforming how public education as a sector is organized in the future.
Reimagining education
The experience of the pandemic in education has been characterized by some as a historic opportunity for reform. Pivoting to remote learning was the ‘greatest edtech experiment’ in history, claimed some media sources. Digital learning was a ‘microcosm’ of the future in the making. The OECD’s director of education, Andreas Schleicher, said it was ‘a great moment’ in which all the ‘red tape’ stifling innovation in public education had been cut away.
These imaginaries of historic opportunities quickly manifested in practical actions. In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo drafted in the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to ‘reimagine education’ for the state, and to put Gates’s longstanding reformatory ideas into action.
‘The old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom and the teacher is in front of that classroom, and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms – why, with all the technology you have?’ asked Cuomo. The alternative path, it seemed, was obvious—tear down the existing system of CONTINUE READING: Worlds of Education: "The Edtech Pandemic Shock", by Ben Williamson & Anna Hogan | National Education Policy Center
