Code Acts in Education: Valuing Futures | National Education Policy Center

Code Acts in Education: Valuing Futures | National Education Policy Center

Code Acts in Education: Valuing Futures

The future of education in universities is currently being reimagined by a range of organizations including businesses, technology startups, sector agencies, and financial firms. In particular, new ways of imagining the future of education are now tangled up with financial investments in education technology markets. Speculative visions and valuations of a particular ‘desirable’ form of education in the future are being pursued and coordinated across both policy and finance.

Visions and valuations

Edtech investing has grown enormously over the last year or so of the pandemic. This funding, as Janja Komljenovic argues, is based on hopes of prospective returns from the asset value of edtech, and also determines what kinds of educational programs and approaches are made possible. It funds unique digital forms of education, investing speculatively in new models of teaching and learning to enable them to become durable and, ideally, profitable for both the investor and investee.

We’ve recently seen, for instance, the online learning platform Coursera go public and reach a multibillion dollar valuation based on its reach to tens of millions of students online. New kinds of investment funds have emerged to accelerate edtech market growth, such as special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) that exist to raise funds to purchase edtech companies, scale them up quick and return value to both the SPAC and its investor, plus new kinds of education-focused equity funds and portfolio-based edtech index investing that select a ‘basket’ of high-value edtech companies for investors to invest in.

The result of all this investment activity has been the production of some spectacular valuation claims about the returns available from edtech. The global edtech market intelligence agency HolonIQ calculated venture capital investment in edtech at $16bn last year alone, predicting a total edtech market worth $400bn by 2025.

But, HolonIQ said, this isn’t just funding seeking a financial return—it’s ‘funding backing a vision to transform how the world learns’. These edtech investments tend to centre on a particular shared CONTINUE READING: Code Acts in Education: Valuing Futures | National Education Policy Center

NANCY BAILEY: We Need Clarity and Consistency From the President When it Comes to Democratic Public Schools

We Need Clarity and Consistency From the President When it Comes to Democratic Public Schools

We Need Clarity and Consistency From the President When it Comes to Democratic Public Schools

President Biden has accomplished much in his first 100 days. He’s a caring President when this is especially needed. There’s much to like about the President’s ideas and, here, for education, but his speech did not highlight some major concerns. He talked strongly about democracy, but he missed the chance to make important points about democratic public schools and teachers.

Here is the transcript of the President’s speech.

Why are clarity and consistency about schools so important?

The President once told educators and parents that he would end high-stakes testing, teaching to the test. However, earlier this year, the Biden administration said states must still test even after a year of disruption due to the pandemic.

Also, preschool is important, but in his speech, President Biden emphasized competition and the workforce. Most teachers and parents dislike connecting the economy, the workforce to children, especially using preschool.

This is the same old talk of previous Presidents, pandering to business. It doesn’t solve the nitty-gritty problems facing schools and teachers, difficulties that need to be fixed if CONTINUE READING: We Need Clarity and Consistency From the President When it Comes to Democratic Public Schools

What's ahead for teachers? | Cornell Chronicle

What's ahead for teachers? | Cornell Chronicle

What's ahead for teachers?

One of the nation’s most influential labor leaders, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten ’80, meets Thursday with ILR Dean Alex Colvin to discuss “One Year Later, What’s Ahead for Teachers?”

Part of ILR’s eCornell series entitled “The Future of Work: Labor in America,” the event is free and open to the public.

Register here for “One Year Later, What’s Ahead for Teachers,” which will be held from 3:30 to 4:30 ET on Thursday.

The first in the ILR “Future of Work” series was “Unionization in Big Tech: Why Now?” and is accessible by completing the form in this link.

After this Thursday’s event, the next in the series will be a May 10 keynote with Colvin, Thomas Perez, labor secretary in the Obama administration and former Democratic National Committee chair, and Cathy Creighton, director of ILR’s Buffalo Co-Lab. The keynote begins at 2:30 p.m. ET.

On Thursday, Weingarten and Colvin will discuss three areas:

• the pandemic’s impact on K-12 learning and teaching, this fall and beyond
• how the Amazon union vote is affecting labor
• how the Biden administration will impact teaching.

Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, a union of 1.7 million teachers; paraprofessionals and school-related personnel; higher education faculty and staff; nurses and other healthcare CONTINUE READING: What's ahead for teachers? | Cornell Chronicle

Teacher Tom: I Will Not Prepare Children for The "Jobs of Tomorrow"

Teacher Tom: I Will Not Prepare Children for The "Jobs of Tomorrow"

I Will Not Prepare Children for The "Jobs of Tomorrow"

I've spent most of my professional career railing against the widely held belief that our schools exist for the purpose of vocational training. Those "jobs of tomorrow" our policymakers are always going on about? "Out educating the Chinese?" Getting the kids "college and career ready?" What a crock. First of all, no one knows what those jobs of tomorrow might be, no matter how authoritatively they speak of the future. The jobs that today's five-year-olds will be applying for 20 years from now are unimaginable to us. Indeed, it will be the children of today who invent the jobs of tomorrow. And this has always been true, going back at least to the Industrial Revolution when policymakers were certain that we would all move to the cities to take our place along an assembly line. My own high school career counselor got it wrong. Most of the jobs our daughter is applying for today didn't exist when she was a preschooler. As for competing with the Chinese, that's a dubious and mercenary adult concern, one that is a cruelty when inflicted on innocent children.

No, the proper "career" aspiration for a preschooler is princess. 

The role of education (not necessarily school) in a self-governing society is to produce good citizens, critical thinkers CONTINUE READING: Teacher Tom: I Will Not Prepare Children for The "Jobs of Tomorrow"

Future-focused Education, Future-focused World | Teacher in a strange land

Future-focused Education, Future-focused World | Teacher in a strange land

Future-focused Education, Future-focused World

I’ve just spent a couple of weeks in Arizona, a first-flight of the fully immunized, and a chance to warm up, eat incredible takeout and be somewhere other than home. A vacation, to see our first-born, in a city that has hundreds of gorgeous outdoor dining patios.

I took along a book—The Ministry for the Future— by Kim Stanley Robinson. I’ve been saving it for this vacation, when I could sit on a shaded patio, uninterrupted, and read. Friends recommended it. And it kind of rocked my world.

I don’t read lots of sci-fi, so Robinson’s name wasn’t familiar to me, but I can understand why he has plenty of fans. As dystopian/utopian fiction, the story was pretty good, but what made it unforgettable was the other stuff that Robinson tucks in around the narrative: Observations, testimonies, riddles and mini-lectures on an array of systems impacting the way the world operates, now and possibly in the next few decades.

It’s a series of enlightenments on practices that must become habit before we all think and act globally: economics, politics, health, equity, and above all, the imminent threat of climate catastrophe.

You would think living through a global pandemic would be the kind of event to jump- CONTINUE READING: Future-focused Education, Future-focused World | Teacher in a strange land