Corporate “
Reformers” Andrew Ross Sorkin. NYTimes.
Beginning with
the Carnegies and the Rockefellers, billionaires have long seen the nation’s
education as a willing cause for their philanthropy — and, with it, their own
ideas about how students should learn. The latest crop of billionaires,
however, has tended to take the line that fixing our broken educational system
is the key to unlocking our stagnant economy. Whether it’s hedge-fund managers
like Paul Tudor Jones (who has given tens of millions to support charter
schools) or industrialists like Eli Broad (who has backed “blended learning”
programs that feature enhanced technology), these philanthropists have
generally espoused the idea that education should operate more like a business.
(The Walton Foundation, backed by the family that founded Walmart, has taken
this idea to new heights: It has spent more than $1 billion supporting various
charter schools and voucher programs that seek to establish alternatives to the
current public-school system.) Often these patrons want to restructure the
system to make it more efficient, utilizing the latest technology and
management philosophies to turn out a new generation of employable students.
For many teachers,
Weingarten explained, this outside influence has become off-putting, if not
downright scary. “We have a really polarized environment in terms of education,
which we didn’t have 10 years ago,” she said. “Public education was a
bipartisan or multipartisan enterprise — it didn’t matter if you were a
Republican or Democrat or elite or not elite. People viewed public education as
an anchor of democracy and a propeller of the economy in the country.” Now, she
said, “there are people that have been far away from classrooms who have an
outsize influence on what happens inside classrooms. Beforehand, the
philanthropies were viewed as one of many voices in education. Now they are
viewed — and the market reformers and the tech folks — as the dominant forces,
and as dissonant to those who work in schools every day. She took a deep breath
and softened her tone: “In some ways, I give Bill Gates huge credit. Bill Gates
took a risk to get engaged. The fact that he was willing to step up and say,
‘Public education is important,’ is very different than foundations like the
Walton Foundation, who basically try to undermine public education at every
opportunity.”
From: Bill Gates has this idea for a History
Class. NYT. Sept. 8, 2014.
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