Rotten Apples - Time Magazine article on Silicon Valley's war on teachers
On a warm day in early June, a Los Angeles County trial-court judge, Rolf M. Treu, pink-cheeked beneath a trim white beard, dropped a bombshell on the American public-school system. Ruling in Vergara v. California, Treu struck down five decades-old California laws governing teacher tenure and other job protections on the grounds that they violate the state’s constitution.
In his 4,000-word decision, he bounded through an unusually short explanation of what was an unprecedented interpretation of the law. Step 1: Tenure and other job protections make it harder to fire teachers and therefore effectively work to keep bad ones in the classroom. Step 2: Bad teachers “substantially undermine” a child’s education. That, Treu wrote, not only “shocks the conscience” but also violates the students’ right to a “basic equality of educational opportunity” as enshrined in California’s constitution.
...the lawsuit was launched and underwritten by a Silicon Valley muckety-muck who lives in one of the fanciest ZIP codes in America. Others painted Treu, who was appointed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson, as a brazen partisan. Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and former D.C. chancellor of schools Michelle Rhee praised the decision for challenging the “broken status quo.”
The reform movement today is led not by grassroots activists or union leaders but by Silicon Valley business types and billionaires. It is fought not through ballot boxes or on the floors of hamstrung state legislatures but in closed-door meetings and at courthouses. And it will not be won incrementally, through painstaking compromise with multiple stakeholders, but through sweeping decisions–judicial and otherwise–made possible by the tactical application of vast personal fortunes. (read more at the link)
http://time.com/3533556/the-war-on-teacher-tenure/
After reading this article about the war on teachers by Silicon Valley and other billionaires, I wondered why they're spending fortunes and are so hell bent on joining hands with Republicans to destroy teachers. I mean, they obviously have nothing to do with education. They are into coding, right? They come up with new phones, with new programs, yada yada. Right? Then suddenly it hit me why they're spending so much money trying to destroy and weaken teachers and re-invent education: If they manage to destroy teachers and teachers' unions, if they manage to re-invent education, they'll strike gold. Just think - how much coding, how many programs, how many computers can these individuals sell to states' education? Taking over schools and weakening teachers, they can reshape schools into places where all that exists is standardized test after standardized test, computer learning, and a monitor sitting by helping the kids get on and learn to how to manage the computer that does the teaching.
Silicon Valley and Republican billionaires can make literally FORTUNES, BILLIONS. Even Bill Gates is in on it! These people aren't stupid. They know how much money they can gain from taking over the entire education system. Which is why they're spending millions destroying the current, teacher-based education system in courts and through propaganda.
While the rest of us are sitting around like total idiots thinking of the kindness of Silicon Valley and other Republican billionaires because of their interest in students, THEY are busy counting their future dollars which they envision as part of their destruction of schools as we know them.
There are 3 important issues these billionaires don't want discussed, but we need to discuss, and need to discuss them widely:
1. One of the biggest problems with schools today is not the educational system, but the influence of the COMPUTER CULTURE itself on kids, which damages the way children think (or rather, renders them unable to think), how they are influenced by the images and constant connection to computerized systems. Kids exposed to phone computers and other computers 24/7 can barely reason. They can't use logic. They can't memorize. They have no originality. Computers themselves have caused students to fall behind. There are ample studies being done on this, which of course, Silicon Valley doesn't want discussed. But oh yes, kids are experts at Tweeting, posting a dialog and sexting nude photos.
2. Also, studies have shown that if you take any subject (except coding or googling) and teach it to one group via teachers, and to another group via computer, the group taught by teachers will learn it well, while the group learning it from computers will NOT learn it properly.
3. The more time a person spends in front of any sort of computer, the less efficiently they are able to use their brain. This does not mean that they cannot use the computer better. In fact, they become addicted to the computer because on their own they can't calculate anything, remember anything, or have inventiveness.
We need to start discussing in the public sphere why exactly Silicon Valley wants to destroy teachers, and just how much they stand to gain monetarily by turning schools into robotic places where kids will truly learn almost nothing.
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