The thing about public education is that it has always worked on behalf of the
class system. That isn't what we were told. We were told that we would all have
an equal opportunity to learn, and the most capable among us would learn more
and, therefore, do better in terms of employment and its rewards. But we're
educated in the schools which are located where we live, and we live in
neighborhoods based on our parents' income and class status. The neighborhoods,
and thus, the schools, are sorted along class lines, as is the kind of
education they provide. Now, all pretense is gone. The least expensive
education will prepare the mass of students to be low paid workers either in an
Amazon warehouse or writing code at a computer somewhere in Africa or Chicago.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2019 3:11 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Tech Education Con
Oh, I think that their motives are pure alright. It's their misrepresentation
that is disingenuous.
It's almost laughable, if it weren't so tragic. Orwell wrote that Big Brother
was watching us, Joe McCarthy warned against Comrade Joe Stalin, Donald Trump
cries out against the Army of Intruders marching against our Southern boarder.
And all along it's our Big Corporate Brothers who are schmoozing us, lying in
order to push their products and to "educate" our children in ways that will
tightly link them to their benefactors.
Public education has always been a two edged sword, working toward 100%
literacy, and a never ending supply of workers.
And once again we place our trust in the hands of "experts" to decide what our
children should learn.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/15/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Tech Education Con
By JS Chen, Jacobin
15 January 19
Big tech companies are spending millions to get young people into
coding and STEM - not out of altruism, but to create a future supply
of cheap labor.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft are the champions of teaching tech in schools.
For many, they are saving education. Apple cuts prices on their
hardware for dot-edu email owners to make their products available to
students. Google competes by selling cheap Chromebooks and provides a
suite of education services to improve teamwork and collaboration.
Microsoft has countless programs to empower classrooms with new
technologies, such as teaching with Hololens.
These companies have catchy slogans for their programs like "expanding
learning for everyone" and "empower every student on the planet to
achieve more." But we shouldn't be fooled. These companies position
themselves as good corporate citizens by empowering students with tech
skills and accelerating STEM education; their motives, however, aren't pure.
While it may seem like these companies are competing in the education
market simply to broaden their consumer base and give back a little,
their collective strategy is much more concerning. Tech oligarchs are
pushing skills like coding in education to train their own future
labor force - and pay them low wages.
It makes sense that these companies are playing the long game on
skills and wages. Labor is among their most expensive costs, with tech
worker salaries running to the low six figures at Facebook and Google.
But with few workers possessing the skills to do these jobs, a
competitive salary is the only way that tech companies can compete for
talent today.
There is no reason tech workers should expect disproportionately high
salaries to be permanent, however. Execs are already doing what they
can to suppress wages. The shorter-term strategies are clear. Tech
companies collude via anti-poaching schemes to keep wages down. They
use non-compete disclosures to push wages down by forbidding workers
to get jobs from competitors. They also take advantage of the H-1B
visa, hiring immigrant workers for cheaper than their American counterparts.
But we should also note their long-term strategy. Under the charitable
guise of providing tech education for all, tech giants are doing
whatever they can to increase the labor supply of technically skilled
workers so that they can cut tech workers' wages.
STEM Education and the Rise of the For-Profit Sector
In 1967, then-California governor Ronald Reagan criticized a liberal
arts education, declaring that there were "certain intellectual
luxuries that perhaps we could do without." In other words, the reason
to go to college was simply to get a job. As part of his broader
argument to cut funding for public education, he added that the state
should not be subsidizing intellectual curiosity.
Obama offered a new iteration of this idea in his last years as president.
Having wooed Silicon Valley execs for financial support during his
campaign, he announced his plan for STEM education as a cure to
America's economic woes. His goal was to "provide opportunities to
learn computer science for all students." At the 2015 White House
Science Fair, Obama announced a $90 million "Let Everyone Dream"
campaign to expand STEM opportunities to marginalized students.
But despite Obama's push for STEM and some recent across-the-board
increases, state spending on higher education remains historically low
- nearly $9 billion below pre-financial crisis levels a decade
earlier. This is good news for the for-profit sector. The combined
demand for STEM education and lack of state funding for education
leaves a gap in the market that big tech companies are eager to fill.
Google has developed their own computer science programs for educators.
Microsoft is spending $75 million to increase access to computer
science education over three years starting in 2016. Investments in
education technology rose to a historical level of $9.5 billion in 2018.
The push for STEM has continued under Trump. Working with Ivanka
Trump, tech execs from Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Salesforce
agreed to collectively spend $300 million toward computer science
education to prepare more students for tech jobs of the future. Apple
CEO Tim Cook spoke with Donald Trump shortly after he assumed office,
advocating coding classes as a requirement in public schools.
To further the cause, Code.org, backed by CEOs from Google, Microsoft,
Amazon, and Infosys, campaigns on an apparent "skill gap" in the US.
The idea is that there aren't enough coders to fill all the
programming jobs out there. They suggest that there are over five
hundred thousand unfilled programming positions in the country.
But as tech education writer Audrey Watters points out, those numbers
are a vast distortion of reality - propaganda from the tech giants.
The five hundred thousand figure comes from a projection by the Bureau
of Labor Statistics about the number of computer and IT jobs that will
be added to the economy by 2026. In the aggregate, tech workers are
also not seeing any substantial growth in wages - one we'd expect, at
least according to mainstream economics, if there was a shortage in the
supply of workers.
These tech companies are not simply investing in STEM education to
equip students with the skills needed to succeed in the twenty-first
century out of the goodness of their hearts. Nor do they just want a
cut out of the growing market of education, which for private
education alone brought in
$68 billion in revenue as of last year. With the help of the White
House, tech companies want to get young people trained in computer
science to build an army of reserve tech labor. And where better to
learn the skills for the job than from the job creators themselves?
Coding Bootcamps and MOOCs
Coding bootcamps are highly intensive programs where adults, having
not studied computer science in school, can develop coding skills over
several months. Upon completion, these programs usually promise
students a tech job.
For the tech giants, these bootcamps are low-cost solutions for
increasing the labor supply in the short term. In 2017 alone, some
twenty-two thousand students graduated from such academies. In
comparison, fifty-nine thousand students in 2015 graduated from college with
a computer science degree.
Google partnered with the professional development school General
Assembly to launch a coding bootcamp for Android application
development. Facebook teamed up with Dev Bootcamp to fund scholarships
for their nineteen-week web development program. The Chan Zuckerberg
Initiative has backed the coding bootcamp Andela to place engineers
throughout Africa. With tremendous corporate support, the coding
bootcamp industry is on track to make $219 million in revenue in 2018.
Massively open online courses (MOOCs) employ a similar strategy. But
instead of training students from unrelated majors, they target other
STEM degree-holders who are trying to enter the tech industry. It's
not too hard for a physics student who already writes R code to learn
web development from a MOOC in order to get an entry position at a
startup.
Like coding bootcamps, MOOCs are big business. In 2017, Coursera, one
of the biggest MOOC companies, was just short of $100 million in
annual revenue, a dramatic jump from the $1 million they made in 2013.
With their ability to rapidly increase the supply of tech labor, tech
companies have rallied around MOOCs. Cofounded by an ex-Google exec,
Coursera maintains a deep relationship with Google and is part of
their Grow with Google initiative. Similarly, EdX and Pluralsight -
close competitors of Coursera - have a close relationship with
Microsoft. Their partnership involves teaching students how to code,
specifically on Microsoft's cloud computing platform, Azure.
By supporting coding bootcamps and MOOCs, tech companies shift the
responsibility of training workers to the workers themselves. In order
to keep up in this digital economy, workers must now pay private
companies (coding bootcamps and MOOC providers) and spend additional
hours reeducating themselves with new skills.
Most outrageous is the Obama-era initiative Educational Quality
through Innovative Partnership (EQUIP) - an experiment allowing
students to take out federal loans to pay for "new models of education
and training." Put simply, this is a way for low-income students to
borrow money from the government to pay for coding bootcamps and
MOOCs.
While bootcamps and MOOCs are a way for workers to pay for their own
employment training, relieving corporations of the burden, EQUIP
legitimizes that practice on a policy level. As Tressie McMillan
Cottom points out, it's poor students paying a tax for job entry - and
the government subsidizing the practice.
Tech Education and Philanthropy
It is impossible to talk about tech education and philanthropy without
talking about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and its younger
equivalent, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Created from the immense
wealth of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively, these
organizations - aside from helping these billionaires keep their money
isolated from public coffers and democratic control - have their eyes
set on expanding tech education in some of the world's most
impoverished countries.
In the same way the American military uses the idea of "freedom" as a
reason to invade other nations, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
and the Chan Zuckerberg initiatives use philanthropic means to exploit
some of the poorest and most vulnerable regions in the world. For
Gates and Zuckerberg, foreign tech education is a way to develop cheap
labor for their corporate empires - and a way to garner praise while
doing it.
Gates and Zuckerberg are both backers of Bridge International
Academies (BIA), a for-profit education business that provides
low-fee, private, and informal schools throughout Africa. Highly
profitable, BIA streamlines their education system by collecting
massive amounts of data on student performance and compares students
across classes, regions, and countries, making standardized testing
and score-based performance central to their education system. By
backing companies like BIA, Silicon Valley investors yield sizable
profits at the expense of some of the world's most marginalized
children while also delegitimizing public education in those
countries.
While not exactly technical training, BIA's tech-driven education
builds the foundation for many students in Africa to enter the tech
job market. It's no coincidence that one of Microsoft's largest
international investments is in "transforming the [African]
continent." Named 4Afrika, this initiative is a large recruiter for
local workers. Through the initiative, Microsoft has invested millions
in "educating the next generation of African web developers" in order
to galvanize the massive and largely untapped market in Africa.
Gates and Zuckerberg have a long track record when it comes to
privatizing public education in the US as well. Zuckerberg donated
$100 million to replace Newark public schools with charters. Gates was
a primary backer of Pearson's Common Core system, a now-widely adopted
curriculum for K-12 that emphasizes standardized testing for its
efficiency and low costs. Pearson and Microsoft signed a deal to put
the Common Core courses on Microsoft devices, allowing Microsoft to
compete against Google's Chromebooks and Apple's iPads for school
district spending. Gates, who is still a major shareholder of Microsoft
stock, is cashing in on this, too.
Summit Learning, Facebook's attempt at education software has been
adopted by over three hundred schools nationwide. Students have
complained about the ineffectiveness of the application, and last
November students in New York City walked out in protest of the
teaching method. This should come as no surprise given that the tool
was built largely by Facebook engineers, none of whom are trained in
pedagogy.
And while the short-term financial gains can seem significant, the
broader project of privatizing education isn't just about making a
quick buck for these companies. It's also a long-term transformation
that benefits capital in multiple way, from new (and often
unregulated) business opportunities to make money to churning out the
next generation of pliant workers, in tech and elsewhere.
The tech giants are obsessed with technical training initiatives for
poor and marginalized students. Microsoft works with Girls Who Code,
while Google backs the National Society of Black Engineers. Amazon
launched a program, blatantly named Amazon Future Engineer, that
encourages more black, Latino, and female students to code.
For the tech giants, it's a clever move. They get showered with good
PR for practicing diversity and inclusion (despite their own companies
not actually being diverse) and save on hiring costs by paying women
and black tech workers lower-than-average salaries - women and black
software engineers both make 8 percent less money on average than
their male and white counterparts, respectively.
***
Public education, like any institution, has to change with the times.
Learning digital skills like coding should be part of any twenty-first
century educational program.
But tech giants' interest in remaking our education systems isn't
altruistic. We have to remain skeptical of their technological
solutionism and tax-evading philanthropy.
As education is taken over by private corporations, with tech
companies playing a key role, and the White House continuing to
promote STEM as the only solution for students, we should ask: who
benefits from a growing supply of reserve tech labor? Who wins from the
nationwide push for STEM?
And what is lost in the single-minded pursuit of this goal?
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