Teachers And Parents Need to Reimagine Our Virtual Foot Up Bill Gates' @$$ by Dr. Michael Flanagan
Isn’t Bill Gates too busy to turn his attention once again to destroying public education? I guess he is multitasking. How in the hell is he rearing his ugly head again into the topic of public education? This time dredged up by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Are we supposed to just forget about his push to dissect large New York schools and his devastating support for Common Core? I guess when you are a billionaire like Gates you get to experiment on children as much as you want. This time, with reimagining public school into a virtual world of remote education.
Teachers and parents need to reimagine our virtual foot up Bill Gates @$$. And Governor Cuomo’s--everybody’s new darling of the Democratic party--as well. For those of us in New York, we remember “Death Sentence Andy” and his charter school sweetheart Eva Moskowitz. God gave us two feet, we might as well virtually use them.
Yes, Cuomo has shown strong leadership during the coronavirus lockdown. But let's remember, George Bush stood on the pile of rubble in the days after 9/11 and looked like a leader too. How did that work out?
Cuomo has already started with his dog and pony show advisory council so he can claim that the remote learning, “virtual schools” were “teacher lead”. These billionaires, and their political shills have no shame, and no remorse. Before the people who have died from Covid-19 are buried and mourned, these vultures are planning to profit from the epidemic.
The script remains consistent for school takeovers. Threaten the schools with severe budget cuts, then label them as failures, disregard the overwhelming desire by students, parents and teachers to learn in their local public schools, then allow vulture capitalists in to rip schools apart.
Make no mistake, Bill Gates is no savior. He is not being altruistic. In the world of virtual learning, he will be selling the computers and software. He is not reimagining education, he is creating a market for his products. As will the other corporations and billionaire education reformers. That is disaster capitalism.
In this time of so much sickness and loss the pressure put on educators and parents to keep their kids safe, focused and educated is extraordinary. Students are stuck at home endlessly performing virtual work alone, as a means of crisis management, not as a form of true education. It is a band-aid in the most extreme of circumstances. Teachers are working harder than ever to provide support and learning for our students at this time. But remote teaching is not even remotely teaching.
For the Governor to suggest that learning in actual school buildings and classrooms is obsolete, because teachers have struggled to make something of this crisis, is a disgrace. Next, to recruit the failed billionaire architect of Common Core and the butchering of large New York schools, to help reimagine education is a direct slap in the face to parents and teachers. Then for the Governor to set up his faux advisory committee--with no early childhood teachers, no special education teachers, and no teachers from the largest public school district in the country on it--in an effort to ram permanent virtual education down our throats while we are the most vulnerable is unconscionable.
It is for this reason that parents and teachers will once again have to step up and defend our children and schools.
The question is, can we rally for yet another fight to save public schools? We spent the last decade protesting and pushing back against Common Core, vouchers, High stakes testing, charter schools etc. Can we once again fight for our public schools, and our students, to protect them from reimagined virtual schools? To keep them from being digital data points for the billionaire profiteers like Gates and their political puppets.
The time to coalesce and marshal our forces is now. Even in the midst of so much suffering, so much stress and despair, parents and teachers must once again prepare against the coming implementation of disaster capitalism. We need to fight for our schools, and our children now. Do not let Gates and Cuomo push through their reimagining of schools into a virtual learning matrix. Remote learning was and is crisis management for this emergency, not our children’s futures.