The video below is public testimony I gave to the Jobs and Education Subcommittee of Philadelphia City Council’s Special Committee on Poverty Reduction and Prevention on Thursday December 5, 2019 at Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School in North Philadelphia. It is my belief that this committee was created to jump start pay for success initiatives in our city, a city of deep poverty. You can read about the predatory nature of pay for success finance here.
In 2016, the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia prepared a white paper lauding Philadelphia’s potential to become a center for the impact economy. Perhaps we could even aspire to be the Silicon Valley of “impact!” Yes, we have THAT MUCH poverty, and Main Line venture capital interests are falling all over themselves to package the data of misery management for a tidy profit. See my previous post on social impact investing and public education in Philadelphia.
Here is my testimony. It’s about ten minutes long.
*Correction. I misspoke at the beginning of my testimony. Mass school closures in Philadelphia took place in 2015 not 2013.
It was SUCH a long hearing with six official panels and over twenty “approved” speakers. As the final panel wrapped up two-and-a-half hours later, I inquired to see where I was on the list of public speakers. A small group of us, including two wonderful kids who had kept themselves busy drawing on the extra agendas, had been sitting patiently with our banner (Children Are Not Data, Human Capital, Or Impact Investing Opportunities-see featured image) all that time. Only then was I was told there would be only ONE more speaker. The rest of the twenty-plus folks, including me, who had pre-registered with the intention of sharing our thoughts on education, workforce development, and poverty, were out of luck. Too bad.
At that point I loudly protested. I had shared 30+ copies of my testimony with a bunch of folks in the audience letting them know I was on the list to speak. I saw a lot of people reading it. They knew I had things to say, and quite a few nodded in agreement when I spoke up. Ultimately the subcommittee, chaired by Sharmain Matlock-Turner of the Urban Affairs Coalition, acquiesced, allowing those speakers who hadn’t already left (eight of us) to testify. Somehow they STILL left my name off the list even though I had email confirmation from Councilwoman Quinones-Sanchez’s legislative aide who was coordinating that part of the event. Finally, I was told I could sit in the front row. I was the last one to speak.
It should be noted that Pedro Ramos, former School Reform Commission member, president of the Philadelphia Foundation and advisor to ImpactPHL, left before any members of the public came up to testify. During the “official” panel discussion he had inquired about out-of school work-based learning (including what policy changes would need to be made to allow this to happen in public schools), citing the Christo Rey School franchise as a model. Christo Rey seems to have a rising profile in San Jose, too. San Jose is another City of LRNG with many similarities to Philadelphia, which I describe here. This is something we need keep an eye on given the Vatican’s expressed interest in impact investing.
In my testimony I reference the “Parents As Consumer” symposium that Social Innovation Partners had planned for last June. That event ended up being abruptly cancelled when word got out about the agenda, which included both pay for success AND Education Savings Accounts.
Among the panelists planning to participate in the event, which was hosted by Bucks County State Representative Frank Farry and Nicholas Torres’s impact-investment catalyst Social Innovations Journal, was Brian McElwee. McElwee is an investor, but not just any investor. He is apparently known as a “finder,” which according to an investigative article on him from the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2016 is a kind of matchmaker who connects investment professionals to elected officials who control government contracts. McElwee is also board chair of Independence Mission Schools, a non-parish affiliated Catholic school non-profit that was set up in 2012 to run urban schools in Philadelphia, schools where I expect there is a lot of potential for “measurable impact.”
Even though the symposium was ultimately cancelled, that event is significant. We must recognize that faith-based initiatives will be a growing aspect of privatization efforts moving forward, and families who have children in ESA-funded alternative work-based Catholic schools are likely to be subjected not only to the expectation of compulsory child labor, but that their data will be harvested for impact investing deals tied to pay for success.
After a very long wait, on my birthday no less, I felt vindicated. Even though there were only about twenty people left in the audience by the time I presented, I was able to add my extensive findings to the public record. I also asked for the California NAACP resolution opposing linking Blockchain digital identity to public benefit systems, which I referenced at the previous hearing on housing, be added to the record.
Below is that resolution, adopted in the spring of 2019. A similar resolution passed, with overwhelming support, at the national meeting of the NAACP in Detroit in July. I believe the model legislation presented here will be useful in helping educate the public about the dangers of digital tracking systems and to protect targeted populations from predatory finance and Internet of Things surveillance. I encourage folks to bring this information to the organizations of which you are a part, and encourage them to adopt or adapt it to your needs. We need to be proactive as the push to link digital vouchers to pay for success human capital contracts begins to ramp up.
I streamed my testimony, and people around the country are watching it. It seems I have been able to put the pieces together in ways others have not. Once we start to see the bigger picture, identifying resistance strategies becomespossible. Active non-cooperation is key as my hero John Trudell said. And you know what? People genuinely seemed to appreciate it. Sure it is upsetting information, but better to know so we can plan.
Together we can carve solidarity out of the dystopia capitalism has created. Time to look squarely at the truth and prepare for an age of automation and human capital debt-finance.
All we have is each other. Love and peace folks.
My testimony:
We are living in a time of extreme wealth and devastating poverty. The future of work is highly uncertain. Based on pronouncements from the Markle Foundation, the Aspen Institute, Pearson, and Tom Vander Ark’s Global Education Futures Initiative, we need to be paying attention to the rise of artificial intelligence, globalized, platformed labor, and human-robot collaboration.
The MacArthur Foundation and its spin-off, Collective Shift, have spent millions of dollars promoting gamified digital media and learning. Philadelphia is one of their pilot Cities of LRNG. Many LRNG cities are also “smart” cities: Dallas, Chicago, San Diego, and San Jose among them. Digital learning is central to the premise of the “learning ecosystem” advanced by Knowledgeworks, based in Cincinnati, and its “Cradle to Career” social impact offshoot StriveTogether. The latter works closely with the United Way through a “collective impact” network focused on predatory pay for success human capital management.
Those in power have reimagined education, and in this future:
Decentralized learning ecosystems replace bricks and mortar schools.
Learning is privatized, outsourced to online providers, non-profits, and corporations.
There are a few community drop-in centers, mostly staffed by AmeriCorps youth.
Academic and behavioral competencies are kept in online learning record stores.
AI “mentors” and “synthetic people” supplant human teachers and peers.
Learning is “engineered” by neuroscientists.
Internet of Things sensors and xAPI impose educational surveillance.
Badges, developed in partnership with Mozilla, substitute for degrees.
“Lifelong learning” is funded using digital vouchers that link payment to the delivery of specified performance metrics.
Accept vouchers? Hand over the data. In this way even homeschool families are sucked in.
Algorithms screen job candidates’ stackable credentials along with psychographic information pulled from custom-designed HR video games.
Black and Brown children are risk-profiled from birth and plugged into planned regional economies (or incarceration or the military) managed for the benefit of the corporate state (increasingly Google and cyber-defense interests).
In this future, “opportunity youth” are trained as “middle-skill” fodder for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Dehumanized education employs “virtual apprenticeships” upon which Lumina, Salesforce, and the Robin Hood Foundation place wagers-betting for and against a person’s life outcomes data. That seems to be what motivated bipartisan support for the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act, the pay for success provision of the ESSA, seed funding from the Social Impact Partnerships Pay for Results Act to get the ball rolling. Evidently there is a lot of money to be made gambling on poor people.
People are being sold on coding as a pathway out of poverty, not realizing it’s this generation’s piecework. STEM sweatshops to build augmented reality “smart” worlds for those who run the cloud and the hedge funds that finance them will start to emerge in federal Opportunity Zones. Digital-on ramps, put in place by Michael and Lisa Nutter years ago with “smart city” money from IBM, wait in the wings as the Philadelphia Education Fund’s STEM ecosystem ramps up. Authentic knowledge will be replaced with isolating online learning, out-of-school time education, Pokémon-Go-style micro-knowledge aligned to the interests of funders like Dow, Chevron, Amgen, and Motorola.
Those in power see children as raw material to be run through the federal labor database O*NET, in Raleigh; “eds and meds,” skills delivered in quantities sufficient to suppress wages while optimizing profit. Meanwhile educational pathways are tracked for value-added “growth” data to run “pay for success” futures markets. Learning Machine has set up Blockchain transcripts with Paul Leblanc at SNHU. Dr. Hite served with him as an educational advisor at Ridge Lane Limited Partners. But whom should we ask about Amply, the pre-k Blockchain identity app launched by Innovation Edge in Cape Town? I hear folks in Philadelphia have been briefed, but I don’t know who’s the project lead.
Worker productivity is high, wages low, and precarious employment the norm. Closed-door deals are struck as Chamber of Commerce insiders line up the policy, finance, and technological infrastructure needed to control the masses. Pay for success, MoneyBall “What Works” Government, behavioral economics, the nudge…every policy wonk, philanthropist, global consultant and sold-out academic pitches techno-solutions for poverty as the Federal Reserve looks on pretending compliance by the oppressed will somehow magically bring them prosperity.
No, justice will not come from more data. What we need is the will to redistribute resources from a billionaire class steeped in white supremacy. Resources must go directly to poor folks; self-determination is key. It is wrong to channel money through intermediaries whose continued existence depends on intractable poverty.
Solidarity not charity!
Instead of coffels, digital peonage will chain people through biometric digital identity linked to public benefits. Eventually, if they get their way, this will include Education Savings Accounts to purchase competency-based education on the open market, the data being fed back into pay for success education deals. Look up State Representative Frank Farry and Social Innovations Journal’s “Parents As Consumers Symposium” planned for June 15, 2018, but abruptly cancelled. The agenda clearly describes the goal of linking ESAs to pay for success.
And so we are here at Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School to discuss education and poverty. Some still trust elected officials to deliver their children opportunities for stable lives presuming they work hard; and yet the reality of pending labor automation is harsh and unforgiving. Who’s going to tell the public there will be no more shop teachers, that the plan is outsourced work-based learning? No one is going to say they are replacing neighborhood schools with IBM and Ford training centers. No one wants to admit the National Center on Education and the Economy’s proposal laid out by Marc Tucker in the “Dear Hillary Letter” is ready to launch; that most future jobs will be gigs, and even those gigs will only go to those with the right sort of human capital. Behavioral data is becoming social credit currency. Build up your brand starting in pre-k, maybe at a Hatch Education surveillance play table. Those in power are watching, always watching; and the rise of robot class means people are becoming more and more disposable.
The United States compulsory education system has been used, since its inception, to reinforce divisions of race and class. It delivers human capital to meet industrial interests: youth trained just enough to do the work required, but not to imagine a future beyond the one defined by the pathways on which they are put. What is needed to eliminate poverty is revolutionary transformation. Poverty “reduction” is not about narrowing gaps. That rift was ALREADY far too great even as the founding fathers hammered out our duplicitous constitution. The system isn’t broken. Trump didn’t break it. Neither did DeVos. Our education system is working exactly as intended.
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
“With false generosity he attempts not only to preserve an unjust and neocrophilic order, but to “buy” peace for himself. It happens that peace cannot be bought; peace is experienced in solidarity and loving acts, which cannot be incarnated in oppression.”
We need to become conscious, we need the oppressed to wake up to the sinister intent of the planned Fourth Industrial Revolution, and we need education for liberation.
Liberation will not be attained through an appointed committee.
It is created in the streets, doing the work with love and solidarity.
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to return to the Seattle area, visit with fellow education activists, and present at the Kent Regional Library. I was last in Seattle in the spring of 2017 when I gave a talk on Future-Ready Schools at the Lake City Library. If you missed that one, you can watch it on KODX’s youtube channel here.
The video below is a voice recording of the talk I gave on November 2, 2019 along with the slides I presented that day. Be forewarned, it’s a long talk, two solid hours and over 120 slides. I apologize for the delay in getting it put together, but better late than never. You can access the slides directly via my google drive here or PDF here. Those images are clearer, so if you want to zoom in and read the text use the links.
This talk builds on the ed-tech research I presented two and a half years ago with much more information on pay for success finance and the ways in which ed-tech and predictive profiling are laying the groundwork for speculative global markets in human capital data. There are a lot of really good infographics, so spend some time with those.
The Kent School District, a member of the League of Innovative Schools affiliated with Digital Promise, has seen widespread adoption of technology in classrooms and a shift towards work-based career pathways. There is a growing sense of unease about these changes, which is why I was invited.
Many corporations advancing ed-tech (Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) have a significant presence in the greater Seattle area. This talk gave me the opportunity to examine some of the key players working to align public education to the precarious, “just-in-time” labor demands of the Fourth Industrial Revolution being promoted by Governor Jay Inslee. It also touches on Inslee’s push for maternal home visits I’ve written about here, and adoption of the Swiss apprenticeship model I’ve written about here.
I’m grateful to have had this invitation extended and for the connections made. I hope it helps those who came to the talk as well as those who watch it online to make sense of the policies that are rolling out and better understand what is motivating these changes. We have to understand the landscape in which we are operating in order to effectively resist. I welcome your thoughts and questions in the comments.
Philadelphia City Council created a “Special Committee on Poverty Reduction and Prevention” on March 28, 2019 (resolution here), and with it the machine of human capital impact investing in our city of deep, deep poverty roared to life.
The purported goal of the committee is to create an action plan to lift 100,000 Philadelphians out of poverty by 2024, though how that will happen given stagnant wages and rising cost of living is unclear. See dismal workforce projections and plans to harness our education system to deliver a ten-dollar-per hour workforce here.
Three subcommittees have been set up: social safety net, education and workforce, and housing. A kick-off gathering of the full committee was held in October and hearings for each subcommittee are scheduled for November.
Transcript of the October 10, 2019 full committee hearing here.
Transcript of the November 18, 2019 “Safety Net Subcommittee” hearing here.
Below is video of testimony I gave at the November 25, 2019 Housing Subcommittee hearing held at Temple University Medical School. In seven minutes I make make clear my opposition to the poor being surveilled and transformed into data commodities to profit transnational global capital through pay for success contracts. If you are not familiar with pay for success, find out more here.
I express concern about Philadelphia’s municipal ID program, and how it could evolve into a “federated citizen” or digital identity system to track “impact” for the purposes of investors.
I note that we must understand Philadelphia’s deep poverty as the legacy of structural racism and recognize that continued automation of work will lead to a world of increasingly concentrated wealth and power. In this world those at the helm of the finance and technology sectors will rule over the masses through the Internet of Things, Big Data, and predictive analytics.
I state that pay for success finance is already being piloted in Philadelphia by Project Home, and that Sister Mary Scullion gave welcoming remarks at the first Total Impact conference in Philadelphia last year. Omar Woodard of the Green Light Fund was a speaker at this year’s gathering, and. Tayyib Smith, a Green Light Fund board member, serves on the housing subcommittee.
Making the poor jump through hoop after hoop on behavioral pathways to prove their worthiness to earn a right to have their basic needs met won’t fundamentally change our situation. Good behavior on the part of the poor won’t redistribute the resources of billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates to those in need. In fact, pay for success finance is designed to enable the rich to make money off the misery of the poor. Dispossession is the raw material of impact investing. It is central to the enterprise.
At the end of my remarks I ask members of the subcommittee if they are familiar with the concept of pay for success. Councilwoman Maria Quinones-Sanches replied, “Yes, we’ve heard the term.” Remember that.
A partner in this initiative is the Reinvestment Fund, lead investor in several “pay for success” deals including the Welcome Home social impact bond in Santa Clara, CA, which I wrote about here, and the Family Stability program in Connecticut, which I wrote about here. The Reinvestment Fund collaborates with Palantir (predictive policing, ICE contracts) in their deal evaluation. See Santa Clara’s Data-Mining Deal With Palantir Draws Scrutiny From Privacy Advocates, covered by SanJoseInside in August of 2018.
Bill Golderer “progressive” pastor of Arch Street Presbyterian Church and relatively new CEO of the United Way of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey (see collective impact and ALICE here).
Pedro Ramos CEO of the Philadelphia Foundation, former member of the School Reform Commission, and advisor to ImpactPHL, an accelerator of the “impact economy.”
Andrew Frishkoff head of Philadelphia LISC, an initiative of the Ford Foundation spun off facilitate the redevelopment of distressed communities in the late 1970s. Note the Ford Foundation set aside a billion dollars of its endowment for impact investing in 2017.
Kristin Romens former program innovator for Big Brothers, Big Sisters who consulted for Bridgespan (Bain Capital’s non-profit impact investing consultancy) and now runs the Pew Fund, which is pouring money into pre-k, child mental health, and out-of-school-time learning-all impact investment sectors.
The final hearing, which will discuss education and workforce, is December 5, 2019 from 4 to 6pm at Dobbins High School, 2150 West Lehigh Avenue Philadelphia, PA 19132. To testify, you will need to email Andre Delvalle, Legislative Assistant to Councilmember Quinones-Sanchez, at andre.delvalle@phila.gov.
Below are the members of the Education and Workforce Subcommittee. Members of the full committee include Superintendent William Hite, formerly affiliated with merchant bank Ridge Lane, LP; Otis Hackney of the Mayor’s Office of Education to whom I protested about pay for success previously; and Dr. Donald Guy Generals, head of the Community College of Philadelphia a pilot for Digital On-Ramp human capital management programs described here.
JOBS AND EDUCATION SUBCOMMITTEE MEMBERS
Jessica Cunningham Akoto, KIPP Philadelphia Schools Rafael Arismendi, Congreso Steven Scott Bradley, The African-American Chamber of Commerce of PA, NJ, and DE Malik Brown, Graduate Philadelphia Rev. Bonnie Camarda, The Salvation Army Katherine Clupper, The PFM Group Carol de Fries, Community College of Philadelphia Pedro Ramos, Philadelphia Foundation Jennifer Rodriguez, Hispanic Chamber of Commerce Esteban Vera, Jr., The Laborers’ International Union of North America Local Union #57 Rhonda Willingham, Menz Fit Tara Williams, PA Department of Human Services H. Patrick Clancy, Philadelphia Works Inc. Otis Hackney, Mayor’s Office of Education Yvette Nunez, The Chamber of Commerce of Greater Philadelphia Alexandrea “Ali” Robinson-Rogers, The School District of Philadelphia
On November 6, 2019, former San Francisco District Attorney, California Attorney General, Senator, and presidential candidate Kamala Harris introduced the Family Friendly Schools Act. If passed, the bill would create a five-year grant program to restructure 500 elementary schools to “better align” schedules to the work day. The legislation authorizes $1,300,000,000 per year from 2020 to 2024 to pay for the program.
Co-sponsors include five Democratic senators: Kirsten Gillibrand (NY); Richard Blumenthal (CT); Jeff Merkley (OR); Sherrod Brown (OH); and Michael Bennet (CO). Ostensibly this legislation is to aid working families by extending the school day with support from community partners. It is being presented as an “economic growth and child development strategy.” In my assessment, child development = human capital management for impact investment purposes.
While it is true that families struggle with child care before and after school, the motivation behind this bill has less to do with taking care of vulnerable communities and more to do with the planned expansion of pay for success finance and “cradle to career” pipelines for impact investors.
The collection of data and the monitoring of students and families this entails will require an expansive system of what I am calling “soft” policing. We may replace school police officers with social workers, but control of Black and Brown populations is still the primary goal. This shift will be justified as fiscally prudent, “what works” public policy, though it is predicated on predictive profiling.
Harris’s bill will usher in a new era of privatization, one in which community based organizations (CBOs) through data sharing agreements target turnaround schools for predatory “evidence-based” interventions; schools as data factories.
What would be truly family friendly would be legislation advancing stable, living wage employment such that an adult could be home with children at the end of a normal school day. In such a world, children would have time to decompress, have a snack, and enjoy a bit of unstructured play without having to conform to a PlayWorks recess rubric or wear a fit bit.
There would be opportunities for families to build community instead of being forced to navigate crises alone where safety nets have been torn asunder. Sure, it’s aspirational, but the “help” being offered here is not motivated by altruism but rather with an eye toward profit. Besides, what does a “normal” work day for low-income parents cobbling together gigs and driving for insta-cart look like? The days of a single nine-to-five job are rapidly coming to a close.
Careful consideration must be given to the context in which this legislative proposal has emerged. Deconstructing language matters. Relationships of money, power, and influence matter. Harris’s career as a functionary of the carceral state matters. It is at our peril that we accept any politician’s framing of an issue at face value. Just because a bill professes to be “family friendly” doesn’t mean that it is.
Restructuring The School Day
The Center for American Progress (CAP) is a liberal think tank affiliated with the Clintons that promotes evidence based policy, impact data, and social finance. It also supports the Family Friendly Schools Act. Catherine Brown, a CAP senior fellow and former Vice President of Policy at Teach for America, provided a ringing endorsement stating the bill would advance “educational equity and provide a needed boost to our economy.” CAP has been pushing extended learning time for over a decade. Kamala Harris, a regular at their events, presented at the 2017 CAP Ideas Conference and at a maternal health disparities event in October.
As indicated below, the language of the Family Friendly Schools Act states a preference for applicants willing to restructure the school day rather than simply adding extra time. This is a red flag.
This approach aligns with CAP’s assertion that “At the core of expanded learning time is a critical and fundamental principle that cannot be overlooked – the complete redesign of the school’s educational program. Successful implementation of expanded learning initiatives occurs in tandem with other reform strategies and practices that take place through the redesign process. Without conjoining expanded learning time with the redesign principle, more time risks being “more of the same” and a promising school improvement strategy becomes a band aid.”
The image below is taken from a white paper funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation for CAP in 2007. More about that foundation’s ed reform and impact philanthropy efforts here and here. Two years later, Arne Duncan created flexibility waivers through Race to the Top that allowed turnaround schools to use 21st Century Community Learning Center funds to “personalize” learning for college and career using “evidence-based” practices IF they partnered with organizations that “demonstrated experience improving student achievement.” The report goes on to laud KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program), noting ELT provides “flexibility to exercise innovation in a very deliberate manner.”
Source: Choosing More Time for Students: The What, Why and How of Expanded Learning
You’ll notice an emphasis on data and community partners both of which are prerequisites for outcomes-based contracting. The United Way has developed a sizeable network of Out Of School Time community service providers, as well as playing matchmaker for the questionable Salt Lake City pre-k social impact bond.
With Obama’s gutting of FERPA and the United Way’s campaign to get parents to sign waivers, the floodgates are now open for the data that will place children on “lifelong learning” pathways to digital indentured servitude. Imagine the number of community partners that will be involved with these 500 “family friendly” schools.
That’s going to be a lot of data!
Source: Data-Sharing Federal Rules and Best Practices To Improve Out-of-School-Time Programs and Student Outcomes, Partnership for Children and Youth, Funded by Charles Stewart Mott Foundation
Source: Youtube: United Way, “Helping Students Through Data Sharing”
The video above was created as part of a United Way campaign to get parents to waive their FERPA rights. Materials for the Salt Lake City’s Promise Partnership community school program were created in both English and Spanish. For more information read Save Maine School’s post, United Way To Parents: Give Us Your Gold.
Another supporter of the bill is the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), a Gates and Lumina-funded “anti-poverty” think tank with ties to Connecting Credentials and the Workforce Data Quality Campaign. The organization prepared a white paper on Social Impact Bonds for the MacArthur Foundation back in 2014. Olivia Golden, Executive Director, noted it was a positive step towards job stability, child wellbeing, and economic security. I guess she hasn’t read the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act reports. The ones where they say a majority of jobs will be automated and the ones left are going to be gigs that pay less than a living wage. More on that here.
There’s yet another think tank behind the bill, the bipartisan First Focus, a lobbying outfit that advocates for the breaking down of program silos (all the better for the creation of data lakes for profiling) in support of federal budget policies having to do with children and families. First Focus has ties to the Institute for Child Success that ran the groundbreaking South Carolina maternal home visit pay for success project. More on ICS here.
And Randi Weingarten and the American Federation of Teachers are backing the bill. Of course. They’ve already embraced reimagined education with partners, and they’re holding the door wide open for community schools. In her statement of support Weingarten talked about “solutions that work.” Sounds about right; “what works” government.
Other supporters are shown on the map below.
Source: Supporters of the Family Friend Schools Act (click link for interactive version)
Expanded / Extended / Out-of-School Time Learning
The After School Corporation, ExpandEd, Wallace Foundation, Mott Foundation, United Way, YMCA, and Boys and Girls Clubs, among others, have been constructing a national Out of School Time Network (OST) that is poised to extend its reach into the school day through Extended or Expanded Learning Time (ELT). These folks are more than happy to participate in all the “restructuring.” In fact, they can hardly wait.
The seeds for this were planted decades ago by affiliates of Marc Tucker’s National Center on Education and the Economy. In a 1987 presidential address, Learning In School And Out, Lauren Resnick, Pitt research professor and close collaborator with Tucker on what would become Common Core State Standards, goes into considerable detail about Out-of-School Time and Extended Learning.
As technology for digital credentialing (badges) and education/training vouchers (ESAs) begins to scale, the extended school day Harris has proposed would be a logical precursor to un-bundled “anytime, anywhere” learning. See recent coverage of IBM’s Blockchain credential platform launch in partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse and this article on new payment systems linked to alternative education delivery, Charter Schools and the Unbundling of K12 Education Services.
Folks at the Heritage Foundation are eagerly anticipating the day fin-tech links up with free market education “choice,” but traditional homeschooling/un-schooling families need to be paying attention.
Source: Financial Technology and School Choice in Education, Heritage Foundation
Digital vouchers are meant to control and commodify out-of-school, informal community learning, too. Libraries, arts organizations, recreation centers, robotics leagues; all the resources home school families have used in the past will be sucked into the “what works” data vortex. Organizations accepting ESAs or awarding digital credentials WILL be harnessed to the standards-aligned, data-surveillance pipeline. We all need to get on the same page. Unbundling schools, if conditioned on standards-aligned competencies for the gig economy, is going to be bad, really bad, for EVERYONE (but especially for Black and Brown communities).
In a previous post I compared hyrid-blended learning to cicada killer wasps (above) that paralyze their victims while consuming them from the inside out. I warned that privatization was taking place from within AND without. Still, too few people are paying attention to the “within” part. While school closures and charters have unquestionably been destabilizing forces for public education, the end game is outright colonization of remaining neighborhood schools through “personalized” learning and outsourced instruction to non-profit providers (teaching artists, etc.) as would be permitted by this bill.
Now we are seeing the rise of innovation networks and portfolio schools that remain titularly “public,” but have been handed over to private managers. These operators are often given free reign to be “innovative,” deploying all sorts of reformist practices often centered around ed-tech. This transformation is coming to fruition, make no mistake. The $6 billion+ behind the Family Friendly Schools Act would take this game to the next level.
The letter below shows how community partners offering out of school time instruction are well suited to participate in alternative (read Competency/Mastery/Proficiency) assessment pilots authorized under ESSA.
Source: Open Records Request, Comments on Pennsylvania Education Plan
How much time is there before gig tutors and “citizen school” mentors largely replace full-time certified teachers? With mastery/competency/proficiency based education we are seeing a shift with credit flexibility to individual student contracts, coursework set up as ELOs where students can earn graduation credit “learning” at a local rock climbing gym, on the job, or even teach themselves! I’ve written a number of posts about how ELOs and after-school programs have opened the door to Ed Reform 2.0 here, here, and here.
Blended Learning: Digital Data Theft
It is hard to ignore the fact that schools are now data factories: academic data, behavioral data, health data, and mental health data. The language of this bill says as much given the “evidence-based” services they plan to provide. Tele-medicine and tele-therapy consultations carried out in educational settings under weakened FERPA protections will open new frontiers in data extractivism. Meanwhile, the populations creating all of this value remain uncompensated and surveilled.
Of course the mother lode remains digital curriculum and online behavior management. That data is mediated through screens and wearable tech, an apparatus through which the elite plan to to exert sustained discipline over the minds and bodies of the masses. In unstable times controlling volatile populations becomes a priority, which loosens the wallet and makes the funding of “family friendly” initiatives like this more of an imperative.
In the summer of 2011, Karen Kator, head of the US Department of Education Office of Science and Technology, convened a meeting in partnership with The After School Corporation (TASC) to discuss the nascent “blended learning revolution” that would be carried out through Community Based Organizations (CBOs) in extended day programs, the type of program being promoted in this bill.
Out-of-School-Time instruction was seen as a great opportunity to expand online learning, because CBOs were viewed as risk-tolerant team players, that would tap into a predominately youthful workforce deemed to be “unafraid of technology.” Note close ties between the Boys and Girls Club and Comcast and the YMCA and United Way.
Meeting participants from City Light Capital expressed excitement about obtaining access to “users in early stages of product development” and the “variety of testing environments” offered.
Source: Blended Learning Partnerships For Community Based Organizations, US DOE, 2011
Extended day programming would allow privatization interests to refine Ed Reform 2.0 strategies like digital badges, e-portfolios, and interoperable data systems, the latter being incredibly important to the future of human capital impact investing. Over the past decade the Wallace Foundation (money from Reader’s Digest) led the creation of OST data systems and pushed for student information sharing as well as the collection of social-emotional learning data.
Source: Blended Learning Partnerships For Community Based Organizations, US DOE, 2011
Among the thirty-five attendees were:
Tom Vander Ark, Learn Capital and Global Education Futures Forum
Jaime Casap, Senior Education Evangelist at Google
Matthew Wicks, Vice President of Strategy iNACOL
Gary Chapman, Executive Vice President of Communities in Schools
Ursula Helminski, Vice President of External Affairs at the Afterschool Alliance
KJ Lavoie, Senior Director of Government Relations, Boys and Girls Club
Ivana Alexander, Senior Public Policy Manager, YMCA of the USA
Community Schools
During the week the Family Friendly Schools Act circulated through my social media feed, many teachers voiced anger and frustration at the prospect of longer work days. They shouldn’t have worried about overwork though; the whole point of the bill is to push teachers out of schools as much as possible.
Mercedes Schneider, blogger at deutsch29, said the problem with the bill was a presumption that schools were “stable” places. She hints at the real issue in the closing line of her post where she notes the program should “exclude schools operated by third parties that are not directly responsible to the public.” Her analysis stops short, however, sidestepping the fact that the proposed legislation overlaps with the roll out of “community” school initiatives; initiatives enthusiastically supported by union leadership through AROS (the Alliance to Reclaim our Schools) and many social justice activists who seem not to realize what is actually going on.
Community schools have an important role to play in this privatization/financialization scheme. The Family Friendly Schools Act would create a vast network of schools tasked with collecting detailed family information, including social determinants of health. The plan is to bring intervention services (tele-medicine, tele-therapy) into schools where data is less protected and can be leveraged for impact investing purposes.
The selection below is taken from a US Department of Education FAQ on Expanded Learning Time under the ESEA Flexibility Waiver. Note references to anytime/anywhere learning, digital instruction, data sharing, e-portfolios and badges.
Source: 21st Century Community Learning Centers, Frequently Asked Questions, Expanded Learning Time Under the ESEA Flexibility Optional Waiver.
There continues to be deep denial about the plan for “community” school wrap around services to be delivered by outside organizations funded through pay for success finance; that the system will run on data. Wake up everyone. When they say “community,” they mean the United Way. “Community schools” is Orwellian doublespeak, and it is diabolically hard to get double-thinking people to recognize that.
In a 2015 whitepaper Where It All Comes Together: How Partnerships Connect Communities and Schools, Martin Blank, former president of the Institute for Educational Leadership (supporter of the bill) and director of the Coalition for Community Schools, states that Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, made community schools a central part of her platform when she assumed leadership in 2008. That is the same time GIIN (Global Impact Investment Network) and human capital data markets (see Gambling With Our Futures) in privatized public services were getting off the ground. Coincidence?
The Coalition for Community Schools is funded by foundations known for investing in human capital: Annie E. Casey, Ford, JP Morgan, and Atlantic Philanthropies. It has partnered with the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), the grandfather of wrap around service providers, carefully tended over the decades by billionaire hedge funders Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller. HCZ is where hundreds of impact equations have been refined, equations that will be leveraged across Promise Zone communities once conditions are right. Do Harris’s backers think that time is now? See this series of posts for further information.
While not as yet on record as supporting the bill, I want to bring to your attention Communities In Schools(CIS), the other high-profile “community” school organization with a national reach. They have advanced adoption of ISS or Integrated Student Supports and lobbied for it to be part of ESSA. In Work To Be Done: 2018-2022 Business Planthey describe their planned market expansion where affiliates are trained in evidence-based culture and data collection and pay for success targets and guidelines are developed. The following screen shots make it clear that “community” schools are in the business of “collective impact.” Affiliates that don’t deliver desired outcomes lose access to the “Communities In Schools” license and branding. This is not at all about altruism, but earned income, a growth model built on poverty and misery.
Source: Work To Be Done: 2018-2022 Business Plan, Communities In Schools
SEL Investment Markets in Behavior Modification
Speaking of mental health, the timing of this legislation has everything to do with a growing demand for student social-emotional data (SEL). This is ostensibly for the purposes of “safety,” “well-being,” and career pathway alignment. While it may be a bit of that, the real deal is that engineering SEL data on dashboards creates opportunities for investors sold on the Heckman Equation to gamble on child data. Gross, right? They want the data to assess how “investible” students are, according to the numbers.
Proponents of SEL recognize that for a variety of reasons, listed here, they’re not going to get as much data as they want during a TRADITIONAL school day. But they DO want the data. So they’re planning on pulling in ELT/OST partners to get it. A 2015 study out of the Center for Cost Benefit Analysis in Education, Teachers College Columbia University suggested a whopping 11% return on investment for every $1 put into SEL programming. The Novo Foundation (Buffett $ via Warren’s son Peter) funded the study. They’re also one of the primary supporters of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning).
Source: The Economic Value of Social Emotional Learning, Center for Cost Benefit Analysis in Education, Teachers College Columbia University 2015
That’s an outcomes-based contract opportunity impact investors are not about to walk away from; so if Harris’s bill creates new opportunities to get that data through a “restructured” school day with complicit partners, they’re all in!
In fact, the language of the bill says each school receiving a grant must come up with a 10% match. The total award could be up to $5 million over five years per school. Right there is the open invitation for impact investors. Even with a bit of money in the game, they’ll be able to demand outcomes-data tied to grant performance. In this way they can exert pressure on partners to adopt digital “solutions,” because they provide “evidence” “with fidelity.” Among the supporters of the bill in Harris’s press release is the Institute for Educational Leadership (IEL), home to the Coalition of Community Schools. Current president Johan Uvin expressed excitement over enacting “innovative policies.” Martin Blank, president of IEL until 2017 was a promoter of student data sharing, touting the potential of community schools to expand partnerships (outsourcing) and leverage outside investment. See screenshot below from a report Blank co-authored.
Source: The Afterschool and Community School Connection: Expanding Learning Opportunities and Partnerships
Community school data sharing agreements brokered within the context of a reimagined school day open up quite the treasure chest. In the diagram below I show the interrelationship between extended learning, social-emotional learning (SE), community schools, and student data sharing..
Source: Community Schools / SEL / ELT / Family Friendly Schools Act (click link for interactive version)
Pay for Success in California
Kamala Harris is allied with Governor Gavin Newsom, Silicon Valley’s golden boy. Newsom is making strides setting up infrastructure for speculative human capital investing through early childhood education and trauma screening initiatives. Tech interests poured a substantial amount of money into Harris’s senate race. Her donors include Marc Benioff of Salesforce, the company that developed ImBlaze for Big Picture to track student behavior competencies; recently launched a social impact investing fund with Lumina and the Robin Hood Foundation; and partnered with China’s Jack Ma (Alibaba, social credit scoring).
Harris also helped found, with California’s first Surgeon General, Nadine Burke Harris, the Youth Wellness Center that focuses on childhood trauma. The center has a deep stable of funders, many of whom are playing major roles in the development of data-driven human capital investing: Annie E Casey, Google, Tipping Point, JPB Foundation, Irvine, Packard, California Endowment. As I have written previously (here), my feeling is that the universal ACEs screenings reimbursed through Medicaid and promoted by Newsom and Burke Harris will be weaponized and fed into the machine of Big Data, creating the baselines required for NGO management of the lives of the poor.
California is five years into a pilot program to advance pay for success finance with support from the Irvine Foundation. Santa Clara County, in particular, has been a test-bed for various data-driven “innovative” financial contracting schemes, see my post on Silicon Valley Surveillance here. Harris’s co-sponsors all come from states that have pay for success pilots in the works. Make special note of Michael Bennet, because Colorado (along with Washington State) is in the lead position to adopt work-based education tied to digital identity and 5G / IoT infrastructure.
Source: Family Friendly Schools Act Sponsors (click link for interactive version)
Kamala Harris: Ventura County Re-Entry Project, Project Welcome Home, Just In Reach, Partners in Wellness, Alameda County Asthma, Alameda County Justice Project, First 5 LA, Nurse-Family Partnership Orange and Sonoma Counties, San Diego REDF/CEO, San Francisco Homelessness
Richard Blumenthal, CT: Connecticut Family Stability Pay For Success Project
Sherrod Brown, OH: Partnering For Family Success, ResultsOHIO
Jeff Merkley, OR: The Way Home: Lane County Re-Entry Collaborative
Kristen Gillibrand, NY: Employment To Break The Cycle of Re-Incarceration, Rikers Island Social Impact Bond
As we consider the implications of an “anytime, anywhere” system of education where oversight is limited and pay for success profit derives from “fixing” poverty and trauma, it is worth noting that the when Harris was the District Attorney of San Francisco, her office refused to release information about their investigation into the sexual abuse of children by individuals associated with the Catholic Church. This non-disclosure continued despite repeated public records requests. San Francisco’s Archbishop William Levada was instrumental in the suppression of information about those crimes not only in the Bay Area, but nationally.
Compiling vast electronic dossiers on children, including the status of their families, mental health, and trauma scores, could put them at grave risk. We must give serious consideration as to the ethics of collecting and sharing sensitive data with community partners and mentors knowing full well that predators exist, and the most vulnerable children will become targets of abuse.
Even though it is unlikely that the Catholic Church will have a presence in a public school setting, the Vatican is a major investor in social impact projects globally. It has hosted three conferences in Rome on the subject in partnership with Notre Dame’s Mendoza Business School, and numerous representatives of technology companies from Silicon Valley, including Omidyar Network, attended. Many social welfare programs, including housing and healthcare, are administered through Catholic affiliated entities. There could easily be overlap with referrals for housing or other services made through “community school” networks. More on the Vatican and impact investing here, here, and here.
Source: Kamala Harris and the Carceral State (click link for interactive version)
Policing Truancy
As California Attorney General, Harris established a Bureau of Children’s Justice with federal funding from Eric Holder’s Defending Childhood Initiative. The effort was aligned to “My Brother’s Keeper” an early-stage human capital management effort launched by Arne Duncan. Harris is a close friend of President Obama.
Truancy was a central focus of the bureau. In her acceptance speech for Attorney General, Harris stated “In San Francisco we threatened the parents of truants with prosecution, and truancy dropped by 32 percent. So, we are putting parents on notice. If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”
Harris spearheaded a 2010 law under which a $2,500 fine or a year prison sentence could be imposed on parents whose children missed too many days of school. A March 2019 feature, The Human Costs of Kamala’s War On Truancy, shares the story of one such parent, Cheree Peoples who at the time of her arrest was in the process of challenging the school district to obtain an IEP for her daughter who was chronically ill with sickle cell anemia. Harris then pushed for an expanded statewide data system to track truancy. That was a recommendation of her 2013 report on the “absentee crisis” In School + On Track. Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it in 2014.
Source: In School + On Track: Attorney General’s 2013 Report on California’s Elementary School Truancy and Absenteeism Crisis
Of all the pressing justice-related concerns in the state of California, why would Harris make truancy such a high profile issue? Well, it turns out that in the United Kingdom where social impact finance is considerably more advanced, truancy is an impact metric for investment purposes. This screen shot is taken from a 2015 Brookings Institution report that documented lessons learned from five years of social impact bond development.
Source: The Potential and Limitations of Impact Bonds: Lessons From The First Five Years Of Experience Worldwide, Global Economic Development Brookings Institution, 2015
AttendanceWorks is a non-profit that spun out of the Casey Foundation in 2006 just as the human impact markets were getting set up. Since 2010 they have been advancing national policy around the truancy issue. Same old funders: Gates, Open Society, Casey, Kaiser Permanente, United Way. So it comes as no surprise that the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 combined provisions for pay for success with a requirement to select additional measures of school quality, one of which was attendance!
In the lead up to the passage of the ESSA, Harvard conducted an attendance study using Philadelphia School students as test subjects, Reducing Student Absences at Scale By Targeting Parents Misbeliefs. It was the quintessential nudge effort where parents were sent form letters comparing their child’s attendance with peers. Our family opted out, but I remember a flurry of negative parent comments when the ridiculous letters came home. Even the title of the paper, published a number of years later, speaks to the industrial nature of this intervention. The system doesn’t really care why a child is absent. The system is not willing to devote material resources to addressing problems. They just want to get data and game it for their benefit.
When you consider whether or not you believe Harris’s Family Friendly Schools Act is truly intended to be “family friendly,” think about Cheree Peoples and these truancy rate cards.
Pay for Success finance presumes/predicts a degree of future criminality and/or brokenness for targeted populations: Black, Brown, poor, disabled, and LGBTQIA. Through data analytics people are pre-emptively designated “broken” so they can, in turn, be “fixed” by “evidence-based” programs documented on data dashboards. This is the sleight of hand that allows financiers to filch the profit built into outcomes-based contracts for privatized services run by community partners.
These predictions are not in any sense “real,” but asserting pre-crime/ or pre-disease characterizations further marginalizes individuals identified as “at risk.” The judicial system, where Harris launched her career, is the largest cost-off set for impact investing, though chronic illness and under-productivity are in the mix, too.
According to James Heckman, the data that can be most readily manipulated for impact investing purposes is character data, or SEL (Social Emotional Learning) data. Informal learning provides a wealth of opportunities to gather SEL data via projects and group activities. The passage of Harris’s bill would expand opportunities to collect behavioral and workforce data and link it to speculative pay for success investments.
I have been theorizing the imposition of impact interventions and the profiling that goes along with it as a form of “pre-carceration.” In a world driven by predatory human capital investments, the poor are designated “pre-criminal,” because that is how they become valuable to fin-tech. In an augmented reality (AR) future, the world becomes a digital prison with an overlay of geo-fencing that can be arbitrarily deployed to restrict a person’s rights. This is what we are hearing about in China with social credit scoring. Privileges are conditioned on one’s compliance to prescribed behaviors. It is the role of compulsory education to prepare youth for such a future.
As a former Silicon Valley prosecutor turned faux-progressive policy maker, Kamala Harris embodies this pivot towards pre-carceration aligned to the interests of surveillance capitalism. We’re swapping the school to prison pipeline for a “cradle to career” pipeline, and yet the humanity and self-determination of Black and Brown students continues to be subordinated to the interests of transnational global capital.
Old Wine, New Bottles
Capitalism is a violent enterprise that expands through primitive accumulation, taking value without paying for it. Education and social welfare data are part and parcel of this enterprise. Given the explosive growth in the ed-tech sector and the “community” school movement, it is not at all surprising that this bill would aim to expand the school day and further commodify social relations and facilitate the harvest of ever more stolen data.
As Dr. Justin Leroy, professor of African American history at UC Davis, notes, the afterlife of slavery (and I would add Indigenous genocide) persistently interrupts the presumption that history follows a progressive course; that its arc must by its very nature bend towards justice. While we desperately want to believe “family friendly” school legislation will bring justice, if you scratch below the surface, even a little bit, the charade starts to fall apart.
Because racial capitalism is embedded within the settler-colonial economic systems of the Americas, new manifestations of oppression and struggle play out as slavery re-emerges and adapts to new conditions. Our present condition is one characterized by the combined influences of technology, debt-finance, globalization and militarism. We organize and protest. They replace police with social workers. The control systems recalibrate, and the cycle of resistance begins anew.
I’d like to adapt a quote attributed to Jay Gould, nineteenth century railroad baron. Recognizing seismic changes are afoot with anticipated automation of worldwide labor, including platformed service and knowledge work, I anticipate we’ll see global capitalists attempt to impose systems of control along Gould’s line of thinking. One half of the population will be deputized to police the other half. This policing will take many forms from overt, state-sanctioned violence to subtle yet insidious forms of data surveillance carried out by outsourced social welfare providers, including educators. That is the “soft” policing of “community” schools. The elite are hoping this move towards pervasive “soft” policing will keep the pot from boiling over, and it might…for awhile.
Schools have always been sites for the powerful to instill societal expectations, such that everyone knows their place, fears stepping out of line, steady as she goes for those at the top and to hell with everyone else. In a world of ever-greater uncertainty teachers are no longer trusted to teach, but must cede their autonomy to playlists of scripted lessons said to produce “results.” Free thought, creativity, and self-determination in schools are extinguished in the name of accountability and safety. In schools today few feel safe, and that is by design.
How better to manage surplus labor than to sort the masses into oppressors and oppressed? Those “fortunate” enough to escape oppression thus become accomplices in unfolding atrocities, triggering self-delusion that makes it difficult to acknowledge let alone escape the circumstances into which they have been thrust. This may account for the profound sense of torpor and denial I see as technologized carceral systems lock into place. Where is the outrage over putting toddlers and un-housed people on Blockchain so people can gamble on their lives? The surveillance play tables? The nudges? So many desperately want to believe nothing bad is happening, because there isn’t yet an obvious Plan B.
This is not to imply struggle is for naught. Leroy notes that history moves in unexpected, cyclic, and palimpsestic ways. See Chilean protestors demanding their Pinochet-era constitution be trashed and Indigenous opposition to the Bolivian coup mounted in El Alto. Resistance to neoliberalism is demanded, tactics of non-compliance with the forces of transnational global capital must be embraced.
And yet those of us attempting to advance the cause of justice must proceed with caution. We have to recognize the ways the powerful seek to confuse and control the narrative. When does a “community” school imprison the community? When does a family-friendly school turn children into a speculative data commodities? Strategic framing is being used to conceal venal intent. We have to be savvy and alert and expose the hypocrisy.
Frederick Douglass spoke of pouring “the new wine of liberty into the old bottles of slavery.” That is what I believe is happening with Harris’s plans for an extended school day and expanded family services. Under the pretense of providing “help,” this law will install an apparatus of “soft policing” tied to pay for success finance to discipline and manage the poor for the profit of investors while undermining the social fabric of targeted communities.
I so appreciate Dr. Leroy’s analysis, and it was a gift to stumble across a new talk of his as I pondered how to write this post. His speech was delivered as part of an “Archiving Colonialism” panel given at Barnard in February of 2019. If you have fifteen minutes, watch it here. It provided me with a valuable framework within which to situate the digital carceral systems I see emerging with breathtaking speed under a banner of data-driven social justice. Eyes open everyone. Things are often not what they appear. A good rule of thumb; look at everything through a lens of racial capitalism. It’s amazing the clarity that brings.
I am writing this letter to the teachers of Chicago as you continue your strike.
I realize you probably won’t have time to read this until after your contract is resolved, but I felt it was important to put my thoughts down now while they are fresh in my mind.
I know you care deeply for your students, colleagues, and the communities you serve.
As the parent of a Philadelphia public school graduate, I know conditions for teaching and learning in under-funded urban districts are deplorable, and that is by design.
I commend the networks you have built to make your vision for well-resourced public schools a reality.
I appreciate the sacrifices you have made to bargain for “the common good.”
I am heartened to hear that you’ve already secured agreements to limit pre-k class sizes, ensure adequate staffing, and safe facilities, as well as guaranteeing the basic human right of toddlers to nap for an hour each day. Bravo.
In reading this contract briefing from July I sense your frustration with CPS’s cost cutting around staffing, especially with regard to the attempted automation of enrollment services. As CPS aims to open over 100 new pre-k classrooms by 2020, I’m confident you will continue to fight for the wellbeing of the children in your care.
Be advised that this will very likely require taking strong stands against pay for success finance and digital identity. Blockchain identity is being set up to underpin a new system of human capital speculation that will target the poor.
These are tools of racial capitalism that build on the Amply pre-k Blockchain identity app implemented by Innovation Edge in Cape Town, South Africa. Several of the parties involved in its development participated in a business-only, global pre-k summit held in New York last fall. The host, ReadyNation, has close ties to Pritzker and Heckman.
Amply is a social impact scheme where pre-k providers are reimbursed via Blockchain impact tokens earned through children’s daily attendance in the program. All the data runs through an app and children build “social capital” on Blockchain, while their families are monitored for compliance.
It’s the type of system that could easily evolve into social credit scoring of the type we’re hearing about in China. Last October GovLab, a MacArthur (Chicago) and Google-funded venture, based out of NYU’s Stern School created a case study for the Illinois Blockchain birth certificate pilot.
The value proposition presented was that individuals would eventually be able to aggregate into their “native digital identity” experiences and attributes “that they have gained throughout their lifetimes that allow them to do certain things or be eligible for certain benefits.” Universal pre-k and early intervention programs are being groomed to be the launch pad for imposition of digital identity. The crew from GovLab did a case study for Amply the very same month. The formatting is identical. It’s a package deal.
Source: Case Study Registering Births on the Blockchain Illinois
Blockchain and pay for success are well established in Illinois, and as the Chicago Teachers Union continues to advocate for equity, it is vital that members invest in the research they will need to grasp the immense threat that this “innovative” system of human capital finance linked to digital identity poses and to be able to articulate that threat to others.
As unions across the nation embrace social justice and expand bargaining positions to include community needs, there is a dire need for members to be able to effectively communicate to one another and their communities the ways in which emerging technologies and finance have combined to codify and automate longstanding systems of structural racism.
Pay for success initiatives use a veneer of progressive language, like “engineering opportunity gaps,” to candy coat their poison pill of financialization. It is moving forward with bipartisan support, characterized as “what works” government. We need to teach people to decode their duplicitous messages and inoculate themselves against the propaganda that is to come. As the story goes, be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. When you do, you could find strings attached that create even greater problems than the ones you already had. Housing is a big concern in that regard.
Source: Chicago Teachers’ Strike Highlights Student Homelessness
Imagine a union winning services for students experiencing housing insecurity, BUT the financing follows the Project Welcome Home model. Well that is going to be a BIG problem, because this “homelessness breakthrough” was launched in Santa Clara, California and utilized a social impact bond that runs participant data through Palantir! Yes, Palantir, Peter Thiel’s evil company that develops secretive predictive policing software and maintains contracts with ICE. The pay for success projects in Santa Clara also pulled in regional health systems with ties to Catholic Charities, the largest community foundation in the nation, and Rocketship education. It’s a very messy business, which you can read more about here. Be sure to note the scorecards for poor families designed to track their “self-sufficiency” metrics. Grim stuff, very much in the vein of Boots Riley’s “Sorry To Bother You.”
The co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale launched a cloud-based “government performance management system” in partnership with researchers from Stanford University back in 2012 to advance data-driven government using California local government budgets as case studies. It was framed as an effort to provide “efficiency” and “transparency” in the post-economic crisis climate of enforced austerity.
The name of the venture was OpenGov, and it is one of a number of emerging civic-tech enterprises that will ultimately meld “smart” city, 5G, Internet of Things sensors (that is Array of Things Chicago) with device-based government service provision. As “federated citizens” of the cloud, we will emerge as free-market data commodities. The growing ranks of the poor, even though they have limited purchase power, will continue to offer value to predator investors, this time as rich data commodities. Their compliance (or not) to the terms of pay for success will fuel the deals managed by Palantir among others.
The idea of “open” government data is meant to sound like a positive thing, but it was Robert Cheetham who successfully lobbied for open data policies in Philadelphia. He then used our data, a public asset freely handed over to corporate interests, to create predictive policing software that was then SOLD to the Chicago police department, among others (see HunchLab). People are not looking critically at these digital systems as they are being set up to control us. Big-data oversight is being integrated into the social welfare programs that caring teachers, including all of you in Chicago, have been demanding for students. If you don’t have this information and can’t see the bigger picture the results for vulnerable families may end up being exactly the opposite of what you had intended.
Meanwhile, Opengov just completed another $50 million venture capital round. Their major backers include Andreessen-Horowitz, Emerson Collective, JC2 Ventures, and 8VC. The first two are heavily invested in disruptive education ventures. Additional investment has also come from Thrive Capital, managed by Josh Kushner, Jared’s brother.
The affordable housing you seek for your colleagues? That too is a pay for success market. See below the teacher housing social impact bond set up in Richmond, CA.
The Federal Reserve System is deeply involved in pay for success affordable housing finance. Their success metrics focus on achieving “mobility,” that is moving low-income families OUT of their neighborhoods with “choice” vouchers. The vouchers are a tool that is being used to facilitate displacement and catalyze gentrification of properties that were subjected to redlining and disinvestment for decades.
I have seen this first hand in North Philadelphia, where a historically-Black community in a formerly red-lined zone had thousands of properties leveled and taken by imminent domain by the government for “affordable housing.” Four years later very little housing has been built and the lots are being flipped to New York developers for market rate developments. All of this overseen from the new $45 million HUD-funded headquarters of the Philadelphia Housing Authority. Long time tenants are being pushed out of PHA housing and sent to the outer suburbs as the neighborhood’s rich Black history is eroded with each new pre-fab townhouse condo.
Now that these communities are becoming attractive to higher-income folks looking to move back into cities, the pay for success “mobility” program (Opportunity Atlas) provides cover to remove Black and Brown residents from their own neighborhoods. Of course the “improvements” in their life outcomes data is what creates the profit for the private investors in the pay for success deals. All of it amounts to abuse and cultural erasure. All those news articles about the benefits of moving a child from one zip code to another to “improve” their lives. Yeah, ultimately it’s about global capital shuffling the poor around to suit their own purposes. Did you think those in power would put a pause on austerity to redirect resources into communities for the CURRENT residents? Um no, not happening.
Source: Leveraging The Power of Place Using Pay For Success To Promote Housing Mobility, San Francisco Federal Reserve
It is important to note the success metrics in the excerpt above. In this case the ones referenced are health and academic performance. You might ask how they intend to capture that impact data through housing. That is where Internet of Things sensors come in: home monitoring systems (NEST), virtual assistants (ALEXA), “smart” appliances (RING doorbells), digital content for education or mental health. All of this can become embedded in “supportive” housing, and it doesn’t have to be some futuristic house, many people already have these items in their homes. As with the Obama phones, these monitoring systems will be provided to low-income families in order to collect their behavioral data for the deals. Their right to shelter will become conditional on having their digital shadows harvested for global finance.
This excerpt from a white paper, Proof of Impact: Unlocking the Intrinsic Value of Impact Through Global Capital Impact Markets, outlining IoT “impact” verification tied to digital identity and finance shows the intended progression of the tracking systems as they become increasingly automated. They start out with individuals self-reporting with the ultimate goal being a reporting system that doesn’t involve humans at all, “end-to-end machine verification.” Some sensors exist in mobile phones: GPS, cameras, and biometrics. While others like satellite imagery and QR codes are become more commonly used. The price of obtaining real-time, “verifiable” data is dropping all the time. The data flows are what will drive the derivatives markets linked to the debt in the pay for success deals. That is why it is so important that the data collection be massive and always in motion, so the gamblers can play their games.
Source: Proof of Impact: Unlocking the Intrinsic Value of Impact Through Global Capital Impact Markets
Tiny houses are a perfect set up for IoT impact data capture, because they can be readily fabricated with all the required wiring and once complete become self-contained pods for individual data-extraction. They also limit social gatherings. It’s hard to organize mass movements in 200-square foot sheds. You get a sense of this watching a video promoting integrated ALEXA and NEST systems in a tiny house model using the Intel hub. While the appointments are slick and modern, you can’t help but get the feeling this is the new manifestation of the carceral state, life in a panopticon (see Yevgeny Zamyati’s 1923 novel WE for a preview). The finishing touches might be inserting a chip in the hand and a drone outside your door. Don’t think the tech oligarchs haven’t been thinking about this already…
If unions plan to wade into the affordable housing debate, their members need to know the terrain, ALL OF IT. Real estate developers eyeing up opportunity zones and hedge funders sizing up human capital in Promise Neighborhoods have staked out their positions. They’re planning to lead folks into the quick sand, so it’s best to know where you’re headed up front, stay focused, be clear, and keep on the right path.
Pay for success is not new to Chicago. Your city issued one of the first education social impact bonds in 2014 shortly after Salt Lake City. But Rahm and Pritzker did one better, because your city’s bond extends all the way from pre-k to third grade and includes reading scores as a success metric. In 2016, Goldman Sachs netted an initial maximum “success” payment for kindergarten readiness. There are many more payments to come. Pay for success has been incorporated into the Every Student Succeeds Act and there is seed money flowing in from the Social Impact Partnership Pay for Results Act. The technocrats are working really hard to bring this to scale.
In the July contract briefing Mayor Lightfoot noted her intention to expand pre-k access and wrap around services in “Education Zones” through a variety of funding mechanisms including “business and philanthropic communities.” That last bit is what you really need to pay attention to. The hedge funds are planning to target low-income communities, Promise Zones, for human capital investment schemes that will short the lives of children. It’s sickening, but true, and you need to be prepared.
James Heckman, a Nobel-prize winning economist based out that hotbed of neoliberalism the University of Chicago, developed a toolkit with funding from Pritzker that guarantees a 7-10% rate of return on private investments in early childhood programs. The catch is that the “success” metrics they want to use in their outcomes-based contracts are tied to character change. This requires the capture and analysis of social-emotional data that is increasingly pulled from software systems.
For your youngest learners this could look like digital surveillance play tables with fisheye lens cameras.
For older learners platforms created by hometown companies like OTUS, NWEA’s data partner, will be tracking behaviors including neuroticism. Only they’ll find another other more “user-friendly” term, because they don’t intend to pack the school board meetings with angry parents.
As you lobby for wrap around services to be offered IN schools, you must be mindful that since Obama gutted FERPA, data collected there is not nearly as secure as data collected in healthcare settings. Pay for Success has now been linked to Medicaid through value-based payment systems. This “innovative” form of finance relies on big data and predictive analytics to assign people degrees of anticipated brokenness, so investors in “evidence-based” “solutions” can take their profit. In this sick worldview, lead poisoning, asthma, diabetes, anxiety, and depression become potential sources of profit, cost-offsets for impact investment interventions.
To secure private investment for these interventions copious amounts of data must be collected to prove the deals. Thus the “care” delivered must increasingly be mediated through devices so it can be precisely measured and efficiently scaled. As a result, we see growth markets in school-based telemedicine and tele-therapy. We are also seeing new markets develop in gamified digital medicine, which is pretty terrifying. It is not hard to imagine there will be strong financial motives to medicalize students and channel them into “evidence-based” treatments. When this happens will parents have the right to refuse? Or will access to public education be conditioned on agreeing to treatment programs that are designed to profit pay for success investors?
Source: Teletherapy Fills K12 Mental Health Worker Gaps
You’re asking for more social workers, and I agree there are tremendous needs and deep trauma in our public schools. However if systems being set up to “help” families are also funded through pay for success, we will see families pushed onto “pathways” that involve prescriptive “non-solutions” designed to milk their poverty. In the world of “smart” Internet of Things-mediated digital surveillance, non-compliance will become harder and harder.
As mass ACE screenings are being advanced in California with growing interest in other states, we should pause to consider how those “scores” might be used in ways that reinforce existing systems of oppression and stigmatize children. There are indications that pay for success is being woven into ACEs treatments, too. Given the serious ramifications of putting sensitive information into hackable cloud-based systems, we must use great caution as we seek to find humane solutions that will truly heal communities rather than reinflict harm.
Social workers, while they may individually be very caring people, are ultimately agents of the state who are compelled to carry out policies with which they may not agree. I’m sure you can, as teachers, relate to being forced to work in ways you know are fundamentally harmful to children. I encourage you to watch this short video about Kathy, a community health coordinator whose job it is to assign treatment plans to multiple members of a formerly incarcerated person’s household. Kathy is paid each time a member of the family jumps through their assigned hoop. The world of social work is becoming more and more automated, data-driven. Their autonomy has been eroded. It is situation with which you can empathize.
I live in a city with extremely high rates of family separation from child protective services. You are probably aware that the State of Illinois had used an artificial intelligence program, Eckerd Connects, tied into its social welfare data system to predict abuse. The contract ended after disastrous results occurred, mistakenly flagging thousands of children as at risk. As you expand in-school services, an unintended consequence could very well be more families losing their children if their housing instability or food insecurity becomes officially known, uploaded as data to the cloud where algorithms might surface it later in unexpectedly damaging ways.
The question is will the treatments offered be ones of care or coercion? When we know Goldman Sachs is lurking around in the shadows, how do we ensure children get the help they need without becoming a data commodity? Their needs, including housing, must not become the basis for a new data-extractivist economic house of cards. Their futures must be their own.
You all in Chicago are on the front lines of a coming techno-dystopia. You can’t wait to get what you bargained for and THEN ask about the financing. Don’t wait for the bait and switch, because once it happens it will be too late to roll back.
We need to demand structural change that addresses systemic racism and creates communities of care rather than pre-carceral systems of soft social welfare policing.
Let us work together on that. Your destiny is our destiny. Solidarity!
The Poor Peoples Economic Human Rights Campaign hosts a monthly breakfast to discuss radical social work and issues relating to the non-profit industrial complex. Follow us on Facebook here. I was invited to participate this month and wanted to post my presentation on pay for success and the opioid crisis, so the information could be shared more widely. Below is a video matching the voice recording to my slideshare, which can be accessed here.
Select resources mentioned in my presentation:
Blog post on the Connecticut Family Stability Project: here.
“Meet Kathy” community care coordinator video: here.
Saving Maine Schools on Tripp Jones, Mentor Network and New Profit: here.
“Authorizing the establishment of a “Special Committee on Child Separation In Philadelphia” to investigate child separation in Philadelphia’s child welfare system and develop recommendations to ensure compliance with State Child Protective Services Law to protect children and due process rights of families and prevent the unnecessary break-up of families. Sponsors: Councilmember Oh, Councilmember Bass, Councilmember Quiñones Sánchez, Councilmember Blackwell, Councilmember Johnson, Councilmember O’Neill, and Councilmember Squilla.”
I remember it well, a casual conversation with a neighbor on the sidewalk. It was a brief exchange, the kind that should’ve been quickly forgotten. At the time I knew nothing of Marc Tucker’s “Dear Hillary Letter” or the National Center on Education and the Economy. I hadn’t yet started mapping IBM and Digital On-Ramps, and Ideas42, the behavioral science research institute incubated at Harvard. I can’t remember the exact year, though it was probably some time after the passage of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunities Act (WIOA) but before Colorado and Washington State started talking about adopting the Swiss Apprenticeship model.
But it happens sometimes, certain moments stick with you over the years, important, even if you didn’t know exactly why at the time. Over the course of this particular chat, it came up that the board of the Community College of Philadelphia (CCP) had begun to weigh-in on what courses would be offered at the school. Evidently classes were expected to align to economic indictors. For example, pre-architecture courses would need to be phased out, because “the numbers” indicated there wouldn’t be enough architecture jobs.
Source: Closed Door Event on Business and Education, January 29, 2018, more here
Whose numbers? Not enough architecture jobs? At the time the city even had a charter high school specifically for architecture and design. Philadelphia’s four-year universities, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel, and Temple, all offered architecture coursework. So why should students choosing to pursue an Associate’s Degree first be shut out of the field?
In 2012, then mayor, now what works, Moneyball government talking head, Michael Nutter, appointed himself and six allies to the fifteen-person board of CCP. The president would be let go within the year, replaced by Dr. Donald Generals. Generals had formerly worked as an administrator at a questionable, now defunct, for-profit secretarial college in New York. The faculty did not support the appointment.
All of this happened shortly after the city accepted a Smarter Cities Challenge grant from IBM to develop our “human capital” via Gates and MacArthur Foundation-funded badging and career pathway initiatives. Did I mention Lisa Nutter, wife of the mayor now social impact investor, was executive director of Philadelphia Academies, the Digital On Ramps project lead, at the time?
Source: IBM Smarter Cities Challenge, Philadelphia Report, 2011
Quite a few of Nutter’s new board members were cozy with the Chamber of Commerce. You remember, that influential group that held a closed-door meeting on business’s role in public education at Girard College during the winter of 2018 (see below).
Well, this is the current board of CCP:
Patrick Clancy: CEO of Philadelphia Works who implemented Pennsylvania’s Welfare to Work program and helped draft the state’s WIOA (Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act) plan.
Harold Epps: Philadelphia Director of Commerce and co-chair of Comcast’s National African American Advisory Council
Chekemma Fulmore-Townsend: CEO of Philadelphia Youth Network, data-driven school-to-work effort and Digital On Ramps partner
Lydia Hernandenz-Velez: Long-time board member of Aspira charter schools and retired administrator from the city’s Department of Aging
Steve Herzog: Former Vice President at Philadelphia Energy Solutions and board member of Philadelphia Academies, work-based learning and original host of IBM’s Digital On Ramps Program
Sheila Ireland: Executive Director Philadelphia Office of Workforce Development and co-founder of West Philadelphia Skills Initiative
Sharon A. Jean-Baptiste: Regional Director for Solutions and Technology at Jacobs, an architecture, engineering, and science firm
Rosalyn McPherson: President of The Roz Group, publishing and cultural consulting, former President of the Urban League and board member of the National Philanthropic Trust
Mindy Posoff: Managing Director of Golden Seeds, institutional investor on board of the Philadelphia Foundation and Ben Franklin Technology Partners
Hon. James Roebuck: Pennsylvania State Representative 188th Legislative District, board member Philadelphia NAACP
Michael Solieau: Vice President of Strategy at Comcast (Comcast was a sponsor of the Chamber event above)
Jeremiah White: CEO White Associates, business development and non-profit fundraising and co-founder Intercultural Family Services
A scan of credentials indicates a group representing the interests of technology, finance, and data-driven human capital investment. No educators in the mix. Skills, skills, and more skills! For the past few years the media has been beating the drum around the “skills gap.”
Industry needs more “middle skill” workers they cry. Harness education to industry and re-skill as needed to facilitate “pay for success” payouts. Earn a badge, and investors take their cut. That’s the program Bill Gates and the tech sector have been setting up since at least the early 1990s.
As in the matrix, people will be the batteries for these hedge fund games.
The image below touting Pay for Success finance for workforce training from the Federal Reserve? That is a direct descendent of Art Rolnick and Steven Rothschild’s Human Capital Performance Bond program, developed in the mid 1990s in Minneapolis-St. Paul (more on that here).
Source: Pay For Success: How Emerging Finance Tools Are Supporting Workforce Development, Federal Reserve of Richmond white paper, 2019
So, I think it best to pause a moment and reflect on the nature of today’s globalized economy. Is it serving the interests of the legions of precarious workers with erratic schedules, heavy workloads, and few, if any benefits?
Nope.
Is it killing the planet?
Yes.
Now imagine the consequences of allowing corporate interests to dictate what coursework can be offered in public education institutions. What happens once members of the chamber of commerce are able to order up talent in quantities to flood the markets? They’ll be able to to cherry pick top applicants for bargain-basement wages, and tax payers will have footed the bill for this just-in-time training, too.
Good for c-suite executives, bad for regular folks.
And what happens when a majority of gigs are STEM-related and entail people building and maintaining the technological infrastructure of the “smart” (extremely hackable) police surveillance state? And why do we have to have so many STEM jobs? Because those in power are systematically diverting manufacturing, service, and knowledge work to robots and synthetic humans. So all that is left for most us to do is to code the shadowy surveillance mixed reality world?
No thank you.
Does it make sense to feed coming generations into a machine designed to shred their souls, while lifting up a few exceptional individuals whose role it is to convince everyone to stay in the game in the hopes that they, too, can come out a “winner?”
As the mom of a nineteen-year-old, humanities-loving kid, that’s a definite NO from me.
Once the career pathways programs are locked down, plays and poetry and foreign languages and philosophy and history will be pushed so far to the margins as to be almost non-existent outside some dumbed-down Common Core State Standard. Books? Who reads books? They’re raising up cadres of students that know little more than screens and video games.
Already, many young teachers are in a bind. Their education took place under regimes of standards-based repression. They don’t know what it was like before everything was tied to a rubric. Corporate interests play a long game. They look 20-30 years out. They’re patient. Over the past few decades they systematically pushed out veteran teachers and created a school culture that would meet their requirements for a marginally-educated, compliant labor pool that would play well with robots and know their place (or be too afraid to step out of line).
So what exactly is going to happen in this brave new world of “work” and engineered economies when people want to leave their home state or get off their assigned pathway? Where are you supposed to go if regional workforce boards control the types of careers on offer and act as gatekeepers for required credentials? If you do a certain type of work can you only reside in a certain region?
It’s strange to me that so few are talking about any of this as corporate America builds out the cradle-to-gray “lifelong learning” pipelines, and Naviance and Clever and the ACT are tracking our children data point by data point to calculate in precise measure their future productivity ratings for a wretched, broken system.
I direct you now to Pennsylvania’s 2018 WIOA plan. It notes the fastest growing employement sectors in my state are dominated by low wage jobs, wages that are insufficient to support a family especially in areas where housing costs are rising. In addition, many of the jobs are physically taxing, unstable, and come with few benefits. As people are working into their 70s with no retirement security, what are they supposed to do? Now Walmart is eliminating greeters and embracing robot shelf scanners. Even THAT work is gone. People’s labor is being made redundant as levels of wealth inequality grow precipitously.
Source: WIOA State Plan for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania FY-2018
The excerpt below, from another section of the 2018 WIOA plan for Pennsylvania, makes it crystal clear that the state is looking to short-change its OWN staff, giving preference to online self-serve CareerLink portals over bricks-and-mortar centers with actual people who can assist job seekers face to face and develop relationships with them.
We are aligning education to a crap economy AND the most vulnerable are going to be the ones harmed in the process. They will be funneled into jobs that will never let them achieve independence and they will become ALICE data fodder for the impact investment predators.
So WHO set up these pathways?
The effort really started to gain traction in the mid 1990s after Bill Clinton took office. It very much parallels advances in technology, the idea being that as economic changes speed up, human capital will have to do the same. Over the past twenty-five years education has become more and more data-driven, because Clinton harnessed it to the tech sector when he created the Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative through Executive Order 13111 in 1999. IMS global emerged from Educause, heavily funded by Gates, and education was pushed more and more towards the banking model of information consumption to feed growing global computing markets and eventually human capital investment markets via Pay for Success.
Source: Advisory Committee on Training Opportunities and Executive Order 13111
In addition to creating a federal infrastructure to grow online learning for government employees and ALL Americans, Clinton also created an advisory committee tasked with linking that digital training to employment. The two committee co-chairs were Christine Hemrick of Cisco Systems and Hilary Pennington who served on the Clinton transition team as a tech advisor and had for many years been CEO at Jobs for the Future (JFF). Eventually Pennington left JFF to work for the Gates Foundation and is now Vice President for programs at the Ford Foundation. In 2017, the Ford Foundation made a commitment to place $1 billion of its endowment into impact investing over a ten-year period.
Source: Ford Foundation Is an Unlikely Convert to ‘Impact” Investing, NY Times, April 13, 2017
One of the Ford Foundation’s current grantees (above) just happens to be the Poor People’s Campaign based out of the Kairos Center. I can imagine the workforce pathway impact investment program dovetailing with this initiative.
Clinton had signed the School-to-Work Opportunities Act in 1994, a year or so after Marc Tucker sent the “Dear Hillary Letter.” That jump-started work-based learning efforts. Jobs for the Future, the American Youth Policy Forum and the National Association of Secondary School Principals developed a paper on “revitalizing” high schools to advance the career pathway effort. This 1995 report embraced many of the ideals promoted in Tucker’s letter to Clinton and includes concepts I have called Ed Reform 2.0: certificates of completion, alternative work-based learning programs , competency-based education with performance assessments, and alternative credentialing systems. The plan was to create a workbased-learning program that would be attractive to employers due to its flexibility, responsiveness, and alignment to regional workforce goals. Excerpts from the report below.
It is no coincidence that JFF brands itself as a social-impact enterprise. Tracking “opportunity youth,” immigrants, and returning citizens into training and employment has become an enormous “pay for success” investment sector in recent years. In fact the US Department of Education awarded JFF and Social Finance $2 million in 2016 to pay the cost of giving technical assistance to partners interested in piloting pay for success financed work-based learning initiatives. This award was one of the first two issued after the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act. ESSA included authorizing language for the controversial pay for success finance initiative. These are JFF’s partners.
Below is a list of grants from four of the organization’s major funders, including a combined $120 million in grants from the Gates Foundation.
Nellie Mae grants link JFF to the competency based education model.
Lumina Foundation grants link JFF to talent development and alternative digital credential systems.
William and Flora Hewlett foundation grants link JFF to Open Education Record (OER) meta-data and impact philanthropy.
So now we imagine college students placed on digital on-ramps to lifelong-learning pathways defined by plug-and-play competencies. Students set up to exhaust themselves curating portfolios of high-demand micro-credentials in the hopes they can successfully run the algorithmic, gig-economy gauntlet that is being built around them.
In this current landscape of economic uncertainty, education at all levels is becoming less about knowledge creation and more about training for the next job and the next and the next; because the only constant is that there will always be the NEXT job. The idea of career stability swept away as the door closed on the twentieth-century.
People are expected to suck-it-up-buttercup, because life on the Blockchain is coming. Earn your badges and integrate yourself into the borg. That’s why schools are pushing ten year olds to start career portfolios; why middle schoolers must have Naviance accounts so Hobsons can data-mine them; and why high school students are expected to participate in work-based learning so they can find their “passions” while having their “soft skills” assessed, even though most experts agree the “future of work” in a mixed-reality world industrial automation remains one big question mark.
After that conversation I wondered what other changes were underway and what was motiving those changes. Fast-forward a few years. I now see how we’re moving towards an engineered economy designed to serve the interests of transnational global capital. Our futures increasingly shaped by the mandates of workforce-planning boards, each region assigned a handful of growth industries.
The letter Marc Tucker sent to Hillary Clinton as Bill prepared to take office in 1992 proposed a vision that was “very complex, will take a long time to sell, and will be revised many times along the way.” And so it began, this kernel, evolving over twenty-seven years into a tech-mediated program of global human capital management where people are reduced to the stackable credentials in their learning lockers and predictions about their productivity as workers.
Source: New Alliance Will Invest In Education And Workforce Development Companies, October 29, 2018
Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Race To The Top, Every Student Succeeds, all advanced the vision fronted by Tucker, step by step with the support of Democrats and Republicans and the computer industry and the military research often carried out in the labs of esteemed universities. It was a vast network of public-private partnerships that generated the framework for this coming cybernetic dystopia.
And so as I went back over the “Dear Hillary Letter” in detail, it sunk in that these people must have envisioned a future of financialized humanity. Maybe they didn’t know it would involve Blockchain smart contracts, but they certainly understood the policy changes that would be needed to turn people into commodities in vast talent marketplace managed by transnational corporations who expected to be able to bend the law to their will, operate above it if need be. IBM, Exxon, Battelle, the true “globalists” would harness people to an Internet that was insinuating itself into our lives in unsettling and intrusive ways.
Tucker carried the ball as far as he could and recently retired after a long career at the National Center on Education and the Economy, founded under the guidance of the Carnegie Corporation. This January he turned the reigns over to Australian Anthony MacKay, ushering in a new era of openly globalized education for digital age learners. MacKay also co-chairs the Global Education Leaders Partnership with Valerie Hannon of the UK Innovation Unit and has ties to the OECD, “deeper learning,” and innovative schools across a dozen countries.
I suspect given levels of economic uncertainty, some find solace believing this digitally engineered system will work for people. I mean who wouldn’t want students to have good options? Isn’t that what they are pitching? Follow the pathway to prosperity. Trust us… we’re the techocrats.
We WANT for students to be able to get good jobs that allow them to pay back their debt. But do we REALLY think schools and employers will prioritize the interests of students and workers over those at the top of the economic pyramid (looking at you Bill Gates)? Especially when those students and workers are Black and Brown and poor?
It doesn’t take much looking around to realize the Fourth Industrial Revolution is offering no guarantees of living wage work that might enable a majority of people to support their families in dignity and contribute to their communities. Keyword searches “Task Rabbit,” “gig economy,” or “just-in-time workforce” for confirmation of that. In fact, the workforce plan for Southeastern Pennsylvania specifically references the gig economy as a GROWTH AREA.
The top ten high-growth jobs for our region? Six of them pay well below $15 per hour.
How will we ever escape our collective Stockholm syndrome if we allow our public institutions to be subsumed within toxic public-private partnerships? Testimony given by former Ohio Senator Ralph Regula on the High Skills Competitive Workforce Act of 1991, stated that “Business knows what sort of formal education is best and what would help their employees and their profit margins, and I think if this is to be successful, the business and industrial community needs to be very much a part of shaping a final package.”
But education, alone, is insufficent. Credentials are meaningless if after 13, 15, 17, 21+ years of knowledge creation young people are pushed into a world where their talents have no perceived economic value. We must reimagine an economy of care, not austerity. One that is just, cooperative, and works within the environmental constraints of our dangerously compromised planet. That will not emerge from this straight-jacketed model. Chamber of Commerce-endorsed pathways of human capital processing will only usher in greater inequality and ever more repressive labor tactics.
To successfully navigate the immense challenges coming our way, the next generation needs a system of education that acknowledges past harms and pushes towards collective liberation. It will have to heal the damage caused by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, no small task. It will require free thought, creativity, human relationships, and opportunities to experiment freely and learn from mistakes. It will require culturally responsive practice and time and space to relearn how to be together in community.
It will also require a decisive redistribution of resources and power away from predatory consultants, think tanks, bean counters and “vulture philanthropy” back into the hands of people at the local level. If we hope to get to a future that is less financialized, less data-driven, less debt-burdened, less racist, there will have to be a great reckoning and a rebirth. It won’t be easy, but what else is there to do but try?
I highly recommended the book Between Earth and Empire by John P. Clark. It includes some difficult truths but is balanced with a sense of hope, too.
