The AFT national convention meets next week and will consider several resolutions about tech, AI, labor and the economy. Yet, the more fundamental danger that is inseparable from this discussion is being obscured, one in which AFT is directly implicated: A publicly-funded, privately controlled school system has emerged in NYC. It is built on data, and it is the harbinger of what both parties have planned for our future.
A deep dive into the battle unfolding in NYC over its school budget, contesting funding of the tech portal of New Visions for Public Schools reveals the extraordinary degree to which neoliberal assumptions have become embedded in education policy and funding, a reality unrecognized and unchallenged by most education workers though it has been furthered by our unions. We missed the original nexus of datafication and privatization – with standardized testing. We can’t afford to miss this new project building on that harmful status-quo, one that AFT and NEA are deeply complicitous, in developing and sustaining.
NEW VISIONS FOR PUBLIC EDUCATION REDEFINED “PUBLIC” – AT KIDS’ EXPENSE
So far the New Visions portal is being challenged primarily on privacy grounds. An audit by the New York State Comptroller found that the city school system did not understand or control the data it collect, nor does it have a complete inventory of software used across schools. The audit leaves little doubt schools and service providers are collecting whatever data they want and their collection is untracked or regulated. Yet, New Visions’ evolution captures something more dangerous, the evolving relationships between school privatization, profits from data, standardized testing, and other neoliberal education reforms pushed by both parties for decades.
In 1989 New Visions announced its aim: securing “private sector support for innovative programs in NYC public schools.” This deceptive and seductive formulation answered by the argument that we can’t turn down private support for schools when we need more funding that’s not forthcoming, masked the project’s larger purposes, privatizing public education and weakening teachers unions, as had been done in the global South. New Visions’ method of promoting privatization was unique in one sense – it swallowed a much-respected progressive movement with NYC roots, one that embodied progressive ideals about teaching, learning, and school organization, “small schools movement.” Understandably frustrated by the schools’ bureaucracy, which hindered their inability to teach in the ways they believed all students deserved, including centering relationships with students and families, small-school advocates bought the idea of establishing their own network of schools, separate from and independent of the system that thwarted change. They bought into the city schools’ restructuring, worked for and endorsed New Visions, funded by the Gates Foundation.
In another sense New Visions captures how neoliberal reforms succeeded in co-opting ideals of social justice and pedagogical ideals. Activists and reformers committed to creating better schools for kids who had been “left behind” missed the economic and political terrain of neoliberal education policy privatizing schools, in the service of big money. Critics who saw the tech connections warned about its use in public/private partnerships.[i] Foundations and individuals, most with ties to the Right and/or tech, poured vast sums into research promoting “evidence-based performance,” using “data” to drive and assess instruction and learning. Yet, critical researchers early on explained how privatization undercut school equity and some flagged New Visions as an example of school reforms implemented in the guise of equity that increased inequality, intensifying segregation and stratification by social class, as well as creating huge, new sources of profit. [ii]
What we missed for too long is how standardized testing served as the nexus between big money’s drive to control curriculum and reap huge profits in privatizing schools. A complete explanation of that process requires analysis of standardized testing goes far beyond the scope of this article. [iii] But a simple formula, “ data collection in schools+ private/public partnerships = huge new profits” captures the history of neoliberal ed policy and current dangers with AI. Standardized testing’s capture of learning and teaching with increased use of apps and platforms has been augmented with data collection about social and emotional health gathered by private contractors who, as New Visions has now done, link data from city agencies that provide a range of services to students and families, including housing, health, and jobs. The newest tech innovations, like use of chatbots for therapy and AI used for everything expand the surveillance and privatization in almost unimaginably expanded ways.
Absence of control and regulation, and even adequate tracking of data, combined with the stunning sprawl of services New Visions provides and for which it collects student data, show the portal is a privatized tech management system that is the nerve center of a new neoliberal publicly-funded, privately controlled school system. It is at the very least a stalking horse, and more likely, a model of reforms to be well beyond NYC. New Visions receives money from a breathtaking array of organizations, including institutions that we fund with our tax dollars, as well as host of foundations and NGO’s, liberal, neoliberal, and far Right and NGO’s, including Educators for Excellence, a front group for the billionaires, who advance a Right wing agenda, which includes replacing teachers unions. [iv]
Though they no longer do, at one point the presidents of the (UFT), United Federation of Teachers, the union representing education workers in NYC, and its national parent, the American Federation of Teachers, (AFT) sat on the New Visions board of directors. Neither has discussed their departure from the New Visions board. But their presence shows they helped advance reforms that were a trojan horse for the current privatization with data. (Neither Mulgrew nor Weingarten has made a public statement about NYC funding the tech portal, which members should demand they do.)
Given Weingarten’s uncritical, public embrace of tech moguls’ aims in pushing AI, which, as I explain elsewhere, is inseparable from her campaign to link education to the economy and ignores great threats posed by this strategy, serving on the New Visions board was a springboard to more ambitious aims. Not satisfied with being a participant in an NGO privatizing schools, Weingarten now wants to sit at the table herself, with the big money funding Trump and the Democrats.
Though Weingarten presents herself as a partner, she is not even a guest at the table. She is serving up public education and our profession as the meal. As her being featured in the largest, most influential neoliberal media outlet shows, our enemies realize this. They’re using her – and us.
Delegates to the national convention, which will be tightly orchestrated, will face an uphill struggle to make floor discussions real debates, let alone to win a change in policy that can be enforced. However, the submission of numerous resolutions about AI signals that Weingarten and the machine she controls are unable to dismiss opposition, public and internal, to the tech moguls project of pushing AI.
At the very least, we need to push for a moratorium on AI as well as scrutiny of contracts that are held by private companies and NGOs that engage in data collection. The broader campaign of political education in which we must engage is having NEA, AFT, their state affiliates, and our locals explain that we have not a cent to spare for private companies to make money off our kids.
They’re too precious, to us and our future.
[i] An exchange about legislation that created community schools, the critique explaining the nexus of privatization with data, and the rejoinder that the legislation created opportunities that could create a new balance of power, may look different in hindsight, given what we know about AFT and NEA involvement in supporting privatization of schools with tech.
[ii]For critical analysis that explains the role of New Visions in advancing privatization and the neoliberal agenda, see Jessica Shiller, Marketing New Schools for a New Century: An Examination of Neoliberal School Reform in New York City and Ken Saltman, The Gift of Education. Public Education and Venture Philanthropy. Saltman’s book explains the convergence of ideological, political, and economic assumptions that supported universities and foundations promotion of the neoliberal reforms, including use of data. See for example this study of New Visions’ role in curriculum and standards, and the importance of data, from Harvard’s Family Research Project, https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED510231.
[iii] For almost three decades scores on standardized tests, sold to us as “scientific” and “objective measures” have become virtually the only acceptable method to assess student learning, for schools and researchers. In fact, standardized tests are, at best, a crude, intrinsically biased measure of a narrow stratum of learning. The scores continue to be the mainstay of research about achievement. Although Trump’s racist, retrograde, anti-intellectual politicization of research is being attacked, as it should be, a version of this politicization of research occurred -and was not criticized by either party – when the Institute for Education Science was created under Bush. Peer review of education research was replaced by dictates about “What works” – based on test scores.
[iv] See the Educators for Excellence program and its Board of Directors, which includes the president and founder of the National Parents Union, which represents the Walton Foundation, not parents. Maurice Cunningham documents this background in several articles, including this correction of an article in the NYT.
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