Read on Twitter
I keep thinking about this (and folks seem confused as to what "Peloton for School Teachers" means here — that is, who's the cyclist in this analogy). So pardon me. A rant… https://twitter.com/audreywatters/status/1336719026685263872
So, the pitch is that, as schools remain unsafe due to covid, teachers — hired by this company, not by the district — will be streamed into schools, "creating a dramatic shift in an antiquated industry" the press release says https://www.prweb.com/releases/elevate_k_12_partners_with_education_influencer_and_former_superintendent_robert_avossa_to_bring_the_peloton_of_school_teachers_to_more_students/prweb17597747.htm
Students will come to school. I'm sure you can picture it: a room full of 30 third-graders just calmly watching their television-teacher, dutifully following the televised instructions.
Oh wait.
Oh wait.
Wait. There will have to be an adult in the room, right? Why isn't it a teacher? And why is it safe for *that* adult to be in-person?
The "sell" here is for schools to outsource pandemic (and post-pandemic, obvs) instruction to a private, for-profit company and replace the teacher in the classroom with other kinds of workers
The worker is the classroom may or may not be a district employee, but they won't be certified, unionized, paid as much, etc. And the worker on TV is a freelancer not a full-time (public) employee — one who will make less than $20 an hour w no benefits
Because "budget shortfalls," my ass. Do we care about the future or nah? Because this is the deliberate hollowing out of public institutions
This is about a refusal to invest in humans in part because of the false belief that technology will be cheaper. (Who cares if it's better) And in part because damn, some folks sure hate teachers unions
There are historical antecedents here, by the way. We've tried this shit before. Take the efforts in the 1960s to teach the children in American Samoa via television. http://hackeducation.com/2015/06/06/american-samoa-educational-tv
Instead of building a robust and well-funded public school system that is responsible to the communities it serves, we're going to just broadcast TV-teaching to students* instead
* Not to all students, of course. As with American Samoa, this will happen to Black and brown students, to poor students, to those already disadvantaged by our school system
What a garbage country full of garbage ed-tech innovators we live in. /FIN
