WHILE many people assume that Microsoft Windows in education is a matter of choice, it is actually a matter of corruption and imposition. Yesterday, for example, we wrote about what happened in Tamil Nadu. Our source told us last night that some of the press in India is starting to catch up with that revelation, whereas a lot of it missed the fact that the tender had been distorted. Take this article for example. It says:
According to the official, companies including Samsung, ASUS and Dell seem to have placed bids. The state is said to have preferred brands that have service centres across all the districts. The minimum specifications required include Windows or Linux operating system, wireless 2 GB RAM and 320 GB hard disk.
The first example was from Newsweek about the results of philanthropic "school reform" programs put in place by several billionaires (including Bill Gates) who decided they understood the problems with public education better than everyone else and so could dictate how to "fix" the broken education system. Seems that that their little experiments haven't panned out as well as they would have liked.
Now, they are here in Seattle trying to justify their existence with the financial aid of Bill Gates to the tune of $2.5M to support TFA, Inc. in opening an office in the Puget Sound area.
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So far “anonymous donors” have offered to pick up the tab for Seattle by way of the Seattle Foundation which receives funding from Bill Gates. Our schools would be so much better off if we could use those funds instead to rehire teachers and counselors who are qualified, have more to offer than “art on a cart” to many of our students, have the funding so that all schools can again have full-time librarians, enrichment programs for all schools and enough money to pay for the millions of dollars in maintenance backlog that has accrued over the years to make our schools safe.
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Will Bill Gates ultimately be responsible for dumbing down our educational system with TFA, Inc. as his tool? The irony is that his vision for education in this country is far from the reality of what he is creating and he doesn’t even know it.
Billionaires (such as the Walton family, the Koch brothers, Bill and Melinda Gates, and Eli and Blythe Broad) and corporations are pushing heavily for the privatization of education and other services, both for financial reasons and ideological ones. From the point of view of billionaires, the free market is ideal. It made them rich, after all. To the extent that they want to improve education, they want to remake the system in the image of a corporation, with top-down management, competition, decreased spending, and a focus on results. Of course, the view from the top is nothing like the view from the bottom. How can billionaires who have never gone through the public education system have any idea of the challenges that teachers and students actually face? As for corporations, they don’t “want” anything in particular. They can’t; they’re not human beings. They are essentially machines whose primary goal is to maximize profits. To further that goal, corporations have an interest in lowering taxes. They also have an interest in directly controlling exactly what is taught to tomorrow’s workforce. They do not have a need for equal opportunity in education, because not all workers in tomorrow’s economy need to think for themselves or to read beyond basic literacy. Finally, there are companies that simply profit off education, taking taxpayer and grant dollars to produce a product. This includes charter schools, teacher preparation programs, online learning systems, standardized tests, and test prep curriculum. Privatization helps them because it creates new markets. Opening a charter school, for instance, means that brand new teachers can be hired and brand new curriculum can be sold. (Of course, this also means that existing teachers must be fired and curriculum thrown away.)