{"id":3429,"date":"2014-12-09T14:15:02","date_gmt":"2014-12-09T19:15:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stager.tv\/?p=3429"},"modified":"2020-07-25T18:58:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-25T23:58:23","slug":"the-troubling-optics-behind-the-president-learning-to-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stager.tv\/?p=3429","title":{"rendered":"The Troubling Optics Behind the President Learning to Code"},"content":{"rendered":"

Did you hear the news? President Obama wrote his first line of code<\/a> yesterday to bring attention to Computer Science Week and Code.org’s Marie Antoinette-style Hour of Code<\/a>. (a “global movement” bankrolled by billionaires and major corporations) I suppose fracking is a global movement too, but I digress.<\/p>\n

I can get past the President of the United States pretending that he’s some dumb guy capable of performing a trivial task on a computer. Huh huh, look at me. Duh,\u00a0“You gotta slow down, ’cause I’m an old man…<\/a>”<\/p>\n

I’m OK with tech corporations successfully engineering a publicity stunt with cute kids and the President even if their real objectives are easing\u00a0restrictions on H1-B visas enabling tech companies to hire programmers from other countries (likely cheaper than hiring Americans). All of that is just business, lobbying, and public relations. I salute the propagandists who made it all happen! Lobbying and selling stuff is the American way. (cue: start humming The Battle Hymn of the Republic)<\/p>\n

None of\u00a0the stagecraft I just described is evil.<\/p>\n

What I will not abide is using Newark, NJ middle school students as human shields as part of a larger agenda to destroy the public schools in their already exploited and disadvantaged community. (I’ve yet to determine if they are charter school students)<\/p>\n

History does not begin with Code.org and the Silicon Valley smartypants who fund it. EVERY Newark public elementary and middle school taught Logo programming for more than a decade to every student. I know. I used to teach the incredibly passionate, dedicated, and competent Newark teachers. Announcing that the seven largest cities in the USA will now commit to offer a middle or high school computer science class<\/a> does nothing to explain why computer science, art, music and other rich subjects have\u00a0become extinct in urban school districts. In fact, it is the very heavy-handed Gates-funded and Zuckerberg-approved education policies that the Obama Administration has inflicted on districts, such as Newark, that has made an hour of looking up from anything but a multiple-choice worksheet for an hour cause for a White House celebration.<\/p>\n

Code.org, the organization behind Hour of Code is heavily financed by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In 2010, Zuckerberg gave a $100 million dollar “donation” to the Newark Public Schools<\/a> as long as they would bust teacher unions, focus on endless test prep, and replace public schools with charters. The legality of the “donation” is still in question. What is not in dispute, is the fact that Zuckerberg got almost nothing for his\u00a0investment\/purchase\/donation<\/a>.<\/p>\n

President Obama rarely, if ever visits a public school. He likes charters. Gates likes charters. Zuckerberg likes charter schools. They all hate teacher unions. I documented the President’s antipathy towards organized teachers back in 2008 in the\u00a0Huffington Post’s\u00a0First We Kill the Teacher Unions.\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0In that article, written before President Obama’s election, I detailed how the wunderkind Newark Mayor, now Senator, needed help in busting teacher unions and privatizing the public schools in his community. Bill Gates’ hostility towards organized labor of any kind is well documented in the countless labor violations Microsoft was adjudicated guilty of during his leadership of the company.<\/p>\n

President Obama also likes “workforce” development gimmicks in education. One of his favorite “public\/private” (corporate) projects is P-Tech High School in Brooklyn, NY (another city decimated by education policies enacted by unqualified ideologues). The “miracle” of that school’s success has even been called into question<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In my March 2014 article,\u00a0Newark, NJ: Larger Class Sizes and Unqualified Teachers \u2013 Perfect Together<\/a>, I discuss the chaos being caused by the “One Newark” being advanced by the state-appointed, locally unaccountable, and Teach-for-America trained superintendent of the Newark Public Schools, Cami Anderson. “One Newark” seeks to fire up to 1,000 teachers and privatize more public schools as charters. Two decades after suspending democracy in Newark, disbanding the local school board, and taking control over the local district, the State of New Jersey is never to be blamed for the real or perceived failure of the Newark schools. Teacher blaming, name-calling, and community antagonism has become a substitute for education policy. The local unpopularity of One Newark inspired a high school teacher and former teachers union President to be elected Mayor of Newark and the superintendent no longer feels safe attending public meetings in her own school district.\u00a0The Mayor of Newark has detailed what he believes to be the legal violations behind One Newark in a four-page letter to President Obama.<\/a><\/p>\n

Let’s review. President Obama, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg are all fans of charter schools. None of them, or their friend Cory Booker, \u00a0care much for the sorts of pesky teacher unions fighting for jobs and democracy in Newark. Zuckerberg is a major force behind Code.org and spent $100,000,000 in Newark. Each of these men is a proponent of the get-fought, back-to-basics, test constantly model of “reform.” Is it a coincidence that Newark students were chosen to be props during the President’s celebration of Hour of Code?<\/p>\n

Addendum:\u00a0<\/em>While I have specific pedagogical issues with Hour-of-Code, this post is a plea to pause before we celebrate\u00a0a singular\u00a0hour of good in a school district savaged by the very same patrons.<\/p>\n

\n

I will share my issues with the implementation of Hour of Code in a future post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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