The Future of Edtech Under COVID

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis

The COVID-19 pandemic has injected significant and likely lasting uncertainty into K-12 and higher education across the globe. Classroom shut-downs, campus closures, the implementation of online, hybrid, pod and home schooling, abortive restarts, furloughing of staff, and near constant shifts in schedules and resource distribution have made for a dizzying 2020 school year. Beyond the many educators, students, and parents who have lost their lives to COVID-19, students have missed millions of hours of classroom learning time which will likely lead to educational delays. Perhaps the only area of growth in education over the last year is the rapid expansion of the education technology industry. If they were not fully ubiquitous before, Zoom, Google Classroom and other edtech essentials are now structurally fundamental to schooling and learning under the threat of coronavirus.

More than two years ago I gave an assessment of where the education media industry was headed. Education media (or edmedia) is now part of the edtech apparatus and includes publishers of both physical and digital education material. Unfortunately some of my troubling predictions were not far off. The juggernaut of education publishing, Pearson, has commenced its long foretold resurgence with new testing contracts in Texas, a medical certification program at Hawaii Pacific University, and a new CEO coming from legacy media company Disney. Pearson says it’s focusing on direct consumer sales, but adding a former UK diplomat to its executive team shows that the company still considers public money their bread and butter.

As Pearson rebuilds after a rocky transition into the digital space, Amazon continues to expand into all facets of education technology while pushing a philanthropic angle. A 2019 Forbes op-ed linked Amazon’s education initiatives to the chuckle inducing notion of “inclusive capitalism”. With their continued growth into teacher-to-teacher curriculum sales and on-demand publishing, Amazon is destined to operate a stand-alone edtech or edmedia firm outside the Amazon.com umbrella; an entity that will operate decidedly outside of public control or quaint ideas of inclusiveness. My money is on Amazon buying up a firm based outside the US (such as tutoring firm VIPKid from China) and pivoting operations to support education infrastructure in developing countries — with little public input.

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In Chile, the school year is only halfway through — and teachers are struggling

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis
A closed primary school in Santiago, Chile in the Spring of 2020

This story was written in the Spring of 2020 while Chile (and the rest of the world) was in in the first phase of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. I’m grateful for my editors at GlobalVoices, a publication dedicated to bringing fresh perspectives on all matters of events happening around the world. Give them a click and support if you can.

By April 1, nearly 1.6 billion learners across the world had been affected by school closures due to COVID-19. For school children in the northern hemisphere, the turbulent school year came to an end with the arrival of warmer weather, but for millions of students and teachers in the southern hemisphere the school year is only halfway through. All primary and secondary level schools in Chile have been closed since March 15, forcing teachers to move classes online. Teaching across Chile’s structurally and economically diverse schooling system presents challenges even without a pandemic gripping the country.

At the beginning of the global pandemic, Chile was initially hailed as a leader in Latin America, due to aggressive testing and what the Chilean government called “dynamic” quarantines, or targeted lockdowns in areas with the highest number of cases. But now, the country of 19 million is still battling a growing infection rate. Over 360,000 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed and more than 9000 people have died due to the disease.

“Winter is coming strong and it is going to be tough, and I don’t think I’m going to see my students any time soon,” Francisca Alvear, a preschool teacher at a private school in Chile’s capital of Santiago told Global Voices through a Zoom video call.

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Support returning school teachers by listening to them — before it’s too late

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis

As the summer in the US draws to a close and school districts across the country struggle to find a responsible way to reopen during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I have noticed a strange trend developing on social media: posts supposedly supporting educators while forcing a lopsided comparison between teachers and healthcare workers.

Many of these posts are coming from essential workers or their allies. I’m not particulary surprised by posts complaining about protesting teachers, especially in a time when teachers unions are actively attacked and the convoluted narrative of “failing schools” is persuasive in public discourse. However, I’m troubled by the well-meaning, but flawed logic of telling teachers everything is “going to be ok”, because it ultimately dismisses teacher concerns while simultaneously telling them to stop worrying and get back to work.

The main point of these social media posts is that other essential workers, specifically healthcare workers, were able to continue or go back to work during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Even though the labor was extremely difficult and often dangerous, essential workers persevered, adapted and rose to the challenge. Posts on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere argue that teachers should be able to do the same. These messages are masked as encouragement, but present an inappropriate comparison. Hearts may be in the right place, but the comparions the posts set up are unfair, unrealistic, and condescending.

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Police Brutality in the United States: The View from Chile

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis
The Carabineros, the national police of Chile, stand gaurd in central Santiago in November 2019

On May 25th George Floyd of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was killed by police officers. Police were responding to a call from a convenience store regarding a disagreement over a possibly counterfeit $20 bill. After confronting Floyd, hand-cuffing him behind his back, and forcing him facedown onto pavement, Officer Derek Chauvin held his knee on Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes. Floyd clearly verbalized that he could not breathe. Three other officers either stood by or helped Chauvin forcebly restrain Floyd. George Floyd was pronounced dead by paramedics around 9:25 PM. Anger and frustration over George Floyd’s killing has spread across the United States in the form of peaceful protests, destructive rioting, and in some instances, looting of private businesses. In countless cases the police response to protests and connected violence have been similar to their response to George Floyd: aggressive, unjustified, and brutal.

In September of 2019 I moved to Santiago de Chile to teach English as a second langauge and hopefully conduct research on education inside Chile. In October of 2019 Chile erupted into mass protest, rioting and in some cases looting. The manifestaciones, as they are referred to as in Latin American media, amounted to a social uprising; an insurrection lead by people that have been pushed too hard, for too long. The protests in Chile are focused on a complex, but interconnected set of grievances: economic inequality, lack of services in health, education, and transportation, unfair pricing of common goods, privatization of public utilities, the land and civil rights of indigenous peoples, and police brutality. What began as a collection of fare-jumping protests against a planned metro ticket hike, quickly escalated, then spiraled out of control when the national police force, The Carabineros, began injuring students with the use of tear-gas, pellet guns, water-cannons, and blunt weapons — all hallmarks of the repressive dictatorship the people of Chile peacefully voted out of exsistant more than 30 years ago.

My research on the Chilean education system has never gotten off the ground, but my teaching experience has been the saving grace of my time here; a respite from the weeks and months of police brutality. I have seen police beat people with metal batons. I have witnessed a police officer racking a shotgun to scare away protesters. I have had tear gas canisters shot in my direction and felt the sting of the canister’s effects. I have watched a looted supermarket burn, only to learn hours later that a man died inside. If the man had been able to escape the market he would have very likely faced armed police officers prepared to complete what the fire did not. Three dozen Chileans have been killed, hundreds more have been permanently blinded by rubber bullets, and more than 10,000 have been injured in the months long ordeal.

The current massive outpouring of police violence in the United States is mirroring what occured and continues to occur in Chile. In the wake of George Floyd’s killing and the responding protests Police across the US are pushing, tear-gassing, beating, and shooting non-violent protesters. In August I will return to the US and I fear I will be returning to a country in the same grip of anger and violence as Chile — anger and violence not from protesters, but from a police force acting out of unfounded fear, learned aggression, and systematic bias against black, brown, and poor people.

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This is Our Alien Invasion Moment. We’re blowing it, but we don’t have to.

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis

As the nations of the world continue to confront the COVID-19 pandemic in ways both responsible and irresponsible, I am reminded of a moment from US President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 address to the United Nations General Assembly. While mimicking the appearance of a thoughtful grandfather, Reagan ruminated on a hypothetical scenario pulled straight from science fiction pulp novels, last popular when Reagan was an actor in the 1950s. If the planet faced an alien threat, an invasion from outside this world, could we as diverse peoples and nations, with competing interests and desires, come together and defeat the threat as a singular force?

“I occasionally think of how quickly our differences world wide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world,” said Reagan to the U.N. General Assembly in the Fall of 1987.

Reagan was using this fictional scenario to find common ground with other world leaders, in the hope of eliminating the very real threat of global nuclear war. Six years later the United States and its chief geopolitical rival, the Soviet Union (in the process of becoming its successor, the Russian Federation) would sign the first in a series of agreements drastically reducing the global stockpile of nuclear warheads. Instead of the fear of nuclear holocaust, could the COVID-19 pandemic be the world encompassing event that unites the human race; akin to an alien invasion of Earth?

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Defunding American Public Education — by expanding religious schooling

On By KeithBevacquaIn Education

This past week during the State of the Union address, President Trump paid special attention to an elementary school student from Philadelphia named Janiyah Davis. Trump used the occasion to announce that Davis would be receiving an “opportunity scholarship” so she could learn at a quality school of her family’s choice. That announcement would prove to be (at best) a muddling of the truth. The Department of Education later explained that the “scholarship” in question would be personally paid for by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos; the tuition money supposedly coming from DeVos’ salary. Why was it worth it for the president to lie about a fake scholarship in front of the entire nation? Trump used this grandstand moment to promote a policy at the heart of both Janiyah Davis’ future and the future of American schooling: education tax-credit scholarships. To better understand this seemingly sweet moment during the State of the Union we have to look closely at an extremely important case currently being deliberated in the Supreme Court and its connection to religious school funding.

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What is the PSU and what does it have to do with Chile’s economic inequality?

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis, Education

The PSU (or University Selection Test in its English translated acronym) is a national level test taken by high school seniors in order to study at one of Chile’s top universities. Taken by nearly 300,000 students each year, the PSU is similar to the SAT or ACT in the United States, but the stakes are much higher. The test is used as the main admissions metric for the 30 plus members schools of the National Council of Rectors (CRUCh), which are often referred to as “traditional universities”. Most of the CRUCh universities are public, jesuit or private schools created before Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup and the subsequent reworking and large scale privitizing of Chile’s national education system.

The universities that utilize the multi-topic PSU are often thought of as the “best of the best” and offer a clearer path to higher economic status inside Chile’s stratified economy, compared to newer, less prestigious schools created post 1973. As in most developed countries, the more prestigious the university a person attends the more opportunities for work and social advancement that person is afforded. In the midst of Chile’s on-going social crisis high school students have challenged why the PSU exists and what function it serves in Chilean society.

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Why the US Doesn’t Care About Chile

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis, Photography

Ask the average US citizen where Chile is on a map and they will likely point in South America’s general direction, with the saying that Chile is the “skinny one”. Americans (a painfully vague moniker United States citizens have granted themselves) usually only learn geography when considering who and who not to bomb into submission. Americans can pin point Iraq, describe Afghanistan in general terms, and Americans over the age of 50 can give you a few key aspects of the Vietnam War. American mastery of elementary level geography is largely based on our military hubris.

It is unlikely that the US is going to bomb or invade Chile any time soon, so most Americans are not going to worry themselves with Chile’s current crisis of economics, political power, and identity. For the nearly 19 million Chileans who are questioning what kind of country they want to be, America’s apathy is both a blessing and a curse. God forbid outside meddlers became involved in Chilean politics, but it is truly a shame that more people across the globe don’t know what is going on in the “skinny country”. Why does the apathy towards Chile’s crisis exist in the first place? And why has international press coverage of the on going protests in Chile slowed to a trickle?

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“We Are Not at War”

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis

On Monday, October 21st multiple groups, including CONFECH (the confederation of studunt unions in Chile) called for mass demonstrations and strikes as Santiago de Chile headed into day three of military control. A State of Emergency order has now been called for several Chilean cities, including Concepcion and Valparaiso, which hosts the country’s National Assembly. Roughly half the country’s population is now under some form of emergency order due to the ongoing backlash to growing economic and social inequality.

National news outlets are beginning to publish and broadcast some of the violent actions undertaken by the military during the last 100 hours, such as the killing of a demonstrator along the country’s Route 5 highway, the striking of an interview subject in Valparaiso with a tear-gas canister, and the accidental shooting of a famous actor in Plaza de Italia. Still, much more reporting needs to be done on the brutality of the military and police at the national level in order for the public to understand the intimidation tactics being used against demonstrators and by-standers.

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The Metro is on Fire: Chile in Crisis

On By KeithBevacquaIn Chile In Crisis

In an action dubbed “#EvasionMasive”, students began jumping Metro gates across the city on Monday, October 14th in protest of continued fare increases for the Santiago Metro and bus system. On October 6th, the Metro de Santiago raised the rush hour fare from $800 pesos to $830 pesos, the second fare increase this year, impacting both metro trains and buses. Student groups in the city proposed a week of evading the fare and called on university and secondary school students to jump payment gates on the Metro and refuse to tap “Bip!” cards on city buses; denying the Santiago Metro system revenue from a major constituency.

By Friday, October 18th, the situation spiraled out of control due to forceful police tactics, including the use of tear gas, riot shields and water cannons, and an escalation of violence from protesters, including pulling down Metro station gates, destruction of equipment, and setting fire to locked station entrances. At the height of the evening rush hour the entire Metro system was shut down, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to walk or rely on the city’s already beleaguered bus service to return home from the work and schools.

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