Transcript
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Welcome to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host, Whitney Webb. For much of the year, this podcast has been exploring the phenomenon of the PayPal presidency, that is the extremely significant influence of the Paypal mafia and their allies in Silicon Valley on the current Trump administration. From healthcare to finance and beyond. Today we will be taking a look at how big tech, neoconservative think tanks and the Trump administration are shaping current education policy, including the so called school choice movement and the promised dismantling of the Department of Education that seem at first glance to be about reducing federal control over education. However, the deeper reality is anything but. Other education policies we will be interrogating today include efforts by the current administration to control anti war protests on campuses under the guise of combating quote, unquote antisemitism, as well as how this effort and other potential future efforts to control speech in classrooms and on campuses could soon be aided by the growing importance of the fintech industry on education funding. We will also touch on how AI analytics of students learning metrics and other data harvested by Big Tech are being used to steer and determine children's futures. Joining me to discuss these topics and more is John Kleezak. John has a Master's in English and and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over a decade. He is the author of the book School World Order and is a contributor to several publications including Unlimited Hangout. Today we will be focusing on John's recent pieces for Unlimited Hangout on education policy. The first entitled Trump Ed 2025 School Choice Corporatization, Social Impact Finance and the dismantling of the Department in Education. And the most recent being from Project 2025 to the PayPal program residency school choice, FinTech for a blockchain, Social Credit Economy. Thanks for joining me today John, and welcome back to Unlimited Hangout.
A (2:31)
It's great to be here. Whitney, thanks for having me back.
B (2:33)
Of course. My pleasure. So a lot of your recent work on education for Unlimited Hangout has focused on the groups behind the so called school choice movement. And school choice sounds like a good thing, just looking at the term superficially. So why do you believe this movement is hiding ulterior motives and who benefits?
A (2:53)
Well, I mean, you know, the reason why I think that it's not a great thing was many, many years back. I mean, it really stems from the research of my mentor, Charlotte Thompson Izerbeat, who worked in the with the Ronald Reagan administration. She was a senior policy advisor in the Department of Education and she blew the whistle on something called Project Best that's basic education skills through technology. It was a program to set up public private partnerships between big tech companies, Department of Education, other local education agencies in order to set up basically operant conditioning through computerized education. And I've written a few pieces at Unlimited Hangout, sort of tracing the history of that and how it ties into something called UNESCO study 11 and basically how that set the groundwork for all things global ed tech and fourth Industrial revolution. But during her time at the, the Department of Education under Reagan, she was also a liaison with a task force on private sector initiatives. And during her time there she's, you know, part of that private sector initiative was the school choice movement. And as the liaison she basically asked the question, isn't this like corporate fascism? And they're all kind of like, gee Charlotte, we, we didn't think about it like that. And then, you know, they moved her to another office at that point. Point. But you know, is the way that she pointed it out from day one, it's essentially, you know, she wouldn't use stakeholder capitalism, was the, wouldn't even have phrase she used. But it's public private partnerships. It's the merger of corporations in the state. That's, you know, sort of Mussolini's definition of fascism. Yeah, it's probably an apocryphal quote, but colloquially we understand that to be his definition corporate fascism. And today we would call that, you know, stakeholder capitalism. Right. It's the mixture of the public and private on a, on a global fail. So basically it's stakeholder capitalism for schools. It's going to subsidize private companies with public tax dollars and it's also going to remove any sort of civil process. Right. So you know, you're not going to have a local school board. Two parts of the school choice movement more broadly is the charter schooling movement, which is pretty much locked in. So charter schools are private corporations that are subsidized, a couple of tax dollars. But then this next round, school choice is basically these different funding mechanisms. So you know, you might just call them all vouchers colloquially. I think part of the reason why they've come up with these different terms like education savings accounts and scholarship granting organizations or tax credited scholarships is largely to kind of muddy the waters, make it harder to figure out what, what they're doing. Now there are some, there are, are some nuanced differences between how the money is distributed and access, between a, you know, a traditional voucher, an ESA and a tax credit. But basically what they all have in common is you're taking public tax dollars. Instead of subsidizing a school or a, you know, a charter school, private corporation, you're just, you're subsidizing a basket of. Could be a charter school, could be a private school, could be a religious school, or could just be any range of edtech products and services, you know, including now they're adding into it therapy. So like mental health services as well, that, you know, could be also serviced with different technologies we might talk about. So ultimately. Right, all that, all of that together indicates that, you know, with the charter, as I mentioned, with the charter schools, there's no, they, they don't have an elected board. Right. And the same thing with, if you take those, those vouchers or those ESA monies and you purchase, you know, your tech products, I mean, essentially you're being serviced again by a company that doesn't have an elected board. So whether it's the charter schooling system or the sort of neo voucher system, the school choice movement, again, right, it's basically destroying the public sector. It's privatizing everything. And then it's also cutting off any, any routes that we would have had towards any court of civic recourse, right, through an elected school board. So those, those are all the, the bad things about school choice.
