Abstract
For decades investors have sought to find ways of profiting off the billions of public dollars spent annually on systems of public schooling across the world. This interest has coincided with the growing marketization of systems of public schooling, especially in the United States, as well as the increased use of educational technologies (or EdTech). This study examines the implications of the growing use of profit-driven educational technologies for the politics and spatial practices of schooling. Specifically, it examines past experiences with market-oriented EdTech systems in Oregon and Michigan to highlight how the combination of market systems of governance and profit-driven EdTech practices depend on the deconstruction of links between schools, communities, and students in order to roll out aspatial and apolitical educational practices that maximize profits. The placeless vision for education embedded in profit-driven EdTech helps promote the reproduction of dominant orders and stifles place-based struggles over educational justice.
Education technology, or “EdTech,” can remove logistical obstacles to education, like geography, by connecting students with institutions, teachers, and each other in ways that previously were only possible in the classroom.
—Introducing the Global X Education ETF (2020: para. 10, emphasis added)
As the global economy shuddered under the weight of the COVID-19 pandemic, asset managers, pension funds, and other institutional investors began to search for profitable sectors to invest in. Financial analysts quickly homed in on educational technologies, or EdTech, as a potential area for high returns based on the likelihood of schooling systems pivoting to online learning. BMO Capital Markets, for example, wrote on March 5, 2020, that “while we are uncomfortable citing ‘winners’ in the coronavirus situation … those that specialize in online education could see increased interest should the situation worsen” (EdSurge, 2020: para. 2). In the months that followed, two new exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were established to specifically focus on EdTech stocks (Williamson, 2020); the stocks of EdTech firms grew 87% from March to October, and a record $16.1 billion (USD) in venture capital flooded into the sector in 2020 (far surpassing the $7 billion invested in 2019). 1
At first glance this quick shift to online learning and the associated flood of capital seems exceptional; however, dreams of an EdTech-led future of education have circulated for decades as part of a wider project to unlock market opportunities in public education (see GSV Advisors, 2012). While EdTech (generally defined as the use of technology in teaching and learning) is varied in its forms and patterns of ownership, in this article I explore case studies that highlight how profit-driven EdTech systems in Michigan and Oregon have been built upon the roll-out of market-based educational policies and the positioning of geographic connections as a “logistical obstacle” to be overcome. Through tracing how for-profit EdTech interventions rely on previous waves of marketization, I illustrate the connections between the use of EdTech and changing geographies of education policy whereby EdTech firms and their supporters have worked to reorient education policies in order to facilitate their proposed technological interventions (Cohen, 2017; Gulson and Sellar, 2019). As Dussel (2020: 49-50) argues, tracing political struggles over education allows us to follow the roll-out of EdTech as a policy intervention into the space of the classroom where “classrooms with technologies are not simply or solely ‘expanded classrooms’; they are inscribed within complex networks that have to be carefully and dutifully assembled.”
With schooling a key site where social identities are produced and where processes of social reproduction occur, the shift to fully-online and/or technology-mediated schooling should be of crucial interest to geographers of education and of social reproduction more broadly (Collins and Coleman, 2008; Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson, 2019; Katz, 2018; Finn, 2016). As argued in this article, spatial relations are at the heart of this shift, with EdTech projects and their enabling policies working towards the construction of placeless learning environments that maximize profits, undermine longstanding place-based struggles for educational justice, and which concentrate negative impacts in marginalized communities. While geographies of education have largely focused on the connections between schools, neighborhoods, and the physical spaces of learning (Collins and Coleman, 2008; Kraftl et al., 2021), emerging online spaces of education present a new empirical reality they must address (Farhadi, 2019; Finn, 2016). If geography is, indeed, a “logistical obstacle” to the realization of profits, then I also argue the alternative is true: that spatial connections are an increasingly important terrain of struggle over the politics and practices of schooling.
The rest of this article proceeds in four parts. First, I place this article within the literature of geographies of education, focusing closely on geographies of education policy. Second, I provide an overview of the dynamics of the EdTech sector, focused mostly on the United States. Third, I outline the specifics of how markets and EdTech were promoted in Michigan and Oregon in order to establish how these efforts attempted to shift the spatial logics of schooling. In Oregon, I examine the emergence of online, for-profit charter schools. In Michigan, I examine two attempts to create EdTech learning systems (both ultimately unsuccessful): a 2011 initiative entitled “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” and a private curriculum system, Buzz, implemented in state-run schools in Detroit. Finally, I discuss the implications of these cases for the continuing attempts to promote EdTech and its potential effects on existing geographies of education. In doing so I argue that the placeless vision of education embedded in profit-driven EdTech experiments helps promote the reproduction of dominant orders and stifle place-based struggles over educational justice while, alternatively, spatial connections between schools and communities are mobilized to resist the roll-out of for-profit EdTech systems (Mitchell, 2018).
Methodology
This article builds upon a larger project examining the politics of market-making projects in American schooling. This included 49 semi-structured interviews conducted in Michigan, Oregon, and with national-level education actors as well as fieldwork over 4 months in Michigan, 2 months in Oregon, and at various national-level conferences. For this article, this data was supplemented with documentary analysis of EdTech-focused reports from the financial sector, news coverage, and financial documents.
Geographies of EdTech, marketization, and social reproduction
The growth of EdTech as a means of providing education follows decades of the increased use of market interventions in schooling and other domains of social reproduction such as health care (Bakker and Gill, 2019; Henry, 2015; Roberts, 2016). Geographers of education have documented much of this shift, highlighting how the neoliberalization of systems of public education has contributed to the privatization of schooling (Gulson and Sellar, 2019; Nguyen et al., 2017), racialized spatial restructuring in cities (Cohen, 2021a; McFadden, 2021; Yoon, 2011), and struggles over how decisions about schooling are made (Good, 2017)—all resulting in the transformation of the spaces where students learn (Holloway and Jöns, 2012; Kraftl et al., 2021). However, as Burch and Miglani (2018) and Williamson (2018) document, the arrival of EdTech has blended this market orientation with a tech-utopianism that proffers educational technologies as simultaneously unlocking profits and improving educational outcomes. How this reorients the spaces and uses of education is a subject that geographers have yet to tackle in detail (although see Farhadi, 2019). In the first subsection, geographies of education and EdTech, I review the geographies of education and education policy in relation to EdTech. In the following subsection, EdTech, standardization, and future geographies of education, I discuss the theoretical and political questions EdTech poses for the subfield and for literatures on the marketization of systems of social reproduction more broadly. This is done to highlight how market-based educational technologies shape the spaces of learning and wider struggles over education by promoting standardized educational practices.
Geographies of education and EdTech
Geographers studying education are interested in both the spaces (formal and informal) where education takes place and the role of education within wider sociospatial processes (Holloway and Jöns, 2012; Nguyen et al., 2017). This has included cultural approaches focusing on how educational spaces shape the everyday experiences and attitudes of children (Holloway et al., 2010; Kraftl et al., 2021) as well as political-economic work focused on spatialized inequality, race, and the neoliberalization of education (Huff, 2013; Hunter, 2020; Nguyen et al., 2017). The online spaces of learning enabled by EdTech exist at the intersection of these interests, with the digital space of learning both reshaping the lives of students (Farhadi, 2019) and shifting the political economy of education in ways that maximize profits (Burch and Miglani, 2018; Regan and Khwaja, 2019). Yet research on these spaces is underdeveloped in geography, with Finn (2016: 29) arguing that they have “received little attention from geographers of education” and Farhadi (2019) noting that there is little critical scholarship on e-learning in the field.
Before delving into the relationship between geographies of education and educational technologies it is important to be clear what we mean by the term EdTech. While the definitional boundaries of EdTech are sprawling and, as Williamson (2021) notes, seemingly expanding by the day, the common definition involves “the educational application of technology to improve the efficiency of education” (An and Oliver, 2021: 7). This simple definition belies debates and distinctions over the term (An and Oliver, 2021; Williamson, 2021). Halverson and Shapiro (2013), for example, document three different types of EdTech: student information systems (student tracking and reporting), assessment technologies (standardized testing including computer-adaptive testing), and instructional technologies (learning management systems like Blackboard or Moodle). Within these categories, they further argue that there is a distinction between top-down “technologies of education” that serve the purposes of administrators and bottom-up “technologies of learning,” where “instead of information being generated for system administrators to assess system success, [with technologies of learning] information is generated to serve the interests of users” (Halverson and Shapiro, 2013: 168). This distinction highlights how the policy context of EdTech matters, with similar technologies often used for drastically different purposes based on the interests of those using it.
Within geography, much of the focus on EdTech has been on how student information systems and assessment technologies have reshaped spaces of education. Finn (2016), for example, highlights how new data systems designed to increase accountability through the use of test scores and other standardized metrics have placed staff in the position where they must orient their work around producing the data demanded by such systems and where students have their attitude towards learning shaped by an affect of progress promoted by digital forms of data capture and assessment. Gulson and Sellar (2019: 351) document a similar process arguing that “producing the right second-order objectives (numbers) has become as important as first-order objectives (pedagogy, curriculum, assessment) in new performative accountability regimes.” Instructional technologies that directly mediate learning (e.g. learning management systems) have had less attention in geography. However, Farhadi (2019: 16) argues that instructional technologies should be an important area of focus for geographers given how online learning technologies function spatially as “as a place of instruction, a place from which space is materialized, [especially] when we account for the people within it.”
Building on Farhadi’s (2019) insight, I draw on Gulson and Sellar’s (2019) work on educational data infrastructures as a guide for how we can understand the growth of, and influence, of EdTech instructional technologies. Their work, described as the geographies of education policy, highlights how policies are a key element through which the spatial dimensions of schooling are remade. As they argue “emergent [technological] infrastructures bring in new subjects of education that expand the site of education from those in schools, such as teachers and students, to a broader set that includes corporate and technical actors” (Gulson and Sellar: 362). This insight is echoed by scholars of the political economy of schooling who have drawn attention to the influence of private actors within what has been variously described as EdTech assemblages (Anagnostopoulos et al., 2013; Dussel, 2020) or organizational fields (Burch and Miglani, 2018). As Burch and Miglani (2018: 593) argue, to understand the field of EdTech we must study both those who consume and purchase education (students/schools) and the businesses and policy actors who “acting as intermediaries … contribute significantly to the field's discourse around values of different educational rights and reforms, for instance, the learning outcomes.”
Within these networks, market-based policies have grown increasingly popular over the past several decades. This includes new market systems of governance like charter schools in the United States and academies in the United Kingdom where private actors receive public money to deliver schooling; money which is often spent on the use of profit-driven curricula and technologies in the classroom (Burch, 2009; Hursh, 2017). Through the lens of geographies of education policy, the space of the classroom is connected to, and shaped by, decisions made over how to organize and govern the delivery of schooling—decisions often driven by market ideologies (Cohen, 2017). As a result, understanding the growing use of for-profit EdTech in the classroom necessitates an attention to how corporate actors shape educational policies to allow for the increased use of their technology and for control over how it is used.
EdTech, standardization, and future geographies of education
The growth of profit-driven EdTech policies and spaces of education also involves a standardization process that should be of concern to geographers of education and of social reproduction more broadly. In the case of data infrastructures, Gulson and Sellar (2019) argue that “underpinning these data-driven systems is an assumption that data can be generated, mobilised and used across diverse spaces and places.” As will be illustrated further through the case studies below, the provision of schooling entirely online or as mediated through technology is built on similar assumptions of these systems’ relevance across spatial contexts. Such standardization of educational practices has many effects. Finn (2016), for example, highlights that, while often resisted by teachers and students, standardization through technology can undermine the ability of teachers to shape the spaces of learning (see also Burch and Miglani, 2018; Farhadi, 2019; Regan and Khwaja, 2019).
Of particular interest to geographers should be how such standardization shapes the spatial relationship between schools and communities. Geographers of education have focused on the spaces of schools and, in doing so, have emphasized the connections between school and community as key elements in the production of space. Here, as Collins and Coleman (2008: 283) argue “[schools are] often represented as part of a community—typically, a community that is coextensive with neighbourhood or school board boundaries … debates over public education frequently take the form of struggles over the appropriate site or scale at which decisions about classroom content and curricula should be made.” Indeed, attention to place-based definitions of a school and learning characterizes much of geographies of education, which spans work on a variety of spaces, from journeys to school to alternative schooling sites such as forest schools and homeschooling (Kraftl et al., 2021), but where there is yet little work on online learning and its specific power dynamics and spatialities. A notable exception is Farhadi (2019) whose work highlights how e-learning, much like data infrastructures, reinforces and depends upon standardized curricula.
The growth of e-learning raises important questions: whose purposes are served by severing the link between school and community through online spaces? What are the means through which it is accomplished? And how does it shape geographies of education? Changes to the management and delivery of schooling enabled by EdTech may have uncertain effects on the stability of the progressive elements of schooling that have somewhat contradictorily emerged in advanced capitalist economies (Apple, 2002; Katz, 2018). For instance, if place-based struggles have bolstered emancipatory projects within schooling, how do these struggles change when schooling moves to online environments? As Nguyen et al. (2017: 9) argue, understanding the changing politics of education through approaching such questions is important to the building of “a critical geographies of education subfield [that] can respond to the ever-dynamic social forces and power relations that organize contemporary educational institutions.”
The extension of new EdTech markets, related standardized schooling practices, and the contestation of their roll-out, should not be of interest solely to geographers of education, however, but also those seeking to understand the dynamics of the marketization of social systems across different areas of social reproduction (Strauss and Meehan, 2015; Mitchell et al., 2003; Roberts, 2016). This is because the marketization of schooling is representative of wider trends across the social services that are typically associated with social reproduction, understood here following Bakker’s (2007) definition as consisting of (1) the biological reproduction of the species; (2) the reproduction of the labor force (including education); and (3) the reproduction and provision of care. From the destruction of social housing to the erosion of health care systems, the removal of what Bakker and Gill (2019) call the social commons has led to an explosion of new market and financial systems that have sought to turn the provision of social services and relations of care into sites of direct profitmaking. Changes to education are paradigmatic of such shifts, and the means through which for-profit EdTech is both expanded and resistance has relevance to similar struggles across domains of social reproduction (Mitchell, 2018).
Breaking down walls: EdTech, finance, and K-12 education
For the past several decades, K-12 schooling has been an area of interest for investors who view it as a virtually untapped market to be exploited (Ball, 2012; Hursh, 2017; Saltman, 2016). In 2012, for example, EdTech investment firm Global Silicon Valley (GSV) Advisors, released their Fall of the Wall report where they bemoaned the lack of private investment opportunities in the $1.3 trillion (USD) market for education. Likening recent market reforms such as charter school programs 2 to the fall of the Berlin Wall, GSV Advisors enthusiastically outlined the profits to be made if the continued marketization of public education systems could, in the words of one investor, overcome local “ingrained, self-interested parties including unions, public school bureaucracies, and parents” (GSV Advisors, 2012: 43). In this section, I review specifics about the EdTech sector in the United States which, as outlined above, has been relatively understudied in geography. This is done in order to provide context for the case studies that follow.
A key precursor to public education's increased reliance on for-profit EdTech has been efforts to remove decision-making from the public through the dismantling of democratic institutions, teachers’ unions, and parent organizations (Ball, 2012; Burch, 2009; Lipman, 2011; Saltman, 2016). As shown below, it is through market, rather than democratic, systems of governance that private EdTech firms have been able to bypass systems of public oversight that present obstacles to the maximization of profits. Market-based policies have linked speculative investments in EdTech with wider projects that seek to reduce public control over the practices of schooling and increase market competition (Lipman, 2011). For example, K12 Inc., a for-profit online school, worked with the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council to lobby for the loose regulation of charter schools in ways that increased their ability to control the infrastructure and delivery of schooling and therefore their profits (Hursh, 2017; Saltman, 2016). As the Fall of the Wall report highlights, such efforts to allow private companies to directly run schools without public oversight (and without associated unionized workforces) is an explicit strategy of the wider movement to marketize schooling. Partly for this reason, over the past decade, the charter school movement and other marketization projects have been heavily funded by some of the same hedge fund and tech billionaires who invest in EdTech (Ball, 2012; Hursh, 2017; Saltman, 2016).
For investors in education more broadly, and in EdTech in particular, the delinking of schools from their communities through market systems has been married in the United States with a focus on standardized test scores as the metric of educational success. Under systems like charter schools, privately run (but publicly funded) schools are not beholden to the decisions of public school districts and school board trustees but instead have autonomy over teaching practices, the use of technology, and curriculum as long as long as they can be justified by rising test scores (Lipman, 2011; Saltman, 2016; Thomas, 2014). This marriage of markets and testing regimes has resulted in educational practices which “standardize, homogenize, and automate knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy” as justified under the rubric of accountability and competitiveness (Saltman, 2016: 106).
The popularity of standardized teaching practices amongst EdTech firms and investors is logical for an industry focused on “removing” geographical constraints. As outlined in the case studies below, for EdTech investments to be profitable, public education needs to be reoriented in ways that allow for the same technologies to apply across geographic contexts and which allow for the deskilling and automation of teacher labor (Saltman, 2016). Simply put, if you create one technology-based learning system, then you can roll out that system through a network of schools (in-person or online) without adding significantly to your costs. This includes attempts to build “virtual” schools where students attend schools entirely online as well as “personalized learning” systems where software carries the heavy load of teaching (e.g. determining and rolling out lesson plans) and thereby allows higher student-to-teacher ratios (Farhadi, 2019; Hartong, 2019; Saltman, 2016).
The shifts desired by an EdTech and finance-led vision of education, therefore, aim to create a marketized and standardized version of schooling that is delinked from the politics and pedagogies of the places where students live. As described through the Michigan and Oregon case studies outlined in this paper, the policies and practices behind online schooling exhibit a push for placeless, apolitical schooling practices that undermine the ability of place-based school districts, educators, and parents to shape educational practices. This presents a challenge for educators who view place-based pedagogies as essential to learning and critical thinking (see, e.g. Popielarz and Monreal, 2019).
This shift-in-the-making towards marketized EdTech systems, and the social relations of teaching embedded within them, has important implications for the spatialities of schooling that are further explored below. Notably, the use of for-profit means of education and its connections to the marketization of governance systems and the standardization of pedagogy accelerate multiple trends that place enormous pressure on schools. These include (1) narrowing the focus of schooling to a private relation by stripping away connections between communities and schools; (2) deskilling and removing autonomy from teachers through EdTech systems that undermine critical and place-based pedagogies and facilitate the loss of stable, union jobs; and, (3) emphasizing science and vocation-oriented education that both produces corporate interests and lends itself to the standardized, automated technologies created by EdTech firms. As EdTech firms and their financial backers attempt to take on the “logistical obstacle” of geography, I argue that this shift draws attention to how important spatial connections are to struggles over the politics and practice of schooling.
Case studies: Space, EdTech, and the marketization of schooling
The current wave of speculative investment in EdTech firms is likely to continue over the coming decade. As witnessed by the long-running interest of groups like GSV Advisors, however, there are existing experiments with profit-driven EdTech systems that provide insights into the politics and spatialities of EdTech-based learning environments. In this section, I explore past experiences with EdTech in Oregon and Michigan in order to examine the spatial aspects of the roll-out of EdTech in each state.
In both cases, geography played a central role in attempts to create new EdTech systems, and in shaping resistance to those efforts. A prerequisite for the roll-out of EdTech systems in each state was the de-linking of schools, teachers, and students from their local context in order to promote standardized curricular interventions. At the same time, resistance to EdTech interventions was explicitly tied to connections between schools and communities, with school districts in Oregon acting as a regulatory check to the growth of virtual charter schools and the demand for democratic accountability in Michigan leading to the failure of multiple efforts to create online and “blended” school systems to be provided by for-profit firms. As these cases reveal, the destruction of the spatial relationships that underpin the practice of schooling, and attempts to push back against such destruction, are at the heart of struggles over the marketization of schooling as EdTech grows in influence.
Small districts, big schools: Virtual charter schools and spatial control
Like many American states, Oregon began experimenting with market-based educational policies in the late 1990s. This took the form of a charter school law passed in 1999 that allowed private organizations to open and run publicly funded schools. However, the state's law included a relatively strong system of regulation, with Oregon ranked as the 30th most unfriendly state (out of 47) for charter schools by the Center for Education Reform (2020) and with relatively few for-profit schools compared to other states. 3 Oregon’s strong regulatory system is based on the requirement that all charter schools be approved by the local school district before they open (a principle referred to in Oregon as “local control”). In effect, this has created a barrier to entry for schools without the local connections needed to convince school districts that a proposed charter school adds value for the community.
However, as technology has advanced, this regulatory system has been challenged by for-profit online charter schools who have gained permission to operate in tiny, rural districts yet enroll statewide. These schools use instructional technologies like learning platforms and online discussion tools to teach students from around the state in a virtual schooling environment. Such technology-mediated schooling practices allow students to engage with materials at their own pace, often with only fleeting interaction with teachers. According to Gill et al. (2015), students attending online schools often spend less time with teachers over the course of a week than a student at a brick-and-mortar school would in a single day. Education at these schools is run through learning management software like Brightspace and Connexus which guide students through lesson plans, contain messaging systems for discussion with teachers and other students, and which track and assess student progress. Through the use of these instructional technologies to enroll students from throughout the state while locating in rural districts, for-profit firms have been able to bypass Oregon's system of local control, which was designed to preserve links between communities and their schools.
Virtual charter schools emerged in Oregon in 2005 when Connections Academy, a for-profit firm owned (at the time) by investment firm Apollo Global Management,
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opened the Oregon Connections Academy (ORCA) in the tiny Scio school district (∼650 students). Despite being in Scio, ORCA advertised its services to students statewide. While most students in Scio did not have a connection to ORCA, the district agreed to host the school in order to receive a percentage of the state’s per-student funding for ORCA. ORCA’s model of locating in a small school district was later replicated by K12 Inc.'s Oregon Virtual Academy (ORVA) which is located in the similarly-sized North Bend district. A school district administrator described this process and the freedom it gave these for-profit schools: You had ORCA and ORVA … it was clear what was going on. They would go find a little school district that they could pick off. It creates a financial incentive for the school district to sponsor them because they are getting 5 to 10 percent of the per student allocation and it is totally hands off by the school district, and its generally not even serving the kids in the school district.”
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When [the charter school law] was originally written … the local control, where a lot of the people, both legislators and school lobbyists and various organizations, they want the power to stay with the local school district … who really advocate for charter schools to be a component of a school district to ensure that extra infrastructure for accountability and oversight.
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After their arrival, there were attempts to bring online charter schools within the regulatory framework of local control. For example, immediately after ORCA opened, the state legislature passed SB1071, which would have brought ORCA within the system of local control by mandating that 50% of virtual charter schools’ students be located in the district that sponsored the school. This would have mobilized the importance of local connections as a means of ensuring stronger oversight of ORCA and ORVA. Ultimately, however, ORCA launched a successful lawsuit by arguing that its charter predated the legislation and therefore the law did not apply—a ruling that was later applied to ORVA as well. As described by a school district administrator: Generally the applications that we see [in Oregon] … Is that it’s a group of parents at a local school or it’s a group of parents in a community who would like to see another option in their neighborhood. Something very locally focused and I think it’s just a different process when the entity comes from out of state, it doesn’t really matter where they locate because they are serving students statewide (emphasis added).
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This departure from the system of “local control” enabled the implementation of the standardized educational practices that are typical of for-profit EdTech firms. Both ORCA and ORVA are part of national chains that use standardized curricula across geographic contexts. As documented by Miron and Urschel (2012) and Molnar (2019), K12 Inc. schools, in particular, have been accused of offering inadequate resources for students (including those with disabilities) and for their low graduation rates. In California, for example, K12 Inc. paid an $8.5 million (USD) settlement in 2016 for falsifying test scores and parental satisfaction results, failing to offer the full range of courses needed for university attendance, not preparing Individual Learning Plans for students with disabilities, providing inadequate learning materials, and falsifying typical class sizes in advertisements to parents (THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA, Plaintiff, V. K12 INC, 2016).
In Oregon specifically, a 2017 report from the Secretary of State highlighted poor graduation rates and a lack of help for students in online charter schools. The report quoted a teacher stating that “for kids who struggle … they’re just lost. They have so many more supports available for them at a brick-and-mortar school” (Stronger Accountability, Oversight…, 2017: 26). Such problems have been especially acute at for-profit schools in Oregon where oversight by the small districts that sponsor the schools have been described as “hands off” and inadequate to ensure educational quality (Stronger Accountability, Oversight…, 2017). These types of findings were referenced by interview participants, many of whom had interacted with former ORCA and ORVA students. As one principal of a blended (a mix of online/and in-person learning) school which does not use standardized EdTech curricula described: We get a lot of [former ORCA and ORVA] students … because I don’t think they can do what we do. First off, they are corporate run. Everybody is trained in their system and I think we can be more flexible in meeting the needs of kids and offering supports. If you are a state-wide school you would have difficulty doing what we do as far as the blended/hybrid, response to intervention opportunities that kids have here … because again you cannot take the teacher out of learning. We’ve tried that for years, no matter how many bells and whistles you put in an online curriculum its still going to be really text-based, even if you might have video and flipped learning concepts.
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Beyond standardizing educational practices, these schools have also served to both deskill teachers and shift labor to caregivers in ways that maximize profits, put pressures on households that are unevenly distributed along lines of race and gender, and attack a source of well-paying jobs. For-profit schools, like ORCA and ORVA, do not hire unionized teachers and often use large class sizes as a means of reducing labor costs. To make this process work (to the extent that it does) they require that each child have a “learning coach” at home who commits to 3–6 h a day supervising younger children and 1–2 h a day supervising high school students. 11 This process of deskilling also undermines both teacher autonomy and the ability to tackle difficult subject matter that challenges the dominant order. As Barbour’s (2019) meta-analysis of the curriculum in for-profit online schools reveals, online charter schools rely on a bare-bones style of instruction that is “mechanical and [where] the system does not encourage creativity” (p. 55). This allows for the use of unskilled and undertrained (but cheaper) teachers and constricts the ability of experienced teachers to construct their own lesson plans. As one founder of a public online school in Oregon described, the ability to be flexible is diminished in the context of the standardized technology and large class sizes typical of online charter schools. In their words, “there are real challenges logistically … How do you deliver special education services, how do you deliver specially designed instructions to kids and their [individualized education plans]. Frankly what [for-profit firms] are doing is trying to take the teacher out of education.” 12
The Oregon case makes clear that the remaking of the spatial boundaries of schooling through changes to policy has been fundamental to the changes within classrooms enabled by EdTech. The profits of these companies are predicated on both the marketization of schooling and the reconstruction of its spatial configurations. It is through removing power from local, community-oriented institutions like school districts that these companies have been able to construct a placeless version of education untouched by public oversight and which can be delivered to large classes by poorly trained teachers. This has served to undermine teacher autonomy and democratic accountability. Without the pressure that comes from local parent and teacher organizing and the public oversight provided by local institutions like school districts, these schools have been able to roll out a pared-down, instrumental view of education.
Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace: Market reforms and EdTech
While Oregon is poorly ranked by charter supporters, Michigan is ranked the 3rd friendliest state for charter schools by the Center for Education Reform (2020) and has the highest proportion of schools run by for-profit operators. However, despite this generally open environment, there has been opposition to the roll out of marketized EdTech systems in the state. In this section, I examine the implications of two such attempts: (1) a proposal to fund education on a course-by-course basis termed “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” explicitly designed to encourage the growth of privately-operated online charter schools; and, (2) the takeover of local schools in Detroit by the state government and the subsequent testing of Buzz, a for-profit EdTech learning system, in those schools. In both cases, the removal of local control over schooling was viewed as a necessary condition for the operation of profit-driven EdTech firms, while the successful opposition to these projects mobilized connections between schools and communities.
Michigan has been at the forefront of experiments with marketized public education systems. One such proposed experiment emerged in 2011 when Governor Rick Snyder announced his vision for the future of the state's education system, termed “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace.” Making the argument that the local school model was outdated and that Michigan needed to embrace the global market for EdTech, Snyder argued: Access to quality education is no longer solely dependent on local classrooms and textbooks. A new global market has emerged as parents, schools and students are realizing the power and effectiveness of online learning. The time has come to embrace innovative learning tools for all Michigan students. (Snyder, 2011: 7)
This project, undertaken with support from Snyder's staff, was workshopping the development of a “Michigan Education Card” that students would be able to use to purchase access to individual courses using public money, as well as the prospect of developing a system of low-cost, online schools that could deliver such courses (Clark, 2013). The group included technology firms but no educators, with Snyder aide David Behen telling the Detroit News that he “purposely didn't put a bunch of teachers on (the panel) … just like if I was going to do something new with law firms I wouldn't bring a bunch of lawyers in.” In fact, the only educator included in the group quit discussions early on, later revealing that he left because “they were discussing a special kind of school being created outside of the Michigan public school system [and] that's when I started questioning my involvement” (Livengood, 2013). The meetings of this group also coincided with the introduction of a state law that would have allowed the direct running of schools by corporations (Michigan Radio, 2012), further highlighting the direction towards providing privatized schooling options within the state.
While the project ultimately disintegrated when discovered by local journalists, its goal was to radically change public education. It would have resulted in locally oriented public schools losing revenue to online schools on a course-by-course basis while still being depended on to provide physical infrastructure for students as well as extra-curricular activities. In this way, its profit-making vision was built on the erosion of state-delivered social infrastructure while still using the remnants of the welfare state to provide needed supports and systems of care (Bakker and Gill, 2019; Henry, 2015). In effect, it sought to create a vision of education delinked from communities to maximize profits for EdTech firms while still relying on local communities to support students’ needs.
This focus of the Snyder administration on promoting EdTech also manifested through the formation of a state body, the Education Achievement Authority (EAA), which was granted the power by a state-appointed emergency manager to take over “failing schools” and implement experimental learning strategies. While ostensibly a state-wide organization, the EAA only took over schools within the majority-Black city of Detroit and used this power to test out a new personalized learning software created by the for-profit Agilax Labs, named “Buzz.”
The context of racialized emergency management, and its bypassing of local systems of accountability and democratic control, was essential to the establishment of the EAA and the roll out of the Buzz software (Cohen, 2021b). Rather than being supported by Detroiters and their elected officials, the takeover of local schools was imposed by the state government through an “Interlocal Agreement” established between the emergency manager and the President of a local university, Eastern Michigan. As one state congressperson described, this policy context was essential to the establishment of the EAA: [The EAA was established by] the Emergency Manager of Detroit Public Schools, who never consulted with the elected school board or the citizens of Detroit really. I mean he didn’t have to, I guess, so he just executed the contract. And the President of Eastern Michigan University who also operates under an appointed Board of Regents, their regents are not elected. And apparently, they never consulted their own Faculty of Education.
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As a piece of technology, Buzz was designed to guide students through the learning process with little-to-no teacher input, with EAA schools staffed by inexperienced college graduates provided by Teach for America. In this way, it mirrored the bypassing of unionized workers that accompanied ORCA and ORVA in Oregon. Furthermore, as outlined by Curt Guyette (2014) for the Detroit Metro Times, the software was flawed from the beginning with lessons and student work randomly disappearing from the system and students able to access pornographic websites through the platform. Most damningly, internal e-mails reveal that the software's flaws were known by Agilax and that the company was using some of the poorest students in the country from a racialized community to work out these flaws while simultaneously marketing their software to other districts (Guyette, 2014). As one teacher described to education reporters at ElectaBlog (2014: n.p): There was no whole group instruction. It was all individualized instruction—student centered—and the students decide what they’re going to learn and when they’re going to learn it. But it was all just a big farce … [In the Detroit Public School system] They had seasoned teachers who actually knew the kids because many of the teachers who were in a specific building were in that building for two or more years. So they had established relationships with the children and with each other, with the community, with families … With the EAA, everybody came running to the administrators or were calling downtown when something didn’t happen right.
Both the “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” program which never materialized, and Buzz which was abandoned a few years later, were undermined by resistance, undertaken by largely white suburban groups, to the Snyder administration's attempts to expand the use of EdTech and undermine local control over schooling. Importantly, as described by multiple participants, it was the attempts to sever the connections between communities and schools that helped make the EAA/Buzz collaboration particularly untenable. As one education activist argued: In many of these towns it’s the public school … that is the heart of the community. We’re trying to help people think about the whole policy debate like that. Do you really want laws to be passed that would make it so your local high school would go away and so that kids will pick from online stuff but you won’t have the local teams, the playgrounds, and so forth … the idea that the school that is not just the place where kids learn but it’s the center of a community [has been a source of resistance].
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We set out to make the EAA as a concept, the concept of the state coming in and taking over a school district, we attempted to make it a toxic proposal. I think where we are at now, three and a half years after the governor first touted this as his signature education plan, we are now within days of [it failing].
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In Michigan then, markets and state power were used explicitly to attempt to create opportunities for-profit driven EdTech firms in ways that both undermined public education (closing schools in Detroit, attacking the statewide funding system) and resulted in substandard learning environments. That those who bore the brunt of these attacks were Black students already suffering from disinvestment and discrimination is not a happenstance but rather a cautionary tale of how the further roll out of marketized education systems will unfold, maximizing extraction from those without the power to resist experiments with untested technologies or poor (but cheap) products. while state power was marshaled to experiment with the Buzz system on Black students in Detroit, it was quickly shut down when attempts were made to take over schools in white suburbs. Through both the “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” proposal and the EAA, the description of EdTech as a savior was accompanied by the proposed (or actualized) use of state power to undermine local institutions in ways that would have unlocked profits and disconnected students from their local communities. There are lessons in the successful resistance to both these proposals, with activists and politicians able to explicitly mobilize the connections between schools and communities to protect systems of public education.
Discussion
Global X Education ETF's description of geography as a “logistical obstacle” to education and Governor Snyder's exhortation for schooling to happen “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” reveal a common logic behind marketized EdTech experiments. Such projects seek to reduce educational practices to their most limited forms and describe the social connections and infrastructure that connect students and place-based communities as superfluous to the process of learning. In Oregon, this involved working directly to undermine a system that prioritized local connections while in Michigan this included the roll out of state power to remove democratic systems in marginalized communities.
While such logics are not inherent to all use of technology in education, these cases reveal much about the future embedded in the profit-driven vision for schooling that is gaining increasing power. As capital floods into the sector and as new profit-driven technological infrastructure are created for K-12 schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are important questions of what this shift means for the spatial logics of education. Indeed, whether attempts to build a profit-driven EdTech future will be successful in the future itself remains unclear. Dissatisfaction with online schooling and EdTech solutions is high despite their increased use during the pandemic (Hobbs and Hawkins, 2020) and it is not assured that EdTech products will change schooling or if they will move to the margins after the crisis. Yet, the capital flowing into the sector and the circumstances of the pandemic points in the direction of at least some increased role for profit-driven EdTech infrastructure in the functioning of schools.
Looking at experiences in Oregon and Michigan is revealing of how any such increased role may alter the spaces of education. In both cases, it is clear that processes of standardization are fundamental to EdTech projects unlocking economies of scale and therefore profits. This shift to standardization has resulted in narrowly-defined views of schooling which emphasize a homogenized learning experience delinked from local context. In the Oregon case, analysis of K12's offerings reveal that their bare bones teaching methods focus on dominant Western curricula without fostering critical thinking (Barbour, 2019) and in Michigan, the Buzz software only offered only minimal elective courses (Guyette, 2014). The demands of unlocking profits seemingly go hand-in-hand with the pressures on schools to align with the needs of capital over the demands of communities, thereby strengthening the power of corporate interests over schooling. This result is only magnified by how EdTech experiments in places like Michigan and Oregon have worked to undermine teacher autonomy and the unionized workforce which protects it.
In some ways, this is hardly surprising. Standardization is often a key element in unlocking profits and a strategy often used by financial capital to allow comparability between investments (Rosenman, 2019). However, the cases described above illustrate that these changes do not only involve the standardization of curriculum but also a shift in the political structures that govern education. This has involved the active de-linking of schools from their communities and either the dereliction of broader duties of care or pushing them onto the already-strained household level. This speaks to trends throughout systems of social reproduction, where localized relations of care such as those provided by public hospitals are stripped away as for-profit institutions gain power (Henry, 2015). In Oregon, K12 Inc. and Connections Academy purposefully avoided local systems of control by wielding their influence over small, rural school districts to enroll students statewide while relying on caregivers to support students. In Michigan, the state government aimed to sever geographic connections between communities and their schools by mobilizing state power to disenfranchise or disrupt the operations of majority-Black school districts and the supports they offered outside the classroom. This both creates profits and undermines the ability of local communities to shape the spaces and practices of schooling as well as their control over the infrastructure of social reproduction.
The positioning of geography as a “logistical obstacle” by the Global Education X ETF and others promoting EdTech's growth potential highlight the connections between process of standardization through technology (and the associated profits), the disruption of policies which promote geographic connections between schools, students, and communities, and the production of placeless learning environments. This is an essential and explicit element of the future that profit-driven EdTech seeks to enact. It is also one that may have profound effects on the politics and practice of schooling given the place-based nature of struggles for educational justice and the potential clash between lived experiences of students and standardized curricula (Farhadi, 2019; Popielarz and Monreal, 2019). This can be witnessed in how local connections were mobilized both as a protective strategy in Oregon, and as a mode of resistance in Michigan (see also Mitchell, 2018). Importantly, the effects of this future are likely to be uneven across geographies of inequality and power. EdTech experiments are built upon an already stratified education system (Katz, 2018; Lipman, 2013) where marginalized students in disempowered districts like Detroit may face a standardized educational future that deemphasizes creativity while the children of elites may continue to opt into face-to-face models of education.
As has been emphasized in the cases above, space is an essential element in understanding how processes of investment and experimentation with profit-driven EdTech are unfolding and changing systems of schooling. The increased marketization of educational practices materialized through the transfer of control over curricula, teaching, and infrastructure to for-profit EdTech firms is one that has in the past been accompanied by a standardized, aspatial view of schooling where the student's lived experiences and connections to communities are viewed as a barrier. Despite the promise that schooling can take place “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” through technology, the reality revealed through the case studies in Oregon and Michigan highlight that such systems are based on a narrow view of the role of schooling. For geographers of education, these cases reveal the importance of tracing how educational policies shape the spaces of the classroom and the ways in which new online spaces of learning alter the relationship between schools and communities that have animated much work in the subfield (Collins and Coleman, 2008; Kraftl et al., 2021). That efforts to build EdTech systems have been resisted by the mobilization of spatial connections is instructive for critical geographic work on the politics of education and of social reproduction more broadly and their emphasis on the production of more just futures (Mitchell, 2018; Nguyen et al., 2017; Roberts, 2016).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Tom Baker, Beyhan Farhadi, Jessa Loomis, and Nicole Nguyen for their comments on this paper in its different iterations. Thank you also to Brett Christophers and the paper's referees for their generative comments.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant no. 201211DVC-236396-303245).
