![]() Pierre Omidyar (the founder of eBay) and so on. Peter Thiel (vampire and enemy of the free press). Elon Musk (the founder of Tesla and SpaceX). “The Ed-Tech Mafia,” I sometimes call this – a nod to “The PayPal Mafia,” those early employees and executives at PayPal who’ve gone on to shape recent Silicon Valley history and business and politics (as investors or entrepreneurs). I’m interested in the shape of the network (who’s in it), the money (where’s the funding going), the power (how do investors and investments influence policy), and the associated narratives about the future. I am currently wrapping up my year as a Spencer Fellow at the Columbia School of Journalism, and my proposed project involves an exploration how these networks work, how education technology investors work in particular – where and how they come up with their ideas, how their influence spreads. More importantly, I’d argue, they share networks. Investors might select certain people as entrepreneurs or back certain officials as reformers, but that’s because they share ideas. Ideas shape the products that entrepreneurs build and the policies that reformers promote. The way in which one talks about education matters – the notion that it’s broken, for example, or that it needs to be fixed through market-based mechanisms. ![]() Now, I believe that that saying overstates its case a lot. But these networks are significantly less powerful.īut as people in Silicon Valley like to say, venture capitalists don’t invest in ideas, they invest in people. That’s not to say relationships don’t matter in academia. Rather that “review” in the ASU-GSV framework is a kind of networking or power brokering – it’s who you know, not what you know it’s not how you wield your research as much as it’s how you wield your relationships. If nothing else, it taps into a powerful cultural trope, one that’s particularly resonant among Silicon Valley and education reform types: that education experts and expertise aren’t to be trusted, that research is less important than politics, that the “peer review” that matters isn’t the academic version. I don’t think this is an insignificant or even an unintentional scheduling gaffe. Also absent from that list (and relevant to our purposes here, no doubt): “education researchers.” Indeed, every year (and this is its ninth), the ASU-GSV Summit seems to coincide with AERA. I can’t help but notice that students and parents and communities are not mentioned among those constituencies. The Summit continues to bring together the most impactful people from diverse constituencies – entrepreneurs, business leaders, educators, policymakers, philanthropists, and university and district leaders – to create partnerships, explore solutions, and shape the future of learning. Here’s how the event’s sponsor GSV, the venture capital firm Global Silicon Valley, describes it: It’s an event I’ve never attended before – one that I’ve been quite loathe to go to, in part because of the reports I hear back about some of the shadiest and most destructive elements in education business and politics. I’m recording this a few days early but by the time of this panel, I’ll be at the ASU-GSV Summit. It’s actually a story associated with the paper I proposed for this panel – so I do have a good excuse for my absence. I’m on a reporting trip for a story I’m currently working on. ![]() My apologies for not being there in person today. Here is (roughly) what I had planned to say today. ![]() The panel organizer, Ethan Chang, was nice enough to let me record a video of my 10 minute spiel, and I am embedding it below: Sadly, I’m not at AERA today, even though I was supposed to be part of a really excellent panel, “Whither Equity in the ’21st-Century School’? Critical Perspectives on Education and Technology,” with some of my favorite educators and scholars. ![]()
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