From: New York
Date sent: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 11:40:23 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Help or Profit?

TO ALL LOOPIES: Think carefully about IBM's school grants. Gary Kreep beat me to the punch with reporting the news (from a different syndicated news source) -- so I will curtail my quotes from the AP story in our area. HOWEVER,...

Lest you think that big business is all heart and concerned about our children, read carefully both IN AND IN-BETWEEN THE LINES in news about IBM's grants and "help" for education. For those who aren't near IBM facilities or may have forgotten, IBM has been vigorously downsizing its employment rolls and selling off divisions for the past several years. The final paragraph in our local paper's AP story out of New York is very important: "What's in it for IBM is very simple," IBM chief executive Louis Gerstner said at a press conference. He noted the company plans to hire 15,000 staff this year and that an educated work force was in everybody's best interest.... [This will be good news for his previous well-educated and unfortunately expendable workforce? ..Manipulatives are not confined to fun-fun math-in-real-life classes!]

The software grant IBM made to "make it easier for teachers in Broward Cty, FLA to electronically collect information, SUCH AS TEST SCORES, ABOUT THEIR STUDENTS," bears close watching. Is "such as" an operative phrase? What else BESIDES "such as test scores" will be electronically collected? How much will IBM stand to make when the pilot program "developed" with the help of the FLA teachers moves on to sales to every school in the country once the Gov. Summit entity (of which Gerstner was the New York governor's nominee) steamrolls into place?

The advanced "voice activation" software that "helps students hone reading skills" is another potential profit bonanza\pitfall. "Students read story passages aloud into the computer microphone, and the computer tells them whether they correctly pronounced the words." Think about that. Who programmed the "correct pronunciations"? Is the computer geared ONLY to the student whose voice it is "recognizing"? Will regional and familial inflections and accents be obliterated in the course of "correctly pronouncing" words. Teachers, at far less cost and robotizing-stress, used to take care of mistakes in read-aloud pronunciations by just correcting the words -- thereby helping a classroom full of students all at once, rather than one at a time on computer. Will students be talking all at once into computers (noise, stress?) or will they be hanging around the student who is the designated reader-into-the-computer? Maybe we should reinvent Mr. Gerstner, with his long trail through R.J. Reynolds and Nabisco prior to IBM???