Monday, April 28, 2014
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Coming Soon to your Community? A School Funded by Walmart Founders Walton Family Foundation
A Walmart Fortune, Spreading Charter Schools
WASHINGTON
— DC Prep operates four charter schools here with 1,200 students in
preschool through eighth grade. The schools, whose students are mostly
poor and black, are among the highest performing in Washington. Last
year, DC Prep’s flagship middle school earned the best test scores among
local charter schools, far outperforming the average of the city’s
traditional neighborhood schools as well.
Another,
less trumpeted, distinction for DC Prep is the extent to which it — as
well as many other charter schools in the city — relies on the Walton
Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that
founded Walmart.
Since
2002, the charter network has received close to $1.2 million from
Walton in direct grants. A Walton-funded nonprofit helped DC Prep find
building space when it moved its first two schools from a chapel
basement into former warehouses that now have large classrooms and wide,
art-filled hallways.
One-third
of DC Prep’s teachers are alumni of Teach for America, whose largest
private donor is Walton. A Walton-funded advocacy group fights for more
public funding and autonomy for charter schools in the city. Even the
local board that regulates charter schools receives funding from the
Walton Family Foundation.
In
effect, Walton has subsidized an entire charter school system in the
nation’s capital, helping to fuel enrollment growth so that close to
half of all public school students in the city now attend charters,
which receive taxpayer dollars but are privately operated.
Walton’s
investments here are a microcosm of its spending across the country.
The foundation has awarded more than $1 billion in grants nationally to
educational efforts since 2000, making it one of the largest private
contributors to education in the country. It is one of a handful of
foundations with strong interests in education, including those
belonging to Bill and Melinda Gates of Microsoft; Eli Broad, a Los
Angeles insurance billionaire; and Susan and Michael Dell, who made
their money in computers. The groups have many overlapping interests,
but analysts often describe Walton as following a distinct ideological
path.
In
addition to giving grants to right-leaning think tanks like the Thomas
B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute for Public
Policy Research, the Walton foundation hired an education program
officer who had worked at the American Legislative Exchange Council, a
conservative business-backed group. Walton has also given to centrist
organizations such as New Leaders for New Schools, a group co-founded by
Jon Schnur, a former senior adviser to President Obama’s transition
team and to Arne Duncan, the secretary of education.
In 2013, the Walton foundation spent more than $164 million across the country. According to Marc Sternberg,
who was appointed director of K-12 education reform at the Walton
Family Foundation last September, Walton has given grants to one in
every four charter start-ups in the country, for a total of $335
million.
“The
Walton Family Foundation has been deeply committed to a theory of
change, which is that we have a moral obligation to provide families
with high quality choices,” said Mr. Sternberg. “We believe that in
providing choices we are also compelling the other schools in an
ecosystem to raise their game.”
The
supporters and critics of charter schools, many of them fierce, cannot
be easily divided into political camps. Supporters include both
Republicans and Democrats, although critics tend to come more from the
left. In Washington, where the charter system has strong backing in City
Hall, supporters have been more successful than in New York, where
opposition from teachers unions and others has kept charter school
enrollment to about 6 percent, despite growth in the past decade.
The
size of the Walton foundation’s wallet allows it to exert an outsize
influence on education policy as well as on which schools flourish and
which are forced to fold. With its many tentacles, it has helped fuel
some of the fastest growing, and most divisive, trends in public
education — including teacher evaluations based on student test scores
and publicly funded vouchers for students to attend private schools.
“The
influence of philanthropy in terms of the bang for the buck they get is
just really kind of shocking,” said Jack Schneider, an assistant
professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,
Mass.
A
separate Walton foundation that supports higher education bankrolls an
academic department at the University of Arkansas in which faculty,
several of whom were recruited from conservative think tanks, conduct
research on charter schools, voucher programs and other policies the
foundation supports.
Last
year, the Walton Family Foundation gave $478,380 to a fund affiliated
with the Chicago public schools to help officials conduct community
meetings to discuss their plan to close more than 50 schools at a time
when charters were expanding in the city.
And
Walton played a role in a recent battle in New York, giving a grant to a
charter advocacy group that helped pay for advertisements attacking
Mayor Bill de Blasio after he denied public space to three schools run
by Success Academy Charter Schools, a network in which students have
gotten high scores on standardized tests.
While
charter schools and vouchers may benefit those families that attend
these schools, there may be unintended effects on the broader public
school system.
Grant
recipients say Walton injects entrepreneurial energy into public
education and helps groups eager to try new ideas move more quickly than
they could if they relied solely on publicly managed bureaucracies.
Thousands of children, they say, attend better schools because of
options Walton supports.
“The
supply of new models and new ideas is really important, and so I think
it’s a very positive thing,” said Robert C. Pianta, dean of the Curry
School of Education at the University of Virginia, of the Walton
investments. Neither Dr. Pianta nor the Curry School have received
funding from Walton.
Critics
say that Walton backs schools and measures that take public dollars —
and, some say, the most motivated families — away from the existing
public schools, effectively creating a two-tier educational system that
could hurt the students most in need.
Although Walmart opened its first two stores in the nation’s capital just last December after a protracted battle over the retailer’s wages,
the Walton Family Foundation has played a role in steering the
direction of public education in the city for more than a decade. Since
2000, the foundation has invested more than $80 million here, not only
in charter schools but also in support of taxpayer-funded vouchers for
students to attend private schools. It poured millions into a
controversial overhaul of tenure, the implementation of stricter teacher
evaluation systems and the introduction of performance pay in the
district’s public schools.
Walton
also supports measures that labor leaders say undermine union
protections for teachers. Like-minded Walton recipients are working
together in many cases, so there are few dissenting voices.
“When
lots of charter schools open up, it’s like a new Walmart store moving
in,” said Kevin G. Welner, director of the National Education Policy
Center at University of Colorado in Boulder. “You could look at it and
say, ‘Well, the schools in a community are losing families because of
healthy competition the same way that the hardware store is losing
customers because of healthy competition.’ But that doesn’t take into
account the long-term harms to the community, which are probably greater
than any short-term benefit.”
In
addition to the foundation’s activities, many individual members of the
Walton family have made millions of dollars in campaign donations to
candidates for local school boards and state legislatures who support
causes funded by the foundation.
Walton’s
largest recipients include the Charter School Growth Fund, which helps
charter school networks expand ($101.6 million since 2000); Teach for
America, which recruits high-achieving college graduates for two-year
teaching stints in poor districts and now places about a third of its
corps members in charter schools ($67.2 million); KIPP, one of the
country’s best-known and largest charter school networks ($58.7
million); the Alliance for School Choice, a national advocate for
private school vouchers ($18.4 million), whose board includes Carrie
Penner, a member of the Walton family; and GreatSchools Inc., an online
schools information database ($15.5 million.)
Last
year, the foundation announced a two-year, $8 million grant to
StudentsFirst, an advocacy group led by Michelle A. Rhee, the former
schools chancellor in Washington who oversaw many of the policy changes
funded by Walton in the district’s public schools. StudentsFirst now
pushes for the extension of many of those same policies in states across
the country, contributing to the campaigns of lawmakers who support the
group’s agenda.
“What
they’re doing in terms of education is they’re trying to create an
alternative system and destabilize what has been the anchor of American
democracy,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation
of Teachers, the country’s second-largest teachers union.
Although
the foundation’s leaders say they are focused on helping children in
poverty or stuck in low-performing schools, some of their actions
support concepts regardless of whether poor children benefit. In 2012,
for example, Walton gave $300,000 to the Douglas County School District
in Colorado to help it fight a lawsuit brought by opponents of a voucher
program. The median income of families in the district, where the
public schools are high performing, is more than $99,000, according to
census data.
Walton
supporters say the foundation is not blindly supporting the expansion
of charters. Two years ago, Walton announced a $5.2 million grant to the
National Association of Charter School Authorizers to support an
initiative under which the group would push state and local regulators
to close about 900 low-performing charter schools around the country,
while opening another 2,000.
“Any
foundation that invests the money has to ask themselves, is their money
impacting the system as a whole?” said Dennis Van Roeckel, president of
the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers
union.
Walton’s
Mr. Sternberg, who started his career in Teach for America and founded
the Bronx Lab School, a public school in New York City, does not
apologize for Walton’s commitment to charter schools and vouchers.
“What’s the argument there?” he said during an interview. “Don’t help
anybody until you can help everybody?”
He said the foundation was focused not on ideology but on results, a word he repeated many times.
In
Washington, for example, the group has given more than $5.8 million to
the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board, whose members are
nominated by the mayor to regulate the opening and closing of charter
schools. The board has used Walton’s grants to help develop
accountability measures for all charter schools in the city. When
critics complained that charters were pushing out difficult students,
the board began reviewing and publishing data on expulsions and midyear
departures. Scott Pearson, executive director of the board, said charter
schools in the city had halved expulsions since the board began
releasing statistics.
“D.C.
is a better place today than it was 10 years ago because of the reforms
that have played out here,” said Mr. Sternberg, who was an official in
the New York City Department of Education under Mayor Michael R.
Bloomberg. He pointed to recent increases in scores on national tests by
both public and charter school students, saying that neighborhood
schools had responded to competition from charters. “And maybe in very
small part, because of Walton’s role,” he added.
Walton
has become a go-to source for many charter schools seeking start-up
grants. In addition to funding large networks like KIPP, which is
expanding in Washington, the foundation has given grants to several
stand-alone schools.
The
Richard Wright Public Charter School for Journalism and Media Arts,
housed in a building across the street from the Washington Navy Yard in
the southeast part of the city, received $250,000 from Walton in 2011.
The school used the money to buy computers for students, as well as
chemistry lab equipment and recording gear for the school’s media
studio.
All
of the school’s students qualify for federally subsidized free or
reduced price lunches. According to Marco Clark, the founder and head of
the school, one in five students have special needs and one in 10 have
been involved with the criminal justice system.
On
a recent morning, the range of academic abilities in the school was
apparent. In an advanced placement world history class, 11th-graders
gave rapid-fire answers to questions about Native American tribes, with
the teacher asking “Why?” to gauge whether students were merely
regurgitating memorized facts. Upstairs, in an eighth-grade reading
class, several students asked the teacher for help in understanding a
passage about the world’s largest harp. One boy struggled to eke out
what he thought was the main point. “It about how can orchastra works,”
he wrote.
Several
students noted that they had come from schools in which they either did
not feel safe or were not learning much. Dr. Clark acknowledged that
the school was still working to raise test scores, and had added extra
math and reading classes.
“Those
who want to criticize any philanthropy group for giving money to kids
to change their futures,” said Dr. Clark, “there’s something wrong with
them.”
Some
parents said they felt torn between the interests of their children and
those of the city. Marcus Robinson, the owner of a pet supply and
grooming business, said he had attended public schools in Washington and
wanted his children to do the same. But his daughters Lourdes, 8, and
Maja, 6, attend Mundo Verde Bilingual Public Charter School, a start-up
that received $250,000 from Walton.
Mr.
Robinson was concerned that the schools in his northeastern
neighborhood had trouble coping with students who had behavioral
problems. He also liked the dual language approach at Mundo Verde, where
students work in small classes on projects related to the environment
and sustainability. A relaxed atmosphere permeates the classrooms, and a
yoga teacher and nutritionist are on the faculty.
“Charter
schools are a bit of a disservice to the public schools,” Mr. Robinson
said. “It puts the onus on public schools to take on the people and
children that other schools don’t want. But in the meantime, between
everyone fighting about it, I did not want my kids to be caught in the
limbo.”
Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Stop Telling Women To Smile
You may have seen this sister's posters around your town.
Meet the artist behind this street art in this short but powerful video,
which relays a correct message
from beautiful women.
lovu,
Kentke
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Lost in Literary History: A Tale of Courage in the South
Nineteen
seventy-four was a good year for nonfiction writing in America. Robert
A. Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” came
out. So did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s
Men.” So did “Working,” by Studs Terkel, and Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
Each was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Yet the winner in general nonfiction — the category was then called
contemporary affairs — was “All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw,”
an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. Its author,
the man who compiled it from extensive interviews, was a writer named
Theodore Rosengarten.
Forty
years later, we remember “The Power Broker,” “All the President’s Men,”
“Working” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” But in a
troubling quirk of history, “All God’s Dangers” has all but fallen off
the map.
Somewhere along the line, people stopped talking about it. Friends of mine who talk about nothing except Southern literature have barely heard of the book. I pounced on it after I discovered that Richard Howorth,
the well-read owner of Square Books, the independent bookstore in
Oxford, Miss., utters its title aloud every time a customer asks the
question, “What one book would you say best explains the South?”
I
wish I could say that, this early spring, I read “All God’s Dangers” in
one sitting. It’s not that kind of book. It’s a meandering thing; its
pleasures are intense but cumulative. This book rolls. But it is superb —
both serious history and a serious pleasure, a story that reads as if
Huddie Ledbetter ( the great musician known as Lead Belly) spoke it while W. E. B. Du Bois took dictation. That
it’s been largely forgotten is bad for it, but worse for us.
“All
God’s Dangers” collected euphoric reviews in 1974, from Robert Coles
and Studs Terkel himself, among others. On the cover of The New York
Times Book Review, H. Jack Geiger wrote that in Nate Shaw, America “had
found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey.”
“All God’s Dangers” remained in print for years as a Vintage paperback. In 1989 it was turned into a one-man play,
starring Cleavon Little. (If the clips on YouTube are any indication,
it was unwatchable.) These days, a hefty paperback edition is available
from the University of Chicago Press. But it seems to have vanished from the culture at large.
This book has a back story. Nate Shaw is a pseudonym. The sharecropper’s real name
was Ned Cobb (1885-1973). Mr. Rosengarten changed the name for the
safety of Mr. Cobb’s family— a grim commentary on race relations in
Alabama in 1974.
In
1969 Mr. Rosengarten was a recent Harvard graduate who went to Alabama
with a friend who was researching a defunct organization called the
Alabama Sharecroppers Union. Someone suggested they speak to Mr. Cobb,
then 84.
Mr.
Rosengarten relates what happened: “We asked him right off why he
joined the union. He didn’t respond directly; rather, he ‘interpreted’
the question and began, ‘I was haulin’ a load of hay out of Apafalya one
day ...’ and continued uninterrupted for eight hours. He recounted
dealings with landlords, bankers, fertilizer agents, mule traders, gin
operators, sheriffs and judges — stories of the social relations of the
cotton system. By evening, the fire had risen and died and risen again,
and our question was answered.”
No
fool, Mr. Rosengarten returned many times, over several years, to speak
with Mr. Cobb. He’d found a powerful American voice, one that cracked
open a world never so fully explored in print. The result is “All God’s
Dangers,” which deserves a place in the front rank of American
autobiographies.
There
are many reasons, in 2014, to attend to Ned Cobb’s story. It is dense
and tangled social history, a narrative that essentially takes us from
slavery to Selma from the point of view of an unprosperous but eloquent
and unbroken black man. In some ways, the book is a reverse photographic
image of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the 1941 classic from James
Agee and Walker Evans. Agee and Evans scrutinized the lives of white
tenant farmers; in “All God’s Dangers,” we witness a black tenant family
through three generations. The book is Faulknerian in its weave. Mr.
Cobb’s working years, Mr. Rosengarten notes, “span approximately the
same years as the Snopes family odyssey in William Faulkner’s trilogy.”
The
book has its share of drama. We read about Cobb’s joining the radical
union, about getting into a shootout with police while protecting a
friend’s property from a fraudulent foreclosure, about his 12-year
prison stint. But, in general, it moves gently; it’s more a stream than a
river.
You
will learn more about wheat, guano, farm implements, bugs, cattle
killing and mule handling than you would think possible. Mr. Cobb loved
and took good care of his working mules. About one, he declares: “She
was just as pretty as a peeled onion.”
“All
God’s Dangers” also happens to be a dense catalog of the ways that
whites tricked and mistreated blacks in the first half of the 20th
century. “Years ago I heard that Abraham Lincoln freed the colored
people,” Mr. Cobb says early on, “but it didn’t amount to a hill of
beans.” About his white neighbors, he declares, “Any way they could
deprive a Negro was a celebration to ’em.”
The
book’s title comes from these sentences: “All God’s dangers ain’t a
white man. When the boll weevil starts in your cotton and go to
depositin’ his eggs in them squares, that’s when he’ll kill you.”
Perhaps
the best thing about “All God’s Dangers” is that it is so direct about
the injustices piled upon Mr. Cobb’s family and other blacks in Alabama,
while remaining so buoyant. Mr. Cobb had an unshakable sense of moral
justice, but he did not want his heart to curdle with bitterness. “Good
God, there wasn’t but few privileges that we was allowed,” he remarks.
Yet he always had “big eyes and high hopes.” He becomes one of the first
black farmers in Alabama to own a car.
Ned
Cobb is full of advice about how to live. Some of this advice is funny.
If you marry a sickly girl, he says, “you might just marry a doctor’s
bill.” About farming and any kind of labor, you often get your best work
done when you’re most tempted to nap. “Look out,” he advises, “for off
times and rainy days.”
The
real lessons in “All God’s Dangers” are the old, primal ones, lessons
that Mr. Cobb manages to make fresh: Stand up for what you believe in;
remain awake to experience; any job worth doing is worth doing well. Mr.
Rosengarten went on to become, in 1989, a MacArthur Fellow. His later
books include “Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter” (1986).
The
exceptional man he presents to us in “All God’s Dangers” says, “Some
folks don’t use the time God gives ’em; that’s why they’re liable to
come up defeated.”
Thursday, April 3, 2014
Siri, You're Messing Up a Generation of Children
The New Republic Magazine online
April 2, 2014Parenting
One of the unexpected
pleasures of modern parenthood is eavesdropping on your ten-year-old as
she conducts existential conversations with an iPhone. “Who are you,
Siri?” “What is the meaning of life?” Pride becomes bemusement, though,
as the questions degenerate into abuse. “Siri, you’re stupid!” Siri’s
unruffled response—“I’m sorry you feel that way”—provokes “Siri, you’re
fired!”
I don’t think of my daughter as petulant.
Friends tell me they’ve watched their children go through the same love,
then hate, for digital personal assistants. Siri’s repertoire of bon
mots is limited, and she can be slow to understand seemingly
straightforward commands, such as, “Send e-mail to Hannah.” (“Uh oh,
something’s gone wrong.”) Worse, from a child’s point of view, she
rebuffs stabs at intimacy: Ask her if she loves you, and after
deflecting the question a few times (“Awk-ward,” “Do I what?”) she
admits: “I’m not capable of love.” Earlier this year, a mother wrote to
Philip Galanes, the “Social Q’s” columnist for The New York Times, asking him what to do when her ten-year-old son called Siri a “stupid idiot.”
Stop him, said Galanes; the vituperation of virtual pals amounts to a
“dry run” for hurling insults at people. His answer struck me as
clueless: Children yell at toys all the time, whether talking or dumb.
It’s how they work through their aggression.
Siri
will get smarter, though, and more companionable, because
conversational agents are almost certain to become the user interface of
the future. They’re already close to ubiquitous. Google has had its own
digital personal assistant, Google Voice Search, since 2008. Siri will soon be available
in Ford, Toyota, and General Motors cars. As this magazine goes to
press, Microsoft is unveiling its own version of Siri, code-named
Cortana (the brilliant, babelicious hologram in Microsoft’s Halo
video game). Voice activation is the easiest method of controlling the
smart devices—refrigerators, toilets, lights, elevators, robotic
servants—that will soon populate our environment. All the more reason,
then, to understand why children can’t stop trying to make friends with
these voices.
Think of our children as less inhibited avatars of
ourselves. It is through them that we’ll learn what it will be like to live in a world crowded with “friends” like Siri.
The
wonderment is that Siri has any emotional pull at all, given her many
limitations. Some of her appeal can be chalked up to novelty. But she
has another, more fundamental attraction: her voice. Voice is a more
visceral medium than text. A child first comes to know his mother
through her voice, which he recognizes as distinctively hers while still in the womb.
Moreover, the disembodied voice unleashes fantasies and projections
that the embodied voice somehow keeps in check. That’s why Freud sat
psychoanalysts behind their patients. It’s also why phone sex can be so
intense.
The literary critic Ruth Franklin, whose
children were also entranced by, then peeved at, Siri, suggested to me
that maybe kids get mad at her because she fails to meet “the maternal
expectations they associate with women.” That sounds right, although, of
course, adults have these expectations, too. The current generation of
iPhones allows you to set Siri to male as well as female, but the point
is that voices communicate gender, age, authority or the lack
thereof—primal social cues that we can’t help but process as markers of a
real personality.
Our minds respond to speech as if it
were human, no matter what device it comes out of. Evolutionary
theorists point out that, during the 200,000 years or so in which homo
sapiens have been chatting with an “other,” the only other beings who
could chat were also human; we didn’t need to differentiate the speech
of humans and not-quite humans, and we still can’t do so without mental
effort. (Processing speech, as it happens, draws on more parts of the
brain than any other mental function.) Manufactured speech tricks us
into reacting as if it were real, if only for a moment or two.
Children
today will be the first to grow up in constant interaction with these
artificially more or less intelligent entities. So what will they make
of them? What social category will they slot them into? I put that
question to Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist who studies
child-robot interactions at the University of Washington. In his lab,
Kahn analyzes how children relate to cumbersome robots whose
unmistakably electronic voices express very human emotions. I watched a
videotape of one of Kahn’s experiments, in which a teenaged boy played a
game of “I Spy” with a robot named Robovie. First, Robovie “thought” of
an object in the room and the boy had to guess what it was. Then it was
Robovie’s turn. The boy tugged on his hair and said, “This object is
green.” Robovie slowly turned its bulging eyes and clunky head and
entire metallic body to scan the room, but just as it was about to make a
guess, a man emerged and announced that Robovie had to go in the
closet. (This, not the game, was the point of the exercise.) “That’s not
fair,” said Robovie, in its soft, childish, faintly reverberating
voice. “I wasn’t given enough chances to. Guess the object. I should be
able to finish. This round of the game.” “Come on, Robovie,” the man
said brusquely. “You’re just a robot.” “Sorry, Robovie,” said the boy,
who looked uncomfortable. “It hurts my feelings that,” said Robovie,
“You would want. To put me in. The closet. Everyone else. Is out here.”
Afterward, Kahn asked the children whether they thought the machine had been treated unjustly. Most thought it had.
Moreover, most believed that Robovie was intelligent and had feelings.
They knew that they were playing with a robot, but nonetheless
experienced Robovie as something like a person. Kahn speculates that
“we’re creating a new category of being,” the “personified non-animal
semi-conscious half-agent.” Or, as one child involved in his experiment
said of Robovie, “He’s like, he’s half living, half not.”
Sherry
Turkle, a psychologist at MIT who has been studying technology and
children for several decades, worries that they’ll be too willing to
settle for the reduced emotional sustenance to be had from these
non-animal half-agents.
In her recent book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other,
she describes watching children’s toys go from being “sort of alive”
(like the Tamagotchis popular two decades ago) to being “alive enough.”
In other words, robotic pets, friends, teachers, babysitters, even
therapists—all already in production or development—will do when the
real thing isn’t available, as it so often isn’t in our time- and
care-deprived world. (And don’t think that robotic caregivers will be
given only to children. Robotic baby harp seals have already begun
serving as companions for the elderly.) Turkle believes that today’s
socially precocious technologies are training all of us, regardless of
age, to accept “the performance of connection” in lieu of connection
itself.
But what will these simulations of
fellow-feeling mean for the psychological and moral development of
children? “I think we’re going to be unpleasantly surprised,” Turkle
told me. One risk is that they’ll turn into selfish monsters.
“Imagine
the following future situation,” writes Kahn in his paper on the “I Spy”
experiment. “A humanoid robot, like Robovie, helps look after your
8-year-old son after school every day. ... He considers the robot his
friend, maybe one of his best friends. Do you want this robot to do
everything your child tells it to do? ... If we design robots to do
everything a child demands, does that put into motion a master-servant
relationship?” To be sure, the robot could be programmed to say no to
the child. But as parents understand all too well, the key to getting a
child to accept authority is knowing when to say no and when to say yes,
and you wonder how a robot can be taught to know the difference.
Toward
the end of his interviews with the children, Kahn asked them questions
about Robovie’s moral status. They felt bad for the robot, they told
him, but weren’t willing to grant it its freedom. They were OK with it
being bought or sold. Nor did they think it should have the right to
vote or to be paid for its labor. To the children, Robovie was
“slave-like,” Kahn told me. Anyone who has read about life in
slaveholding societies knows how coarsening it can be to grow up among
others defined as almost but not quite equal.
Moreover,
thinking of these “friends” and “mentors” as subordinates may obscure
the fact that many of them will effectively serve as spies. Most
children probably don’t realize—and might not care—that every question
they ask Siri is relayed back to servers in Apple’s cloud for analysis
and kept there for two years.
For the first six months, voice records are tagged with a number; after
that, the number is stripped from the recordings. But that doesn’t
actually anonymize the data. According to Nicole Ozer, who keeps tabs on
technology and privacy for the aclu of Northern California, the
recordings can still be traced to our smartphones via a “unique device
identifier”; the data also contains geolocation. As for our children’s
inquiries and impertinences, Siri’s privacy policy says that Apple does
not “knowingly collect personal information” on children, although
“knowingly” and “personal” go undefined. But that’s almost beside the
point. Friends don’t collect data on friends, wittingly or not.
Judith Shulevitz is a senior editor at The New Republic.
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