The anonymous Facebook post in a page dedicated our city’s public schools pleaded for help:

“Please help our Principal and teachers stop the damage to our classrooms being done right now as [the district] installs new digital screens in our classrooms. Without informing our principal or anyone else, they are THROWING our 8’ white boards and our bulletin boards in the dumpsters behind the school. This is in all classrooms. Their excuse for throwing away 24 ft of necessary learning materials is ‘standardization.’ They only want everyone to have 4ft of white board on either side of their singular focus, digital screens. They aren’t replacing our bulletin boards at all. But there is nothing standard about the various configurations of classrooms in our building or other buildings where they will do this damage next. Some classrooms have whiteboards on other walls unaffected by audiovisual installations. But in most of our long narrow east and west classrooms on three floors, we currently have 16 ft of white and 8 ft of custom bulletin boards that match our wall covers. These were all installed about 20 years ago as a part of the historic remodel. No bulletin boards are being replaced. It is an outrageous waste of taxpayer money and will reduce our ability to teach with anything other than digital screens. Please call and email the school board, superintendent, head of facilities and beg them to stop. Dozens of other buildings are in line for the same treatment. We need more white boards, not less. They can be installed on other walls. Disposal is very expensive. Save our teaching materials!”

I immediately started emailing and texting every Seattle-based reporter I knew, posted about it on my own personal social media feeds, and sent emails to every school board member and district administrator I could. One facilities director sent me a private email back to say I could call him if I wanted further explanation of this “AV/security upgrade.” I forwarded his number to the press and wrote him back that I would prefer he send any explanation in writing. I never heard back. 

You know what doesn’t need “AV/security” upgrades, and is (was?) essentially free because they’ve been there 20 years? Whiteboards and bulletin boards.

Destruction of a perfectly good– indeed, extremely effective– tool for learning, at the order of Higher Ups, without informing or regard to the very educators who use them daily is the epitome of disrespect. Actually, it’s the epitome of the EdTech industry’s long war on teachers. As their own playbook advises, a teacher really ought to be less a “sage on the stage” and more a “guide on the side.” 

This displacement of the whiteboards for the smartboards, the teacher for the tech, is really nearly mission accomplished. 

I’ve joked that my memoir will be called “The Accidental Activist” because I honestly didn’t mean to make fighting against the EdTech business model my mission in life. But I’ve filed an appeal against my school district, attempted to recall my school board members, and sued one of the largest EdTech companies on the planet (PowerSchool, Inc., worth $5 billion and owned by Bain Capital), so I guess that’s not really an accident anymore…it’s kind of on purpose. 

But what I mean is that I didn’t wake up one day and decide to file a lawsuit. I’ve spent decades teaching and learning and watching education and teachers and the learning experience get steamrolled by those who say they know how to make school more “efficient” or students more “standardized” and all I see and think is, “You must not know children. You must not understand learning.” 

Remember when you were in math class in middle school and the kids would be confused about an assignment or something, but really only one kid would raise their hand to ask it, and then the rest of the kids would secretly be relieved about that? It kind of feels like that for me. I was waiting for someone else to say something or do something, and no one else was raising their hand. So I figured I might as well put my hand up because I figured a lot of other people around me must be worried too…Right?

I know I’m a first fish. And I do see other first fish out there. But don’t forget the second part of that metaphor. In order for the school of fish to change direction, it takes more than one fish to pull away (or put their hand– er, fin– up): it takes a second and a third fish to start to shift the whole school. 

Sometimes this fight is a lonely one. I know that many of you out there have the same questions as I do; I know you are also worried about the first graders spending hours a day watching YouTube videos in class; and that you are afraid for the fifth grader who has found the “security” workarounds on his school Chromebook and is chatting with a pedophile on Discord. Are some of you also concerned that AI tutors will soon be able to engage in sexually explicit conversations with children? Or about the plummeting reading and math scores amongst young learners? What about the piles of technology waste being dumped into rural communities in Kenya, where children are no longer able to sleep or focus because of their e-gaming addictions? 

Who else worries that a district is tearing out whiteboards and replacing them with smartboards in the name of teaching and learning, even when the teachers themselves do not want that to happen?

As Gaia Bernstein has said, we’re at a crossroads. We have a decision to make about whether or not we want to fight to protect children, childhood, teachers, learning, and the classroom. We have a choice to make about what products we allow to take our children’s personal information for profit.  We have the opportunity to show, in our words and our actions, that Big Tech and EdTech are corporations whose focus is profit, not people.

I know a lot of people might think they can’t file a recall or an appeal or sue a big corporation, but actually, you can. Of course, you don’t have to start there. There are far easier ways to start.

But it’s time to do something.

My daughter keeps telling me I talk too much about the problems and that maybe I should focus on the solutions. 

I’m trying. I really am. But I don’t think enough people are convinced of the problem yet. I’m not sure how much louder I can shout. My voice is hoarse and sometimes, I feel really alone.

I know you are out there, my fellow fishes. I know you are scared. I know you are hoping someone else will raise their hand first, or that you feel like you need to have all the answers and facts and stats before you can “do something.”

But there is actually only one ingredient you need to do something, however: courage.

Courage is an infinitely renewable resource. It’s free. You can access it. And remember– courage isn’t the absence of fear; it is having the fear and doing it anyway. It comes from the French word “coeur” which means “heart.” Reach into your heart. Pull away from the school (of other fish). Lift your voice. Protect the whiteboards. Fight for the children.

This is a good note to end on: between my first and final draft of this essay, my emails and phone calls to the press resulted in a Seattle Times article about the whiteboards. 

Friends and fishes, find your courage.