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Act 35, United Teachers of New Orleans, white flight and school integration, DEI and racialization; will be important to conceptualize overall linking of education to political economy. Further, the text produces many questions for me: How do reforms become spaces for racecraft? How might education restructuring in NOLA provide insight to education restructuring post- and during disaster? How does it help questioning the normative and the prescriptive? 

Further, in interviews of new hires of charter schools, Tompkins reveals how they are ambivalent about what they can do and about their positionalities and ethics, arguing that it leads to atomization and desocialization of the individual, and that prevents collective action. How can ambivalence be interpreted as a space for collective potential rather than collective paralysis? Can it be interpreted as such? Since action does not follow knowledge of contradictions and ambivalence, how can this subjectivity be articulated as politically productive?

An oversight board of 20 well-known, reputable individuals has been (publically) convened to make final decisions about contested content removal from the platform. 

Critics note that content removal is not the only ethical issue Facebook has, and Siva Vaidhyanathan notes that the proprietary algorithm that shows people content is a serious issue over which this board has no authority. 

Joan Donovan notes that the slow legalistic pace will not keep up even when damaging content is a serious ethical issue, as even only a few hours is sufficient for viral digital content to reach huge audiences: 

Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center and an expert on media manipulation, raised concerns that the board would become “weaponized” by bad actors, who will use it as another opportunity to get their issues into the press.

“This theory of oversight is heavily informed by legal scholarship, which is slow and administrative and technical in nature, when we need something much more suited to the speed of the technology itself,” she said. “They’re going forward with this really long drawn out procedural mechanism that doesn’t address what the problem is – which is that viral content only needs to be on the internet for 4-8 hours for it to do its damage.”

Looking at the scale of the “infodemic” facing Facebook amid the coronavirus pandemic, Donovan said that the much more pressing concern is to solve the problem of “information curation, especially in a place like Facebook, that helps guide the user toward correct content and information rather than putting them in the middle a landfill and saying, ‘You sort it out’.” The oversight board is ultimately a distraction from “what really needs to happen”, she said, “which is to design technology that doesn’t allow for the expansive amplification of disinformation and health misinformation”.