UPDATED: Rebranding in a crisis

At the risk of turning this into a newsletter about how things are really very weird if you think about it, the ease with which different people in power use the language of transformation to describe their long-standing political prerogatives is slowly making me feel insane. The debasement of actual meaning in politics is politics, I get it, so let’s just call this a version of exposure shock—a consequence of streaming too many press conferences and using my local public radio station as the white noise of quarantine.

“You get moments in history where people say, ‘OK, I’m ready. I’m ready for change.’ I get it,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said last week. It’s a sentiment that could apply to any number of things right now—they’re all pretty bad—but was, instead, said about partnering with a group of very rich people to “reimagine” education after the pandemic. “The old model of everybody goes and sits in a classroom, and the teacher is in front of that classroom and teaches that class, and you do that all across the city, all across the state—all these buildings, all these physical classrooms,” Cuomo said. “Why, with all the technology you have?”

As Annie Abrams, a public school teacher in New York City, wrote for us this week, educators across the state understood this to be a barely concealed threat about introducing more privatization and standardization into education, twin forces that have been choking the system for years. And as Chalkbeat reported, the council Cuomo brought together to do this big thinking doesn’t include a single K–12 student or any current “teachers, principals, parents, district leaders, or administrators from the New York City Department of Education,” which is the nation’s largest and the hardest hit by the pandemic.

So we had Cuomo explaining that, because of this unprecedented crisis—because nothing is the same and may never be the same again—something must change, at which point he introduced the same ideas he has been pushing throughout his tenure as governor. This kind of regifting has been the case in the White House, in Congress, and virtually every statehouse and local governing body across the country in recent months. As my colleague Nick Martin noted this week, it is the crisis that changed everything and changed nothing: a looping cycle of “opportunistic leadership seizing the moment to justify long-standing ideological projects or more of the same old shit.”

But Cuomo spoke with such conviction. You want to believe him, you know? Things are crumbling, who doesn’t like to be told change is coming?
—Katie McDonough, Deputy Editor