The 500-Pound Gorilla
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12 years ago this article made frightening predictions.
Sadly, they are a reality today in American education.
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PHI DELTA KAPPAN
October 2002
The
500-Pound Gorilla
By
Alfie Kohn
The
best reason to give a child a good school. . .is so that child will have a
happy childhood, and not so that it will help IBM in competing with Sony. . .
There is something ethically embarrassing about resting a national agenda on
the basis of sheer greed.
–
Jonathan Kozol
I
give a lot of speeches these days about the accountability fad that has been
turning our schools into glorified test-prep centers. The
question-and-answer sessions that follow these lectures can veer off into
unexpected directions, but it is increasingly likely that someone will
inquire about the darker forces behind this heavy-handed version of school
reform.
“Aren’t giant corporations raking in profits from standardized
testing?” a questioner will demand. “Doesn’t it stand to reason that these
companies engineered the reliance on testing in the first place?”
Indeed,
there are enough suspicious connections to keep conspiracy theorists awake
through the night. For example, Standard & Poors, the
financial rating service, has lately been offering to evaluate and publish
the performance, based largely on test scores, of every school district in a
given state – a bit of number crunching that Michigan and Pennsylvania
purchased for at least $10 million each, and other states may soon follow.
The explicit findings of these reports concern whether this district is doing
better than that one. But the tacit message – the hidden curriculum, if
you will – is that test scores are a useful and appropriate marker for school
quality. Who has an incentive to convince people of that conclusion? Well, it
turns out that Standard & Poors is owned by McGraw-Hill, one of the
largest manufacturers of standardized tests.
With
such pressure to look good by boosting their test results, low-scoring
districts may feel compelled to purchase heavily scripted curriculum programs
designed to raise scores, programs such as Open Court or Reading Mastery (and
others in the Direct Instruction series). Where do those programs
come from? By an astonishing coincidence, both are owned by McGraw-Hill. Of
course, it doesn’t hurt to have some influential policy makers on your side
when it’s time to make choices about curriculum and assessment. In April
2000, Charlotte K. Frank joined the state of New York’s top education
policy-making panel, the Board of Regents. If you need to reach
Ms. Frank, try her office at McGraw-Hill, where she is a vice
president. And we needn’t even explore the chummy relationship between
Harold McGraw III (the company’s chairman) and George W.
Bush. (1) Nor will we investigate the strong statement of
support for test-based accountability in a Business Week cover
story about education published in March 2001. Care to guess what
company owns Business Week?
Stumble
across enough suspicious relationships like these and your eyebrows may never
come down. However, we don’t want to oversimplify. The sizable
profits made by the CTB division of McGraw-Hill, as well as by Harcourt
Educational Measurement, Riverside Publishing, Educational Testing Service
(ETS), and NCS Pearson(2) – the five companies that develop and/or score
virtually all the standardized tests to which students and prospective
teachers are subjected – cannot completely explain why public officials,
journalists, and others have come to rely so heavily on these
exams. Let’s face it: for a variety of reasons, people with no
financial stake in the matter have become boosters of standardized
testing.(3)
More
important, even if one could point to a neat cause-and-effect relationship
here, the role that business plays in education is not limited to the realm
of testing. Indeed, its influence is even deeper, more complicated, and
ultimately more disturbing than anything we might reveal in a game of connect
the corporate dots. Schools – and, by extension, children — have
been turned into sources of profit in several distinct ways. Yes, some
corporations sell educational products, including tests, texts, and other
curriculum materials. But many more corporations, peddling all sorts of
products, have come to see schools as places to reach an enormous captive
market. Advertisements are posted in cafeterias, athletic fields, even
on buses. Soft drink companies pay off schools so that their brand, and
only their brand, of liquid candy will be sold to kids.(4) Schools are
offered free televisions in exchange for compelling students to watch a brief
current-events program larded with commercials, a project known as Channel
One. (The advertisers seem to be getting their money’s
worth: researchers have found that Channel One viewers, as contrasted
with a comparison group of students, not only thought more highly of products
advertised on the program but were more likely to agree with statements such
as “money is everything,” “a nice car is more important than school,”
“designer labels make a difference,” and “I want what I see advertised.”)(5)
Even
more disturbing than having public schools sanction and expose children to
advertisements(6) is the fact that corporate propaganda is sometimes passed
off as part of the curriculum. Math problems plug a particular brand of
sneakers or candy; chemical companies distribute slick curriculum packages to
ensure that environmental science will be taught with their slant.(7) A
few years ago, someone sent me a large, colorful brochure aimed at educators
that touts several free lessons helpfully supplied by Procter &
Gamble. One kit helps fifth graders learn about personal hygiene by way
of Old Spice after-shave and Secret deodorant, while another promises a
seventh-grade lesson on the “ten steps to self-esteem,” complete with
teacher’s guide, video, and samples of Clearasil.
It’s
worth thinking about how corporate sponsorship is likely to affect what is
included – and not included – in these lessons. How likely is it that
the makers of Clearasil would emphasize that how you feel about yourself
should not primarily be a function of how you look? Or consider a
hypothetical unit on nutrition underwritten by Kraft General Foods (or by
McDonald’s or Coca-Cola): would you expect to find any mention of the
fact that the food you prepare yourself is likely to be more nutritious than
processed products in boxes and jars and cans? Or that the best
way to quench your thirst is actually to drink water? Or that a
well-balanced diet requires little or no meat? Or that smoking causes cancer? (Kraft
General Foods — and Nabisco, for that matter — are owned by a tobacco
company. )
A
few companies, then, make money by selling books and tests, while many more
sell other things to children. The third, and most audacious, way that
schooling can be milked for profit is by letting corporations take over the
management of the schools themselves, or even allowing them to own schools
outright as they would a car dealership. Opportunities for such
businesses have greatly expanded as a result of a movement simply to
privatize education. This effort seems to gather strength as people
friendly to its aims find themselves in positions of power, as the Supreme
Court narrowly voted in late June [2002] to allow public funds to pay for
tuition at private – including religious – schools, and as proponents become
more skilled at public relations (for example, jettisoning the unpopular
word vouchers and justifying their agenda in terms of its
ostensible benefits for low-income people of color).
By
way of background, consider that the center of gravity for American education
has shifted over the last few years from local schools and districts to state
capitals. The commissioner or state superintendent of schools, the state
board of education, and the legislature have usurped much of the power that
communities have long enjoyed to set education policy. Indeed, even
Washington, D.C. has gotten into the act, with new federal legislation
requiring that every state test every student every year. It’s
understandable, then, that frustrated students, parents, and teachers would
be inclined to see government as the problem. Some conservative
activists have even begun referring derisively to public schools as
“government schools.” But there are two problems with this
equation. First, the current level of interference in curricular and
assessment decisions by politicians is not logically entailed by the idea of
public schooling; indeed, it is unprecedented. If your governor began
telling your local library which books to order, that would not be an
argument against the idea of public libraries. Second, the actions taken by
government officials have been offensive precisely to the extent that they
have appropriated the slogans and mindset of private enterprise. The
problem is that people in the public sector are uncritically adopting the
world view of the private sector — and applying it to schools.
Privatizing
education is predicated on an almost childlike faith in competition: let
self-interested people struggle against one another, and somehow all of them
— even their children, presumably — will benefit. This belief, as
quickly becomes evident from reading and listening to those who hold it, has
the status of religious dogma rather than empirical hypothesis. It is
closely related to a second ideological underpinning: a pronounced
individualism in which there is no us, just you and her and him and
me. To apply a marketplace mentality to education both assumes and
exacerbates this perspective, with parents encouraged to focus only on what
improves their own children’s position. This is the very opposite of an
invitation to work together to make schools more effective and inviting
places for all our children. Perhaps it was the implications of this
threat to the value of community that led the political philosopher Benjamin
Barber to observe, “Privatization is not about limiting government; it is
about terminating democracy.”
Clearly,
education is just one arena in which larger ideologies are being played
out. These days, as education historian David Labaree put it, “We find
public schools under attack, not just because they are deemed ineffective,
but because they are public.”(8) Once the struggle over public institutions
has been joined in the classroom, though, it isn’t hard to understand the
consequences of implementing voucher plans and other “school choice”
proposals – including, to some extent, charter schools, which many see as a
first step toward undermining public schooling altogether. What happens
to schools when they are plunged into the marketplace? To begin with,
they must shift much of their time and resources to, well,
marketing. (It is those who sell themselves skillfully, not those who
are especially good at what they do, who tend to succeed in a competitive
market.) Moreover, the pressure to make themselves look better presents
a temptation to screen out less desirable students, those whose education
takes more effort or expense. “The problem with public schools,”
remarked author John Chubb, “is that they must take whoever walks in the
door.”(9) The philosophical core of the privatization movement
for which Chubb speaks is neatly revealed in the use of the word problem in
that sentence.
Deborah
Meier writes memorably of the “dictatorship of the marketplace,” noting that
“privatizing removes schools from democratic control.” She observes
that private schools “cannot serve as general models; their value and
advantages depend on their scarcity…. Schools dependent upon private
clienteles – schools that can get rid of unwanted kids or troublemaker
families…and toss aside the losers – not only can avoid the democratic arts
of compromise and tolerance but also implicitly foster lessons about the
power of money and prestige, a lesson already too well known by every
adolescent in America.”(10) Meier’s indictment extends beyond voucher
programs, suggesting the corrosive effect of any sort of interference in
public education by business interests. The quest for private
profits, in whatever form it takes, can only contaminate efforts to help all
students become enthusiastic and expert learners.
These
three basic ways by which corporations can profit from education are all
quite straightforward. Vivendi Universal, which owns Houghton Mifflin (at
least for the moment), which in turn owns Riverside, makes money selling the
Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Nike makes money by advertising its shoes to
young people who are required by law to be in the vicinity of its
billboards. Edison, Inc. makes money (or will do so eventually, it
assures its investors) by running whole schools.
But
there are also more indirect ways to turn learning into a business. When
corporations can influence the nature of curriculum and the philosophy of
education, then they have succeeded in doing something more profound, and
possibly more enduring, than merely improving their results on this quarter’s
balance sheet. That can happen when businesses succeed in
creating “school-to-work” programs, by which children are defined as future
workers and shaped to the specifications of their employers. It can
happen when the whole notion of education as a public good is systematically
undermined – an ideological shift that paves the way for privatizing
schools. It can happen when a business ethos takes over education, with
an emphasis on quantifiable results, on standardized procedures to improve
performance, on order and discipline and obedience to
authority. Students expect to be controlled with rewards and
punishments, to be set against their peers in competitions, to be rated and
evaluated by those who have more power than they do. None of this is
particularly effective at preparing children to be critical thinkers,
lifelong intellectual explorers, active participants in a democratic society
– or even, for that matter, good friends or lovers or parents. But
the process is exceedingly effective at preparing them for their life as
corporate employees.
Rather
ingeniously, some practices serve the interests of business in multiple ways
simultaneously. For example, selling products in classrooms may
immediately increase a company’s market share but it also contributes to a
socialization process whereby children come to see themselves as consumers,
as people whose lives will be improved by buying more things.
Standardized
testing may be an even better illustration in that it manages to achieve
several goals at one stroke:
$ it brings in
hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the handful of corporations that
produce the tests, grade the tests, and supply materials to raise students’
scores on the tests;
$ it screens
and sorts students for the convenience of industry (and higher education);
$ it helps to
foster acceptance of a corporate-style ideology, which comes to be seen as
natural and even desirable, in which assessment is used less to support
learning than to evaluate and compare people – and in which the education driven
by that testing has a uniform, standardized feel to it; and finally
$ when many
students perform poorly on these tests (an outcome that can be ensured from
the outset, and then justified in the name of “raising the bar”), these
results can be used to promote discontent with public education: “We are
shocked — shocked! — to discover just how bad our schools are!” Again, this
can create a more receptive climate for introducing vouchers, for-profit
charter schools, and other private alternatives. (Anyone whose goal was
to serve up our schools to the marketplace could hardly find a shrewder
strategy than to insist on holding schools “accountable” by administering
wave after wave of standardized tests.)
To
the extent that colleges, too, are increasingly seen as ripe for a corporate
makeover, testing younger students would make sense as part of a long-term
strategy. In the words of one instructor:
The
whole standards movement, after all, is about restricting learning to what
is actually useful: the memorization of information, the
streamlining of knowledge to what can be evaluated by a standardized
test. By curtailing the excessive autonomy of K-12 teachers and
requiring them to teach “to the tests,” we are preparing future college
students for a brand of higher education designed and administered by the
savviest segment of our society: for-profit corporations.(11)
There
may be some sort of shadowy business conspiracy at work to turn schools into
factories, but this seems unlikely if only because no such conspiracy is
necessary to produce the desired results. Most politicians have uncritically
accepted the goals and methods outlined by the private sector – and, with the
possible exception of attitudes toward vouchers, there are few differences
between the two major parties. Marveling that “Democrats and Republicans
are saying rather similar things about education,” a front-page story in
the New York Times explained, “One reason there seems to be
such a consensus on education is that the economic rationale for schooling
has triumphed.”(12)
More
ominous is the extent to which even educators have internalized a business
approach. Many of us defend “partnerships” between schools and
businesses, willingly “align” our teaching to uniform state standards, shrug
off objections to advertising in the schools, refer to learning as “work”(13)
or schooling itself as an “investment. ” The next time you leaf through
one of the leading education periodicals — or listen to a speech at a
conference – try counting all the telltale signs of corporate ideology.
There’s
no need for executives in expensive suits to show up in schools if we’re
already doing their work for them.
Some
readers may dismiss as rhetorical excess any comparison of schools with
factories. In fact, though, the analogy was first proposed by people who
were quite explicit about wanting to make the former more similar to the
latter. Back in 1916, one Ellwood Cubberley wrote that “our schools are,
in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped
and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”(14) In the
1950s, this way of thinking was still in favor. A Fortunemagazine
article titled “The Low Productivity of the Education Industry” informed
readers that we should strive “to turn out students with the greatest
possible efficiency…[and] minimize the input of man hours and
capital.
In this respect, the schools are no different from
General Motors.”(15)
The
popularity of such parallels may wax and wane over time, but were Mr. Cubberley
to find himself magically transported to the early twenty-first century, he
would almost certainly feel right at home. He would immediately notice
that thousands of American schools, some of them dating back to his own era
but still open for, um, business, literally resemble factories.
Inside them, he would see, as Linda Darling-Hammond observed in 1997, that the
short segmented tasks stressing speed and neatness that predominate in most
schools, the emphasis on rules from the important to the trivial, and the
obsession with bells, schedules, and time clocks are all dug deep into the
ethos of late-nineteenth-century America, when students were being prepared
to work in factories on predetermined tasks that would not require them to
figure out what to do.(16)
Cubberly
would likely be impressed as well by the remarkable power that business
continues to have in shaping educational policy. Every few months, he
would notice, another report on American schooling is released by a
consortium of large corporations. These documents normally receive wide
and approving press attention despite the fact that they all recycle the same
set of buzzwords. Rather like a party game in which players
create sentences by randomly selecting an adjective from one list, then a
noun from another, these dispatches from the business world seem to consist
mostly of different combinations of terms like “world-class,” “competitive,”
and “measurable”; “standards,” “results,” and “accountability.”
A
few examples from the last decade that might set Mr. Cubberley’s head to
nodding: The Committee for Economic Development, consisting of
executives from about 250 large companies, demands that school curricula be
linked more closely to employers’ skill requirements; it calls for “performance-driven
education,” incentives, and a traditional “core disciplinary knowledge”
version of instruction. Ditto for the Business Roundtable, which
describes schooling as “competing in the education Olympics.” Besides
endorsing narrow and very specific academic standards, punishment for schools
that fall behind, and more testing, it approvingly cites the example of
taking time in high school to familiarize students with personnel
evaluations. The National Association of Manufacturers, meanwhile,
insists on more testing as well as “a national system of skills standards
designed by industry.” And the Business Task Force on Student Standards says
that “workplace performance requirements of industry and commerce must be
integrated into subject-matter standards and learning environments.”(17)
To
scan these recommendations is to realize two things. First, most have
been adopted as policy. To an extraordinary degree, business’s wish
becomes education’s command. Second, they traffic in the realm not only
of methods and metaphors, but of purposes and goals. The question is not
just whether we will compare schools to factories, or even whether we will
prescribe practices that will make schools more like factories.
The question is what vision of schooling — and even of children — lies behind
such suggestions. While a proper discussion of the purpose of education
lies outside the scope of this essay,(18) it is immediately evident
that seeing schools as a means for bolstering our economic system (and the
interests of the major players in that system) is very different from seeing
education as a means for strengthening democracy, for promoting social
justice, or simply for fostering the well-being and development of the
students themselves.(19)
In
the final analysis, the problem with letting business interests shape our
country’s educational agenda isn’t just their lack of knowledge about the
nuances of pedagogy. The problem is with their ultimate
objectives. Corporations in our economic system exist to provide a financial
return to the people who own them: They are in business to make a
profit. As individuals, those who work in (or even run) these companies
might have other goals, too, when they turn their attention to public policy
or education or anything else. But business qua business
is concerned principally about its own bottom line. Thus, when
business thinks about schools, its agenda is driven by what will maximize its
profitability, not necessarily by what is in the best interest of
students. Any overlap between those two goals would be purely accidental
– and, in practice, turns out to be minimal. What maximizes corporate
profits often does not benefit children, and vice versa. Qualities such
as a love of learning for its own sake, a penchant for asking challenging questions,
or a commitment to democratic participation in decision making would be seen
as nice but irrelevant – or perhaps even as impediments to the efficient
realization of corporate goals.
Some
people in the business world object to this characterization, of
course. They insist that modern corporations have similar goals
to those of educators, that business today needs employees who are critical
thinkers and problem solvers skilled at teamwork, and so
forth. But if this were really true, we would see cutting-edge
companies taking the lead in demanding a constructivist approach to
instruction, where students’ questions drive the curriculum — as well as a
rich, Whole Language model for teaching literacy. They would ask
why we haven’t thrown out the worksheets and the textbooks, the isolated
skills and rote memorization. They would demand greater emphasis on
cooperative learning and complain loudly about the practices that undermine
collaboration (and ultimately quality) – practices like awards assemblies and
spelling bees and honor rolls, or norm-referenced tests. They would
insist on heterogeneous, inclusive classrooms in place of programs that
segregate and stratify and stigmatize. They would stop talking about
“school choice” (meaning programs that treat education as a commodity for
sale) and start talking about the importance of giving students more
choice about what happens in their classrooms. They would publish
reports on the importance of turning schools into caring communities where
mutual problem-solving replaces an emphasis on following directions.
The
sad truth, of course, is that when business leaders do address these issues,
their approach tends to be precisely the opposite: they write off
innovative, progressive educational reforms as mere fads that distract us
from raising test scores. This is evident not only from those
reports sampled above (from the Business Roundtable and similar groups) but
also from the consistent slant of articles about education that appear in
business-oriented periodicals.
Moreover,
while there may be more talk in boardrooms these days about teamwork, it is
usually situated in the context of competitiveness – that is, working
together so we can defeat another group of people working
together. (Business groups commonly characterize students as
competitors – as people who do, or will, or should spend their lives trying
to beat other people. Other nations are likewise depicted as rivals,
such that to make our schools “world class” means not that we should cooperate
with other countries and learn, but that we should compete against them and
win.) While “social skills” are often listed as desirable attributes,
business publications never seem to mention such qualities as generosity or
compassion. While it is common to talk about the need for future
employees who can think critically, there is reason to doubt that corporate
executives want people with the critical skills to ask why they (the
executives) just received multimillion-dollar stock option packages even as several
thousand employees were thrown out of work. Corporations may, as we have
seen, encourage high school English teachers to assign students the task of
writing a sample personnel evaluation, but they seem less keen on inviting
students to critically analyze whether such evaluations make sense, or who
gets to evaluate whom. In short, what business wants from its workers –
and, by extension, from our schools – in the twenty-first century may not be
so different after all from what it wanted in the twentieth and even
nineteenth centuries.
What
it wants, moreover, it usually gets. It doesn’t take a degree in
political science to figure out why politicians (and sometimes even
educators) so often capitulate to business. For that matter, it isn’t
much of a mystery why a 500-pound gorilla is invited to sleep anywhere it
wishes. But that doesn’t make the practice any less dangerous.
Indeed,
we might even go so far as to identify as one of the most crucial tasks in a
democratic society the act of limiting the power that corporations have in
determining what happens in, and to, our schools. Not long ago, as
historian Joel Spring pointed out, you would have been branded a radical (or
worse) for suggesting that our educational system is geared to meeting the
needs of business. Today, corporations not only acknowledge that fact
but freely complain when they think schools aren’t adequately meeting their
needs. They are not shy about trying to make over the schools in
their own image. It’s up to the rest of us, therefore, to firmly tell
them to mind their own businesses.
NOTES
1.
See Stephen Metcalf, “Reading Between the Lines,” The
Nation , 28 January 2002, pp. 18-22 – reprinted in A. Kohn and
P. Shannon, eds. , Education, Inc.: Turning Learning into a
Business, rev. ed. (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2002).
2.
Notice that the phenomenon by which a company makes money by testing
students, then turns around and sells the materials designed to prepare
students for those tests, is not limited to McGraw-Hill. Many of
the major textbook publishers are represented in this list of test
manufacturers.
3.
For other explanations, see Alfie Kohn, The Case Against
Standardized Testing (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 2000), esp. pp.
2-4; Robert L. Linn, “Assessments and Accountability,” Educational
Researcher, March 2000, esp. p.4; and Gary Natriello and Aaron M.;
Pallas, “The Development and Impact of High-Stakes Testing,” in Raising
Standards or Raising Barriers?, edited by Gary Orfield and Mindy L.
Kornhaber (New York: Century Foundation Press, 2001), esp. pp. 20-21.
4.
See Alex Molnar, “Looking for Funds in All the Wrong Places,” Principal,
November 2000, pp. 18-21. Thanks to Pat Shannon for calling this article
to my attention. As of early 2002, between 300 and 400 school districts
had signed exclusive beverage contracts – more than double the number in
mid-1999 — according to the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education.
5.
Bradley S. Greenberg and Jeffrey E. Brand, “Channel One:But What About
the Advertising? ”Educational Leadership, December 1993 / January
1994, pp.56-58.
6.
For more examples of – and ideas for responding to –this phenomenon,
contact the Center for Commercial-Free Public Education (www.
commercialfree.org) or Commercial Alert
(www.commercialalert.org). Also see Alex Molnar, Giving Kids
the Business:The Commercialization of America’s Schools (Boulder,
Col.: Westview, 1996), or contact his Commercialism in Education Research
Unit (www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/ceru.htm).
7.”Your
child’s science teachers may be summering with Weyerhaeuser or the hunting
lobby. They may be teaching about our food supply with a lesson plan
developed and donated by Monsanto. And the video on how oil is
formed? An Exxon production. … Andrew Hagelshaw, director of the
Center for Commercial-Free Public Education in Oakland, said such programs
are an attempt to establish brand loyalty. He said the logging companies
and oil industry have figured out what fast-food restaurants have long
known:‘If you just start educating people at young ages around these facts,
then they accept it as truth,’ and that means customers for life.” See Chris
Moran, “Education or Indoctrination? ” San Diego Union-Tribune,
13 May 2002.
8.
Labaree, How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning: The
Credentials Race in American Education (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1997), p.51.
9.
Chubb is quoted in Bernie Froese-Germain, “What We Know About School
Choice,” Education Canada, Fall 1998, p.22.
10.
Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas (Boston:
Beacon, 1995), pp. 79, 8, 104, 7.
11.
Nick Bromell, “Summa Cum Avaritia,” Harper’s, February
2002, p.76.
12.
Ethan Bronner, “Better Schools Is Battle Cry for Fall Elections,” New
York Times, 20 September 1998, p.A32.
13.
On this point, see Alfie Kohn, “Students Don’t‘Work’ – They Learn,” Education
Week,September 3, 1997, pp.60, 43; and Hermine H. Marshall, “Beyond the
Workplace Metaphor:The Classroom as a Learning Setting,” Theory Into
Practice , vol. 29, no. 2, 1990, pp.94-101.
14.
Elwood Cubberley, Public School Administration (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1916), p. 338.
15.
The Fortune article is quoted in Daniel Tanner,
“Manufacturing Problems and Selling Solutions,” Phi Delta Kappan,
November 2000, p.198.
16.
Linda Darling-Hammond, The Right to Learn (San
Francisco:Jossey-Bass, 1997), p.40.
17.
Jeff Archer, “New School Role Seen Critical to Respond to Modern
Economy,” Education Week, 8 May 1996, pp.1, 8; Catherine
S. Manegold, “Study Says Schools Must Stress Academics,” New
York Times, 23 September 1994, p.A22; Business Roundtable, A
Business Leader’s Guide to Setting Academic Standards(Washington,
D.C.:Business Roundtable, 1996);Mary Ann Zehr, “Manufacturers Endorse
National Tests, Vouchers,” Education Week, 14 January 1998, p.14;
Business Task Force on Student Standards, The Challenge of Change:
Standards to Make Education Work for All Our Children(Washington,
D. C. : National Alliance of Business, 1995).
18.
Many writers, of course, have grappled with education’s ultimate
goals. I attempt to sort through some of the underlying issues in The
Schools Our Children Deserve (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999),
pp.115-20.
19.
See, for example, an analysis of the powerful Business Roundtable,
whose “main objective is not quality education but the preservation of the
competitiveness of corporate America in the global economy,” in Bess
Altwerger and Steven L. Strauss, “The Business Behind Testing,” Language
Arts, vol. 79, no.3, January 2002, pp.256-62. Quotation appears on
p.258.
This
article is adapted from the introduction to the revised edition of Education,
Inc.: Turning Learning into a Business, an anthology
published by Heinemann, edited by Alfie Kohn and Patrick Shannon.
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