Corporations want our children not to think critically -- oh, I know what you are thinking, "Wait a minute, did she say corporations? " Yep -- get to know the friendly people behind the push for testing and making decisions about your children's education. It's not teachers. Not by a long shot.
From
Reading Between the Lines by Stephen Metcalf in
Education, Inc.: Turning Learning into a Business edited by Alfie Kohn and Patrick Shannon
<snip>
"The Bush revolution in education is the culmination of a decade of educational reform spearheaded by conservatives and business leaders. To gauge the significance of this trend, consider the original aspirations for an American public school system: As Horace Mann, and later John Dewey, saw it, public schools were necessary to fashion a common national culture out of a far-flung and often immigrant population, and
to prepare young people to be reflective and critical citizens in a democratic society. The emphasis was on self-governance through self-respect; a sense of cultural ownership through participation; and ultimately, freedom from tyranny through rational deliberation. {emphasis mine}
"Fast forward to 2002: The new Bush testing regime emphasizes minimal competence along a narrow range of skills, with an eye toward satisfying the low end of the labor market. All this sits well with a business community whose first preoccupation is "global competitiveness": a community most comfortable thinking in terms of inputs (dollars spent on public schools) in relation to outputs (test scores). No one disputes that schools much inculcate the skills necessary for economic survival. But does it follow that the theory behind public schooling should be overwhelmingly economic? One of the reform movement's founding documents is
Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America's Public Schools by Lou Gerstner,
chairman of IBM. Gerstner describers school children as human capital, teachers as sellers in a marketplace and the public school system as a monopoly. Predictably, CEOs bring to education reform CEO rhetoric: stringent, intolerant of failure, even punitive -- hence the word "sanction," as if some schools had been Turning away weapons inspectors. {bold emphasis mine}
"Nowhere has this orientation been more frank than in George W. Bush's policies, first as Texas governor and now as President. When he invited a group of "education leaders" to join him for his
first day in the White House, the guest list was dominated by Fortune 500 CEOs. One, Harold McGraw, the publishing scion and current chairman of McGraw-Hill, summed up: "It's a great day for education, because we now have substantial alignment among all the key constituents -- the public, the education community, business and political leaders -- that results matter."
<SNIP>
"The big educational testing companies have thus dispatched lobbyists to Capital Hill. Bruce Hunter, who represents the American Association of School Administrators, says, "I've been lobbying on education issues since 1982, but the test publishers have been active at a level I've never seen before. At every hearing, every discussion, the big test publishers are always present with at least one lobbyist, sometimes more." Both standardized testing and textbook publishing are dominated by the so-called Big Three -- McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, and Harcourt General -- all identified as "Bush stocks" by Wall Street analysts in the wake of the 2000 election."
websites to visit
Achieve.Org
http://www.achieve.org/Business Roundtable
Education and the Workforcehttp://www.businessroundtable.org/taskForces/index.aspx#Education&theWorkforceNo Child Left Behind http://www.businessroundtable.org/taskForces/taskforce/issue.aspx?qs=6545BF159F849514481138A6DBE7A7A19BB6487BF6B38ISSUE: K-12 Education Reformhttp://www.businessroundtable.org/taskForces/taskforce/issue.aspx?qs=6535BF159F849514481138A6DBE7A7A19BB6487BF6B3BISSUE: Early Childhood Educationhttp://www.businessroundtable.org/taskForces/taskforce/issue.aspx?qs=6525BF159F849514481138A6DBE7A7A19BB6487BF6B3Aedit: typos
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