The
500-Pound Gorilla
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. 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. 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."
by Alfie Kohn, The Teachers.net
Gazette
For more articles visit
www.bridges4kids.org
and
www.educationnews.org.
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 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 Fortune magazine 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).
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. David F. 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.
About Alfie Kohn...
Alfie Kohn has written seven books on education and human
behavior, including The Schools Our Children Deserve: Moving
Beyond Traditional Classrooms and Tougher Standards, just
published by Houghton Mifflin, from which this essay is
adapted. More information is available at his World Wide Web
site.
Visit Alfie Kohn's
website at
http://www.alfiekohn.org.
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