The Education Industrial Complex
Not sure who coined the phrase “Education Industrial Complex”, a play off the more famous “Military Industrial Complex” used by President Eisenhower in a 1961 speech. I kept thinking it was radical educator and public school critic John Taylor Gatto, but in my research on the Internet could not find any confirmation of that. I did find a use of the term by Paul Peterson, director of Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard Kennedy School, in a 2008 commentary…
Around 1970 or thereabouts, the educational-industrial complex was hammered into place: School boards gave teachers collective bargaining rights. State governments assumed greater responsibility for financing the schools. The courts instructed schools on the civil liberties of their students. Regulations multiplied. America gained a federal Department of Education. And state
