Educating for Democracy: The Corporate System of Education
Guest blog by Joel Shatsky:
In a recent interview on CNN in the “Fix Our Schools” series, a Pennsylvania legislator, Senator Vincent Hughes, seemed to me to let the cat out of the bag, when he explained why he favored standardized testing as way of determining student achievement: it would provide the State of Pennsylvania with the data needed to see what it was getting for the taxpayers’ money within the “corporate structure” for education.
Now I, and many other critics of the so-called “educational reform movement” initiated by the Clinton Administration as “accountability,” codified by the Bush Administration’s NCLB program and now the Obama Administration’s RTTT, have rejected the methods used to measure improvement in student learning as a “corporate system” imposed on education. But I’ve never before heard a proponent publically admit it. Senator Hughes assumes that a specific amount of numerical data useful for determining industrial production can be
