The Business of American Business Is Education
From corporate donations to workplace restrictions, what’s taught in the classroom has always been influenced by American industry
- By Dana Goldstein
- Smithsonian.com, April 15, 2013, Subscribe
Industrialist Andrew Carnegie (front row, center) financially supported the Tuskegee Institute and its faculty members, pictured here. Carnegie lauded the efforts of Booker T. Washington, who opened the school in 1881, shown here with his wife Margaret next to the businessman. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Divison)
If you ask American leaders about the overall goal of the nation’s education system, you’d likely get a broad set of answers: to prepare young people for the workforce; to close racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps; to create informed citizens ready to participate in popular democracy. Other western nations, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany, provide their public schools with a national curriculum, roughly equalized budgets and government-produced exams. In contrast, the defining feature of American education is its localism; we have no shared curriculum, large funding disparities and little national agreement about what the purposes of schooling should be.
The absence of centralization leaves space for business leaders and philanthropists to define and fund what they see as priorities in education reform. Today, a broad coalition of standardized test and textbook manufacturers; mega-philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates and Eli Broad; and CEOs passionate about school reform, like Mark Zuckerberg, coalesce around an agenda that includes implementing Common Core academic standards and tying teacher evaluation, job security, and pay to students’ test scores. The underlying idea is that extraordinary teachers, with high standards for all students, can prepare every child to attend and succeed in college, regardless of a student’s socioeconomic disadvantages.
This goal—what the Gates Foundation refers to as “college-ready education for all”—represents a sea change from the traditional outlook American business leaders brought to school reform: one that sought to sort students and select only a few for higher-education, while sending the rest to the
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