Higher Ed, Corporate Reform Has Arrived: Featuring Maryland’s Nancy Grasmick
Though much of corporate reform focuses on the K-12 classroom, its well-financed, invasive influence certainly does not stop with the public high school. Imposing philanthropy and its fast friend, the business of education, also aim to control America’s college and university classrooms.
Higher education faculty, you are not out of the reformer’s reach.
Over the last several decades, there has been growing corporate/ free-market interest in higher education. These behind-the-scenes efforts– launched in large part by non-profits such as Achieve, Inc. and the Eli Broad Foundation, and further exacerbated in more recent years by legislative efforts launched by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and lobbying by corporations such asPearson– have led to a tipping point in higher education.
Reform Conflict of Interest: Columbia’s Susan Furhman
One way to appreciate the full scale of the efforts to corporatize higher education is to acknowledge the relationships between those individuals who are placed within higher education and their lesser-known relationships with these “reform” initiatives.
A recent example is Susan Furhman, President of Columbia Teachers College. Her role as a member of the Board of Directors for Pearson has led many students and teachers at Columbia Teacher’s College to question whether or not her dubious
