Schooling in the Ownership Society: Educator tells climate criminal Exxon: 'Hands off our kids and our schools'

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Educator tells climate criminal Exxon: 'Hands off our kids and our schools':

Educator tells climate criminal Exxon: 'Hands off our kids and our schools'

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.” -- Fortune Magazine

Rex Tillerson is chief executive of ExxonMobil, possibly the world's worst climate criminal and catalyst for war and social/economic instability in the Middle East and around the globe. It's a corporation that spends millions each year to run climate denial campaigns.

New York State's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman iscurrently investigating Exxon to determine whether the corporation lied to the public about climate change, or to investors about the risks to the oil industry.

Yet somehow, Tillerson and Exxon still feel qualified and on moral enough ground to bash public schools and debase students as a way of promoting corporate-style reform, and particularly, Common Core and its testing regimen. 

To Tillerson and several other of the wealthiest corporate execs including Bill Gates, public schools are little more than a publicly-financed training ground for the corporate labor pool. Putting schools at the service of the global corporate race to the top, has also been the mantra of Arne Duncan and the D.O.E. for the past seven years. To them, schools are a business, preparing and marketing students to the corporations -- and, according to Tillerson, turning out an inferior product. This, even though Exxon and the 12 other giant petro-corps contribute little in the way of taxes to support public ed.

Exxon gets $600 million in annual federal tax breaks. Every effort to eliminate these breaks—recently pushed by Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Robert Menendez of New Jersey—can't get through Congress. Surprise, surprise. Exxon pays an effective corporate income tax rate of about 13 percent, just over a third of the nominal rate of 35 percent. (Daily Kos)

Tillerson's remarks have drawn a sharp rebuke from parents and educators. Ed activists are joining environmentalists in calling for a boycott of Exxon products. They make the point that the job of public schools is not to supply a workforce for Big Schooling in the Ownership Society: Educator tells climate criminal Exxon: 'Hands off our kids and our schools':