A CEO’s Point of View: Children as Products for Corporate Consumers
Business Gets Schooled, a long piece in the January 1, 2016, issue of Fortune, perches the reader as a fly on the wall of the corporate board room during a conversation among CEOs about public education. This blog has argued that while public schools are the quintessential institution of the 99 Percent, education policy is being made by the One Percent. Business Gets Schooled explains how that works.
The reporter, Peter Elkind—whose point of view dovetails nicely with the thinking of the business executives he is profiling—describes the involvement of Bill Gates, Exxon Mobil’s Rex Tillerson, and IBM’s Lou Gerstner, without even wondering what these people know that qualifies them for imposing the Common Core standards on the schools. One wonders if the corporate giants who hatched the standards ever leave their offices to spend time with their own children or grandchildren. As profiled in this piece, they do not acknowledge the existence of a credentialed education profession or of a vast body of academic literature on child and adolescent psychology or learning styles or the role of family economics in educational success. Neither does Elkind seem to know about any of this.
Exxon Mobil’s Tillerson stands out. For him schools are a kind of machine: “I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer… What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation… Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested? (American schools) have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that A CEO’s Point of View: Children as Products for Corporate Consumers | janresseger: