The Business Roundtable's Plan To Turn Your Kids Into Corporate Clones

Googling around recently, I stumbled across a 2002 dissertation that describes how the Business Roundtable met in 1989 to plan a state-by-state campaign to push standardized testing and reduce community participation in education.

I suppose those with kids already know about the changes in education that have taken place over the past couple of decades. Most of us have heard about increased standardized testing, and how classrooms are increasingly teaching for the test.

But did you know that much of this was driven from the top? As Kathy Emery, the author, puts it:

"This policy has redced local school boards to implementers rather than creators of policy, while giving corporate lobbyists a free hand at the state level to influence the details of education statutes and appoinments to the state educational bureauracy...In the summer of 1989, the national Business Roundtable devoted its entire annual meeting to synthesizing the various business-led reform efforts of the 1980s into the high-stakes testing agenda," which "eliminated public debate over educational goals and justified the resegregation of the public school system. Goals associated with democracy and desegregation have been eliminated, leaving schools with the narrow charge of educating students to become highly skilled task completers in the New Economy."

I.e. rather than learn how to think, the goal of our nation's educational policies is to ensure our children learn how to be obedient corporate employees who don't ask the big questions.

About as Orwellian as it gets, isn't it?

It's a stunning thesis. Worth reading along with other great exposes of the corporate assault on higher education, such as Jennifer Washburn's book, University, Inc. and Campus Inc. by Geoff White (ed.). And if you want to do something about it, I suggest contacting Rethinking Schools, and Liberty Tree.