Honing job skills: Parisian
school pupils perfect their enamel work in the early twentieth century.
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All
education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held
by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its
youth.
Alvin
Toffler,
American futurologist (1928-)
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Although business leaders
in the United States influenced school policy in the past, today their clout is largely
unrivalled
 Looking
to business is nothing new in education. A century ago, schools adopted reforms based
on their reputed economic benefits to individuals and the newly industrializing urban
society. The current era has at its core a resurrected and strengthened version of
this notion. In both eras, reformers have agreed that whatever public schools do
to improve individual students’ job opportunities has direct economic consequences
for the nation as a whole, and for cities in particular.
The difference today is that corporate reformers have gained the upper hand, tilting
a tension-filled compromise that had prevailed over the past 100 years. Corporate
leaders have assumed the unrivalled moral authority to define the purposes and methods
of public schooling in response to the new technology-driven global economy. Hailed
as victorious generals in the battle between capitalism and socialism, many espouse
a millennial vision that links education to global free markets. Schooling, they
tell us, hedges our national bets in the global competition for market share and
predicts which students become good employees. But history also cautions us that
the long-term consequences of today’s experiments are probably less well understood
than their advocates imagine.
The transfer of management methods from business to schools began with a critique
of school failure. Between 1880 and 1920, different proponents had their own economic
justifications for reform. Corporate leaders criticized urban schools for failing
to respond to a newly industrialized, centralized, and increasingly integrated world
economy. They sought centralization and efficiency, frequently invoking the powerful
metaphor of scientific management or “Taylorism,” using the stopwatch and management
to discover the “one best way.” These principles had been instrumental, industrialists
of the time believed, in creating the American industrial revolution and the wealth
of powerful international companies. The quest for efficiency of those decades led
to the problems we must now repair, notably the rigid and bureaucratic structure
of our school systems.
Today, public schools continue to adapt new business efficiency techniques in what
seems to be a constant recycling process. Scientific management, it turns out, was
only the precursor to a host of ever newer management theories aimed at encouraging
greater worker productivity, and hence greater national wealth.
When
schools become levers to attract business investment
These trends
have echoes in the management reforms prescribed for and adopted by schools. Some
seek increased efficiency through decentralized school governance while others imagine
that outsourcing (or contracting) the management and operation of schools will lift
educators’ performance because incentives are lacking in secure government jobs.
All this is happening against the backdrop of economic globalization, which inevitably
creates political tensions by pitting governments against one another in competition
for transnational corporate jobs and global capital. Our current era mimics the turn
of the century to the extent that international capital flows and transnational production
processes influence both corporations and governments. Today, technologically induced
speed, growth among investors, concentration of wealth, and interconnectedness have
increased the effects of this global speculation and decreased the capacity of governments
to regulate business and markets. Not surprisingly, this global market ideology has
been broadly recognized as a force in national education policy.
Reforming local schools becomes one of the ways that cities engage in the global
competition to provide production resources to corporations. When formal schooling
is seen as a key element of productive capacity, a view reinforced by the decline
of manufacturing and the rise of information-based technologies in the U.S., the
quality of the local public school system takes on renewed importance for business
leaders and local politicians alike. Today’s corporate leaders have uncommon access
to elected political officials and government agency heads, the wealth of large corporations
to draw upon, and the ability to affect local and regional economies simply by making
business decisions.
Schools are treated as engines of economic development to lure businesses to a particular
city or state, so corporate and local political leaders cooperate in their governance
and redesign. In short, school policy becomes labour policy.
This powerful combination of corporate, national and state executives is happening
at the expense of education professionals. In contrast to the turn of the century,
when educators played a pivotal role in debates by emphasizing the role of schools
in developing citizenship, today they have been largely discredited. Selecting school
leaders from outside the field has become both symptom and spur to this decrease
in the educator’s status. A small but influential group of school districts is choosing
leaders from among the ranks of businessmen, politicians and the military, rather
than educators.
All this is taking place with little evidence that recent management solutions will
turn around poor schools, nor that improvements in school performance protect against
declines in productivity or the business cycle. Yet there are more troubling problems
with reform strategies that pit the market against government in education. One is
that education is reduced to its narrowest economic purposes. According to a 1992
survey, corporate executives most want schools to emphasize “a basic understanding
of math and science” and “sound work habits such as self-discipline, timeliness and
dedication to work.” These are laudable goals, but reflect a narrow set of traits
that employers predict their workers will need in an information economy.
The corporate model of reform pays little heed to other expectations of public schools:
building just and tolerant communities, reducing distrust of one another and our
shared institutions, safeguarding democratic ethics and introducing children to the
cultural wisdom of the world. We are also witnessing the abandonment of many kinds
of equality. Neither markets nor business ethics routinely put equality or fairness
above profits. Whole groups of people will not fit the prevailing model of what it
takes to be competitive in an educational marketplace in which competition is the
guiding principle of improvement. Another disturbing trend is the anaemic citizenship
that economic justifications for schooling envision. Increasing the emphasis on individualism
is likely to exacerbate a pattern of civic disengagement many already find disturbing
in its scale and scope.
A
balancing act to reach a healthy equilibrium
We need a contemporary
counter-movement to restore a healthy equilibrium of goals for our public schools.
This movement would be grounded in a very different educational critique that rejects
the metaphor of market (or management) failure, and instead tackles the problems
in our schools as symptoms of a widespread civic breakdown. The solutions to school
failure would then hinge on common concerns, rather than rigorous individual competition
and accountability. In addition to academic criteria, parents and reformers would
craft student performance measures that reward active citizenship, tolerant and respectful
behaviour, and cultural knowledge in the arts, history and languages. This reform
movement, seeking equity and tolerance, would revitalize democratic institutions,
and not merely aim for more efficient production.
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