From: Jeff Bryant <info@ind.media>
Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2020 12:15 PM
To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: How Corporations Are Forcing Their Way Into America’s Public Schools
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How Corporations Are Forcing Their Way Into America’s Public Schools
A story unfolding in Virginia reveals how corporations such as Amazon, Cisco
and Ford want to control schools right down to the curriculum.
By Jeff Bryant
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<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/-lng-en-pubid-donate-ind-media/d7flxg/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
In the expanding effort to privatize the nation’s public education system, an
ominous, less-understood strain of the movement is the corporate influence in
Career and Technical Education (CTE) that is shaping the K-12 curriculum in
local communities.
An apt case study of the growing corporate influence behind CTE is in Virginia,
where many parents, teachers and local officials are worried that major
corporations including Amazon
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, Ford
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and Cisco
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—rather than educators and local, democratic governance—are deciding what
students learn in local schools.
CTE is a rebranding of what has been traditionally called vocational education
or voc-ed, the practice of teaching career and workplace skills in an academic
setting. While years ago, that may have included courses in woodworking, auto
mechanics, or cosmetology, the new, improved version of CTE has greatly
expanded
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course offerings to many more “high-demand” careers, especially in fields
that require knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).
Education policy advocates across the political spectrum, from Education
Secretary Betsy DeVos
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to former First Lady Michelle Obama
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, have praised expansions of CTE programs in schools. Fast-tracking federal
funds for CTE programs in schools has become
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the new bipartisan darling of education policy. CTE lobbyists and advocates
have successfully pressed
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for expanded funding of their programs at federal
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and state
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levels. And a 2019 study
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by the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing advocacy group based in
Washington, D.C., found
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that since 2004, mentions of CTE in U.S. media outlets “have grown over
tenfold, and they have doubled since 2012.”
According to a September 2019 analysis
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from Brookings, “more than 7 million secondary school students and nearly 4
million postsecondary students were enrolled in CTE programming
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.” And a 2018 review
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of CTE programs by the federal government’s National Center for Education
Statistics found 73 percent of school districts offered CTE courses that give
students both high school and postsecondary credit, a potential benefit for
students and parents who want to reduce the cost of college.
What has folks in Chesterfield County, Virginia, concerned is the particular
brand of CTE that has come to their district. At a September 2019 community
event, middle school teacher Emma Clark and others mentioned
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the district’s collaboration with Ford Next Generation Learning (NGL), an
offshoot of the Ford Motor Company that claims, according to its website
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, that it “mobilizes educators, employers, and community leaders to create a
new generation of young people who will graduate from high school both college-
and career-ready.”
Chesterfield parents I spoke with also pointed to the district’s collaboration
with the Cisco Networking Academy
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ter-docs-P51-FY09-Virginia-pdf/d7flyl/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
, an offshoot of the computer networking giant
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that has its own branded
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course offering in the Chesterfield CTE curriculum.
In a phone conversation, Clark described the district’s collaborations with
these companies as “new layers” of school privatization. First, corporations
like these can use the rush to CTE to flood schools with new course offerings
that require technology the schools have to buy. And another layer is the CTE
programs businesses help to create provide them with free job training.
The concern Chesterfield teachers and parents have about corporate influence in
K-12 public school curricula is magnified enormously due to the entrance of
Amazon into the equation.
The “centerpiece”
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of Virginia’s successful effort to lure Amazon to build a new headquarters in
the state, according to state-based news outlets
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and state-issued reports
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, was a commitment to more than double Virginia’s tech-talent pipeline,
beginning in K-12 schools.
“Virginia’s ultimate proposal was centered around an effort to provide
Amazon—or any other tech firm that wanted to come—with all the educated workers
it needed,” according
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/f-how-virginia-won-amazon-hq2-/d7flyx/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
to a report in the Washingtonian, and the state sealed the deal with a pledge
“to plow $1.1 billion into tech schooling.” The state’s commitment to
developing a tech-talent pipeline providing workers for Amazon and other
companies was key to inking the deal, says
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/w-virginia-won-amazon-hq2-html/d7flyz/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
an Amazon spokesperson in the Cincinnati Business Courier.
“We’re being hijacked in Virginia,” Kathryn Flinn explained to me. Flinn is a
20-year resident of Chesterfield and mother of two children, one a
special-needs child, who both have attended Chesterfield County Public Schools.
Flinn strongly considered a CTE track for her special-needs child, but now
maintains that the type of CTE she sees rolling out in Chesterfield and
elsewhere in Virginia “is very different from traditional CTE.”
She noticed that CTE classes in her local schools were changing from an
emphasis on encouraging students to pursue their interests in work-related
skills and knowledge to courses that partnered with specific corporations and
businesses to form “career pathways” that lock students into narrower courses
of study as early as seventh grade.
The change to a more employer-driven curriculum has been especially traumatic
for Sara Ward, another Chesterfield parent I spoke with. When the high school
her son was to have attended became designated a Ford NGL CTE academy, she
noticed a change in his attitude about school and his increased depressed mood.
In middle school, he had been placed in a gifted and talented curriculum with
courses in advanced math two years ahead of his peers. But the Ford NGL-aligned
curriculum at the high school was reorganized into three career paths with “no
way to opt out of them,” she explained.
The focus of the new math offerings, she believed, would be more about applied
math including manufacturing and accounting and not about advanced concepts. “I
want my child to decide how he’s going to use math, not to be told what to do
with math,” she said. Ward pulled her son out of public schools and instead
enrolled him in a private program. It was “not something I ever thought I’d
do,” she said.
These Chesterfield parents, along with local teachers and activists, see their
experiences as linked to not only a statewide but also a national campaign by
big business and tech companies to align school curricula to corporate
workforce training. They point to a February 2019 visit
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by DeVos to a Loudoun County school program, in northern Virginia, where
students take specialty classes in one of three academies focusing on
vocational training. The visit was orchestrated by the Association for Career
and Technical Education, according
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/s-of-loudoun-during-cte-month-/d7flz2/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
to a Loudoun County news outlet, “that celebrates the value and achievements
of nationwide CTE programs.” The Chesterfield folks I spoke with suspect that
many of the forces at work in their local schools are at work in Loudoun and
elsewhere to gear school curricula to corporate agendas.
“We’re not against teaching students career skills” that could eventually help
them find employment, Flinn explained. “We’re against corporations writing the
curriculum.”
“We do want our kids to have technology skills that give them a strong resumé
when they come out of school,” Clark told
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/-5poAeY-feature-youtu-be-t-473/d7flz4/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
her Chesterfield audience, “but there is zero reason that we can’t have
educators writing and creating that curriculum as opposed to corporations.”
A ‘False Promise’ of a Job
“These parents should be concerned,” Kenneth Saltman told me in a phone call.
Saltman, a professor of educational leadership at the University of
Massachusetts-Dartmouth, has written extensively about school reform, business
interests in education, and education politics.
“A narrow focus on teaching skills really misses the boat on developing
abilities that will matter to people in the future,” Saltman said. “We don’t
really know what the jobs of the future will be, so schools should be focused
on developing students’ capacity to think, question, and theorize in new
contexts related to their learning about the self and society. These goals will
be gutted out by a narrow skills-based agenda.”
Saltman argues that teaching students the more traditional, abstract skills “is
not really at odds with ensuring students can become fully functioning in the
economy. In many ways, a technical and skills-based curriculum will undermine
students’ future economic capacity.”
Research on the long-term impact of CTE on students has found a mixed bag at
best. A 2018 study of Massachusetts’ CTE program found
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/doi-full-10-1162-EDFP-a-00224/d7flz6/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
“participation in a high-quality CTE program boosts the probability of
on-time graduation from high school by 7 to 10 percentage points for higher
income students, and suggestively larger effects for their lower-income peers.”
Another study
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/out-and-College-Going-Behavior/d7flz8/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
from 2017 found
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/-chances-going-to-college-html/d7flzb/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
“taking career and technical education classes in high school increases
students’ odds of graduating on time, but doesn’t improve their chances of
enrolling in college,” according to a report in Education Week.
Matt Barnum, a reporter with Chalkbeat, analyzed a 2017 European study
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/t2yj5g6/d7flzd/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
on the impact of CTE and found
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/oints-to-a-potential-downside-/d7flzg/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
“a significant downside of such programs: students may benefit early in their
careers, but are harmed later in life as the economy changes and they lack the
general skills necessary to adapt.”
Research on the long-term impacts of students concentrating in STEM, the
favored focus of the CTE fad, has found equally uneven results.
In 2016, in testimony given to a U.S. Senate subcommittee meeting on the
proposed expansion of guest worker programs, Economic Policy Institute
associate and Rutgers University professor Hal Salzman explained
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/rams-and-the-stem-workforce-2-/d7flzj/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
that colleges and universities in the U.S. “graduate twice the number of STEM
graduates as find a job each year.” About two-thirds of STEM degree graduates
end up employed in jobs that don’t require STEM degrees, he added.
In the tech industry in particular, which figures most prominently in
Virginia’s CTE plans, only about a third of the workers in the sector have STEM
degrees, Salzman stated. And tech worker salaries have been flat for decades,
which would seem to intuitively indicate an oversupply of workers, not the
opposite.
“Very little evidence is consistent with the complaints about a skills
shortage,” a 2015 study of the so-called skills gap concluded
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/i-abs-10-1177-0019793914564961/d7flzl/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
, “and a wide range of evidence suggests the complaints are not warranted.”
Instead, employer demands for workforce training are often based on the
employers’ perceived notions about the availability of qualified employees and
the willingness of employers to invest in training and lower their hiring
requirements, observed
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/s-gap-modestino-shoag-ballance/d7flzn/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
economics reporter Matthew Yglesias in an article for Vox. To reach this
conclusion, Yglesias pointed to a paper by Alicia Sasser Modestino, Daniel
Shoag, and Joshua Ballance presented at a 2019 American Economic Association
conference
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/nference-2019-preliminary-1021/d7flzq/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
that found that during periods of high unemployment, employers made job
descriptions “more stringent,” and when unemployment rates went down, hiring
requirements became “more relaxed.”
In my conversation with Kenneth Saltman, he contended that students led to
believe that business-branded CTE courses guarantee future employment with the
business are really buying into a “false promise, or at least a careful hedging
of a promise. The real promise is maybe someday [you] will get a job.”
Clearly, students need multiple opportunities to learn as much as they can. But
that assumes no single entity can actually own the curriculum, and decisions
about what’s best for students to learn should not be based on the
self-interests of those who have something to gain by controlling the system.
Virginia appears to be dangerously headed in the direction of changing that.
To learn more about school privatization, check out Who Controls Our Schools?
The Privatization of American Public Education
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ation-destroying-democracy-and/d7flzs/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
, a free ebook published by the Independent Media Institute.
Click here to read a selection
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/ation-destroying-democracy-and/d7flzs/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
of Who Controls Our Schools? published on AlterNet, or here to access the
complete text
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/-our-schools-pdf-ebook-1-1-pdf/d7flzv/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
.
Jeff Bryant is a writing fellow and chief correspondent for Our Schools
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/our-schools-/d7flx6/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He is a communications
consultant, freelance writer, advocacy journalist, and director of the
Education Opportunity Network, a strategy and messaging center for progressive
education policy. His award-winning commentary and reporting routinely appear
in prominent online news outlets, and he speaks frequently at national events
about public education policy. Follow him on Twitter @jeffbcdm
<https://go.ind.media/e/546932/jeffbcdm/d7flzx/555335943?h=PwL9wpqM_N2hJZw_f8yZd1oYXkSLOGYm6H9E70Y2CPo>
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