Corporate education - News for Educational Workers - Brief Article

With the growth of testing and standardized high school curricula, foundations and corporations will offer an even greater "free-market" bias to students. High school economics courses were first introduced into the schools in the 1970s and 1980s, and corporations and non-profit organizations often worked together to provide supplementary readings, classroom activities, and most recently, websites. Organizations like Junior Achievement claim to reach four million students every year with its "free enterprise message of hope and opportunity." The Foundation for Teaching Economics (FTE) joined Junior Achievement in 1975 offering one-sided, pro-market messages to students and teachers. The National Council on Economic Education (NCEE) has become the largest provider of economics curriculum materials for K-12. In 1994, after Congress mandated economics as one of the nine core subjects for which national standards should be developed, the U.S. Department of Education designated NCEE, with the assistance of FTE, to produce the Voluntary Content Standards, a list of 20 standards and accompanying teaching strategies guaranteed to provide an increasingly one-sided indoctrination in a "free market" ideology. (Dollars and Sense, May/June 2002)

For a critique of Christopher Whittle's Channel One, and its metamorphosis into the Edison Schools, see the Boston Globe, June 14, 2002. For a history of Edison and its recent plunge in the stock market (from $38 a share to $1 a share), see Corp Watch, June 20, 2002. "Edison's economic troubles raise renewed questions about the wisdom of turning public schools over to for-profit corporations--and could pose a major setback for the school privarization movement." (www.corpwatch.org)

A federal advisory board recently reported that a shortfall in federal and state grants, along with rising tuition charges, would keep more than 400,000 qualified high school students from attending and 170,000 college students from returning to college in the fall of 2002. (Boston Globe, June 27, 2002)