Education, Inc.: Turning Learning Into a Business

Radical Teacher, Summer, 2004 by Sutton Stokes

EDUCATION, INC.: TURNING LEARNING INTO A BUSINESS (REVISED EDITION)

Edited by Alfie Kohn and Patrick Shannon. Heinemann, 2002.

We've all seen the signs of the growing corporate presence in our public schools. A glowing Coca-Cola vending machine in the lunchroom. Billboards on the school buses. A banner above the office door: "School is your first job." Compulsory viewing of commercial television.

At the same time, more and more teachers must spend a substantial amount of their time prospecting for grant funds from private companies. Then there are the national organizations of CEO's like Business Roundtable, the Committee for Economic Development, the National Association of Manufacturers, and others that relentlessly promote the idea that schools can be compared to businesses, and should be run accordingly.

For that matter, in addition to be being run like a business, some of your local, "public" schools may even be run by a business, with names like Edison or Tesseract.

In short, the ideas, principles, and even the for-profit activities of massive corporations are flooding into our nation's schools, and the question of whether or not big business should have a role in education is no longer an abstract consideration. Big business is in the schoolhouse, and the question now is: should it be allowed to stay? Absolutely not, says education writer and former teacher Alfie Kohn, in his introduction to Education, Inc: Turning Learning into a Business, a collection of articles edited by Kohn and Penn State education professor Patrick Shannon. Distinctly unapologetic for the fact that--as Kohn puts it--"this book makes no pretence of offering a 'balanced' treatment of its subject," Kohn describes the articles he and Shannon have assembled as a "tiny counterweight to the overwhelming (and under-challenged) corporate point of view that surrounds us."

The collection's contributors are a mix of independent education observers, mainstream reporters, and academics specializing in the intersection of business and education. The articles are all reprints, and most were first published in the years 1999-2002, with a few older chestnuts thrown in. If you're a regular reader of The Nation, national op-ed pages, The New York Times, Rethinking Schools, or The American Prospect, there's a good chance you've seen a few of these pieces before, but a collection like this at least means you've got them close to hand, and don't need to troll through endless Google searches trying to locate that great article on "shoe schools" you remember reading last year.

It's disappointing, in a way, that the book is limited to just sixteen articles, although this is more a symptom of the current state of public discourse on this subject than it is a failing on the part of Kohn or Shannon. Also, in his own writing, Kohn has made something of a trademark of moderate-length, approachable, and affordable texts, which at least makes it possible for overworked educators to try to make time for them.

For all its brevity, the book offers a diverse assortment of eloquent commentary on everything from school vouchers to Channel One to the marketing of testing and test prep materials. Education professors will find it a useful source of readings for pre-service teachers; the book would also be a valuable purchase for school professional development libraries.

Despite Kohn's disclaimer that the book takes an anti-business tone, the collected articles are no mere polemics. Researchers Kenneth Howe, Margaret Eisenhart, and Damian Betebenner report the disquieting findings of their 2002 study of the effects of public school vouchers in a Colorado school district. New York Times business columnist Constance Hays parses

a 2000 Government Accounting Office report criticizing commercialism in schools. Alex Molnar and Joseph Reaves, education professors with Arizona State's Commercialism in Education Research Unit, sketch out the current dimensions of private business's involvement with public schools, with brief summaries of naming rights/sponsorship activities, incentive programs, fund-raising programs, and so on. Like most of the articles in this collection, these are even-handed, thoughtful accounts that cannot simply be dismissed as ax grinding.

One standout piece is the reprint of freelance writer Stephen Metcalf's "Reading Between the Lines," which outlines the astoundingly complicated and long-standing connections between the Bush family and the family at the helm of education publishing behemoth McGraw-Hill, and the resulting influence McGraw-Hill has had on US education policy. Dictionary definitions of "conflict of interest" should cite Metcalf's article.

It's always a pleasure to read media journalist Russ Baker's sparkling prose, and he puts his craft to good work in a devastating critique of Channel One and its new parent company, "pornography purveyors" About.com. Also of note is educator and researcher Sara Freedman's thoughtful examination of the widening phenomenon of grant-seeking public school teachers. University-level education observers may overlook some of the negative aspects of this development, since grant seeking is such an integral part of the post-secondary world. Also, grants from non-school system sources may sometimes be the only means teachers have of implementing some of the methods or philosophies they studied in their pre-service training. But, as Freedman points out, the grant system tends to reward the most business-friendly teachers, with obvious implications for the nature of their instruction and the reinforcement of class, gender, and ethnic divisions.