The failure of corporate school reform: Toward a new common school movement

12-07-2011

Op-Ed b Kenneth J. Saltman/Truthout

Kenneth J. Saltman is professor of educational policy studies and research at DePaul University in Chicago

In the United States, a corporate model of schooling has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum and nearly all aspects of educational reform. While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). (more...)

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