Students should unionize to protect themselves from the constant onslaught of business imperatives in the classroom. Seriously. The latest boardroom scheme is a sincere but misguided attempt to pay low achievers among Atlanta's urban poor a miserly $8 per hour for studying.

The "Learn and Earn" after-school program, funded by Charles Loudermilk, the CEO of Aaron Rents, and directed through a nonprofit founded by Jackie Cushman, the daughter of Newt Gingrich, is a short-term, top-down initiative that aims to help students get better grades and test scores in math and science.

Their idea is to inspire academic motivation and curb dropping-out by using extrinsic rewards —- a curious notion that paying someone to learn now will somehow be internalized continuously over time when the funding stops. Whatever its intentions, "Learn and Earn" serves not to build up a marginalized subgroup of kids but to hold them down, to reinforce their roles as members of the servant class in the new economy.

One way of reading school failure in business terms is to consider that learning is an individualized project, a personal and emotional investment in the self. This line of thinking demands that young people in poverty jettison inadequate parents and embrace outsiders' help to manage the risks of upward mobility and craft promising life trajectories.

Children from upper-income families already have learned how to make the right choices; they embody the entrepreneurial values of self-reliance and responsibility so important in the highly competitive global marketplace. We admire how groomed and suited they are for success, easily transitioning into planned educational and employment pathways.

We do not consider the ensemble of personalized support propping up these kids: demanding, monied, educated family members, relatives, teachers, tutors, coaches and counselors, therapists and doctors. Neither do we know about the contacts developed and doors opened from time spent at pedigreed programs in selective schools and colleges. We will be sold on their manicured image as workplace-ready, savvy knowledge workers. They'll have few troubles landing a salaried job.

Educational reform in metro Atlanta is infused with class privilege and social advantage, although few will admit to elitism. Under the banner of choice, a variety of boutique charters cream off-the-top achievers through niche markets that attract aspiring parents hoping to remove their children from the stigma of those public schools.

Select diploma programs further segregate suburban from urban students by positioning wealthier districts for early college credit through Advanced Placement and the International Baccalaureate, among other leading college-prep offerings. Even vocational education has a higher-status track of employer-linked career academies.

Educational leaders have strayed far from their historic role in shaping ethical citizens who thereby serve the public trust, ensuring democratic practice in the affairs of state. Corporate and civic leaders use the schools to inculcate free-market values of individuality over community, privatized self-interests over the collective good.

Free-market capitalists do not acknowledge class-based injustice for fear of empowering those who suffer from that injustice.

That is why power brokers deeply resent unions in particular and the rank and file who engender what is considered dangerous familylike interest over mutual cares and related concerns. Yet the working class is not invisible and certainly not fading into the sunset anytime soon.

Corporate deindustrialization and outsourcing practices have devastated our communities and deprived thousands of Americans of a livable wage. Juggling a number of low-paying jobs, the working poor are just too busy and tired to attend school-related functions and academic events.

Capitalist chieftains could redirect their largesse toward humanizing the workplace instead and implement a work-leave policy that unites parents with children and teachers. That would arouse genuine hopefulness among our underserved youth —- more so than the false promises of study for pay.

> Richard D. Lakes is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

 JON KRAUSE / NewsArt