Learn4Life is the latest effort in corporate America’s exploitation of public schools and their students. The problem is, at root, the arrogance of assumption.
Consider three central problems with Learn4Life (not counting the idiotic use OF a number for an actual word in what is purported to be an education initiative): 1) monumental lack of expertise; 2) specious motives; and 3) mythological purpose of education.
Firstly, the chamber of commerce is not a Chamber of Educational Theory and Practice. It is a group of business people whose only expertise in education is that they have attended school. Can we imagine a council of teachers writing up a manifesto to help retailers and the broader economy?
The chamber’s goal is to use their monetary influence to exploit public schools to meet their private interests. This is not about students; this is about future workers and corporate profits. Invoke terminology like “community” and “partnerships” and everybody nods in agreement without considering the dramatic downside of such private influences on the public sphere. In colluding with the Atlanta Regional Commission, the chamber simply leverages corporate clout over elected officials and the cronies they appoint.
Even the non-profit Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta is awash in hundreds of millions of dollars they use to influence what goes on in schools by way of a formula that has been disastrous for public education: turn to “private partners” to fill the void left by a government that has gutted public schools of over $8 billion dollars since 2002. Get credit for being a “benefactor” or “donor,” just don’t use those dollars to restore critical, recurring (i.e., not temporal or grant) funding to schools. The United Way of Greater Atlanta also panders to the clichés of our time insofar as they tout “preparing kids with the skills they will need for future careers.”
This is probably the most frustrating part of education policy analysis. The mythology about the purpose of public education suffers from the sheer lack of understanding that education is not the same thing as training and that, while jobs are vital, they should be determined by the interests of the students, not by the chamber of commerce, the Atlanta Regional Commission, or any outside lobby.
The problem is that economic rationality has become synonymous with education policy and the message sent to teachers is that they don’t matter, unless they parrot the empty marketing verbiage their superintendents have borrowed from, or been forced to use, by the business community. We should wake up to the fact that educational administrators are really middle managers cut from the corporate cloth. They expect teachers to attend seminars in which they have Learn4Life-type expectations dumped on them again and again. Professional development is, therefore, neither.
We should replace the platitudes with meaningful discourse about the critical role schools play in society and get rid of meddling outsiders who impose arbitrary “benchmarks” and know little to nothing about the messy, difficult work of teaching and learning.
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