Educators’ Misgivings About Corporate Involvement
While school-reform efforts initiated by corporations generally are instituted with the best intentions, some critics have concerns about the role of business in school reform.
Three Major Concerns
1. Lack of Accountability to the Public
Despite their call for school accountability, corporate advocates for school reform are not themselves accountable to the public, according to Mickelson (1999): "Because corporations are private entities, there is no legal imperative for public disclosure of goals, processes, and resources."
Mickelson cited a Charlotte, North Carolina, reform initiative that was announced to the public only after its terms had been shaped by corporate leaders:
Once citizens in Charlotte scrutinized the proposed Education Village, they found that what appeared to be a tidy integration of work, school, and family was a reform initiative shaped to a considerable degree by the strategic interests of a handful of private firms. (Mickelson 1999)
2. Lack of Systematic Evaluation
While many corporate advocates of school reform promote corporate grants and partnerships with schools, few systematic evaluations have been conducted to determine the educational value of these activities.
According to the U.S. General Accounting Office, no central data source tracks the value of corporate contributions to precollege education. As for school-business partnerships, Mickelson (1999) observed: "There are few if any systematic evaluations of these programs," and therefore, "very little reliable evidence that these, in fact, lead to positive outcomes for students."
3. Diversion of Public Attention from Larger Problems
A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, the U.S. Department of Education’s seminal report, suggested that a significant source of the problem with schools lay in the multitude of often conflicting demands placed on educators who were routinely called on to solve "personal, social, and political problems that the home and other institutions either will not or cannot resolve" (U. S. Department of Education 1983).
The report warned, "We must understand that these demands on our schools and colleges often exact an educational cost as well as a financial one." Nevertheless, the report called on schools to help solve industry’s problems, suggesting that the economic crisis was attributable to the failings of schools and calling for greater accountability and higher standards.
Bonsting (2001) questioned the link between the economic decline of the 1980s and the next generation’s mediocrity in school: "Never mind that the implied cause of our country’s poor economic and industrial health in the early 1980s was pinned on the educational failure of people who were only kids during the economic decline."
Reforming Schools While Cutting School Taxes
In his presidential address to the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society in 1999, Deron Boyles raised "the basic question regarding why schools are faced with shortages in funds for the very computers grocery chains are supplying in the first place" (Boyles 1999).
Boyles questioned the consistency of corporate leaders who advocate for school reform but oppose paying school taxes. He cited Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools: "City and state business associations, in Chicago as in many other cities, have lobbied for years against tax increments to finance education of low-income children" (Kozol 1991, quoted by Boyles).
From the standpoint of education, advocating for schools while opposing the payment of taxes that will be used to financially support these schools might appear contradictory. However, from the standpoint of corporate interests, this strategy makes good business sense. Boyles noted that as charitable donors, corporations receive tax incentives, a beneficent public image, and the ability to influence the curriculum and purpose of schools to meet their own needs:
Corporations would rather "donate" computers than pay taxes because "donations" can be curtailed. Corporations benefit doubly. They enjoy tax breaks for locating in their respective municipalities and, with only some of the money they would pay in taxes, cast themselves as beneficent charities and responsible members of the community. In so doing, corporate interests are able to leverage the curriculum as well as the general purposes of schooling by reinforcing the community belief that schools exist to prepare future workers. (Boyles 1999)
Equating Education with Work-Force Preparation
Boyles raised concerns over corporate school-reform efforts that assume the main purpose of schools is to prepare students for jobs and, reciprocally, to supply companies with workers who meet the companies’ skill specifications. One of the problems "with schools as sites for corporate influence is that it reinforces the assumption that schools primarily exist for workforce preparation" (Boyles 1999).
Boyles called attention to what constitutes an education, over and above work-force skills training. An emphasis on training-oriented schooling over "education-oriented schooling… risks undermining the potential for democratic citizenship" (Boyles 1999).
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