As Kathy Emery and I show in Why is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? (2004), by the time Congress passed the No Child Left Behind Act, the infrastructure for corporatizing schools was firmly in place. From the National Education Goals Summit in 1989, where America 2000 was ironed out, through the No Child Left Behind Act, corporate chiefs and their allies have worked to end kindergarten as we know it, to deny children's diversity in every grade, and to install a rigid system of tests and measures that will force a national curriculum onto the schools. Once that curriculum is in place, politicians can claim that every student has an equal opportunity to become a global worker. The mantra of marketplace education is "Algebra for elimination." When students fail, members of the ruling elite can send them to their rightful place on the minimum-wage dunghill with admonition, "Well, we gave you an equal opportunity to meet the gals." And the outlook is not any better for those who conquer algebra, calculus, and other things that go bump in the night. In The Shell Game, education analyst Clinton Boutwell (1997) argues that Corporados have deliberately sought world-class education in order to lower the wages of high-tech workers--with the result being a lot of highly qualified people competing for the same job--and desperate enough to take whatever is offered. A look at the U. S. Bureau of labor Statistics job projections shows that new jobs over the next 10 to 15 years are in the service industry, not in fields requiring a college degree. Larry Cuban, for one, says that "the myth of better schools as the engine for a leaner, strong economy was a scam from the very beginning" (Cuban, 1994).
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