The not-so-hidden agenda behind "school to work"
Should kids go to school to get a job - or an education?
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, May, 1997

If you listen closely to the debates now raging in Kentucky over education issues, you will notice a not-so-subtle shift in the emphasis of reform efforts. Even if you don’t listen carefully, it’s hard to miss.

When KERA was passed in 1990, the debate was largely over how to better educate children. In the years since the law was passed, there has been a healthy discussion about whether KERA was the right solution to the problem.

Since the passage of the reform law, however, new assumptions have crept into discussions about education policy - assumptions that could completely change the role of schools in Kentucky and which could completely alter the futures of Kentucky children.

The old assumption was that children were to go to school to be educated; in other words, to have their minds improved. The new assumption is quite different. The new assumption is that school is not for improving the minds of children. School, it is now maintained, is for improving the future ability of children to get jobs.

The new assumption about what school is for - job preparation, is much narrower than the old assumption - preparation for life. Schools, under the old way of thinking, were to improve the lives of children.  Under the new way of thinking, schools are for improving the future incomes of children.

Improving people’s lives includes the inculcation of skills necessary for jobs, but involves much more than that. The new view, however, focuses the school’s attention much more narrowly on vocationalism.

Although these distinctions may be a little too philosophical for some parents to readily grasp, they will become all too clear when they find out that among the things that are much lower on the new list of priorities is college preparation.

Why is vocationalism now displacing the academic mission of schools? The answer to that question can be seen in the new view of who schools serve. Most people would say that schools serve, first, the parents who send their children there, and secondly, the taxpayers who pay for them.

Under the new vocationalism, however, schools exist to serve business. This is the view, for example, of Bill Bishop, the Associate Editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader, who is a leading proponent of what is called “School-to-Work.”

Bishop and other advocates of this view of education see schools in the larger context of social efficiency. They are, as Bob Holland, editorials editor for the Richmond Times-Dispatch says, the “systemic change people” - people who believe that our society (particularly the economy) is not “efficient” in many ways, and that the way to resolve this problem is to harness schools to accomplish the goals and objectives of those in government and big business who have the best idea of how to bring about an efficient society.

Critics of this new emphasis on social and economic efficiency, however, point out that, in order to bring it about, the freedom of individuals to choose their place in the society in general, and in the economy in particular, must be subordinated to the interests of those who are responsible for organizing it. The interests of the individual must take a back seat to the interests of the national economy as determined by an elite group made up of government economic planners and big business.

New programs now being implemented in schools, such as the Certificate of Initial Mastery (CIM), a part of the larger School-to-Work program, are examples of how state officials are implementing this agenda in schools. Critics fear that the CIM’s will eventually be used not as a certificate for businesses to use to determine the work-readiness of high school graduates, but as a sort of “Green Card” that must be obtained before a person can get a job or an employer can hire any individual.

The growing debate about School-to-Work pits conservative organizations fearful of liberal ideas about centralized economic planning against national foundations and government bureaucrats who are pushing it. But it is parents and taxpayers who will ultimately decide the outcome.
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst