Among educators, one often hears objections to “corporate education reform,” the implicit point of which, if I understand correctly, is that efforts to revamp public education by facilitating the rise of specialized instructional providers, encouraging cost-consciousness on the part of parents and students, and increasing the number of schooling options represent an effort to enrich for-profit firms. Traditional public schools, in contrast, are presented as paragons of non-market civic virtues. The irony of this stance is that today’s traditional public schools represent the cutting-edge business mantras of the early 1900s, as Rick Hess argues in The Same Thing Over and Over.
And so I was delighted to see this post at the blog Sunday Magazine, which draws on the archives from The New York Times Sunday Magazine. The following headline is from June 11, 1911:
THERE IS TOO MUCH WASTE IN OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM: Business Principles of Factories Should Be Applied to It, Says Leonard P. Ayres, of the Sage Foundation. We Don’t Demand Definite Results and Don’t Know What We’re Aiming At.
One could react to this in many ways, two of which leap to mind:
(1) Ah, today’s corporate education reformers are recapitulating the errors of an earlier era!
(2) The business principles of factories were applied to our educational system soon after this article appeared, and the system that resulted was pretty successful for a pretty long time. But now the business principles of factories are being used to prepare students for a markedly different economic environment. Meanwhile, our political system has grown so calcified, and public employees have grown so powerful, that while “corporate educational reformers” of the 1910s succeeded in pushing systemic change, today’s “corporate education reformers” have for the most partfailed in applying the business principles of digital organizations to the educational system.