Students as Commodities

Abstract

A STORY I find useful for all sorts of situations has to do with placing a frog in cold water and gradually warming the water. The frog is lulled into permanent -- and fatal -- complacency before it winds up on the dinner table. The chance to jump out is gone before the frog realizes it. Despite belated protests to the contrary, public education seems to be in the midst of a step-by-step movement toward economist Milton Friedman's idea of salvation by competition. The move is very much one of semantics. It can be seen in the words we use to describe our values and our goals, and the words are changing. I sometimes wonder if it started, innocently enough, with the title of one of the seminal books on education written during the mid-1980s: The Shopping Mall High School: Winners and Losers in the Educational Marketplace. The authors, Arthur Powell, David Cohen, and the late Eleanor Farrar, surely did not intend to set off a debate that would incorporate themes about vouchers and the marketplace, but they exposed the realities of the comprehensive high school. It had lost its center, it played to the extremes, and it was breaking up into an array of different accommodations that were made in an effort to keep students in school. Several recent events serve to remind us of just how thoroughly schools and students are now seen as servants of the marketplace. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, recently settled with companies that have been collecting detailed personal information from students as young as 10 years old, presumably to be used for educational purposes but actually to other companies that want to market to the children. The companies had amassed information on millions of children. Or take another example: high school students are spending $2,000 or more to hire sports-recruiting firms to get their applications and video clips to the most promising college athletic programs. This industry matches or bests that of the private consultants who are paid to get students with academic skills into top colleges or to get students who still lack skills into any kind of college. For a long time, schools, parents, and commercial enterprises have been arguing about the issue of giving businesses access to students -- from providing classroom resources, to offering sodas and junk food, to advertising at football stadiums and on school buses. All the objections to these commercial intrusions into schooling faced a tough road until recent studies exposed the problem of obesity in children. At least that might boot the soda and candy machines out of school cafeterias. However, children often do not have role models to show them how to avoid being commercialized. National education organizations, for example, have always depended on private enterprises, especially those seeking contracts with schools, to fund the extras at their meetings. Having just returned from a major education conference, I was struck by how much was now being sponsored or sold -- major speeches, receptions, awards, and entertainment. The imbibing might not be as intoxicating, but the feeling would be more in keeping with the purpose if Ms. Jones' third-grade class brought lemonade and cookies for these adult parties. The latest annual study of for-profit education management companies by the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University gives a glimpse of what's happening in the marketplace. Private investors and entrepreneurs who look at the $300-billion K-12 education sector must be rubbing their hands with pleasure and anticipation. …