The doors are open.....

The Superintendent of Buffalo Schools, Kriner Cash, publicly announced a back door takeover of 8 schools in the Buffalo News today. It sounds very positive to those concerned about the quality of education that students are receiving, but in reality, it amounts to a public funding of corporate control over 8 schools – with the eventual intent of the graduates of those schools working for the corporation in question.

The schools? Arthur O'Eve Elementary, Bennett, East High School, Lafayette, Riverside, South Park, and two new high schools – Montessori and the Research Lab of Life Science and Informatics.

How would these schools be transformed? The curriculum would be geared towards the “sponsoring” institution's economic needs. What does Solar City need in a worker? The paired up school, in this case South Park, would have its curriculum geared towards the science classes needed for the manufacture and installation of solar electricity. The claim is that it would be only a small part of the school. It's actually a foot in the door. And we all know what happens when a salesperson gets a foot in your door. Soon he's in the living room pawning his wares.

While this sounds good in theory, it reminds me of the OP-ED a few weeks ago where the writer spouted off about how college students need to sign deals with corporations, where the corporation pays for the student's college costs and, in return, the student works for the corporation for a given number of years as a glorified indentured servant. Same thing would happen here, only at the high school level.

And the taxpayers get to foot the bill.

While this does sound very similar to various vocational education programs, the insidious part of it is that a specific company, or series of companies in the bio-medical corridor that is opening up, will have a controlling voice in what is taught in the school.

In my graduate work in education, I had to take a class on educational philosophy. One short reflective essay that I wrote told of what I thought education was supposed to be about.

In Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas I stated that I believed education was about teaching students how to learn. Not what, but how. Give them those tools, and the world is theirs. They will have the ability to walk out of “Plato's cave” and potentially free themselves from the chains that bind them.

This new arrangement that is being proposed is creating a highly specialized proletariat that will only be able to work in one specific area. And when that area goes bust, like all areas do, what then for those workers?

Education is supposed to be about freeing the minds from its chains.

The new career training plan that is being proposed is about making them tighter.

And Kriner Cash is holding the door wide open for the snake oil salesmen to come in.