District Administration - April 2008 - (Page 28)

CORPORATIONS & SCHOOL POLICIES mining how their districts can beneﬁt from corporate involvement while avoiding problematic relationships that only beneﬁt the corporation. “When I talk to business groups, my focus is on the beneﬁts for the business—here’s why you need to be involved and how the partnership impacts educational achievement,” says Jay Engeln, resident practitioner of school-business partnerships for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. For educators, however, “the mission of your school must be ﬁrst and foremost at all times, and the businesses are partners with the school in achieving that mission.” is its top social priority and a strategic business investment. IBM can succeed only if it has successful employees and successful customers in successful communities, says Robin Willner, IBM’s vice president of Global Community Initiatives. The challenge, she says, is creating both programs that fulﬁll what students will need in order to be prepared for a diﬀerent world in 20 years, and narrower programs that deal with today’s unmet needs. IBM’s Reinventing Education initiative awarded $75 million in grants between 1994 and 2004, and many of the partnerships continue. In a 2004 evaluation, the Center for Children & Technology estimated that over 90,000 teachers and millions of students used the educational technology tools created through the program. IBM also recruited and paid the salaries of full-time IBM employees from its research laboratories and consulting organizations to work with educators Students at Ravenswood City School District in California beneﬁt from a partnership with HP. IBM Science- and technology-oriented companies take their educational mission seriously and have invested millions of dollars in projects through philanthropic foundations. IBM says improving public schools in classrooms. Coming early in the Internet age, Reinventing Education focused on helping schools adapt to the World Wide Web. Today, IBM’s K12 education initiatives have a diﬀerent ﬂavor. Reading Companion is a Web-based program that uses voice recognition technology to help ALTERNATE OPINION Emery and Ohanian Slow Takeover An excerpt from Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian’s book, Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? WHEN TED KENNEDY AND GEORGE BUSH AGREE on something, we’d better worry about who the man behind the curtain is. Research that started with Kathy [Emery’s] dissertation and extended to the writing of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? (Heinemann) shows that the men behind the curtain are the members of the Business Roundtable (BRT). No Child Left Behind represents only the latest manifestation of a bipartisan bandwagon of standards based advocates— a bandwagon built in the summer of 1989 by the top 300 CEOs in our country. At this meeting, the BRT CEOs agreed that each state legislature needed to adopt legislation that would impose “outcome-based education,” “high expectations for all children,” “rewards and penalties for individual schools,” “greater school-based decision making” and align staﬀ development with these action items. By 1995, the Business Roundtable had reﬁned their agenda to “nine essential components,” the ﬁrst four being state standards, state tests, sanctions and the transformation of teacher education programs. By 2000, our leading CEOs had managed to create an interlocking network of business ng ll ls associations, corporate foundations, governor’s associations, non-proﬁts and educational instituKathy Emer y and Susa tions that had successfully n Ohanian “An extrao rdinary boo k.” —J persuaded 16 state legislatures to adopt the ﬁrst three components of their high stakes testing agenda. This network includes the Education Trust, Annenberg Center, Harvard Graduate School, Public Agenda, Achieve, Inc., Education Commission of the States, the Broad Foundation, Institute for Educational Leadership, federally funded regionally laboratories and most newspaper editorial boards. The editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal often entreat schools to be more like business. At least since 1999, when Education Trust began peppering the pages of its publication Thinking K-16 with references to Standardista school superintendents as CEOs, the national push to align school reform in a corporate model has been out in the open. From the hand-holding embraces at the 1989 corporateOur Public Schools? ONAT HA N KO ZO L bulk .517" (9/16 ") ti Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? Why Is Co rporate Am erica Bashi ng 28 April 2008 District Administration

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - April 2008

District Administration - April 2008
Contents
Editor’s Letter
Letters
News Update
Technology
Facilities & Construction
Curriculum
Inside the Law
District Profile
Administrator Profile
Profit and Loss in School-Business Partnerships
The Broad Way
Big Macs for Big Grades
Hometown Success
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
Speaking Out
Crisis Response
New Products
Problem/Solution
Computer Literature
Research Center
Calendar of Events
Products Showcase
Understanding the Times

District Administration - April 2008