From Diane Ravitch's bolg... On a Gates Foundation website, seeking to persuade businesses how much America needs the Common Core–even though it has never been field-tested to gauge its real-world consequences–Alan Golston wrote this execrable sentence: “Businesses are the primary consumers of the output of our schools, so it’s a natural alliance.”
Peter Greene almost jumps through the page–or, the Internet–shouting NO! He writes:
“Output of our schools. Students are not output. They are not throughput. They are not toasters on an assembly line. They are not a manufactured product, and a school is not a factory. In fact, a school does not create “output” at all. Talking about the “output” of a school is like talking about the “output” of a hospital or a counseling center or a summer camp or a marriage. When talking about interactions between live carbon-based life forms (as in “That girl you’ve been dating is cute, but how’s the output of the relationship?”), talking about output is generally not a good thing. Primary consumers. Here’s another thing that students are not– students are not consumer goods. Businesses do not purchase them and then use them until they are discarded or replaced. Students are not a good whose value is measured strictly in its utility to the business that purchased it.”
They don't walk, talk or think like educators, yet they are foisting their unsophisticated, uninformed and misguided education policies on the entire country, not because they are wise, but because they can. See here.
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