The billions of ready cash from No Child
Left Behind provided a dollar-powered incubator
for the birth of the modern day education industry. State and local education agencies in search
of quick solutions to meet NCLB’s impossible demands desperately turned to
business solutions, ranging from direct instruction products to more expansive plans
for corporatization of schools and school governance. NCLB’s focused control mechanism built on collection
of test data and a primitive fear-based accountability provided a model for
expansion of the education industry into higher education.
When combined with the ideological
incentives to gain control of unions, re-position the teaching profession within
corporate boundaries, and establish total social control over poor and minority
populations, the profit possibilities triggered by NCLB gained traction like
never before in American education.
With $700 billion at stake each year in
education spending, schooling has become big, big business, a fact that has made
corporate control at the federal and state levels paramount in order to keep
the revenue streams running. Among the
most well-positioned and fattest parasites among a new consultant species is
the Parthenon Group. Rob Lytle heads its
“Education Practice,” which is strategically burrowed into a corporate
governing bureaucracy that advises large swaths of K-22 educational
institutions, both public and private.
What makes Parthenon’s position most
interesting, however, is the fact that Lytle and the jackals under his watch
take the information gleaned from advising schools and colleges in how to
establish new techno-efficiencies to then create flashy powerpoints to share
with hedge fund gangsters, ed industry profiteers, and venture philanthropists
looking to steer public policy while collecting huge tax breaks to do so.
Here is what Lytle told a group of
investors in Manhattan in 2012 about the coming bonanza from Common Core:
Think about the upcoming rollout of new national academic standards
for public schools. . . . If they’re as rigorous as advertised, a huge number
of
schools will
suddenly look
really bad, their
students testing
way behind in reading and math. They’ll want help, quick. And private, for-profit
vendors selling lesson plans, educational software and student assessments
will be right
there to provide it. . . You start to see entire ecosystems of investment opportunity lining up. It could get really, really big.
In
2009, Lytle declared in another powerpoint aimed at higher ed investors looking
to make a killing in the online business that “all students are not equal—some are more profitable than others.”
And
just yesterday, Lytle was in DC at the Education Industry Days Summit with
another powerpoint, “Parthenon Perspectives: What is Next in K-12 - Digital is
Coming!”
How do we
know “digital is coming?” Because Lytle has
been manufacturing opinion that says so.
Here is his slide to prove that "district decision makers" prefer technology over decreasing class size:
No doubt Lytle has another presentation that he uses with school officials that says that "increased technology use" has been shown in research studies by the Gates Foundation to be cost effective in raising scores than lowering class size.
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