Jersey Jazzman: Corporate Education Reform Gets a Stranglehold On the Media

Jersey Jazzman: Corporate Education Reform Gets a Stranglehold On the Media:

Corporate Education Reform Gets a Stranglehold On the Media

Fortune magazine as a big, new article about the Common Core State Standards out this week. I first got wind of it from Julie Borst, who was as stunned as I was at the hubris of this quote from Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson:

“I’m not sure public schools understand that we’re their customer—that we, the business community, are your customer,” said Tillerson during the panel discussion. “What they don’t understand is they are producing a product at the end of that high school graduation.” 

The Exxon CEO didn’t hesitate to extend his analogy. “Now is that product in a form that we, the customer, can use it? Or is it defective, and we’re not interested?” American schools, Tillerson declared, “have got to step up the performance level—or they’re basically turning out defective products that have no future. Unfortunately, the defective products are human beings. So it’s really serious. It’s tragic. But that’s where we find ourselves today.” [emphasis mine]

You read that right, folks: Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson thinks students are "products" that he gets to "consume." Any idea that the American education system might have a purpose other than producing human "products" for corporations is not even worth considering.

This is the sort of thinking that leads corporations like Exxon to have such regressive records on things like LGBT rights and workplace safety and climate change and environmental protections. It's the sort of thinking that justifies insanely low taxes on those same corporations. It's the sort of thinking that rationalizes salaries for their CEOs that are - See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2015/12/corporate-education-reform-gets.html#sthash.UOKlRTxQ.dpuf