Academic Freedom Forum

Challenges of Corporate-Style Education

What Morris and others often ignore when considering the affect of standards on academic freedom, however, is that written standards are only one piece of a larger force brought on through the standards and accountability movement of the last quarter century. In addition to the written state standards, there is also a push in recent decades to standardize the day-to-day processes of teaching and learning that take place in public education at the high school level. Educational scholar Henry Giroux and others have identified that this standardization is modeled on a corporate framework that demands conformity within a strictly hierarchical structure. According to Giroux, “teaching in the corporate model translates educational exchange into financial exchange, critical learning into mastery, and leadership into management” (Henry Giroux, Stealing Innocence: Youth, Corporate Power, and the Politics of Culture, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, 91). This corporate style [of] education can manifest itself in various forms that directly impede academic freedom by stifling teachers’ ability to improvise during the course of a term based upon their interests and motivations in relation to those of students.

Until recently, I was a Social Studies teacher at a suburban high school around Madison, Wisconsin. One of the ways my academic freedom as a high school teacher was limited based upon the corporate model of education purported by the standards and accountability movement was through an innovation called common assessments. Common assessments demand that the various major assessments given to students over the course of a term—mostly exams and projects—are the same, word-for-word, amongst the various teachers of a course. In the high school where I taught, it was required that at least two assessments per semester were common, and one of the two needed to be the final exam that amounted to 15 percent of students’ final semester grade. What is more, this was only a first step, as the 2004-2005 school year was the first in which common assessments were a requirement for all departments at the high school where I taught. The goal, our principal relayed to us, was to eventually have all unit assessments be common, as well.

The rationale behind the initiation of common assessments was so that parents were assured their child was receiving the exact same education no matter which teacher was leading the class. Indeed, I was one of five different teachers teaching the freshmen-level World Studies course and one of four teaching the junior-level United States History course. Common assessments created a neatly pre-packaged, consumer-friendly, quality-controlled education that provided parents and students—our customers—the comfort of knowing they were receiving a standard educational product for the tax dollars they paid.

What common assessments also created were severe limitations on my ability as a teacher and the right of students in the class to dictate the direction of the teaching and learning throughout the course of the term. Since I had an obligation to help prepare students for the common final exam, which was comprehensive in both of the courses I taught, there were few instances during the semester when I felt comfortable deviating from the pre-determined concepts and readings for each unit. At times, it worked out that the direction I and my students wanted to take our class coincided with the predetermined direction of the course as a whole, but on most occasions it did not. Moreover, it was the idea that we could not stray even if justified and desired that was limiting. It did not matter, for instance, that my freshmen took great interest in our lesson on being a Muslim in America during the Islam unit; we had to move on after that one-day lesson because there were other topics that were already determined to be on the final and therefore needed to be covered. Even if I had a voice in the creation of those predetermined unit concepts and readings at the beginning of a semester—which as a first-year teacher I found I mostly did not—there was no way for me to guess which topics would strike a chord between me and the students once the term began. What the students and I were thus denied was the academic freedom to take a critical approach to our own learning and teaching on a daily basis. As Henry Giroux notes, “Corporate education opposes such a critical approach because it cannot be standardized, routinized, and reduced to a prepackaged curriculum; on the contrary, a critical and transformative education practice takes seriously the abilities of teachers to theorize, contextualize, and honor their students’ diverse lives” (Giroux, Stealing Innocence, 91).

To preserve academic freedom in high schools there needs to be a reassessment of the corporate-style educational model and the various manners in which the standards and accountability movement has invaded the day-to-day processes of teaching and learning, in addition to written curriculum. While the goal is not to fashion teachers as independent contractors, it is to put the power to determine the direction of a class into the collaborative hands of teachers and students. Additionally, the relationship between teachers of the same course at an institution should be as colleagues and not clones. A critical approach to teaching and learning on a daily basis must be born to remind educators, policymakers, and the public that education is an experience, not a pre-packaged product. 

Seth Zlotocha
School of Human Ecology
 University of Wisconsin, Madison

Remaining Blind to Intolerance

It is heartening that the OAH Newsletter (May 2005) has opened a tiny crack into the issue of academic bias from both right and left—apparently the first national historical publication to do so.

It is sad, however, to read Julie Greene’s statement that “the crisis in Colorado is part of a stifling of dissent occurring across the country in the wake of 9/11.” Such an uninformed assertion negates your effort to explore the issue with an open mind. Her self-denial reminds me of a response that I made on October 20, 2001, in accepting the North Carolina Humanities Council’s Award for Public Service: “Yet, by the mid-1990s some academicians who suffered—or could have suffered—under the censorship of McCarthyism and speaker bans ignored that lesson and sought to limit diversity of opinion by imposing speech codes on faculty and students and political tests on search committees on the grounds that only their truths deserved to be heard.” The editor of the Council’s NC Crossroads, by deliberately omitting the word “only” when the statement was published, defeated its entire emphasis. Fortunately, my point was correctly made in a subsequent sentence: “Sadly, those who sought to outlaw unpopular speech and views before September 11 now, less than six weeks later, must be haunted by the recency of their own intolerance, because the chilling effects of a wartime temperament again threatens free expression, both theirs and ours.”

As long as apologists for the far-left and the far-right remain blind to their own intolerance, academe will continue to repress rather than promote free and unfettered exchange of information and opinions.

H.G. Jones
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Bad History

The article “Consulting All Sides on ‘Speech Codes’” is a masterpiece of bad history. They slant all of the incidents they relate. In the Cal Poly case, Steve Hinkle is presented as having “done nothing more than attempt to post a flier in the school’s multicultural center.” The truth is, he was deliberately provoking an incident. What the writers do not say is that all schools have rules about obtaining permission before posting on school club and special interest boards, and Hinkle had not done that. Without rules, posting boards would become war zones. He knew perfectly well that there were many public boards where he could (and probably did) post, but he wanted Mason Weaver’s opponents to be forced to look at his fliers. As for the University of Oregon event, the administration took the legally sensible action of defunding an organization that thinks it is acceptable to ridicule individuals on the basis of their gender. The University of Colorado incident of the “affirmative action” bake sale would be an open and shut case on any campus. The purpose of the sale was to ridicule blacks as people who take advantage of government policy, whereas the majority of blacks today are not beneficiaries of the policy, and the primary objective of Lyndon Johnson’s original affirmative action guideline (and the many court opinions since) was the equal hiring of women, the great majority of whom are white. The bake sale was racist and inappropriate, period. The University of Nevada case sounds egregious the way it is presented by the letter writers, until one discovers that what the professor actually said to his students was that homosexuals spend money freely “because life ends with them” (Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2005), whereas both assertions are manifestly unsubstantiated and homophobic. It is hard to find the facts on any of these cases because conservative bloggers have jammed cyberspace full of fire-breathing indignation. What Beito, Luker, and Johnson are really demanding is the right to ridicule whom they want without restriction. On the street corner, they are free to do so, in the academy, not. Do I think the academy should have rules to prohibit hate speech? No, I think the faculties should teach students what is wrong with this speech, how it is anti-social and cruel. The courts, however, have made it clear that administrators have the duty to create an atmosphere conducive to learning, and when they tolerate contrary conditions, the administration can be sued by the black, female, homosexual, and transgendered students afflicted by bullies. That may be a clumsy way to rectify the injustices of the past (and it is only one way), but it is one of the things that makes the United States great.