The Bad Math behind Corporate America’s Education Agenda

Why do the CEOs of the largest American corporations care so much about what your children are learning in school? The answer might not be immediately apparent, but the American business community has long had a proprietary interest in the nation’s public education system. And when the Business Roundtable went out and hired Dane Linn to be its point person on education policy in November 2012, it was a clear sign that corporate America was once again ramping up its participation in today’s hotly contested debates over school reform.

Although you have probably never heard of him, few people are having a greater impact on your children’s education than Linn, an affable former elementary school teacher and principal. When you listen to Linn you can still hear the folksy sounds of Pineville, West Virginia (population: 654), where he used to teach in the 1980s. These days, though, you are more likely to hear him speaking from the dais at the American Enterprise Institute, or the Committee for Economic Development, or the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, where he likes to discuss decidedly un-folksy things like “alternative education pathways,” “resource reallocation,” and that wonky Holy Grail: data-based decision making.

Linn spent seventeen years as the Director of the Education Policy Division at the National Governors Association (NGA) and then Executive Director for State Policy at The College Board, before hiring on at the Business Roundtable as Vice President in charge of the organization’s Education and Workforce Committee. It was that pedigree, along with a shared history as a longtime supporter of standards-based education reform, which made the unlikely West Virginian such an ideal fit for the position at corporate America’s top lobbying outfit.

The standards movement is responsible for such now-familiar blights on the landscape of public education as the widespread increase in high-stakes student testing and outcomes-based evaluations for teachers and school districts, ballooning public investment in charter schools and voucher programs, and systematic state-level attacks on educator collective bargaining rights and job security. During his time at the NGA, Linn helped spearhead the development of the Common Core State Standards, which critics malign as an egregious addition to this catalog of misdeeds. But one of the Common Core’s earliest and most consistent supporters has been the Roundtable, which has been the main clearinghouse for the business community’s education reform advocacy since the 1980s, when the standards movement first emerged.

Released in 2010, the Common Core has now been adopted in forty-three states and the District of Columbia. It establishes benchmarks based on international student assessments for what K-12 students are expected to know in language arts and mathematics by the end of each grade and applies them consistently across the states—a uniform model intended to ensure that all graduating high school seniors across the country, no matter the particular circumstances of their local school district, will receive an education that leaves them, as Linn likes to say, “college- or career-ready.” But that same one-size-fits-all approach has infuriated parents, teachers, students, and commentators on both sides of the political spectrum—uniting libertarian mouthpieces like Glenn Beck and Michelle Malkin, and liberal education experts like Diane Ravitch, in an unusual alliance. Popular support has been waning fast, as a Gallup poll released in late August made clear: a year after the same poll found that more than two-thirds of respondents had never even heard of the Common Core, it now reported that 60 percent of the public opposed the state standards.

In the months following Linn’s hiring, the Roundtable began rallying the broader business community to beat back this mounting public criticism, especially within the Republican Party. In September 2013, more than forty CEOs met with Education Secretary Arne Duncan and former Republican governors Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels—both early and ardent supporters of the Common Core—at the Roundtable’s third-quarter meeting, to begin laying the groundwork for a big business counteroffensive. In March 2014, the Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce launched a massive nationwide public relations blitz supporting the Common Core. The two business organizations formed a not-very-business-sounding front group—the Higher State Standards Partnership—and began plastering the airwaves with moving testimonials from teachers supporting the state standards, primarily targeting right-wing media outlets like Fox News.

The business community’s stake in this debate takes some explaining. Since the earliest movements for education reform dating back to the mid-nineteenth century—which also put a premium on formalizing, standardizing, and otherwise “modernizing” the schooling American children were then receiving—business leaders have sought to turn schools into the primary training ground for the next generation of American workers. Time-work discipline, obedience to authority, uniform (read: English) language competency, basic accounting, and other job-oriented skills first learned in the classroom were the earliest objectives of a business-driven push for educational standardization.

In calling for states to “fully adopt and implement” the Common Core, the Business Roundtable speaks hardly at all about improving the quality of the country’s failing schools.

The Common Core’s emphasis on developing certain highly testable skills over others—its marked and controversial preference for training students to read informational instead of literary texts in the language arts curriculum, for example; or its focus on academic training in lieu of imaginative play at the early childhood level—is surely reminiscent of the more utilitarian premises behind the business-backed reform movements of the nineteenth century. In calling for states to “fully adopt and implement” the Common Core, the Business Roundtable speaks hardly at all about improving the quality of the country’s failing schools or even closing the so-called achievement gap, but rather of establishing a “pathway toward a more skilled, prepared workforce.” As the president of the Business Council of Alabama put it recently, “the business community is by far the biggest consumer of the product created by our education system,” and the crudeness of that remark, critics argue, is reflected in the premium the Common Core puts on workplace-oriented skills rather than on developing other types of critical thinking or intellectual engagement. No wonder many educators complain that the standards limit their autonomy in the classroom and their freedom to teach subjects that students are genuinely curious about; in many respects, the Common Core is intentionally designed to turn the nation’s school system into a massive, publicly subsidized job training program for the most rapidly growing employment sectors of tomorrow.

The Common Core is designed to turn the nation’s school system into a massive, publicly subsidized job training program.

There is another rationale behind the business community’s longtime support for the standards movement. Although Common Core proponents insist that higher state standards are key to improving student test scores, especially in the lowest performing school districts—on the campaign trail, Linn likes to talk about achieving “equity” between students in affluent Shaker Heights, Ohio and the impoverished Mississippi Delta—most teachers and education experts agree that simply imposing more rigorous benchmarks is a bit like applying lipstick to a pig. As Ravitch notes, the United States has consistently placed “in the middle or bottom quartile” on international tests of student reading and math skills ever since such tests were first created fifty years ago. The explanation for the lower scores for American children has nothing to do with lower standards, but rather, Ravitch argues, “the thing that drags us down again and again is that kids are poor.” It is not incidental, in other words, that the countries where students consistently score higher than American students on international assessments are also the countries that consistently have lower relative rates of child poverty than the United States. But this is not an issue the business community wants to engage.

The countries where students score higher than American students on international assessments are the countries that have lower relative rates of child poverty than the United States.

Surely, Linn knows about this relationship between poverty and educational deficit: after all, there are few places where kids are poorer than in Wyoming County, West Virginia, home to Linn’s old Pineville elementary school. According to the most recent census numbers, one in five Wyoming County families live in poverty, and the number goes up to one in three families with children under the age of five. More than one-third of Wyoming County residents have less than a high school education, and a full 60 percent of the working-age population is not in the labor force. When the New York Times recently ranked the “hardest places to live” in the country, based on a combination of variables that took into account income, employment rates, health outcomes, and educational attainment, Wyoming County ranked 2,990 of the 3,135 surveyed counties.

Forget Shaker Heights: closing the gap between student test scores in Wyoming County and student test scores in, say, Slovenia would require doing something about the fact that children are three times less likely to live in poverty in Slovenia than in the United States. But fixing child poverty costs a lot of money, and so the business community prefers talking about standards because they are more or less cost-free and promise to solve the problems of the poor without the corporate world being too inconvenienced at tax time.

The first premise of the standards movement has always been that fixing the public schools does not require putting more money into the system so much as it does changing the way existing funds are spent: less on struggling public schools and more on charters; less on teacher compensation and more on data-proven pilot programs of one kind or another; less on school safety and family services and more on high-stakes testing and evaluation systems; and so on. Listen to any public talk that Linn gives (and a number are available online), and he is sure to say some version of “the pie has shrunk, and it isn’t getting any bigger,” as he told an audience at the New America Foundation in July 2013; or, “we are not going to see more money put into education, so the name of the game is around the reallocation of resources,” as he proclaimed definitively at New York University in December 2012.

This must be music to the CEOs’ ears: a former schoolteacher from one of the poorest and most systematically under-resourced regions of the country, insisting with East Coast foundation and policy-making audiences that we will simply have to make do with a little less pie, just like the kids in Wyoming County. If a Fortune 500 CEO said that, he would sound like Uncle Scrooge; when Linn does, it qualifies as expert testimony.

In what, after all, is still the world’s richest economy, the money is available. Tax loopholes allow corporations to fully deduct more than $7 billion every year for “performance-based” executive compensation like stock options and other forms of incentive pay. A modest “Robin Hood” tax on financial transactions, like the one the European Union established last May, would generate an estimated $350 billion in new revenues—if it could ever be passed over corporate America’s cries of high treason. Meanwhile, the estimated loss in revenues due to corporate profit shifting into off-shore tax havens comes out to roughly $90 billion a year. Why not tap into all that? If this is the new math they are teaching in the Common Core, it only makes sense to Dane Linn and his new buddies in corporate boardrooms.