Marker boards are spartan, cold and steely, and they're extremely popular in corporate boardrooms and offices everywhere, not to mention Dilbert. They're as much a symbol of business as chalkboards are of schools. But now, I'm thinking that perhaps I shouldn't have written about blackboards. Maybe the bigger story was how schools, over the past 10 years, have been adopting many of the techniques and attributes of businesses. Schools which fail to meet their test score quotas get a public flogging.
Bigger numbers mean bigger bonuses and job security.
The state doesn't ask how schools increase their numbers, as long as they go up, up, up. Just close the sale and make your quota. At the heart of Blueprint 2000 was the assumption that schools could improve if they acted more like businesses. Free marketers have long thought that competition is the key to innovation, and have sought to apply that principle to education. Magnet schools, private school vouchers, and school choice programs all have schools vying over students in unprecedented ways.