In this view, corporations are out to dim the hopes of students whose teachers might otherwise teach them they can get somewhere in life if they work hard and graduate. The corporate problem is that educated people expect to get somewhere good. This is the real new economy, but it's not what today's students envision for their middle-class futures. People tend to accept poverty when they think there's no alternative, but not when they've followed the rules and still can't get ahead. Don't get me wrong.
Public education has serious problems.
Chief among them is an underfunded, inequitable financing system dependent on local property taxes, compounded by vastly disparate family and community resources that lead directly to disparate outcomes. This remains true in Massachusetts despite recent minimal efforts to close the gap. High-stakes testing only ensures that more kids drop out into the lowest level of the service economy or into prison or welfare. What students won't learn in corporatized schools is how to think for themselves. That's not a bad outcome for the corporate sponsors, conspiratorially speaking.