It is all a matter of balance. Most private business leaders with whom I talk want to leave the role to the public sector, but I hear today more than ever before some business leaders strongly backing highly centralized curricula and testing, including high stakes national testing. Most of them argue this for business reasons. Profit in the education industry traditionally is wafer thin. To be successful, a company needs volume.
Volume requires a common product.
A test score used as the primary, even the single, measure of a serious education is a nicely focused product. Concurrently, however, such an eventuality will profoundly cheapen American education. The bottom line of a serious democratic education is not the same as the bottom line on an industry balance sheet. Again, I am not business bashing. I am merely asking that we all look carefully at the best interests of the children first, rather than at ways and means to lift the cost of truly public education from the tax payers by shifting it over to companies that must provide a return for their stockholders.