Corporate Schooling Meets Corporate Media: Standards, Testing, and Technophilia

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies ISSN: 1071-4413 (Print) 1556-3022 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gred20 Corporate schooling meets corporate media: Standards, testing, and technophilia Kenneth J. Saltman To cite this article: Kenneth J. Saltman (2016) Corporate schooling meets corporate media: Standards, testing, and technophilia, Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 38:2, 105-123, DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2016.1155953 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2016.1155953 Published online: 19 Apr 2016. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=gred20 Download by: [Kenneth Saltman] Date: 20 April 2016, At: 07:35  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 2016, VOL. 38, NO. 2, 105–123 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2016.1155953 Corporate schooling meets corporate media: Standards, testing, and technophilia Kenneth J. Saltman The convergence of corporate media and corporate education Educational publishing corporations1 and media corporations in the United States have been converging, especially through the promotion of standardization, testing, and for-profit educational technologies. Media and Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 technology companies—including News Corp, Apple, and Microsoft—have significantly expanded their presence in public schools to sell hardware and curriculum products such as tablets and learning software aligned with the Common Core State Standards. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (funded with profits from Microsoft) promoted financially and politically more than any other force the Common Core State Standards that sought to advance the testing and standardization agenda (Layton 2014). As well, the four largest educational test and textbook publishers—Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Houghton-Mifflin, and ETS (Educational Testing Service)— lobbied legislatures to promote the Common Core State Standards and other testing products, and they have commercially promoted their own products that respond to the changes for which they have lobbied. These four massive educational publishing corporations have spent more than $20 million to influence states and the federal government to pass legislation supporting standardized testing, the standardization of curriculum, and other “reforms” for which these companies produce digital and traditional materials (Persson 2015; Strauss 2015a). The money invested in influencing politicians is a pittance compared to the $2 billion that these companies annually earn (Strauss 2015a). Media/technology corporations partner with education corporations, as in the partnerships between Microsoft and Pearson and Apple and Pearson, to produce Common Core products. The Apple Pearson project made headlines when the $1.3 billion contract with the Los Angeles Unified School District ended in disaster, with the FBI raiding boxes of product as they launched an investigation into no bid contract corruption. The raid revealed that the technology had gone largely unused, with the exception of students hacking the tablets and accessing the open internet. Media and education companies seek to profit not just from digital and tra- ditional texts and testing, digital and traditional test preparation, and related © 2016 Taylor & Francis  106 K. J. SALTMAN digital and analog curriculum products and hardware but also from database tracking, administrator software products and web applications, teacher evaluations, professional development products, and student teaching evaluations. The growing intersection of the media and education sectors is exemplified by a revolving door between for-profit media and education sectors. Joel Klein, for example, began as an attorney for the media conglomerate Bertelsman, became a prosecutor and reached notoriety for antitrust prosecution of Microsoft, then became Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools and aggressively promoted the Gates Foundation’s neoliberal agenda for school reform, only to leave and become education chief for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp’s Amplify! education division. John Deasy was hired to lead the Los Angeles Unified School District from the Gates Foundation, and he was financially supported by the Broad Foundation as Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 he pursued the venture philanthropist’s corporate reform agenda. With close ties to the executives at Apple and Pearson, he orchestrated the aforemen- tioned $1.3 billion Apple/Pearson contract while saving money by laying off arts teachers, closing libraries, and neglecting school repairs. The deal ended in his resignation, criminal investigation, and subsequent hiring by the Broad Foundation to head their project to privatize educational leadership. Numerous former elected public officials from both parties including former Massachusetts Governors William Weld and Deval Patrick, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Guiliani, Senator Lamar Alexander, and former Pennsylvania Governor and first Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge have cashed in by going into for-profit education in the private sector. The contacts and influence of departing public officials is of course extremely valuable to private companies dependent upon contracts with the public sector that will capture public tax money. Yet, it would be a mistake to under- stand the convergence of media and education corporations as a consequence of the actions of individual beneficiaries of the public–private revolving door. What is at stake here is not merely individual instances of corruption, misuse of technology, or the profit seeking activities of individuals with connections. The growing role of for-profit media in public education is structural and sys- tematic, and it has economic, political, and cultural implications for a society theoretically committed to democratic values. In what follows, I detail the tendencies of for-profit companies to standar- dize, homogenize, and automate knowledge, curriculum, and pedagogy. The first section reviews the policy trends that established the standards, standar- dization, and technology regime that created the conditions for the education media/tech convergence and its consequences. The second section examines the economic interests driving the expansion of media and education companies with a particular look at the expansion of tablet products. The third section discusses the political and cultural implications of these trends.  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 107 The growing convergence of the education and media sectors must be understood more centrally as the consequence of corporate consolidation and monopolistic tendencies endemic to contemporary capitalism (Harvey 2014). As David Harvey writes, “monopoly power is foundational rather than aberrational to the functioning of capital and that it exists in a contradictory unity with competition” (2014, 134). The convergence must also be comprehended as a consequence of a neoliberal regulatory atmosphere that allows for media and knowledge-producing companies to consolidate (McChesney 2004) under the guise of “free markets,” as well as the expansion of technology-based educational products made possible by new technologies such as tablet hardware, web resources, big data applications, online testing, textbook, database evaluation, and tracking software. Despite the incessant rhetoric of “competition and choice” that has been used to justify public school privatization in all of its guises, the expansion of profit-seeking Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 activities into the public sphere brings with it the monopolistic tendencies of markets. For example, as Gary Miron and Alex Molnar’s tracking of the educational management organization sector illustrates, large education management organizations have consolidated over time (Molnar, Miron, and Urschel 2010). As pioneer of school commercialism, Chris Whittle (creator of Channel One, Edison Learning, and Avenues) told the American Enterprise Institute in 2009 that he expects the for-profit education sector glo- bally to consolidate into a handful of massive companies. Media corporations tend toward consolidated ownership and monopoly as studies by Bagdikian (1997), Robert McChesney (2004), Herman and Noam (2002), and others demonstrate. Indeed, as public education increasingly integrates media corporations, the media monopoly and its private sector knowledge-making tendencies become increasingly central to the future of public education. The media education nexus discussed here needs to be understood as part of a broader neoliberal restructuring of public education by economic and political elites. Neoliberalism aims to demolish the public sphere in forms that do not directly provide commercial potential for capitalists or control of the growing number of people it has rendered disposable. Neoliberalism has pro- duced radical inequality and social precarity by disinvesting in and selling off the caregiving roles of the state including public education. As I detailed in my book The Gift of Education (2010), venture philanthropists (a neoliberal reinvention of charity that evolved from the tech sector to use non-profits for promoting the privatization and corporatization of the public sphere) have succeeded in strategically advancing privatization and market-based school “reforms” to transform public education into a private industry while also hijacking public governance over educational policy. Leading venture philan- thropists with deep pockets such as Gates, Walton, and Broad have funded an infrastructure for school privatization supporting national, regional, and local organizations such as charter school and voucher promotion organizations  108 K. J. SALTMAN and lobbying groups. They have also funded competitions for districts and schools to fulfill the dreams of billionaire funders such as uncapping charter schools, related school closure schemes, or requiring technology databases to implement “data driven” instruction or leadership. The corporate school reform or neoliberal restructuring movement has been led not only by venture philanthropists but also by a network of corporate foundations, rightist think tanks such as American Enterprise Insti- tute, Hoover, Heritage, Fordham, and Manhattan and an array of lobbying and political organizations. The expansion of corporate culture, curricular standardization, testing, the homogenization and numerically quantifiable forms of teaching and learning have been central to the neoliberal agenda. The rightist project of making public education into a private industry involves privatizing school management in the form of charters, vouchers, scholarship tax credits and deunionizing teachers and replacing teacher and Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 administrator labor with low paid, low skill workers and machines. The pro- ject also involves transforming the culture of education by reeducating the public to accept education as a private consumable service, the teacher as a deskilled deliverer of knowledge rather than as an intellectual, and knowledge as a commodity to be consumed rather than as the result of pedagogical exchange that centrally involves dialogue, curiosity, and dissent. That is, the forms of teaching, learning and administration in the corporate project foster hierarchical and authoritarian social relations that model the values and imperatives of the corporation rather than those of a thoughtful and participatory democratic society (Giroux 2010). The corporate remaking of the policy terrain for the media education nexus In the United States, educational textbook, testing, and media/technology corporations have contributed to and profited from a radical remaking of public education in which constant testing, teaching to tests, and efforts to standardize and align testable curriculum came to dominate the school day (Hursh 2008). Under the guise of “accountability,” the standardization movement was launched through policy in earnest in 2000 with the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act that rolled out “high stakes” standardized tests punishing poor schools and students for failing to increase test scores. This reversed the compensatory logic of the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 that sought to support schools in poor communities. Publishing giant McGraw-Hill was a major early player in promoting the passage of and then profiting massively from NCLB with testing and texts. The reauthorization of NCLB and launching of Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standards expanded the federal role in promoting the standardized testing and curricular standardization trends  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 109 that primarily benefitted educational publishing and media companies. These trends coincided with the steady expansion of for-profit technology products in schools. Popular resistance against overtesting and the standardization trend accel- erated with the growth of an opt-out movement against testing that spanned the political spectrum. By the end of 2015, The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) responded to broad-based resistance and replaced No Child Left Behind as the new iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. ESSA partially shifts power over testing to the states but still requires annual standardized testing. While the ESSA of 2015 allows states to reduce the number of standardized tests promoted under No Child Left Behind, it maintains the requirement for standardized testing and ties state funding for teacher and leader preparation to student test scores. It follows the federally promoted installation of a Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 massive state-based infrastructure in testing and standardization. It also federally supports the launch of Wall Street’s “pay for success” or “social impact bond” schemes and “social emotional learning” schemes, projects to promote neoliberal character education models like “grit” that promote learned corporeal discipline as the antidote to poverty (Saltman 2016). “Pay for success” schemes allow investment banks such as Goldman Sachs to “invest” in educational services and collect additional public money as profits if these projects meet account- ability metrics. For example, Goldman Sachs finances an early childhood education program for $16 million in Chicago but if the metrics show “success” they get to collect as much as a $30 million payout. Venture philanthropies, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, are championing these schemes that appeal to politicians because they can claim they are funding social services without raising taxes. Investors love them because they can capture public money by gaming the metrics and make a fortune from getting a bonus payment from the public entity. This allows for stealth privatization and public resource skimming in line with other privatization trends such as chartering and vouchers. “Pay for success” relies on heavy amounts of surveillance and numeri- cally quantifiable accountability schemes to justify the skimming. So while the federal government partly withdraws from directly punishing the poor through testing under ESSA, it requires states to continue testing and it funds and promotes new forms of privatization, surveillance, and corporeal control over students and teachers. It also privatizes teacher and leadership preparation (pushed particularly by the Broad Foundation) by promoting alternative certification that undermines the role of universities and expands private practitioner-oriented forms of preparation linked to charters and other private school operators. Hence, the restoration of local control in the forms it takes in the ESSA offers new insidious forms of control, opportunities for corporate profiteering at the state and local levels, and also opportunities for local struggles to expand critical pedagogical projects.  110 K. J. SALTMAN As the ESSA act passed, all but six states had already withdrawn from the Common Core State Standards yet many have simply renamed the standardi- zation and testing regimens while keeping in place the longstanding trends. While the ESSA partially restores state and local control with regard to testing it does not undo the expansive testing and standardization requirements that dominate educational policy and practice. It will be years before the inertia for testing and standardization can potentially be reversed, and such a reversal is hardly guaranteed. The continuation of standardization and testing will allow education and media companies to continue to do what they were doing under the Common Core State Standards, which involves tailoring curricu- lum and pedagogical products to state standards and numerically quantifiable measures. Economic imperatives: Cutting costs through mass production and Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 decreasing labor In 2013, Bill Gates predicted that in the next decade educational technology spending would be about a $9 billion market (Kamenetz 2013, 43). The Silicon Valley Business Journal predicts educational technology spending in public schools to double to $13.7 billion by 2017, propelled by the Common Core State Standards (as cited in Malkin 2014). The signature Obama administra- tion Race to the Top program, which aggressively promoted privatization and market-based reform, included in funds for North Carolina a $30 million grant for educational technology. News Corps’ Rupert Murdoch has openly discussed education in the United States as a $500 billion market (Kamenetz, 43). This is roughly the amount spent on all educational services annually in the United States. So when the mostly public spending on education is framed as a market, the idea of capturing that money in private service spending is presumed by profiteers such as Murdoch. The trends to replace paper books, tests, and record keeping with electronic formats are justified by proponents on the bases of efficiency, technophilia— technological innovation and inherent pedagogical value in technological for- mats, the promises to economic growth discursively linked to technophilia, and ecology (not killing trees). Although there are serious questions as to any inherent value of technological formats for teaching and learning, there is no question as to the ways that different technological formats are being used to consolidate corporate control as opposed to other technological formats that foster teacher autonomy and democratic educational practices. For example, companies such as Microsoft, Apple, News Corp, Pearson, and others produce closed source technology products that result in the adop- tion of hardware that assures a market for the software. Apple sells iPad tablets that set up the sale of software through iBooks and iTunes and that set up the use of curriculum produced by partner Pearson. Once a school  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 111 has gone with one company’s hardware, the software decisions for the future have been made. These companies market closed source technology products to public school districts as superior to open source technology resources, like online free curriculum, that are freely distributed and shared. There are two principle profit advantages to technology-based products for those who sell them: (a) Corporate media/education products can be standardized, homogenized, and hence mass produced and distributed; and (b) corporate media/education products can displace labor with automation. The first tendency toward standardization and homogenization is exempli- fied by K12, Inc., the largest for-profit educational management organization as measured by number of students. By using the Core Knowledge Curricu- lum developed by cultural conservative E. D. Hirsch, the company can sell the same curriculum product to the largest number of buyers. Hirsch argues for transmitting the culture of the “best and the brightest” to disregard the Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 relationship between knowledge and particular cultural contexts, disregard the experiences of learners and teachers, and disregard the relationship between knowledge and the broader social world. This is not only a way to promote the knowledge, culture, values and ideologies of economic and political elites. It is also a way to legitimate mass producing and selling a homogenous curriculum product that only needs to be produced once to be sold anywhere. The neoliberal project of homogenizing and standardizing curricular content that can be mass produced and sold works compatibly with the neoconservative project of promoting a core or cannon of conservative knowledge (Apple 2006). Neo-conservative cultural content such as Hirsch’s Core Knowledge cur- riculum is at the center of the neoliberal K12, Inc. cyber homeschooling and charter school business. As a business, K12, Inc. depends upon replacing tea- cher labor with technology, leaving classrooms of fifty students with a single teacher and technology facilitator. Predictably, studies of these “cyber schools” show them having abysmal outcome (Simon 2013). Recent studies indicate that cyber schools, despite being massive profit generating machines for tech- nology companies, are so bad in terms of traditional measures of student achievement that they are equivalent to no schooling at all (Strauss 2015b). The Common Core State Standards represents the largest case of homoge- nizing and standardizing curriculum products. Although many liberal and progressive defenders of the Common Core have insisted on its promoting of teacher autonomy over how to teach because it measures “test-based outcomes,” the reality is that the high stakes testing means that administrators and teachers will be inclined to rely on the large for-profit publishing and media corporations such as Houghton-Mifflin and Pearson for their ready- made curriculum such as scripted lessons that are tailored to the tests (Editors of Rethinking Schools 2013). Although there has been a recent move, at least in rhetoric, away from the radical overtesting in the United States and a turn  112 K. J. SALTMAN to more local state control represented by the ESSA of 2015, the culture of numerically quantifiable test-based measures of quality and improvement will hardly evaporate. The culture of testing and curricular standardization and the positivist and vocational assumptions about knowledge remain deeply entrenched in both policy and practice. Within these assumptions, knowledge is framed as a collection of facts to be consumed and accumulated. Defenders of the Common Core suggest that the teaching to these tests encourages critical thinking skills. Yet, such materials treat critical thinking as problem-solving skills while delinking knowledge from both the subjective experiences of students and from the broader social forces and realities that give knowledge its meaning. Critical thinking in this sense evacuates the relationship between knowledge and power, politics, and ethics. That is, critical thinking in this view is not about critical dispositions for judgment and interpretation that could provide students with the intellectual tools to Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 act as social and political agents capable of reconstructing experience and engaging the world. Such anti-critical approaches to knowledge and learning are established in all of the dominant educational policies including the CAEP (teacher training standards) and ESSA. The second profit advantage of technology-based products for those seeking profit is the capacity to replace the largest cost to any enterprise, labor costs, with cheap machines. The largest players in the effort to hawk tablets and corporate curriculum to schools include Apple, Microsoft, and News Corps’ Amplify. The potential for enormous sums of money is inspiring these monopolistic media firms to rush into classrooms. Some of the largest early adoptions of tablet technology have made news headlines as stunning disasters. In North Carolina, which received that aforementioned $30 million in Race to the Top (RTTT) funds, “The Guilford County public school district withdrew 15,000 Amplify tablets last fall. Pre- loaded with Common Core apps … the devices peddled by News Corp. and Wireless Generation were rendered useless because of defective cases, broken screens and malfunctioning power supplies” (Malkin 2014). Similarly, the Los Angeles Unified School District spent $1.3 billion for overpriced Apple e-books that came with Pearson’s Common Core branded apps. Students “breached the LAUSD’s iPad firewalls and made a mockery of their adult guardians. Despite hefty investment in training and development, many teachers couldn’t figure out how to sync up the tablets in the classroom” (Malkin 2014). However, there is much more at stake than questionable product quality, no-bid contract accusations, or even school commercialism. Part of what is at stake is the central role of technophilia in the ways capitalist ideology is used to guide the direction of public education. Some commentators in the popular press have pointed out that these contracting boondoggles need to be seen in relation to scarce public money for public schools as well as the gutting of entire areas of study such as the  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 113 humanities in favor of test-prep oriented forms of pedagogy and vocationally oriented curricula (Malkin 2014). Yet, both the mass media and policy discussions of educational technology equate the expansion of education tech- nology with capitalist growth, assume that technology is a prerequisite for the proper formation of future potential workers and consumers, assume that good teaching must use technology to be effective, and assume that even bad teaching can be made effective with technology. Technology is thoroughly wrapped up with a broader set of neoliberal educational assumptions and values including vocationalism, instrumentalism, school to work, privatization, growth, and deregulation. Amplify’s tablet technology, for example, is meant to capture scarce edu- cational dollars that could be used to pay for more teachers and decrease class sizes. The tablets and the corporate curriculum are intended to become the basis for learning throughout the school day. As Anya Kamenentz writes, Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 “Amplify presents a vision of an integrated, twenty-first century classroom —though it’s also very much a corporate minded dream, in which one company provides every need” (Kamenetz 2013, 43). In this corporate dream, the role of teachers and school administrators, parents and communities in deliberating about curriculum and pedagogy is replaced by corporate control of all aspects of the school. Standardization and pedagogies of control figure prominently in the project to decrease the single biggest expense in education: human labor. Technological automation in the form of learning analytics and mass produced curriculum programs stand to displace not only teachers but administrators as well. This is a corporate dream that its promoters falsely present as outside of politics. Cultural tendencies of converging media and education: The politics of denying politics Neoliberal education leader Joel Klein is explicit in denying the politics of knowledge and curriculum in Amplify’s products: “Instead of relitigating the same fights about the workforce, accountability, and school choice, we’re beginning to see a growing coalescence about the potential power of technology to empower teachers and engage kids” (Kamenetz 2013, 43). On the surface, Klein’s technophilic doctrine of apolitical efficacy is hard to take seriously coming from a company, News Corp, that is the single largest global promoter of right-wing politics in mass media through Fox News and The Wall Street Journal. However, the suggestion that technology in schools has nothing to do with privatization (choice) and struggles over disciplining the teacher labor force is ludicrous. This is precisely what Amplify’s technology products are about. They capture public money to be used in place of teacher work and displace the dialogue between teachers and students with prepack- aged curricula to be consumed by students. They come loaded with  114 K. J. SALTMAN curriculum products that have distinct ideologies, narratives, and ideas that represent particular points of view and group interests. Neither technology nor the knowledge loaded onto its products is apoliti- cal. As Istvan Meszaros explains, technology and science, despite being incess- antly framed as the solution to environmental destruction, cannot solve the problems they create: [T]o say that “science and technology can solve all our problems in the long run” is much worse than believing in witchcraft; for it tendentiously ignores the devastating social embeddedness of present-day science and technology for solving our problems—for obviously we must—but whether we succeed in radically changing their direction, which is at present narrowly determined and circumscribed by the self-perpetuating needs of profit maximization. (Meszaros 2015, 29) Public schools and the public sector more generally are targets for the class of people who own and control capital for accumulating profit. Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 Technology products such as tablets and software products that the capital- ist class sells to schools differ from the primary use of technology for business. Technology is political in the ways it is employed to foster hierarchical and authoritarian organizational forms or to foster egalitarian ones. As David Harvey explains, Capital’s immediate purpose is to increase productivity, efficiency and profit rates, and to create new and, if possible, ever more profitable product lines. When consider- ing the trajectories of technological change, it is vital to remember that the software and organizational forms are every bit as important as the hardware. Organizational forms, like the control structures of the contemporary corporation, the credit system, just-in-time delivery systems, along with the software incorporated into robotics, data management, artificial intelligence and electronic banking, are just as crucial to prof- itability as the hardware embodied in machines. (Harvey 2014, 92) As public schools are framed by investors, corporations, and tech compa- nies as businesses, those organizational forms like the hierarchical and anti- democratic control structure of the corporation take greater prominence in public schools. Expansion of these technologies as “delivery systems” pro- motes both a transmissional model of pedagogy and the image of schooling as private business rather than as public good. Public schools do not exist to accumulate profit (although increasingly they are being privatized and commodified to do just that). They exist ostensibly to serve the public interest. However, that has been successfully redefined in neoliberal terms of opportunity for students to compete in the national and global capitalist economy toward the goals of work and consumerism (“college and career readiness”). As Bowles and Gintis wrote in 1976 on the eve of the neoliberal onslaught, The system as it stands today provides eloquent testimony to the ability of the well- to-do to perpetuate in the name of equality of opportunity an arrangement which  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 115 consistently yields to themselves disproportional advantages, while thwarting the aspirations and needs of the working people of the United States. (Bowles and Gintis 2011, 30) In this individualized economic promise, technology plays an important symbolic role by being linked to capitalist growth, progress, and the techno- logized workplace of the imagined future. Technology education (such as the STEM trend) is interwoven with neoliberal false promises for individual upward mobility and the false promise that educational reform on its own can mitigate poverty, economic inequality, and a hierarchical class structure (Means 2015). If more education on its own is alleged to result in more income, opportunity, and consumption, then more technology education is alleged to result in even more market benefits. Governments and corporations aggressively promote so-called STEM Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) education in line with their assumptions of human capital theory. In the fantasy, every student will become an app developer, video game entrepreneur, or do some other tech work that requires little more than knowledge of how to code. Such economic promises that are alleged to result from STEM education disregard crucial aspects of what deter- mines economic mobility for most, such as capital investment. The ideology of STEM for economic mobility has nothing to say about how in neoliberal globa- lization locally developed technologies have no reason to stay local in terms of their translation into commercial products and work opportunities. I work for the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, which has a technology emphasis and caters to working-class students in the south of the state. Economically devastated cities in the region such as New Bedford and Fall River, which once had powerful textile industries, now have high unemployment, poverty, and a dwindling tax base as those textile industries now operate in the Pacific Rim. Engineering graduates will pursue tech jobs outside the region in the 128 Corri- dor (near Boston) or in Silicon Valley. There is little reason to believe that these deindustrialized former textile cities will be able to recover as a consequence of local investment in STEM or STEM Education curricula in those local schools. Yet, the rhetoric of STEM is used to justify K12 reform and frame policy issues especially through a neoliberal lens that equates tech industry with educational and labor opportunity. The point is not to suggest that there is no value in science, mathematics, and engineering education. The point is that these educational dis- ciplines cannot be relied upon to save a locale from capital flight and the resulting unemployment, poverty, and social precarity. Social movements, political action, struggles to democratize institutions and expand the commons, and popular educative efforts to link local public problems to global justice aspirations stand a much better chance (DeLissovoy, Means, and Saltman 2014). Technologies of knowledge production in schools play a crucial social reproductive role in that they “preserve and promote the necessary mental  116 K. J. SALTMAN conceptions of the world that facilitate productive activity, guide consumer choices and stimulate the creation of new technologies” (Harvey 2014, 100). Indeed, aside from amassing wealth for the owners of media corporations such as News Corp, the social reproductive role of the ideologies conveyed by and through technologies such as tablets and corporate curricula software programs are of primary importance in terms of their service to ruling class people. For example, there are ideological boundaries with regard to what can be taught and whose perspective can be taught in corporate-produced curriculum products. Corporations, like other institutions, do not commit suicide. Corporations, whether it is media or educational corporations, are largely not going to produce knowledge and curriculum that calls into ques- tion undemocratic social arrangements from which corporations and their owners benefit. Corporate curriculum tends to make narratives, histories, and perspectives that affirm rather than contest elite power. It promotes Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 values for consumerism, “progress” understood through corporate steward- ship, the corporate media monopoly, money driven elections, capitalism as the only imaginable economic system as opposed to economic democracy, representative forms of republican democracy rather than direct and partici- patory democracy. Corporate knowledge production also fosters rarified views of culture rather than culture as contested, produced from below, and capable of transforming civil society, consciousness, and structures of power. In short, corporations favor knowledge that represents the interests and perspectives of economic, political, and cultural elites at the expense of the interests and perspectives of workers, the poor, immigrants, women, and other historically oppressed people. What kinds of social relations are fostered when teachers are replaced by tablets or other machines that are corporate products and that are loaded with corporate curriculum? What kinds of social relations are produced by replacing dialogue between students and teachers with students using touch-screen apps that are standardized in terms of their content and delinked from particular contexts and subjectivities of the student or the teacher? As Alex Means, Heather Roberts-Mahoney, and Mark Garrison have explained, the rise of adaptive curriculum software is far from apoliti- cal (Roberts-Mahoney, Alexander, and Garrison 2016; Means in press). Adaptive learning software is like the movie streaming service Netflix. Net- flix uses a program to predict the consumer’s likely interest in particular films and consequently tailors what is readily available based in past selec- tions. This builds a consumer identity profile based on the programmed assumptions of the software engineers as to what are the intelligible cate- gories of film viewership. Of course, such categories are based in marketing and the interest in delivering inexpensively obtained content while retaining viewer subscriptions. Very different categories and suggestions would be developed if the aims were, for example, to promote viewership of films  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 117 valued by and discussed by film scholars. Different aims and assumptions would result in a very different adaptive model. Adaptive learning software changes the curriculum based on the test per- formance of the student. Consequently, it forms a case or identity profile of the student that then is used for sorting and sifting the student, determining capacities, interpreting intelligence and potential, and providing particular future curricula. As Zygumunt Bauman and David Lyon argue, what is at stake in the rise of surveillance technologies such as these is not only the loss of privacy and the expansion of secrecy for the wielding of unaccountable power but also the tendency toward social sorting and the making of “cumu- lative disadvantage” (Bauman and Lyon 2013, 13–14). What is particularly insidious about this new form of tracking is that it is wrapped in the osten- sibly disinterested and objective guise of techno-science that naturalizes the outcomes of sorting as beyond human evaluation and judgment, free of Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 assumptions and values, delinked from the vagaries of subjective all too human error. Of course, these software curricula are made by people with particular values and ideologies and the content of the curricula expresses ideologies, values and assumptions of particular classes and cultural groups. One of the most significant political and pedagogical dimensions of the expansion of corporate tablet technology is the usurping of the role of the tea- cher by the corporation in making decisions about what and how to teach. This is not just a matter of the displacement of labor through technology but the replacement of teacher control over cultural production—signifying practices that affirm or contest broader public constellations of meaning. The makers of tablet hardware and software curriculum claim that not only are they not usurping the roles of teachers but also they are actually expanding teacher auto- nomy and control in the classroom. Joel Klein, CEO of Amplify! claims that the tablet is not taking control away from teachers but rather is simply responding to teachers’ demands (Bloomberg 2014). Anya Kamenentz describes the Amplify! software curriculum design that is alleged to give teachers control: [M]any educators are still skeptical of tablets in the classroom – and Amplify seems designed to put them at ease. Its operating system gives teachers and schools an unprecedented level of control over the devices in students’ hands. There is no HOME button, for example: Students can’t just exist out of a math program the way they can close Angry Birds on an iPad. Instead, if a teacher hits her EYES ON TEACHER button, any or every student’s tablet in her classroom suspends; a message tells the student to look up. Or the teacher can call on a student randomly, and a message pops up on her screen. Or with just one click, a teacher can pose a mul- tiple-choice pop quiz and see instant results, set a five-minute timer for an activity, or divide students into discussion groups. Or she can automatically give individua- lized homework assignments based on the day’s performance. (Kamenentz 2013, 43) What the teacher does not control in these examples is the making, select- ing, and administering of the curriculum itself nor the testing of that  118 K. J. SALTMAN curriculum. The teacher does not put that math lesson up on the board, write that pop quiz, or engage in dialogue with the students about the object of knowledge. Instead, the teacher becomes a facilitator of prepackaged and standardized curriculum and assessments made by the company. In this case, technology takes the practice of scripted lessons a step further away from teacher control. Those individualized homework assignments are not the result of the teacher’s decision-making and thought. Nor do they allow the student to comprehend knowledge and subjective experience critically, that is, in terms of the broader forces, structure, and material and symbolic con- tests informing their production. Rather, these assignments are the result of the learning analytic program that sorts students and makes the student into a case for future sorting. Furthermore, as students use the prepackaged software, their scores are recorded and the data is managed by those in a position of authority over Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 the teacher for evaluation of the teacher’s “performance.” The teacher is caught in a data surveillance web in which control over the making of the knowledge with the student is replaced by automated measures of learning determined by the accounting practices installed in the machine. Anya Kamenentz frames the problem of technology as a battle between total corporate control over, on the one hand, knowledge and the school versus, on the other, the use of technology for “open access” to freely access- ible knowledge and curriculum. She asks education investor Matt Greenfield whether the Amplify! model of total integrated corporate control of the class- room will win out over the “open source” model. In the integrated “closed source” model, a company such as News Corp seeks monopoly control over the integrated hardware product and proprietary software product. In the open source model, computer hardware such as laptops and tablets can accommodate a variety of web-based applications such as Wikipedia or the curriculum software that a school or district develops itself (assuming it has the time and resources to develop it). This, however, is a false dichotomy between future technology models. Once the technology is in the classroom, the public is beholden to it. That is, educational spending gets channeled toward acquiring, maintaining, and upgrading the hardware if not also the software. Such spending comes at the expense of decidedly low maintenance resources such as books that also more centrally rely upon the teacher. Kamenentz and Greenfield frame the debate over the future of educational technology as between the Amplify! model of total corporate monopoly versus open source technology. This framing misses the crucial issue of the different capacities that different schools have for implementation. A monopolistic model such as Amplify! that controls hardware and curriculum means that not only do working class and poor schools get targeted for highly standar- dized and scripted forms of pedagogy and prepackaged curricula. It also means that these cash strapped schools are beholden to high technology  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 119 spending on the most integrated models in place of such proven beneficial reforms as smaller class sizes. Classroom technologies that tend toward standardization foreclose the possibility of critical pedagogies that relate learning to power, ethics, and politics. It was unsurprising to me that Kamanetz framed out crucial questions of power and specifically the cultural politics of knowledge with regard to technology and school reform. She interviewed me at length for her book The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing But You Don’t Have to Be and excluded from her book any mention of the points I made to her about the way testing denies the values, knowledge, assumptions, and ideologies behind competing claims to truth and the inevitable connections between particular knowledge and the material and symbolic interests of individuals and groups. She clearly understood and was familiar with these ideas but appears to accept the ideological limits of advertising- Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 driven journalism and avoided raising the questions of how testing is implicated in power struggles. Some technologists position “open source” technology as a hopeful alterna- tive in that technology allows schools to access Wikipedia or other infor- mation sources. Bill Gates, for example, celebrates the open source charter school Summit Public Schools for “building its own learning platform that is student driven” (Kamenentz 2013, 43). It is easy to see the allure of open access technology, especially for leapfrogging over an historical failure to invest in books, libraries and pre-digital information forms. Hundreds of schools in Chicago have no libraries. Why invest in print books? Schools in many African nations have no material resources and yet the population has wide access to cell phone technology. Open access technology projects paired with hardware seem to offer a promise of instantly creating access. However, unless governments provide public schools access to a network of all public libraries, such “openness” is a false promise from the start. It will replicate the market driven, tiered access model of the subscription-based for-profit publishing industry. For example, there is a radical difference in the access to library information and databases between elite universities and third tier universities. Worse, if the subscription model is abandoned in favor of a commercial advertising-driven model of “open source,” public schooling collapses into the commercial culture of advertising-saturated television and internet. Furthermore, a pattern of targeting working class and poor urban and rural schools for repressive pedagogical approaches and standardized curricula appears to be continuing in the ways that these two approaches, vertical integration and open access, are being discussed. High degrees of bodily control, discipline, and standardization have a histori- cal legacy intertwined with efforts to make poor students and non-White students docile and compliant for exploitative work and for assent to political marginalization. Students have also become increasingly valuable for short  120 K. J. SALTMAN term profit as they are commodities in for-profit schooling contracting and privatization schemes. As Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger have shown, technological forms of school commercialism are on the rise (Molnar and Boninger 2015). Perhaps most pertinent here is the questions of how different schools and students have different capacities to make curriculum within the open access model. It is crucial for students and teachers not simply to default to using whatever preexisting curricula is readily available. Instead, to be involved in making knowledge, teachers and students need both the material resources and critical intellectual tools to do so. If Amplify!’s monopolistic design is about more tightly controlling and replacing teacher labor, it is also deeply in line with the trend to more tightly control student bodies as expressed by the repressive pedagogies found in KIPP, the discourse of Grit, biometric pedagogy, and the use of smart drugs Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 (Saltman 2016). Amplify! sells its hardware by promoting teacher control in the form of its One Click feature that freezes the computer screens of the students. It also sells tablets with the promise of technological relevancy: “Among the features of Amplify’s digital curriculum is the ability for teachers to see if students really understand vocabulary words when they use them in Twitter-like hashtags and other social media contexts” (Rich 2014, A13). Aside from the dubious pedagogical benefits of such innovations, a basic question arises as to why would anyone want to teach comprehension of vocabulary through the most limiting of social media formats like Twitter rather than through intellectual traditions, interpretation of texts, literature, and essays that convey ideas while teaching dispositions of interpretation and judgment. Amplify’s approach seems to suggest that allegedly catchy media formatting is the basis for learning. Amplify aims to be stylistically and technologically relevant rather than meaningful to students in ways that would help them understand themselves, understand how social forces make them as selves, and develop a sense of the capacity to act with others to control and transform their life conditions. In other words, the basic limi- tation of these technology products is that their degree of standardization, homogenization, and displacement of the role of the teacher actively prohibits forms of engagement aimed at reconstructing experience and fostering polit- ical rather than merely consumer agency. The corporate commitment to education appears to be limited to its profit possibilities as exemplified by News Corp’s 2015 announcement that it intended to sell its education division Amplify! because it is not profitable enough. The sale of Amplify!, which began as a purchase by News Corp of Wireless Generation, provides a reminder of the difference of commitment to education represented by public and private institutions. Although public institutions ideally represent service to the public over the imperative for profit, private institutions maintain their commitment to the public only as  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 121 long as it appears to its investors as maximally profitable relative to other opportunities. Private institutions oriented around maximizing short-term financial gain bring the vicissitudes of markets into the public sector, raising questions as to their reliability and stability over the long term. Conclusion Seemingly monumental changes have recently occurred to the educational policy scene in the United States. The high stakes standardized testing regime pushed by federal power was ostensibly withdrawn in the rewriting of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as the ESSA. The partial retreat on high stakes standardized testing in the form of the ESSA of 2015 is a small step in the right direction. However, the modest latitude over assessment Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 afforded to states and locales ought to be seen as an opportunity to pursue a critical and intellectual form of teaching and learning that fosters habits of curiosity, dialogue, and dissent that are not only the basis for critical and creative thought but are also essential for a democratic society. It would be a mistake to turn to allegedly emancipatory corporate technologies that are depoliticized. As educational policies guiding teacher certification and prep- aration, state and national standards need to be changed to link knowledge to both subjectivity (lived experience) and objectivity (the broader social world) in ways that take seriously the constitutive class and cultural antagon- isms that structure the self and the social. Rather than taking up knowledge, teaching, and learning in relation to power and politics, unfortunately the details written into the act imply that the ESSA will continue to use federal funding to promote the privatization of teacher and leader preparation in forms that remain linked to positivist standardized testing and that move toward vocationalism and the “methods fetish” and away from the pedagogi- cal, curricular, and social theory found in the best critical university-based preparation programs. While the educational possibilities and even critical pedagogical possibili- ties of technology should not be discounted for their potential to contribute to genuinely democratic social movements, the question of education cannot be comprehended in terms of the technical efficiencies of delivery of knowl- edge nor of the development of critical thinking as problem solving skills. Rather public schools ought to create the conditions for a thinking society capable of democratic self-governance, humane and collective forms of control, and the reduction of arbitrary and authoritarian forms of control. The development of technological tools for education ought to be considered for how they can foster critical identifications and dispositions for social and self-interpretation that can form the basis for democratic social transformation.  122 K. J. SALTMAN Note 1. Educational publishing corporations produce, for example, textbooks, tests, curriculum, lesson plans, apps, tablet content, evaluation software and data tracking products, student teaching online platforms, and online education products. References Apple, M. 2006. Educating the Right Way. New York, NY: Routledge. Bagdikian, B. 1997. The Media Monopoly. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bauman, Z., and D. Lyon. 2013. Liquid Surveillance. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Bloomberg, L. P. 2014, April 4. CQ Roll Call “Amplify CEO Joel Klein Interviewed on Bloomberg TV.” Bowles, S., and H. Gintis. 2011. Schooling in Capitalist America. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Delissovoy, N., A. Means, and K. Saltman. 2014. Toward a New Common School Movement. Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Editors of Rethinking Schools. 2013. “Rethinking Schools V27n4 Summer.” http://www. rethinkingschools.org/archive/27_04/edit274.shtml Giroux, H. 2010. Education and the Crisis of Public Values. New York, NY: Peter Lang. Harvey, D. 2014. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Herman, E., and C. Noam. 2002. Manufacturing Consent. New York, NY: Pantheon. Hursh, D. 2008. High Stakes Testing and the Decline of Teaching and Learning. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Kamenetz, A. 2013. “News Corp.’s Big Test.” Fast Company, July/August. Layton, L. 2014. “How Bill Gates Pulled Off the Swift Common Core Revolution.” The Washington Post. Accessed June 7, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bill-gates-pulled- off-the-swift-common-core-revolution/2014/06/07/a830e32e-ec34-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_ story.html Malkin, M. 2014. “Feeding the Edu-Tech Beast.” Pittsburgh Tribune, Accessed January 13, 2016. http://triblive.com/opinion/featuredcommentary/5380653-74/google-district-common#axzz3x ndcON3t McChesney, R. 2004. The Problem of the Media. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Means, A. J. 2015. “Generational Precarity, Education, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” Critical Sociology. Advance online publication. doi:10.1177/0896920514564088 Means, A. J. Forthcoming. “Algorithmic Education, Big Data, and the Control Society: Toward a Decolonial and Biotechnical Commons.” Cultural Studies in Science Education. Meszaros, I. 2015. The Necessity of Social Control. New York, NY: Monthly Review Press. Molnar, A., and F. Boninger. 2015. On the Block: Student Data and Privacy in the Digital Age— The Seventheenth Annual Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends, 2013–2014. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Molnar, A., G. Miron, and J. L. Urschel. 2010. Profiles of For-Profit Education Management Orga- nizations: Twelfth Annual Report - 2009–2010. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Persson, J. 2015, March 30. “Pearson, ETS, Houghton Mifflin, and McGraw-Hill Lobby Big and Profit Bigger from School Tests.” Center for Media and Democracy. http://www. prwatch.org/news/2015/03/12777/reporters-guide-how-pearson-ets-houghton-mifflin-and- mcgraw-hill-are-profiting Rich, M. 2014, March 3. “New All-Digital Curriculums Hope to Ride High-Tech Push in Schoolrooms.” The New York Times: A13.  THE REVIEW OF EDUCATION, PEDAGOGY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES 123 Roberts-Mahoney, H., J. M. Alexander, and M. J. Garrison. 2016. “Netflixing Human Capital Development: Personalized Learning Technology and the Corporatization of K-12 Education.” Journal of Education Policy. Advance online publication. doi:10.1080/ 02680939.2015.1132774 Saltman, K. 2010. The Gift of Education: Public Education and Venture Philanthropy. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Saltman, K. 2016. Scripted Bodies: Corporate Power, Smart Technologies, and the Undoing of Public Education. New York, NY: Routledge. Simon, S. 2013. “Cyber Schools Flunk, But Tax Money Keeps Flowing.” Politico. Accessed September 25, 2015. http://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/cyber-schools-flunk-but-tax- money-keeps-flowing-97375.html Strauss, V. 2015a, March 30. “Report: Big Education Firms Spend Millions Lobbying for Pro- Testing Policies.” The Washington Post. Accessed April 6, 2016. https://www.washington- post.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/03/30/report-big-education-firms-spend-millions- lobbying-for-pro-testing-policies/ Strauss, V. 2015b, October 31. “Study on Online Charter Schools: ‘It is Literally as if the Kid Downloaded by [Kenneth Saltman] at 07:35 20 April 2016 did not go to School for an Entire Year’.” The Washington Post. https://www.washington- post.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/10/31/study-on-online-charter-schools-it-is-literally- as-if-the-kid-did-not-go-to-school-for-an-entire-year/ Whittle, C. 2009. “The Rise of Global Schooling.” Paper presented at the American Enterprise Institute Conference: More Than Just Schools, Washington, DC, December 7.