K12 Schools Must Fill Need For Digital Media Skills
There is a new urgency to teach digital media literacy as a study finds students are taking online information for granted
From national initiatives that aim to broadly reform education to local efforts to pair children with tutors, corporations are increasingly involved with schools. The idea of business-school relationships is not new. However, the confluence of several powerful currents - corporate advocacy on education policy, cash-strapped public schools, privatization of public schools, and the pervasiveness of marketing geared toward young children - has made it a hot-button issue.
A survey by the Council for Corporate and School Partnerships found that 95 percent of schools had a partnership or conducted some activity with business. Such programs include Verizon Wireless' Bridging the Digital Divide Among Hispanic Youth in South Florida, as well as powerhouse partnerships with IBM, Hewlett-Packard and ExxonMobil.
Corporations have many motives for getting involved with schools, including the marketing aspect. But other motives range from concerns about workforce competitiveness from groups such as the Business Roundtable, to the desire of businesses to generate goodwill - and good publicity - in the surrounding community.
Some critics, including Alfi e Kohn, author of Education Inc.: Turning Learning into a Business, (rev. ed.; Heinemann, 2002), decry the degree to which education has assumed a corporate purpose and ideology. Critics, including Kohn, believe the dominant corporate focus on schools' ability to produce competent workers detracts from teaching that promotes critical thinking and democratic values. Corporate leaders, critics say, advocate running schools like businesses-defi ning narrow academic standards, measuring them in standardized tests, and rewarding or punishing schools based on those results.
Other critics, such as Alex Molnar and Faith Boninger of Arizona State University's commercialism in Education Research Unit, lament the continuing spread and evolution of marketing to schoolchildren, such as using comics sponsored by the Disney Corp. as part of a reading and writing curriciculum. Marketing in venues "previously off limits is coming to be considered 'normal,' " according to the 2006-2007 Report on Schoolhouse Commercializing Trends.
But the key for administrators is determining how their districts can benefit from corporate involvement while avoiding problematic relationships that only benefit the corporation. "When I talk to business groups, my focus is on the benefits for the business-here's why you need to be involved and how the partnership impacts educational achievement," says Jay Engeln, resident practitioner of school-business partnerships for the National Association of Secondary School Principals. For educators, however, "the mission of your school must be first and foremost at all times, and the businesses are partners with the school in achieving that mission."
IBM
Science- and technology-oriented companies take their educational mission seriously and have invested millions of dollars in projects through philanthropic foundations. IBM says improving public schools is its top social priority and a strategic business investment. IBM can succeed only if it has successful employees and successful customers in successful communities, says Robin Willner, IBM's vice president of Global Community Initiatives. The challenge, she says, is creating both programs that fulfi ll what students will need in order to be prepared for a different world in 20 years, and narrower programs that deal with today's unmet needs.
IBM's Reinventing Education initiative awarded $75 million in grants between 1994 and 2004, and many of the partnerships continue. In a 2004 evaluation, the Center for Children & Technology estimated that over 90,000 teachers and millions of students used the educational technology tools created through the program. IBM also recruited and paid the salaries of full-time IBM employees from its research laboratories and consulting organizations to work with educators in classrooms.
Coming early in the Internet age, Reinventing Education focused on helping schools adapt to the World Wide Web. Today, IBM's K12 education initiatives have a different flavor. Reading Companion is a Web-based program that uses voice recognition technology to help children practice reading. So far, IBM has given grants worth about $5 million to put the program in 497 sites in 19 countries.
