March 6, 2008
High Schools Add Classes Scripted by Corporations
Lockheed, Intel Fund Engineering Courses;
Creating a Work Force
By ANNE MARIE CHAKER
March 6, 2008; Page A1
In a recent class at AbrahamClarkHigh School in Roselle, N.J., business teacher Barbara Govahn distributed glossy classroom materials that invited students to think about what they want to be when they grow up. Eighteen career paths were profiled, including a writer, a magician, a town mayor -- and five employees from accounting giant Deloitte LLP.
"Consider a career you may never have imagined," the book suggests. "Working as a professional auditor."
The curriculum, provided free to the public school by a nonprofit arm of Deloitte, aims to persuade students to join the company's ranks. One 18-year-old senior in Ms. Govahn's class, Hipolito Rivera, says the company-sponsored lesson drove home how professionals in all fields need accountants. "They make it sound pretty good," he says.
Deloitte and other corporations are reaching out to classrooms -- drafting curricula while also conveying the benefits of working for the sponsor companies. Hoping to create a pipeline of workers far into the future, these corporations furnish free lesson plans and may also underwrite classroom materials, computers or training seminars for teachers.
[...]
Schools, for their part, have embraced corporate support as state education funding has remained flat for a decade and declining housing values now threaten to eat into property-tax revenues. Teachers, meanwhile, often welcome the lesson plans, classroom equipment and the corporate-sponsored professional development sessions.
But however well-intentioned, such corporate input may blur the line between pure academics and a commercial agenda, critics say. "When you have a corporation or any special interest offering an incentive, you are distorting the educational purpose of the schools," says Alex Molnar, an education-policy professor at ArizonaStateUniversity who directs the school's Commercialism in Education Research Unit.
[...]
Project Lead the Way was formed 10 years ago with an initial $1.5 million grant from a foundation run by Richard Liebich, chief executive of a tool-manufacturing company based in Orchard Park, N.Y. Mr. Liebich said he could never find enough engineers to hire, and envisioned an entity that could help by creating engineering courses for pre-college students. The group's curriculum is technical, with no textbooks. Open-ended questions and problems encourage students to be creative, the organization says.
Project Lead the Way says its courses are offered as electives, and aren't meant to supplant core subjects typically taught in school.
"What these companies bring is contemporary expertise that can sometimes be insulated in a purely academic environment," says Niel Tebbano, Lead the Way's vice president of operations. With a traditional, theoretical approach to math or sciences, he says, "you get the young people asking, 'Why do I need to learn this?'" The lack of real-world application for this knowledge, he says, "has been the albatross around public education's neck."
cont'd...
