Mindsets paper business

Mindsets paper: business The business mindset has the longest history of colonizing education. Callahan documents how over the 20th C, business took over schools. 

One thing to note is the mechanism—the social prominence of businessmen led to them being in positions of power, especially school boards. This meant superindendents were directly accountable to businessmen. If superintendents wanted to keep their jobs, they needed to adopt the lens through which businessmen approached problems. 

There are three essential components of the business mindset in education: commodity, accountability, and market forces. 

Commodity: when business came into schools, they needed a target, like money. Thus they adopted an ersatz epistemology that claimed learning could be standardized. 

Accountability: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” This implies Taylorism and hierarchy. 

Market forces. 

The business takeover of education has not been successful. The components of business mindset do not hold for learning. Actually, learning works much more like the pre-industrial piecework system: each student’s learning is an individual product, produced idiosyncratically and 

What’s new now is that the startup economy is flexible and creative in finding more efficient ways to maximize the objective. This also means valuing only the objective

Commodity: The measures of learning which were originally proxies become the targets themselves. There’s something interesting about personalized education—it’s a bit like how the “sharing economy” turned into Uber’s “you can work any 14 hours you want in a day.” 

Accountability:

Market Forces:

How it serves the poor

How it serves the rich