This thoughtful and provocative essay by Shawn Gude situates present-day corporate reform in its historical context. Gude shows the connections between early 20th century social efficiency and the present-day demand for testing, standardizing, and data-based decision-making.
Here is an excerpt:
“There’s a special resemblance between the struggles against scientific management, or Taylorism, and today’s teacher resistance to corporate reform schemes. Just as factory workers fought top-down dictates, deskilling, and the installation of anemic work processes, so too are teachers trying to prevent the undemocratic implementation of high-stakes testing and merit pay, assaults on professionalism, and the dumbing down and narrowing of curricula.
“There are more obvious parallels: Proponents of scientific management counted some prominent progressives in their ranks, just like the contemporary left-neoliberals hawking education reform. The nostrums of both Taylorism and the education accountability movement paper over foundational conflicts and root causes. Many of those who espouse education reform cast their solutions as unimpeachably “scientific” and “data-driven,” yet as with scientific management partisans, the empirical grounding of their prescriptions is highly dubious. And proponents of scientific management and corporate school reform share an antipathy toward unions, often casting them as self-interested inhibitors of progress.”
And here is another excerpt:
“When education is reduced to test prep, rich curricula and the craft of teaching are imperiled. The vapid classroom of neoliberal school reform mirrors the vapid workplace of Taylorism. Teach for America, which implicitly advances the idea that the sparsely trained can out-teach veteran educators, engenders deskilling and deprofessionalization. Non-practitioners dictating to practitioners how they should do their work mirrors management’s disciplining of workers; both militate against work as a creative activity. The appropriation of business language — the head of the Chicago Public Schools is the “CEO” — reinforces the idea that schools should be run like corporations. Merit pay individualizes and severs educators’ ties to one another, forcing them to compete instead of cooperate. So too with the anti-union animus that neoliberal reformers and scientific management proponents display.”
Read the essay. You will understand the roots of the corporate reforms of our day.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Dylan: But I’ll know my song well before I start singing. And it’s a hard. It’s a hard. It’s a hard rain’s gonna fall . . .
hard indeed
Called hail which can cause serious damage, much like the current educational malpractices being pushed by the edudeformers.
Corporations “train” employees which is an ocean apart from “educating” someone. I am a certified middle school math teacher w/20 previous years in the public sector. I have lived the difference. The education reform movement is focused on training vs educating. It is driven by private billionaires and bought-out politicians who want trained and brainwashed robots and puppets for future employees and voters. The purpose of public education is to create an educated and informed citizenry for a successful democracy – not to train, train & train for private and political gain, gain and gain.
Your statement below is what teachers are trying to get through these TESTING KING’S HEADS…but they are completely devoid of any common sense!
“When education is reduced to test prep, rich curricula and the craft of teaching are imperiled.”
…The vapid classroom of neoliberal school reform mirrors the vapid workplace of Taylorism…
… Read the essay. You will understand the roots of the corporate reforms of our day. …
“Thorough and efficient system…” is probably the nation’s most common state constitution ed clause, dating from 1851 or earlier.
From The “E” in Thorough and Efficient: How Can We Insure Efficiency in Spending School Tax Dollars?
“Professor Tractenberg finished with a few summarizing thoughts: (1) the need to get serious about defining and implementing an efficient system of free public schools; (2) the desirability of doing that through a voluntary or consensual process; and (3) the constitutional imperative to realize that efficient system.”