In this chapter we cover a lot, from the point President Nixon coming into power and making big changes in the educational system, where the school curriculum changing to accommodate all ethnicity and not just the Protestant Anglo-American culture. Also Nixon administration’s promotion of career education committed the school to educating students for Jobs. “Go to school to get a job” would become the major justification for supporting the school system. I guess Nixon administration way of looking at the education system as a way of getting students ready for the job market has a positive outlook for the economy. Encouraging student to go to school in order to acquire a good job is and is still a good driving force for promoting a wealthy economy and an improving society to decrease the level of poverty.
Another thing that stood out to me in this book is educating for the consumer economy. This section talks about franchised and companies gearing up to educate workers for the global economy they became a training ground for future consumers. School were used as the place for making the student or as you may say the consumers or future consumers become more aware of commercial advertising and a perfect ground for converting traditional home economics courses into consumer sciences course. As we see today a lot of fast food chains such as McDonalds and Wendy’s invading school by curriculum as mention in the book were these food chains are promoting their chains as a place to work and gain good work experience for the work force.
Standardizing testing section of this chapter also stood out to me. I know we have discussed this so much time in class. I know this is a very touchy subject because many that not all students are perfect test take, that standardize testing have some form of biasness to it and also that standardize testing is a waste of time. This chapter talks about Leon Lessinger who believed that accountability is important for fitting and be equipped for workforce. The accountability movement spread in the early 1970s and with that drive school were force to publicize that annual test score on standardized test. During that period students found themselves taking an increasing number of achievement tests to satisfy the requirements of accountability. I wonder how that really worked out back then. I think that method of testing students to see what job they are capable of doing limits the student. I like that in today’s society student have the opportunity to go to college and take course in different areas to see what really is interesting to them.
