How Big Businesses Are Colonizing the Classroom: Parents say their children's education suffers when career and technical education programs are tailored to the needs of corporations.

• Author: Bryant, Jeff

"IT'S going to be great," I louston entre preneur Jim Mclngvale told a re porter about the charter school he was planning to open in August 2020. According to Mclngvale, known locally as "Mattress Mack" the new school--named Premier High School--would be located inside one of his businesses, Gallery Furniture, and offer Career and Technical Education (CTE) courses in automotive, electrical, welding, and carpentry.

While having part of a high school's curriculum devoted to "valuable job training"--as Mclngvale put it--might sound beneficial to students, some of that training is on-the-job at Gallery Furniture. Mclngvale, in a pitch to prospective students, sketched out what this looks like in practice. His school is "going to train you for four days a week That's going to be free. You work for Gallery Furniture one day a week to pay off the, ah, equipment that you might need, tuition, whatever," he said in a program broadcast on a local morning radio show.

So when Mclngvale exclaims his school is "absolutely free," what he really means is that he's getting one day per week of free labor in addition to free workforce training, at taxpayers' expense, for the students who graduate and decide to stay on as Gallery Furniture employees. It's easy to see this setup as a racket; what's less obvious is how Premier High School challenges the idea of a liberal arts education model, which consists of a holistic learning experience where students develop their creativity and critical thinking along with technical career knowledge and skills. Instead, the sole purpose of Premier, according to a local reporter, is to "get a job, keep a job, [and] help career advancement."

But it's not just small entrepreneurs like Mclngvale who see public schools as a potential source of cheap employee training. A 2021 New York Times Magazine article about Amazon's influence in California included a section on career and technical education courses taught at a high school in San Bernardino. Here, students wear shirts "emblazoned with the Amazon logo" and learn in a classroom "designed to emulate the inside of an Amazon facility." According to the article, "The lesson of the day was on Amazon's '14 Leadership Principles.'"

A "giant sweepstakes-style Amazon check" in the classroom bears the $50,000 figure that Amazon donated to start the program--a sum that likely doesn't even cover the costs of employing the teacher.

Aligning school curriculums to the demands of big...