Corporate involvement in public education is often met with suspicion. As it should be in the case of the Narara Valley High School's formal partnership with NuCoal Resources, argues Dr Leila Morsy.
OPINION: Corporate involvement in public education is often met with suspicion. As it should be in the case of the Narara Valley High School's formal partnership with NuCoal Resources announced this week. This formal partnership between the Central Coast school and a mining company is the first in NSW.
NuCoal will provide training for maths teachers and will help adjust the curriculum to include material that will support school leavers to better engage in the mining workforce.
At times, corporate involvement in schooling has taken the shape of a well-developed partnership, balancing the goals of public schooling with corporate interests (in the US, IBM and JPMorgan Chase have developed rich, thoughtful initiatives with schools). Sometimes the goals of corporations can be aligned with the goals of schools and partnerships can be effective.
Suspicion around corporate involvement is more pronounced when a company's motives are not transparent or their goals are not clearly stated or seem exclusively self-interested.
NuCoal's motives are clearly stated but seem insincere and misaligned with what NuCoal is doing: NuCoal explains their aim is to improve maths skills of school leavers, but their initiative does not just address maths. The curriculum is being modified to include more mining-related material. The benefits for Narara Valley High School and its students are short-term: students will be better trained to work for NuCoal, but the breadth and depth of their education will be narrowed. The benefits seem disproportionately in NuCoal's favour.
Corporate involvement in schools raises two issues. First, it can threaten the long-term goals of public schooling. Corporate interests often operate on a shorter timeline than those covered by the aims of schools. Corporations must meet quarterly targets measured in profit margins. But, the aggregate value of education is more difficult to measure. The yields of schooling can take years to bear fruit, sometimes in indirect ways that are more valuable than being well-prepared for the first day of the first job of a lifetime.
Corporate goals for schools are private ones and corporate interests do not include many of the essential ancillary aims of public schooling, such as citizenship, social skills, physical and emotional health and critical thinking. In the case of the NuCoal partnership, the curriculum will emphasise basic academic skills, a small sliver of what we want our students to learn. Some might argue that a focus on these basics cannot be damaging to the goals of public education, but school time is a zero-sum game: tilting the curriculum too heavily towards maths, reading and writing shifts attention away from other elements of a rounded education.
The second issue falls at the heart of a broader education debate: evaluating an education based on what can be measured. NuCoal wants to hire graduates with better maths skills because these are necessary to be a better worker (in their eyes at least). This is not a bad aim: basic maths skills are important. But better maths skills at the expense of less easily measured skills is a loss for students. In fact, a better education is not necessarily one that is better measured. The way corporations tend to measure the value of education is to gauge how prepared school leavers are to work for them in entry-level jobs (as in the case of NuCoal). So, what can be quantified (numeracy skills) is of higher interest to some companies than soft skills that cannot be quantified (love of learning, curiosity, compassion, tolerance, educated scepticism, informed questioning, intellectual autonomy).
But for schools, the promise of money in corporate partnerships is often too appealing to refuse, even if it is in exchange for fulfilling short-term corporate aims.
Schools are not a pipeline for the factory and should not be beholden to turning students into workers. And school leavers' lives do not begin and end at the factory door - our schoolteachers are one of the first shepherds of students' intellectual and civic lives.
One suggestion is to have school-based committees that include parents, teachers and students to oversee proposed initiatives and programs with external funders. If these initiatives are truly partnerships, equal oversight and agency for school and private partners over funding, programs, outcome measures and evaluation is necessary. School partners must be involved in the development and implementation of programs. The long-term goals of students, school and the community must be at the forefront.
Not all corporate involvement in government schooling is pernicious for schools but it must be approached with a fair amount of discernment on the part of educators who should select their partners carefully, and prudently look in the gift-horse's mouth.
This opinion piece was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Dr Leila Morsy is a lecturer in the school of education at UNSW. She has a doctorate from Harvard University and her research is on the motivations and strategies of the 500 largest US corporations' grant-making in the education sector.