Jajuna

Currently there is  a growing mobilization of corporate interests who view the excessive emphasis on rote-learning and high-stakes testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act as harmful to workforce development. Enter the 21st Century Skills coalition whose board of directors is made up of representatives from some of the most powerful corporations in the United States. This network has developed an educational framework which they are pushing on individual states and are agressively lobbying to make official policy under the Obama administration.

At its root the 21st century Skills partnership represents a pro-corporate plan for education which advocates widening curricular mandates in order to produce more entrepreneurial, flexible, and creative workers. On the surface the proposals may strike some as representing much needed progressive reforms, for instance the skills framework calls for media and civic literacy programs. However, when one spends any amount of time reading the policy papers  of 21st Century Skills their agenda appears far from civic oriented. Instead, it promotes the privatization of public education and the commercialization of curriculum. For those concerned with the direction of public education under the Obama adiministration, the 21st Centruy Skills partnership is definitely an entity to start monitoring.