How corporations are forcing their way into America's public schools; By Jeff Bryant

I n the expanding effort to privatize the nation’s public education system, an ominous, less-understood strain of the movement is the corporate influence in Career and Technical Education (CTE) that is shaping the K-12 curriculum in local communities. T he growing corporate influence behind CTE is  visible in Va. where major corporations including Amazon, Ford and Cisco—rather than educators and local, democratic governance decide  what students learn in local schools. CTE is a rebranding traditional vocational education and has expanded course offerings to many more “high-demand” careers, especially in fields that require knowledge of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).The “centerpiece” of Virginia’s successful effort to lure Amazon to build a new headquarters in the state, was a commitment to more than double Virginia’s tech-talent pipeline, beginning in K-12 schools.”