From first-grade lessons promoting the products of Fortune 500 companies to education reform designed to suit the interests of big business, corporations are being granted more and more power to determine what happens in our schools. This book explores the implications of this trend, examining everything from advertising aimed at children to "school choice" plans and other attempts to privatize public education. The articles refute the charge that the schools are to blame for the nation's economic woes, describe how advertisers target students, reveal what really goes on in school-to-work and apprenticeship programs, reassess the place of computers in schools, and explore how learning suffers when we refer to students as "workers" or import other workplace metaphors and models. Following an introduction (Alfie Kohn) that dissects the demand for higher performance and specific standards that is at the heart of business-led school reform, the articles are: (1) "Schools, Scapegoats, and Skills: Educational Reform and the Economy" (David C. Paris); (2) "Restructuring Students for Restructured Work: The Economy, School Reform, and Non-College Bound Youths" (Carol Axtell Ray and Roslyn Arlin Mickelson); (3) "Despite Touted Gifts, Business Tax Breaks Cost Schools Money" (William Celis III); (4) "Ad Pitches Target Teen Consumers" (Melanie Wells); (5) "Channel One: But What about the Advertising?" (Bradley S. Greenberg and Jeffrey E. Brand); (6) "Giving Kids the Business: The Commercialization of American Schools" (Alex Molnar); (7) "Do Not Use as Directed: Corporate Materials in the Schools" (John Olson); (8) "Investors Look to Education as Possibility for High Flier" (Mary B. W. Tabor); (9) "Selling the Schools a Bill of Goods: The Marketing of Computer-Based Education" (Douglas D. Noble); (10) "Beyond the Workplace Metaphor: The Classroom as a Learning Setting" (Hermine H. Marshall); (11) "The Littlest Customers: TQM [Total Quality Management] Goes to School" (Alfie Kohn); (12) "Schooling in Capitalist America" (Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis); (13) "Youth Apprenticeship: High Schools for Docile Workers" (Hannah Finan Roditi); (14) "On to the Past: Wrong-Headed School Reform" (James Moffett); (15) "The Hollow Promise of School Vouchers" (Robert Lowe); (16) "Is School Privatization the Answer?" (Martin Carnoy); and (17) "Why Not Privatize?" (Deborah Meier). (HTH)