Some have noted a rise in what is sometimes called the Educational-Industrial Complex in which the educational process is molded to best fit the needs of corporations that produce educational products such as textbooks, student information system software, school security equipment, and even legal services. That is, rather than focusing on the needs of students, educational institutions have been forced to become consumers of the products and services most easily produced and supplied by private enterprise. Of course, this is all justified with rhetoric asserting that this is done to benefit students, but the real aim is to maximize access to public funds. Corporations that supply educational materials lobby hard to gain control over educational budgets and to guarantee themselves sales. They make sure that legislation affecting public schools is designed with this in mind. Although NCLB and RTTT are superficially different, both provide corporations with the ability to pull the strings behind the scenes and to manipulate educational institutions so that they have little choice but to purchase their products.

The solution I propose to remedy this state of affairs is for the government to pull the rug out from under corporations and to back open source projects instead. Two examples of projects already in existence that take this approach to the development of curricular materials are curriki.org and sourceforge.net. Projects like these could quite possibly save school districts billions of dollars annually, but more importantly they would empower teachers and give them back the influence on their profession that has been usurped by corporations. Bureaucrats and corporations really don't know anything about teaching and they really don't have the interests of children at heart. For them children are simply pawns in a game to maximize their revenue and/or to get re-elected. Teachers, on the other hand, have dedicated their lives to the education of children and they know better than any other interest group how best to serve children and to maximize the effectiveness of schools.