Found on Telepolis: TP: Enforcement of Controlling and Ranking at All Levels:
If a critical economist had been invited to the congress, he would have probably formulated the Bertelsmann strategy as follows: Democratic decision-making and open discussion are replaced by control procedures from modern business administration. Everything is sweetened with dynamic Anglicisms from marketing babble, but often ideas from the business administration specialty of controlling are hidden behind them. Earlier, one spoke more prosaically of accounting/internal auditing, but meant the same thing: the internal control and monitoring of production processes. This is done by means of cost-benefit analysis, profit and loss accounting, budgeting, profit centers, key figures for everything and anything, etc.
My personal aversion to business administration as, in my opinion, a far too short-sighted vision of the market should be known by now. However, the connection with a rather sanctimonious acting major publishing house makes the whole thing really explosive - because such corporations primarily have their own economic interests and should therefore be kept out of educational policy discussions, especially they are definitely the wrong ones to be involved as advisors in educational policy decision-making. But in the course of the politicians' privatization frenzy, such blunders are repeatedly made - combined with the marketing lies that automatically arise from such companies to consolidate their own route (such as the survey on tuition fees cited in the text, in which the path of free study was simply excluded - and then it was claimed that students were predominantly in favor of tuition fees).
The biggest problem with this close connection to the economy - whether it's Bertelsmann in educational policy or other companies in other areas - is the lack of democratic control. Politicians are still controlled in a rudimentary way, public institutions are forced by the new information law to disclose many areas, but decision-making in private sector institutions is not subject to these controls. If politicians, for example, refer to studies from the economy, one may get to the point - that the decision is based on a study by Institute So-and-So - but one may find out nothing about the structure and actual content of the study. And thus, control by the population is bluntly circumvented.
In my opinion, given the importance of educational policy, every influence of the economy and industry must be excluded. Completely irrelevant what they demand - they have nothing to do with the political design of educational policy. But unfortunately, our politicians repeatedly sell political control to private sector institutes instead of doing the work themselves. And they are selling our future and our sovereignty as a society to the economy.