The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry's Trojan Horse in Chicago Public Schools

The Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) has long been celebrated as one of Chicago’s great civic treasures. But behind its sleek glass exhibits and corporate “innovation” rhetoric lies a story of creeping privatization, ideological capture, and attacks on public education under the banner of partnership.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the museum’s partnership with Collins Academy STEAM High School in North Lawndale.

Through its Science Leadership Initiative (SLI), MSI presents itself as a benevolent ally of underfunded public schools. The museum dispatches facilitators, survey tools, and “improvement rubrics” designed to “help schools transform science education.” It even invites teacher leaders and administrators to Griffin Hall for “professional development.”

This is not help. It is capture. The museum’s so-called “support” is a corporate-style management system disguised as science education. Schools must complete “items to rate” and “indicators of progress,” quantifying “leadership,” “collaboration,” and “strategic partnerships” as if teaching were a start-up.

Each indicator reinforces the premise that schools require strategic alignment with private partners, rather than public funding and accountability. In MSI’s rubric, teacher freedom of conscience is replaced by compliance with external “vision.” The student’s curiosity becomes a metric. Science itself is reduced to the efficient delivery of outcomes for corporate funders.

MSI is a private 501(c)(3) corporation housed in a public building on public parkland and governed by a board of financiers and executives. Its largest donor, hedge fund billionaire Kenneth C. Griffin, recently secured naming rights through a $125 million gift. Patrons such as SC Johnson, Boeing, Microsoft, etc. fund exhibits that double as corporate PR.

MSI enters a public school as an unelected body acting under the authority of capital, not the city or its citizens. Consider the museum’s Blue Paradox exhibit, sponsored by SC Johnson, which scolds visitors for plastic pollution while omitting the company’s role as one of the world’s largest plastic producers. Far from critical inquiry, the lesson to students is personal guilt. A neat inversion of responsibility that protects industry while moralizing consumers.

Now that same ideology is exported into CPS classrooms under the guise of “leadership.” At Collins Academy, teachers were volun-told to rate the school’s “culture,” “values,” and “leadership structures” using MSI’s rubrics. Yet when educators asked for evidence or accountability, they were told none is needed, that personal impressions would do. This is ritualized compliance.

The Science Leadership Initiative is nothing more than a philanthropic experiment to test whether Chicago’s teachers can be retrained to internalize corporate management language as professional virtue. “Distributed leadership,” “continuous improvement,” “vision alignment” function as tools of control.

Philanthro-capitalism seeks to appear generous while contributing to erosion of the public sphere. Schools are told to “build strategic partnerships with business and community partners” and to “apply for and manage grants.” I.e. beg for funding while serving as the marketing arm of private foundations.

What a cruel joke in neighborhoods like North Lawndale, where disinvestment is manufactured by the very elites now claiming to "revitalize" it. The same foundations funding school closures now fund “innovation.” The same corporations poisoning the planet now sponsor “science education.”

If the Museum of Science and Industry truly served the public, it would submit to public authority. Its board must be opened to community representation, its contracts and sponsorships made transparent, its curriculum subject to democratic review.

Until then, every “gift” MSI offers must be treated with the skepticism it deserves. The future of Chicago’s public schools will not be written by the donors’ suite atop Griffin Hall. It must be reclaimed by teachers, students, and communities who understand that education belongs to the people, not to capital.