Highlighted Posts for the week of May 27th

The corporate reform movement is an attempt by a group of wealthy philanthropists to impose market forces where there had previously been none or had protections against them.  

Slip ALEC Education Agenda Into Wisconsin Budget

The proposed budget provisions have the potential to "radically change public education in the State of Wisconsin," says Julie Mead, chair of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Big $$$ Behind NC Privatization Bills 

In the year that has followed, North Carolina has absorbed a flood of more than $90,000 in campaign contributions to lawmakers friendly to the school choice movement.

Four Keys of Effective School Leadership

Numerous studies on the topic of effective school leadership focus our attention on four key factors: Organizational Knowledge; Use of Data; Scheduling; and Positive Beliefs and High Expectations.  

What teachers need and reformers ignore: time to collaborate

Whether that transformation occurs has everything to do with how policymakers and practitioners approach this new reform.  Ironically, old style factory-model thinking could undercut richer student learning if we follow traditional patterns of education reform implementation.

As the editorial points out, however, research tends to show that police in the hallways  creates schools-as-prisons and students-as-criminals, increasing, rather than eliminating, the problems.

A Handy Reference Guide on Who is Donating to Corporate-Style Education Reform 

As Big Money continues to shape public education, it can be hard to keep all the players straight - from wealthy individuals, to foundations, to corporations. Here's your guide.

School Closing Quotables

One key component of this strategy is demographic inversion- moving the poor out of the center city into the periphery, where they will no longer be able to physically or politically threaten the global elites who will be working and playing in the redeveloped Center.