The tangled webs of private influence on public school reform
Last February, a Washington D.C.-based nonprofit organization called In the Public Interest, submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for private emails and other files from Indiana school superintendent Tony Bennett and the Indiana Department of Education in an effort to track the extent of private influence on public education policy. Indiana, as public school teacher Doug Martin details in this article on the Schools Matter website, has stonewalled.A similiar FOIA request was made in Maine, where officials released documents that helped show that a big part of Maine’s digital education agenda is being led by private outside companies. They include the nation’s two largest online education providers, K12 Inc. of Herndon, Va., and Connections Education, a Baltimore-based subsidiary of Pearson — which stand to earn a great deal of money from the Maine digital initiative, the Portland Press Herald reported in this story.
In September the newspaper described more than 1,000 documents that had been obtained concerning
The problem with economically fixated reform
School reform in recent years has taken a decidedly corporate bent. Here Chris Gilbert, who teaches English at a high school and community college in North Carolina, explains why economically fixated reform is a problem. He has published several articles in the National Council of Teachers of English's English Journal.
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