Tuesday, July 22, 2014

This is Why Parents Are Not Invited to the Ed Reform Table. They Just Don’t Have the ‘Right’ Credentials. | Missouri Education Watchdog

This is Why Parents Are Not Invited to the Ed Reform Table. They Just Don’t Have the ‘Right’ Credentials. | Missouri Education Watchdog:



This is Why Parents Are Not Invited to the Ed Reform Table. They Just Don’t Have the ‘Right’ Credentials.

education reformers
The closed fraternity of education reformers

Andrew Ferguson writes in The Weekly Standard about the history and players in the education reform movement and how the movers and shakers are in a special fraternity.  Members can kvetch and make plans to spend government money for those privately controlled blueprints and those outside the fraternity are blackballed from any decision making and marginalized as they are not part of the group.  Don’t waste your time pining away for a bid from the reformers.  From The Common Core Commotion:


At least since the heady days of “A Nation at Risk,” the world of education reform has been a cozy fraternity. Foundation directors sit on one another’s boards, think tankers beehive with other think tankers in the lounges of convention hotels, academics peer-review the work of academics who will soon peer-review their reviewers’ work. One foundation will give a grant to another foundation to study the work of the first foundation. In the last decade the fraternity has increasingly become a creature of the fabulously wealthy Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates has spent more than a billion dollars studying primary and secondary education. Few institutions dedicated to education reform have escaped Gates funding. Recipients range from trade groups like the American Federation of Teachers (more than $10 million since 2010) and Council of Chief State School Officers (nearly $5 million last year alone) to think tanks of the left (Center for American Progress) and the right (Thomas B. Fordham Institute).
The Gates Foundation has tunneled into the federal bureaucracy, too, at levels low and high. Several Gates officials and recipients worked in the Education Department under the second Bush, back when NCLB was the thing. Now, under President Obama, they are This is Why Parents Are Not Invited to the Ed Reform Table. They Just Don’t Have the ‘Right’ Credentials. | Missouri Education Watchdog: