History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
The fundamental choice
- 05-27-2011
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Blog by John Thompson/Huffington Post
We want businessmen in the free market to take risks and leverage their capital in order to increase their profits and create a dynamic economy. Some experiments will fail, but "its only money." Actually, the game involves more than money as families, as well as the investors' bottom line, are damaged when gambles do not work out. That is why we need the checks and balances of our democratic system to counter the "creative destruction" of capitalism. The biggest winners in today's corporate world seek to apply the same competitiveness to school reform. They have adopted a strategy of "convergence" or "flooding the zone" to drive rapid, "transformational change" in selected districts and schools. They seek out charters and systems with mayoral control in order to avoid the messiness of constitutional democracy. These sincere data-driven "reformers" are funding a culture of risk-taking, and urgent experimentation. (more...)
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