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Residential poverty tends to be concentrated, and successful school integration requires either a district with enough socioeconomic diversity within its boundaries or a group of neighboring districts which, when combined, have enough diversity to facilitate an interdistrict integration plan.

To justify their campaign, ed reformers repeat, mantra-like, that U.S. students are trailing far behind their peers in other nations, that U.S. public schools are failing. The claims are specious. Two of the three major international tests—the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and the Trends in International Math and Science Study—break down student scores according to the poverty rate in each school. The tests are given every five years. The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in U.S. schools where the poverty rate was less than 10 percent ranked first in reading, first in science, and third in math. When the poverty rate was 10 percent to 25 percent, U.S. students still ranked first in reading and science. But as the poverty rate rose still higher, students ranked lower and lower. Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75 percent. The average ranking of American students reflects this. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty. And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.

Drilling students on sample questions for weeks before a state test will not improve their education. The truly excellent charter schools depend on foundation money and their prerogative to send low-performing students back to traditional public schools. They cannot be replicated to serve millions of low-income children. Yet the reform movement, led by Gates, Broad, and Walton, has convinced most Americans who have an opinion about education (including most liberals) that their agenda deserves support.

THE COST of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year

I sat today using Diigo to bookmark, annotate, highlight, capture pages and pictures, and do just about anything I needed to do effortlessly.  Ya'll, this is straight from this educator's heart:  Diigo is amazing! Now look, my thinking about tech tools is that they have to serve everyone:  teachers --administrators, students, parents -- basically all stakeholders to be truly of value.  I'm into the reality of teaching which means if it is not going to improve the outcome for students academically by supporting their learning, most teachers just don't have the time to deal with it.  But, I'd like to think I'm a realist and if there's a tool that makes a teacher's life easier, then preparing for lessons, classes, professional developments and, yes, our other life is easier, and that translates to a happier educator who has more time to work on supporting those students learning

 Diigo has to be the single most valuable tool that I have on my computer.

Government had to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.

In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns. First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on. Second, government must become involved in the "spiritual" development of its citizens -- not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment ("conservation"), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture.

Progressives therefore embraced a much more active and indeed imperialistic foreign policy than the Founders did.

uture is not out there to be "discovered": It has to be invented and designed.

Learning is a process of knowledge construction, not of knowledge recording or absorption. Learning is knowledge-dependent; people use their existing knowledge to construct new knowledge. Learning is highly tuned to the situation in which it takes place. Learning needs to account for distributed cognition requiring knowledge in the head to combined with knowledge in the world. Learning is affected as much by motivational issues as by cognitive issues.

previous notions of a divided lifetime-education followed by work-are no longer tenable.