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Sixteen years ago, as students were enjoying their summer break, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman issued his own report card on the American education system. In a guest commentary in The Washington Post, he described it as "backward," often producing "dismal results."

Republican lawmakers and corporations have a new target: kids in special ed.

Next week (August 11-12), Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker and Michelle Rhee will speak at the Global Leadership Summit. Started in 1996 by Bill Hybels-guru at Willow Creek Community Church, the chief branch of the multi-church Willow Creek Association -the summit takes place just outside of Chicago in a $75 million auditorium and will be beamed via satellite to hundreds of churches in the U.S. and seventy countries, with an expected audience of 165,000.

"There will be no classrooms full of students. There will be no staff of teachers. The sign outside indicates that the location is the school district headquarters. Yet, this will be the location of Douglas County's newest charter school. "

A group of executives who represent around 300 of America's largest corporations has labored in the shadows since the early 1970s to promote free market policies to state legislators. The cabal met this week in New Orleans' Mariott hotel and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal was the luncheon speaker at the mid-week gathering. The influence which the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has demonstrated includes virtual destruction of public employee collective bargaining rights, voter identification requirements that appear to be aimed at restrictive voting, and most importantly a frontal attack on public education.

The wish we all have. To find a crystal ball. To see if what we're doing now will pay off tomorrow. Where we go to college. Whom we marry. Where we buy a house. How we raise our kids. We think about it in the big picture, too. In our economy. Our politics. So it is with our public schools. They always seem like a playground for experimentation. Some proved to be bad ideas, like open-classroom school buildings. Most have been replaced. Or the brilliant idea when I was in high school. English and history taught as electives. Let the students choose what interests them. I'm still paying the price for that scattershot experience. And the "new math" roller coaster. We all paid the price for that one. But, they were bumps in the road compared to what is playing out now. The experimentation is on such a grand scale and so many are convinced it is the "right and only" way to go, there may be no path to recovery if it all turns out to be misguided. I've been glimpsing a crystal ball. And what I see in it frightens me.

Walmart family heirs and others are changing the face of education in Wisconsin

State-level battles over changes in education policy have shifted in many places from legislative chambers to courthouses, as unions and other critics of new laws challenge them on the grounds that they violate state constitutions and worker contracts.

State-level battles over changes in education policy have shifted in many places from legislative chambers to courthouses, as unions and other critics of new laws challenge them on the grounds that they violate state constitutions and worker contracts.

There is a persistent debate over the role of scale of operations in education. Some argue that school franchises offer educational services more effectively than do small independent schools. Skeptics counter that large, centralized operations create hard-to-manage bureaucracies and foster diseconomies of scale and that small schools are more effective at promoting higher-quality education. The answer to this question has profound implications for U.S. education policy, because reliably scaling up the best schools has proven to be a particularly difficult problem. If there are policies that would make it easier to replicate the most effective schools, systemwide educational quality could be improved substantially.

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"The decades-long campaign to end public education is propelled by the super-wealthy, right-wing DeVos family. Betsy Prince DeVos is the sister of Erik Prince, founder of the notorious private military contractor Blackwater USA (now Xe), and wife of Dick DeVos, son of the co-founder of Amway, the multi-tiered home products business."

"The video below is a short preview of the 34-minute video "School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias."  Private schools receiving funding through "school choice" programs are using A Beka Book, Bob Jones University Press, and other Protestant fundamentalist curricula.  The textbooks in these series teach that dinosaurs lived on earth with humans; deny global warming; promote hostility toward other religions and other sectors of Christianity (particularly Roman Catholicism); provide a biased and often factually incorrect version of history; and teach extreme laissez-faire economics, claimed to be biblically-based."

This article will investigate the fix-the-teachers campaign of today's "education reformers." It's not their only project. They also want public schools run with the top-down, data-driven, accountability methods used in private businesses; they aim to replace as many regular public schools as possible with publicly funded, privately managed charter schools; some are trying to expand voucher programs to allow parents to take their per-child public-education funding to private schools.

When they were recently asked whether the current administration is seeking to privatize public education, a couple of PA State Senators used the term "selective dismantling" in discussions with school board members and superintendents in Delaware County.

On Oct. 1, 650 people attended the 4th annual Northwest Teachers for Social Justice conference in Seattle.  Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp gave a well-received talk on "Challenging Corporate Ed Reform." He ended on an uplifting note with " 10 hopeful, tangible signs of organizing resistance and alternatives to the corporate reform agenda."    The following is an excerpt from that presentation.

"Republicans are hatching an ambitious plan to rewrite No Child Left Behind this year - one that could end up dramatically rolling back the federal role in education and trigger national blowouts over standardized tests and teacher training. NCLB cleared Congress in 2002 with massive bipartisan support but has since become a political catastrophe: The law's strategy for prodding and shaming schools into improvement proved deeply flawed over time, and its unintended failures have eclipsed its bright spots. Today, NCLB is despised by some parents who blame it for schools "teaching to the test," protested by some on the left for promoting education reform and reviled by Republicans in Congress who say the law represents aggressive federal overreach."

"This may be the most important article you read this week, this month, or this year. It was published last year, and I missed it. But, wow, Bruce Baker nails what is wrong with "education reform.""