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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 for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy-where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision-investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

This article has been around for a few years but continues to be relevant. Kozol contextualizes provides a good summary of the push to privatize public education. The most striking part of the article is the quote from where the title is taken, "The larger developing opportunity is in the K-12 EMO market, led by private elementary school providers", which, they emphasize, "are well positioned to exploit potential political reforms such as school vouchers". From the point of view of private profit, one of these analysts enthusiastically observes, "the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada". Kozol has shedding light on educational inequities for years. With this piece he warns of the dangers of ignoring just how motivated corporate interests are to move beyond "nibbling at the edges" of public schools and devour the whole system.

"A Manhattan woman has sued a $19,000-a-year preschool her daughter attended, arguing that the program failed to adequately prepare her daughter for the test required to enter New York City's hypercompetitive private school system. "

Who does this site serve? "Since 1998 we have helped thousands of families around the world to find the right schools for their children. We work with individual families and with corporations. We work with gifted children, kids with special needs, or any child whose parents want to make sure he or she is in the right educational environment. Our expert consultants are trained to look beyond the superficial aspects of a school - the pretty campus, the brand new gym, or how popular it is - and instead strive to understand a school's culture, atmosphere, values, and environment. Above all else, we are committed to the concept of "fit" so that your child can reach his or her full potential. "

"Are charters really doing a better job educating the city's public school students than the traditional public schools? That was the question of the week, after state test scores came out on Tuesday showing not only far greater proficiency in English and math by third through eighth graders who attend the city's charters, but also far more improvement this year."

Juan Goonzalez on the connections between charters and Wall Street

http://www.corrugate.org/granito_de_arena/project_support For over 20 years, global economic forces have been dismantling public education in Mexico, but always in the constant shadow of popular resistance... Granito de Arena is the story of that resistance - the story of hundreds of thousands of public schoolteachers whose grassroots, non-violent movement took Mexico by surprise, and who have endured brutal repression in their 25-year struggle for social and economic justice in Mexico's public schools. Completed in 2005, Granito de Arena provides context and background to the unprecedented popular uprising that exploded in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006. "

Charter schools in the US: Wall Street's education model By Nancy Hanover 11 July 2011 Last month a new for-profit investment fund was created, the first of its kind, to finance the construction of charter schools across the United States. Jointly managed by Canyon Capital Realty Advisors ($20 billion in assets) and Agassi Ventures, LLC, owned by Andre Agassi, it plans to buy up undervalued urban land and jumpstart the construction of 75 new charter schools.[1] The Canyon-Agassi Charter School Fund announcement states, "The fund will provide investors with current income and capital appreciation by responding to the growing demand for quality charter school facilities in the nation's burgeoning urban centers and by capturing the opportunities arising out of the current dislocation in the real estate market." In other words, it will buy inner-city land cheaply, develop it and then sell the facilities to charter operations. The firm expects to raise $300 million in equity and invest up to $750 million."

"On Monday, Michael Winerip, education columnist for The New York Times, weighed in on what has become the back-to-school book of the year: "Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools," a 400-plus page tome by Steven Brill, the founder of Court TV and the American Lawyer site. Mr. Winerip said Mr. Brill "has little positive to say about teachers," adding that the villains of his story "are bad teachers coddled by unions." (Mr. Brill posted a comment on nytimes.com expressing surprise at the "anger" in the column, and saying it distorted his work; Mr. Winerip responded: Read their debate and other comments here.) "

ducation Panel to start the program at 6PM on the issues ahead for this coming school year for parents/teachers/children - preserving and enhancing public education. * Yelena Siwinski (GEM/Grassroots Education Movement) * Mark Torres (PPM/Peoples Power Movement) * Brenda Walker (CPE/Coalition of Public Education) * Clarence Talyor (Recently released book - "Reds At The Blackboard") WBAI's Radio Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report

As millions of students prepare to go back to school, budget cuts are resulting in teacher layoffs and larger classes across the country. This comes as the drive toward more standardized testing increases despite a string of cheating scandals in New York, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and other cities. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also recently unveiled a controversial plan to use waivers to rewrite parts of the nation's signature federal education law, No Child Left Behind. We speak to New York City public school teacher Brian Jones and Diane Ravitch, the former assistant secretary of education and counselor to Education Secretary Lamar Alexander under President George H. W. Bush, who has since this post dramatically changed her position on education policy. She is the author of "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education."

The biggest problem that the education system faces today is a preoccupation with, and the application of, the factory model of management to education, where everything is arranged for the scalability and efficiency of "the system", to which the students, the teachers, the parents and the administrators have to adjust. "The system" grinds forward, at ever increasing cost and declining efficiency, dispiriting students, teachers and parents alike.

Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills - like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools - at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later. The spending push comes as schools face tough financial choices. In Kyrene, for example, even as technology spending has grown, the rest of the district's budget has shrunk, leading to bigger classes and fewer periods of music, art and physical education.

While producers of print-based curriculum and instructional materials are struggling, companies that are focused on technology-based instruction and tools for data collection and analysis are thriving in the K-12 market, says a new report by Berkery Noyes, an independent investment bank. An emphasis on accountability and data-driven decision-making in education is part of what's behind that trend, said Vivek Kamath, a managing director at the New York City-based bank who specializes in the education market. "Schools are realizing that they need to treat their schools like businesses," he said. "What they're looking for are enhanced analytics."

"The Shock Doctrine, as articulated by journalist Naomi Klein, describes the process by which corporate interests use catastrophes as instruments to maximize their profit. Sometimes the events they use are natural (earthquakes), sometimes they are human-created (the 9/11 attacks) and sometimes they are a bit of both (hurricanes made stronger by human-intensified global climate change). Regardless of the particular cataclysm, though, the Shock Doctrine suggests that in the aftermath of a calamity, there is always corporate method in the smoldering madness - a method based in Disaster Capitalism."

I've spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed institutions and policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist, and a policy advocate. But these days I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, sometimes literally, it should be blown up. Because the increasingly polarized national debate around education policy is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of budget cuts in a society that has its priorities seriously upside down.