StickWithANose

Well, at least you can say that old Frederick Hess is being honest for once… [h/t]
The nice thing about these ventures is that they “own” their reforms and are solely committed to executing them–not to meeting every need of every child in a given geography. The 21st century “system” may well be [...]

Think tanks are marketing machines. Their sole function is to communicate and cement “common sense” understandings of socio-political reality that do the bidding of their corporate masters, and they do so across media via both digital and traditional routes. The key to their success is self-referentiality. In the relatively closed system of think tanks and [...]

Today, Schools Matter introduces us to one of the major players behind ‘Waiting for Superman’, Philip Anschutz. Turns out that Mr. Anschutz is a big player in the dark world of conservative think-tanks and edu-philanthropy.
One of the key players in the distribution of Waiting for ‘Superman’ is Walden Media, a film company owned by [...]

One of the most frustrating aspects of playing the academic game is the un-comfortable truth that if you are willing to sell your soul to the powers that be by generating “research and analysis” that provides a patina of legitimacy to public looting and ceding the commons to private interests you can be richly rewarded [...]

Not content with leaving the nation in worse shape than did his mentor Herbert Hoover, the Bush family is celebrating the launch of the Bush Institute for Knowledge Pollution at SMU with the announcement of its first policy initiative: The Alliance to Reform Education Leadership. The goal of the initiative is to train educational leaders [...]

As a follow-up to my previous posts on the publication of the Point study on teacher incentives and the attempt by noted think-tank intellectual Matthew Yglesias to polish that turd, I want to share with you a very small example of how incestuous the world of philanthropist funded think-tanks and policy centers really are. Yglesias [...]

With yesterday’s release of Vanderbilt’s POINT study, the knowledge industry has kicked into high gear in order to put a happy face on data that undermines much of what they’ve been telling the nation about incentives and education for the past two decades. Today, that great fountain of village consensus thinking Matt Yglesias does his [...]

Of all the think tank trolls I’ve read, I must say that Fredrick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute is my favorite. This is not because I hold his work in high regard. Quite the opposite. In conducting my dissertation research, I had the pleasure of reading the very large number of books that [...]

I’m a big proponent of what I would term as quasi-decentralization by which I mean a school system with national standards but local control in the best ways to achieve those standards. This is the kind of system used by Finland with great success. So, I’ve been watching with great interest the growing trend of [...]

As I’ve noted previously, one of the primary functions of a think tank troll is to not only promote the agenda of the organization and its funders but to also attack its perceived enemies. Yesterday, the Education Sector’s Bill Tucker offered us yet another example of this dynamic in action. Noted educator and critic Alfie [...]