The Condition of Public Education.

[LWolf]

For those with an interest, Jerry Bracey has released his 13th report in Phi Delta Kappan's October issue. It may be more detailed and technical than some wanted, but it has some interesting sections.
Look for the "Golden Apple Awards," and any other particular interests you may have. I've snipped part of the section on vouchers for you; the entire document is 17 pages long. Download, print, and read at your leisure! (There's a different snip on teacher qualification over in the editorial forum)

As for Cleveland, an ongoing evaluation by Kim
Metcalf and his colleagues at Indiana Un i versity found
that public school students had started first grade with
test scores below those of voucher students. By the end
of third grade, the public school students had narrowed
the gap from 14 points to just 3 points. In language
arts, the gap closed from 11 points to 5, and in
math the public school students had not only closed a 9-point gap but had overtaken the voucher students to lead by 2 points. Said the evaluators, “The most recent results do not reveal any significant impacts of participation in the voucher program on student achievement.” 21 Despite this lack of impact, the Catholic Council of Ohio and David Brennan, author of the Cleveland voucher plan, pushed through—literally in the dark of night— a $10.5-million voucher expansion.

All of this dancing around about whether vouchers work is, of course, largely irrelevant to the larger aim of voucher advocates:
to privatize the public schools. The grandfather of the American voucher programs, Milton Friedman, titled one of his articles “Pu blic
Schools: Make Them Pr i va t e . ”2 3William Bast, CEO of the Heartland Institute, has said that vouchers are merely a temporary expedient on the way to full privatization. The efforts to privatize public schools and the motives behind the efforts to do so have been well summarized in The Voucher Veneer.24 The various Peterson papers contain acknowledgments of who funds the research. Mostly they are the same right-wing foundations that paid Charles Murray a million dollars for The Bell Curve and bestowed $2 million on David Horowitz’ Center for the Study of American Culture.

The principal force behind the privately funded voucher programs is Children First America, which began life as the Children’s Educational Opportunity fund or CEO America. If one goes to CFA’s website ( w w w. childrenfirstamerica.org) and clicks on “links,”
one finds a list of more than 20 right-wing organizations,
such as the Manhattan Institute, the Institute for Justice, the Mackinac Center, the Goldwater Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, which Slate editor Michael Kinsley once called “a right-wing propaganda machine masquerading as a think tank.”25

Of course, the privatization fox is now in the public education hen house. Eugene Hickok, who as secretary of education in Pennsylvania helped bring Edison Schools, Inc., to that state and tried repeatedly to get vouchers installed, is acting deputy secretary of education.
Nina Shokraii Rees has brought her ideology from the Heritage Foundation to the U.S. Department of Education as deputy under secretary for innovation and improvement. From this perch, she doles
out an “Innovation of the Week.” She awarded one to Bill Bennett and his K12, Inc., which, according to Rees, provides a “world class” curriculum. Since the curriculum has no research base, much less a “scientific” research base, one wonders how she comes to
judge it as world class.

http://interversity.org/lists/arn-l/k0310bra.pdf