'Edupreneurs' now the way for U.S. Department of Education to waste billions on 'innovation'...

[Hannah Bell]

Readers who want to know the next step in the Education Department's strange inversion of reality need to read the recent Harvard Business Review blog article — The Innovation Mismatch: Smart Capital and Education Innovation — reprinted below. The author of the article, Joanne Weiss, is one of the most powerful people in education in the USA today. Note that there isn't even a pretext of asking teachers — or even local school superintendents of school boards — what might or might not work in the classrooms with real children. The technocrats are in command.

But this article isn't just anybody talking, or even any Harvard professor with too much theory and no real practice.

The company she keeps. Reading this piece, who would guess that Joanne Weiss' salary is paid for by US taxpayer dollars? Joanne Weiss served as a director and chief operating officer for the New School Venture Fund from 1998 to 2008. She was appointed to head the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program in 2009, following Obama's appointment of Arne Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education. During the decade prior to her debut in government service, Weiss practiced a brand of "venture philanthropy" with money provided by the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation and other wealthy individuals. Weiss's "New Schools Venture Fund" work helped incubate networks of privately controlled charter schools and charter management organizations as well as organizations to mold new teachers and principals in the corporate education reform movement’s technocratic image.

Weiss's words below seem like they should be coming from the Business Roundtable or maybe Wireless Generation and McGraw-Hill. One thing is clear: The Duncan people in 2011 feel no need to be subtle. Weiss is very clear about the real purpose of the Common Core Standards and Assessments...

http://substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2149§ion=Article


For those of you who pooh-poohed the idea that Ed Deform is about privatization:

"The development of common standards and shared assessments radically alters the market for innovation in curriculum development, professional development, and formative assessments. Previously, these markets operated on a state-by-state basis, and often on a district-by-district basis. But the adoption of common standards and shared assessments means that education entrepreneurs will enjoy national markets where the best products can be taken to scale."


It's coming. They're not even trying to hide it.