Dissent Magazine: Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools/EPI: Leading experts caution against reliance on test scores in teacher evaluations/ New PSBA website on taxpayer funded school vouchers

DISSENT MAGAZINE Winter 2011 »

Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools

By Joanne Barkan

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.

http://dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=3781

The following study was cited in the above article:

News from EPI: Leading experts caution against reliance on test scores in teacher evaluations

August 30, 2010: Student test scores are not reliable indicators of teacher effectiveness, even with the addition of value-added modeling (VAM), a new Economic Policy Institute report by leading testing experts finds.

http://www.epi.org/publications/entry/news_from_epi_leading_experts_caution_against_reliance_on_test_scores_in_te/

New PSBA website on taxpayer funded school vouchers:

http://www.psba.org/issues-advocacy/issues-research/vouchers/index.asp