Going Private In Philadelphia (Urban Education)

Salon.com's take on the Microsoft-funded "School of the Future" points out that the effort has nothing to do with the Gates Foundation and chronicles a range of similar privatization-related efforts going on under schools CEO Paul Vallas: Building a better high school.

In at least a few ways, the piece riffs off of my good friend Bret Schaeffer's earlier article in AlterNet: My Own Private School District.

Some of the plans sound pretty scary, and the piece is predictibly skeptical about private involvement in public education, but it acknowledges realistically that public-private partnerships are here to stay. In fact, the next stop for Microsoft's School of the Future may be Chicago.

For more on the increase in private companies servicing public education, see the "Business of Education" (a new section).

In the meantime, there was also some sketchy announcement about how Philadelphia was going to use federal Smaller Learning Communities funds to .... buy PLATO software. Can someone explain?

Best of the Rest:

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