Over this holiday weekend, I would recommend going through Catalyst’s In-Depth report of Arne Duncan’s Renaissance 2010, the plan for Chicago schools that he rolled out as CEO of the Chicago Pubic School system. He heralded his plan as a success and his appointment to Secretary of Education was based on this so-called “success”.
He then took that model of Renaissance 2010 and projected it onto school districts around the country re-titling it “Race to the Top”. The results of this expensive effort has shown mixed results at best.
Another interesting and informative article on Arne Duncan’s Renaissance 2010 plan describing how and why it developed in Chicago was published in Rethinking Schools last year. The full version can be found at Common Dreams.org.
Both are recommended reads.
Enjoy.
Dora
Seattle Education 
sublime,
Glad to hear from you.
Sue, my co-editor, and I are both parents.
You might like to check out our posts on the Huffington Post also in the Education section.
If you google one of our names and “huffington post”, you should be able to find our articles.
Dora
Your blog is eye-opening. I found it only today, but will most assuredly be back. I have been frustrated with the direction that my children’s education seems headed. I agree that the voice of Parents have gone unoticed. It seems that I may not be as alone as I once thought.
sublimeandreason.wordpress.com
The eduformers call it “taking it to scale.” Start small, have marginal, or even limited, success, and then blow it up so that the successes seem bigger and better and more effective than they ever were or ever could be. With the proper verbiage and cool-sounding buzz-words, you can create something pretty impressive-sounding. Probably impressive enough to fool most of the people most of the time.