*He lists Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates and Ted Kennedy (due to his part in the NCLB) as influential in current reform efforts yet all three went to private schools.
*"Today, the consensus is that there is little difference between President Obama and former President George W. Bush when it comes to education policy. Nor is it easy to distinguish differences between the secretary of education under Mr. Bush, Margaret Spellings, and the current secretary, Arne Duncan."
*"Does a private school background give them a much-needed distance and fresh perspective to better critique and remake traditional public schools? Does it make them distrust public schools — or even worse — poison their perception of them? Or does it make any difference?"
This article raises a really interesting thought. What qualifies a person to reform an industry? Is a businessman qualified to reform public education, when he has no experience in teaching or learning in one? Is a teacher qualified to go into a hospital and reorganize how it is run? Is a lawyer qualified to tell an engineer how he will be assessed as an employee? In general, what qualifies each of us, as participants in American society, to use our "stakeholder" status to bring about reform and improvement? I think it has to be the fact that education is publicly funded, and thus tax payers have a right to have a "say". However I find it odd that the very people pushing vouchers to get their kids out of public schools are also trying to change public schools. What benefit would they have to pushing Race to the Top, if they are not sending their own children to these schools?
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