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04/09/2006:

"New York Rethinks Its Remaking of the Schools"

The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, is once again rethinking the nation's largest school system.

He has hired Chris Cerf, former president of Edison Schools, the commercial manager of public schools in 25 states. He has retained Alvarez & Marsal, a consulting firm that revamped the school system in St. Louis and is rebuilding the system in New Orleans. And he has enlisted Sir Michael Barber, a former adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain who is now at McKinsey & Company in London.

These consultants, often in pinstripe suits and ensconced in a conference room on the third-floor mezzanine of the headquarters of the Education Department in Lower Manhattan, are working with a small army of city education officials, all led by Mr. Klein's chief of staff, Kristen Kane. The effort is being paid for with $5 million in private donations.

Together, the consultants and officials are re-examining virtually every aspect of the system, not quite three years after Chancellor Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg charted perhaps its most exhaustive overhaul and made it a laboratory for educational experimentation, closely watched across the country.

They are evaluating everything from how textbooks and paper are bought, to how teacher training programs are chosen, to how students, teachers, principals and schools are judged. They are running focus groups of dozens of principals, and they are studying districts in England, Canada and California.

A top goal is to find ways to relax much of the very centralization put in place by the Bloomberg administration and give principals a far freer hand, provided schools can meet goals for attendance, test scores, promotion rates and other criteria.
nytimes.com

This might sound ok, but it is a sinister development. In the name of 'smaller government' the forces of privatization move in. It's the same all over the globe.