Kansas City, here we come?

If you're interested in urban education, you should be keeping an eye on what's going on in Kansas City. Bruce Baker breaks it apart today.

This past week, the good citizens of Kansas City and Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education were graced with one of the most vacuous manifestos on education reform I’ve read in a really long time. Yes, on my blog, I’ve pontificated about numerous other vacuous manifestos that often take the form of blog posts and op-eds which I suspect have little substantive influence over actual policies.

But this one is a little different. This report by an organization calling itself CEE, or Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust, in collaboration with Public Impact, is a bit more serious. No more credible, but more serious, in that it is assumed that state policymakers in Missouri might actually act on the report’s recommendations.

as always with Professor Baker, go read the rest!

UPDATE: His point here on privatizing of public resources, is, I think, right on the mark and should concern us all:

And taxpayers may find increasingly that documents and information (and meetings) they perceived as publicly accessible, are not, as organizations shift key roles responsibilities under private governance in order to shield them from public disclosure.