Some of the nation's wealthiest philanthropies, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Broad Foundation have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in education reform. With vast wealth and a political agenda, these foundations have helped to reshape the reform landscape in urban education. In Follow the Money, Sarah Reckhow shows where and how foundation investment in education is occurring and presents in-depth analysis of the effects of these investments within the two largest urban districts in the United States: New York City and Los Angeles. In New York City, centralized political control and the use of private resources have enabled rapid implementation of reform proposals. Yet this potent combination of top-down authority and outside funding also poses serious questions about transparency, responsiveness, and democratic accountability in New York. Furthermore, the sustainability of reform policies is closely linked to the political fortunes of the current mayor and his chosen school leader. While the media has highlighted the efforts of drastic reformers and dominating leaders such as Joel Klein in New York City and Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., a slower, but possibly more transformative, set of reforms have been taking place in Los Angeles. These reforms were also funded and shaped by major foundations, but they work from the bottom up, through charter school operators managing networks of schools. This strategy has built grassroots political momentum and demand for reform in Los Angeles that is unmatched in New York City and other districts with mayoral control. Reckhow's study of Los Angeles's education system shows how democratically responsive urban school reform could occur-pairing foundation investment with broad grassroots involvement. Bringing a sharp analytical eye and a wealth of evidence to one of the most politicized issues of our day, Follow the Money will reshape our thinking about educational reform in America.

"How you spend your resources really does speak to the ethics, morals, and values about what is important. I use these ideas each day to help schools leverage their resources in strategic and creative ways to meet students′ needs." —Mary Nash, Assistant Superintendent Boston Public Schools, MA "A powerful new lens for looking at school resources by fundamentally changing the question from ′How much money do schools need to succeed?′ to ′How well are resources being used to ensure student success?′" —Richard Murnane, Economist and Professor Harvard Graduate School of Education Strategically reorganize school resources to support instructional and performance priorities! How can schools best use the resources they already have? That question is at the heart of this inspiring book for school and district administrators challenged with increasing student performance without additional funding. Exploring the link between purposeful resource allocation and academic achievement, Karen Hawley Miles and Stephen Frank demonstrate how educational leaders can develop successful and strategic schools by assessing how well they use all available resources—people, time, and money—and by creating effective alternatives to meet goals. The authors use their extensive research with urban schools and districts to present case studies of schools that successfully reorganized resources to implement the "Big 3 Guiding Resource Strategies": improving teaching quality, creating individual attention, and maximizing academic time. The Strategic School offers planning guides, checklists, worksheets, and strategies aligned with ISLLC standards to help leaders: Assess current resource use in new ways that go beyond the typical budget review Organize resources more creatively and flexibly Craft a master schedule that works Connect resource allocation to student and school performance

Teaches teenagers how to make important decisions about money, including shopping, paying for college, saving, and investing.

Simultaneous pressures to reduce costs and increase student achievement have never been greater than they are today. Not only is cost-cutting essential in this era of tightened resources, argue Hess and Osberg, but eliminating inefficient spending is critical for freeing up resources to drive school reform. Stretching the School Dollar book brings together a dynamic group of authors—scholars, consultants, journalists, and entrepreneurs—who offer fresh insights into an issue no school or district can afford to ignore. Stretching the School Dollar is a volume in the Educational Innovations series.

The great monopoly in this country is money. So long as that exists, our old variety and individual energy of development are out of the question. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit.