The Obama Administration and Educational Reform seeks to situate, problematize, and bring to light the goals, accomplishments, experienced blockades, and disappointments of the Obama administration's educational policies.

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of President Obama's education agenda. Obama's reforms have drawn skepticism from supporters of traditional public schools. Robert Maranto and Michael McShane believe that the Obama-era reforms have led to successful innovation in both the private and public sector.

Introduction / Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane -- Testing and accountability: what have we learned and where do we go? / Deven Carlson -- The limits of policy for school turnaround / Ashley Jochim -- Incentives and inducements: the feds fight federalism / Patrick McGuinn -- Federal efforts to improve teacher quality / Matthew A. Kraft -- The Bush-Obama agenda for education research and innovation: major investment, mixed returns / Robert Pianta and Tara Hofkens -- Why standards produce weak reform / Tom Loveless -- Federal support for charter schooling: a presidential priority / Anna J. Egalite -- Challenging, building, and changing capacity in state education agencies / Sara E. Dahill-Brown -- Sound and fury: education and civil rights in the Bush and Obama administrations / Joshua Dunn -- Conclusion / Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane

This book offers a comprehensive analysis of President Obama's education agenda. Obama's reforms have drawn skepticism from supporters of traditional public schools. Robert Maranto and Michael McShane believe that the Obama-era reforms have led to successful innovation in both the private and public sector.

In 2012, Chicago's school year began with the city's first teachers' strike in a quarter century and ended with the largest mass closure of public schools in U.S. history. On one side, a union leader and veteran black woman educator drew upon organizing strategies from black and Latinx communities to demand increased school resources. On the other side, the mayor, backed by the Obama administration, argued that only corporate-style education reform could set the struggling school system aright. The stark differences in positions resonated nationally, challenging the long-standing alliance between teachers' unions and the Democratic Party. Elizabeth Todd-Breland recovers the hidden history underlying this battle. She tells the story of black education reformers' community-based strategies to improve education beginning during the 1960s, as support for desegregation transformed into community control, experimental schooling models that pre-dated charter schools, and black teachers' challenges to a newly assertive teachers' union. This book reveals how these strategies collided with the burgeoning neoliberal educational apparatus during the late twentieth century, laying bare ruptures and enduring tensions between the politics of black achievement, urban inequality, and U.S. democracy.

Policy Patrons offers a rare behind-the-scenes view of decision making inside four influential education philanthropies: the Ford Foundation, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation. The outcome is an intriguing, thought-provoking look at the impact of current philanthropic efforts on education. Over a period of several years, Megan E. Tompkins-Stange gained the trust of key players and outside observers of these four organizations. Through a series of confidential interviews, she began to explore the values, ideas, and beliefs that inform these foundations’ strategies and practices. The picture that emerges reveals important differences in the strategies and values of the more established foundations vis-à-vis the newer, more activist foundations—differences that have a significant impact on education policy and practice, and have important implications for democratic decision making. In recent years, the philanthropic sector has played an increasing role in championing and financing education reform. Policy Patrons makes an original and invaluable contribution to contemporary discussions about the appropriate role of foundations in public policy and the future direction of education reform.

This book offers a sophisticated overview of President Obama’s education agenda, exploring how and why education policy became national and ultimately presidential over the past seven decades. The authors argue that the Obama education agenda, though more ambitious, is broadly in line with those of recent presidencies, reflecting elite views that since substantial increases in spending have failed to improve equity and achievement, public schools require reforms promoting transparency such as the Common Core national standards, as well as market based reforms such as charter schools. While sympathetic to President Obama’s goals, the authors argue that the processes used to implement those goals, particularly national standards, have been hurried and lacked public input. The Obama administration’s overreach on school reform has sparked a bipartisan backlash. Even so, Maranto, McShane, and Rhinesmith suspect that the next president will be an education reformer, reflecting an enduring elite consensus behind school reform.