Tom Shuford, a retired teacher in North Carolina who writes for EdNews.org, last week published a wonderful analysis of how the "we're-from-the-government-and-we're-here-to-help-you" types have, for decades, been progressively destroying effective local community education.

No doubt Southern Nevada, with its massive, inhuman schools and its distant Egyptian-priesthood of educrats, is a perfect example. Its metastasizing centralization necessarily ends up classifying teachers, families and neighborhoods as "problems" to solve and pawns to move about on its chess board. And the result of this runaway centralization is the education wasteland that we all face.

With great clarity and many examples, Tom illuminates how government-wielding "reformers" systematically gut the basic social & community infrastructure upon which successful community schools depend. His essay is at http://ednews.org, specifically here.

Ryan Boots, over at Edspresso.com, posted a remarkable article a couple of weeks ago. Going into the history of how school boards came to be, it documents how they were designed from the beginning to override the educational values of the parents and communities that they supposedly were to represent.

The whole article, and a follow-up posted later, are well worth every would-be education reformer's attention.