Here’s an interesting article from a leftist magazine, Dissent, on how a few billionaires and their foundations are controlling—likely to its detriment—the direction our public schools are taking.

THE cost of K–12 public schooling in the United States comes to well over $500 billion per year. So, how much influence could anyone in the private sector exert by controlling just a few billion dollars of that immense sum? Decisive influence, it turns out. A few billion dollars in private foundation money, strategically invested every year for a decade, has sufficed to define the national debate on education; sustain a crusade for a set of mostly ill-conceived reforms; and determine public policy at the local, state, and national levels. In the domain of venture philanthropy—where donors decide what social transformation they want to engineer and then design and fund projects to implement their vision—investing in education yields great bang for the buck.

As someone in the trenches of education, I am absolutely convinced that the nations schools are going backward—not forward—with every new reform. We’ve spent two decades trying all of these new-fangled education ideas dreamed up by ambitious Ph.D.s and power accumulating state and federal bureaucrats and the end result, if you believe these same Ph.D.s and Bureaucrats is that things are getting worse. So much worse, in fact, that we need even more change than before.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Lets go back to the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic with traditional teaching methods. That’s the education that the Ph.D.s and bureaucrats received that made them so smart in the first place.

Here’s a handy gizmo that combines the ever-useful grey card for color balancing with crib notes on the rights of a photographer in case you’re ever challenged.

Digital Photography School has an instructive article on applying textures to a photograph using PhotoShop.

Right now, Amazon.Com is is offering deep discounts on cameras and camcorders

A nice stocking stuffer for the photographer