The British Are Coming!

From today's New York Sun: The adults were nervous, the children were rambunctious, and the two middle-age British women who arrived to help them were armed with clipboards, a jolly sense of humor, and firm advice that few would dare question. The scene could have been from "Nanny 911," the reality TV show about a crew of British nannies who swoop in to rescue parents struggling to tame their unruly children. In reality, it was a public middle school in Greenwich Village, and the visitors were reviewers from the British company Cambridge Education, which has a contract with the Department of Education valued at about $6.4 million a year to evaluate how city schools evaluate themselves. The role of the for-profit company isn't much different from that of the nannies, however. The mostly British reviewers are among a growing group of outsiders Chancellor Joel Klein has turned to in his quest to transform a school system that — though it has seen many improvements during his tenure — still has more than 300 failing schools and a graduation rate near 50%. Read all about it!