Yesterday’s New York Times article by Samuel G. Freedman (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/education/) highlights some interesting outcomes from Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s unprecedented power over New York’s K-12 school system. New York City Schools were decentralized in the 1970s and re-centralized under Bloomberg and Klein six years ago. Freedman points to their use of private money to fund new schools and the Leadership Academy as lacking public accountability and their actions have lead to some larger questions about private/public accountability. Freedman documents, for example, that the New York City Public Schools, a public institution, “has received more than 330 million in grants and donations from private sources over the past three years, according to Education Department statistics.” While this is small compared to the 15 billion school budget, this is where a lot of this administration’s ideas about innovation are happening, and it represents a theory of change that speaks volumes about the Bloomberg/Klein school reform agenda: 1) Bloomberg/Klein have actively supplemented their public budget with private funding, 2) Circumnavigating public funding potentially ignites change, and potentially disengages public accountability, transparency, and evaluation, and 3) Adding private money to public funding undercuts conservative thinking that more money is not what is needed and supports the idea that innovation comes from outside systems of education.