Rupert and Wendi Murdoch backed a scandal-ridden city school
Besides his Joel Klein hire, his company’s $27 million state testing contract, and his entrance into education politics, there’s another schools angle to Rupert Murdoch, the embattled media tycoon.
Long before Murdoch’s News Corporation was accused of employing illegal news-gathering strategies, Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, were supporters of the Shuang Wen School. The Chinatown dual-language school was revealed last year to be illegally charging families for mandatory Chinese instruction.
In 2004, the Murdochs pledged three years of financial support for Shuang Wen’s after school programs, according to an article published in a city’s Chinese language paper at the time. That pledge amounted to half a