eb Bush, Rupert Murdoch and the "business" of education
by David Safier
I could easily begin and end this post with the following sentence:
Rupert Murdoch will deliver the keynote address at the Jeb Bush's National Summit on Education Reform.
What more needs to be said? And yet, I can't resist saying more.
Jeb Bush's group is the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Its purpose is to use the trumped-up triumphs of the "Florida Education Miracle" to push a nationwide privatization/voucher agenda, and he's got big money donors behind him. One of my favorite targets, Matthew Ladner, who used to be the education guy at the Goldwater Institute, works for Jeb now, which gives me greater insight into the agenda and methods of propaganda which are FEE's stock in trade.
Rupert Murdoch has recently joined the "Gold in them thar schools" crowd, staking his claim with the company, Wireless Generation, which he bought for $360 million. It's a data mining company whose purpose is to compile test scores and other student information for school districts and state governments. The level of irony in trusting someone involved in a huge information hacking scandal to compile