Getting rich off of schoolchildren
Stop pretending wealthy CEOs pushing for charter schools are altruistic "reformers." They're raking in billions
TOPICS: EDUCATION, SCHOOLS, CHARTER SCHOOLS, TECHNOLOGY, CEOS, MICHAEL BLOOMBERG,TEACHERS, RUPERT MURDOCH, TECHNOLOGY NEWS, BUSINESS NEWS, POLITICS NEWS
Last week, Los Angeles provided yet another example of a cadre of anti-public-school millionaires swooping in to try (and in this case, fail) to buy a big-city school-board election. And once again, that sparked a round of Orwellian newspeak that distorts what’s really happening in education politics.
You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”
The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs whofinance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of