Is it Research – or Propaganda?
This article was published four years ago on this site but needs to see the light of day again.
-Dora Taylor
There’s a lot of brand new education research coming out nowadays, and it’s telling our policymakers that privatization is good for education. Class sizes are going up? That’s okay, because research shows that class size has little impact on student learning. Charter schools are competing with your neighborhood schools? Hey, many of them outperform public schools!
And this is good research. Great research. In fact, it’s the best research money can buy. Big money, I mean. Corporate money.
How do they buy it? Through right-wing think tanks. Corporations fund think tanks, and the think tanks employ researchers, and then the researchers wrangle leadership roles in strategically placed research centers, which – like schools – are being privatized.
This article takes a quick look at a few right-wing think tanks and how they’re steering education policy in just one city – Seattle, Washington. If you want to delve deeper into the topic of think tank propaganda, visit sourcewatch.org or rightwingwatch.org.
What Are Think Tanks?
Think tanks are organizations that produce propaganda posing as legitimate research for the benefit of their funders – generally, corporations and billionaires. Some of them were founded decades ago by pro-corporate leaders in partnership with millionaires and corporations. They were created for a specific purpose, such as to battle the “communist menace” after World War II or to help out the tobacco industry. Other think tanks have been founded more recently, by people such as the Koch Brothers.
This article will touch on just three: the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, and the Fordham Institute.
American Enterprise Institute
The American Enterprise Institute is a pro-business, conservative think tank that puts profits before people. It was founded in 1943 by a combination of thinkers, business leaders, and finance leaders.
It has a rather spotty past — in the 1980s, it mounted a propaganda campaign for the tobacco industry, and in 2007, it came under fire for bribing scientists to disseminate information that undermined legitimate research on global warning.
In the field of education, AEI scholar Charles Murray drew fire for his book The Bell Is it Research – or Propaganda? | Seattle Education:
