CURMUDGUCATION: Eli Broad's Bloodless Coup

CURMUDGUCATION: Eli Broad's Bloodless Coup:
Eli Broad's Bloodless Coup
I don't think there's ever been anything like it.

Well, maybe Teapot Dome, kind of. Back in the early 1920s, the feds had special oil reserves set aside for the Navy. One was near Teapot Dome in Wyoming, and during the administration of Warren G. Harding, some folks engineered the oil reserves at Teapot Dome being handed off to the department of the interior. But since Secretary Albert Bacon Fall had been fully bought by Sinclair Oil, he quickly and quietly turned over what was supposed to be a public national resource to a private company in a secret-ish no-bid process that let the oil go for so little money that it could hardly be called selling it.

Imagine. There was a time when that sort of thing, with public officials bought and corrupted by private interests giving away public resources, was actually shocking.

But now it's 2016, and if Eli Broad wants to just go ahead and take over a public school system, he can just go ahead and do it in plain sight.

This, of course, is not new. Broad long ago decided that education would be better run by people with a business background, not an education one, and so he set up Broad Academy, a-- school? program? thingy?-- that finds the Right People, puts them through some edu-business training, and declares that they are fit to be superintendents because Eli Broad says they are. It is an amazing piece of ballsiness, as if I set up an Officer's Training School in my back yard and started issuing certificates declaring my graduates were First Lieutenants in the US Army. Well, it would be like that if I were really, really rich and well-connected and managed to convince the US Army to let my trained "officers" actually take command. But this is the guy who literally wrote the book about how to shut down a public school system and replace it with privately operated charters. 

Broadies have been put in place in districts all around the country. And what we saw in Kansas City, when Broad picked up the phone and told John Covington that he was going to Detroit, is that the CURMUDGUCATION: Eli Broad's Bloodless Coup: