Latest News and Comment from Education

Monday, November 14, 2016

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Pritzker gives Hillary a pat on the head and wants her to move into ed philanthropy.

Schooling in the Ownership Society: Pritzker gives Hillary a pat on the head and wants her to move into ed philanthropy.:

Pritzker gives Hillary a pat on the head and wants her to move into ed philanthropy.


Chicago Billionaire J.B. Pritzker was the chair and chief money bungler bundler for the Clinton campaign. He's the heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and hotel union-buster supreme. He told Crain's that his aim, "isn't ego gratification; it's all about making money". I suspect it's both.

Last month I called him out on his special-ed hustle with Goldman Sachs. It allows private firms to foot the initial bill for public education services and then be repaid with interest if those services reduce the number of kids in special ed. They call it "social impact" investing. I call it a plot to reduce services for needy kids -- or public education meets the Ownership Society.

Chicago Mag calls him, "the other mayor of Chicago" even though he's lost every political election in which he's run (I think it's one). He's even got a Chicago charter school named after him.

In this morning's Sun Times, Pritzker hands out the party line on the election postmortem. Like the rest of the Democratic leadership, Pritzker takes no responsibility for the defeat and puts all the blame on Comey, the pollsters, and men. He forgot about the Russians and the electoral college for some reason.

So the story goes,


 He praised Clinton for running “a campaign of substance” and made up of “the best statisticians and data analytics people in the world.”
If any of that were true, H.C. would have won by a landslide. What were the substantive issues of her campaign? Basically, "I'm not as bad as Trump and the Russians are rigging the election." Certainly nothing young potential voters or much of anyone else could get excited about. She barely mentioned the education.

And if her statisticians and data analysts were so great, couldn't they at least have 
Schooling in the Ownership Society: Pritzker gives Hillary a pat on the head and wants her to move into ed philanthropy.: