This may seem to be inside baseball for most of my regular readers, but it is nonetheless worth noting.

The DC think tanks exercise undue influence on the national media, because they are located in our nation’s capitol, and the media assumes it is worth paying attention to people who spend full time thinking. Unfortunately, almost every DC think tank is funded by the Gates Foundation, and they seem to think the same way about education issues. The one consistent outlier is the Economic Policy Institute, which is not Gates-funded and which consistently tries to figure out why most people in this country are left behind when corporate interests are put first.

So, it is of more than passing interest that corporate reformer Kevin Carey of Education Sector has just moved to the New America Foundation, which until now had not been a DC player on education issues. He brings some of the Ed Sector staff with him, enabling New America to join with other voices for corporate reform and to get additional funding from advocates for corporate-style policies.

And of even greater interest is that Education Sector, once thought of as centrist, or at least center-right, has now shifted decisively to the right as privatization advocate John Chubb steps up to be interim CEO and Hoover Institution economist Margaret (Macke) Raymond leads the board of directors. Also prominent in the Ed Sector hierarchy is a DFER executive from Illinois. Ed Sector can now reliably be viewed not only as a cheerleader for education reform (which it always was), but as an usually  strong voice for privatization.

Diane