Fred Klonsky reports that Education Reform Now, the Wall Street hedge fund managers’ front group, spent $1 million on TV ads to try to persuade the public that the Mayor won. ERN is part of Democrats for Education Reform, the Wall Street boys who want Democrats to adopt Republican policies. DFER has cannily used its vast resources to reshape Democratic policy to align with those of the far-right in the Republican party.
Klonsky tried to imagine how many books or teachers’ salaries that $1 million would pay for. But groups like ERN/DFER don’t spend money on improving schools. They spend money to control schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
$1 million? How about laptops, I-Pads, a modest building/ground enhancement…many great things $1 million could do to support a local school and help its students succeed. Wow. The decision to use that money to attack the school with an eye on making a profit from the meat while leaving the carcass behind is very telling.
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I watched that ad at work where I don’t have speakers, so I couldn’t listen to what was being said. So what I noted was the visual presentation – the perfectly racially balanced, small class groups; the happy, healthy, well-dressed children with freshly scrubbed faces; the nice, clean, well-supplied school facilities. Yeah, that’s what your average CPS school looks like, alright. And Rahm’s responsible for it all.
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The privatizers invest heavily in public relations in the same way the tobacco lobby spends heavily to get people to ignore the evidence-based research Surgeon General’s Warning: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy. But the truth is a very powerful force.
Fabricant and Fine take on this dilemma in their new book on charter schools: how can the corporate education movement enjoy such success in spite of the overwhelming evidence that the reforms that the push for charters will make education worse (http://amzn.to/P5AeDG)?
In Chicago the community-based movement effectively neutralized the spin merchants. That strategy deserves close attention and “taken to scale.”
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It is the best of times and the worst of times in Chicago because we can never stop fighting. The corporate deformers are unwilling to listen, discuss or compromise. One side has so much money to feed the willing media lies.
Lately the big spin is
1.) the mayor didn’t lose,
2.) the union contract is so expensive that the mayor has to close a lot of public schools and turn them into charters, (really this was his original plan) and
3.) the mayor likes teachers, just not the union.
Their opinion polling among a certain white middle class demographic told them that parents like their kids’ teachers, but don’t like unions in general. So billionaire Bruce Rauner got on tv to say he likes teachers, just not their union.
Sounds hollow to me.
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