On reading that a gaggle of philanthropists is sponsoring education coverage by the Los Angeles Times, many readers assume this implies editorial control. Perhaps not. We will wait and see. The groups involved have a record of attacking public schools and promoting privatization. Eli Broad, one of the group, recently announced his intention to get at least half the city’s children into charters. He is widely known for his tight control over his grants.
One reader, Mike Sacken, had a suggestion:
“I wonder if we could negotiate w/the gang of bored billionaires for them to take over a state – it could be their fiefdom and playground and they do whatever the hell they wanted w/it. Citizens could escape as needed. I have a few states in the south I think we could give them so the rest of America could continue w/this perilous and complex experiment w/semi-democracy.”
Any volunteers prepared to abandon democracy in return for spare change from the Billionaire Boys Club?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Regarding Mike Sacken’s suggestion:
They already have or close to it. The last I heard was that this conglomerate had ready to spend and/or intended to spend MORE THAN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY on the next election.
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These Bully Bullionaires certainly have more than enough money to found their own private academies and colleges, as former ages of Noblesse Obliges used to do in the past. You really have wonder why they don’t indulge their nobility or narcissism or whatever by building legacies of their own instead of depredating and destroying what little the little people have built for themselves over the long decades and centuries before. Is it mere laziness, or something more like sociopathy?
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Indeed….think Broad Academy, the unaccredited “superintendent” college that teaches a-holes how to be worse a-holes when Broad buys a school board election or gets his a-holes appointed to a district to ruin from within.
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Nevada is already there. The billionaire raiders are not interested in settling for one state. Mike Sacken makes the mistake of believing they are interested in education as a democratic institution of liberty and opportunity. The see dollar signs, and they are not going to let themselves be held accountable if they don’t have to, and right now, thanks to the President and many state governments, they don’t have to.
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Any possibility that the island of Elba in the Mediterranean is still available? Worked for Napoleon. We’ve run out of penal colonies? One-way space rides? Floating billionaire ships which never set foot on shore? Milking our children for $B requires consequences.
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Better yet, give them an island. Somewhere in the mid pacific.
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If Easter Island were not inhabited, I’d say that would be particularly apt.
These guys could add their own heads to the collection.
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Aren’t there some atolls we used to use for testing missiles? Maybe even one that is slowly disappearing below the waves. Perhaps that would convince them that global warming might be worth paying attention to.
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Kansas and Texas are already annexed.
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In the interests of full disclosure: it’s the Bored Billionaire Boys Club aka BBBC.
Much of the explanation for the self-styled “education reform” movement flows from the members of the BBBC taking on education—re the owner of this blog—as a vanity project.
Hence the petulance that folks that Bill Gates display when asked the simplest questions about what he’s doing to public schools.
Their egos are involved as much as their wallets. And they will defend either or both to the last drop of our blood.
😎
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Since these are all men, I assume you are using “egos” as a standin for something else.
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I would not wish these folks on anyone in any state.
I would suggest we instead offer them the moon and a free ticket (one way, of course, and under the stipulation that if they manage to find a way back they will be thrown in the klink as soon as they touch down.)
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That’s so kind of Sachen to offer a state in the South from some nebulous “we.”
Let them be required to subject their own children and grandchildren to whatever “reforms” they purchase, without any entitled-child modification.
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You are ever so correct, and have pointed out a big problem that many of our Northern friends suffer from. Without any immersion in the local culture, they assume their superiority to those in the South. This makes them feel good, particularly as their quality of life declines. And, of course, it also serves the purposes of the ruling class, which has encouraged factionalism among the peons for millennia, thus allowing a small minority to retain power.
The same attitude still poisons parts of the South, where poor White sharecroppers, with no property at all, would look at the Black freemen and say, “At least I’m better than him”.
If we expect to accomplish a common goal, it would be a good idea to stop using divisive language and images in pursuit of that goal.
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Pluto 4 Plutocrats ❢❢❢
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Now, on THAT I can agree!
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Waiting for the Electrician or Someone like Him????
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What a great idea…my vote is Alabama.
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Do you live there? If not, why not suggest your own State?
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These “reformers” don’t deserve any state, and I don’t want to wish a state on any of them. They deserve the pits of hell. No more, no less.
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I was amazed and stunned by this bland admission by the Times that they were allowing outside funding to subsidize their education reporting. How would people react if they said United Teachers Los Angeles was funding three reporters? The Times, to me, has had a very one sided reporting history, starting with their championing of VAM, publishing teachers by name who had fallen victim to the faulty measurement, driving one to suicide, continuing with their narrative of poor teaching, support of John Deasy despite flagrant flaws, support of pro-charter candidates for school board, and general anti-union opinion pieces, pitting teachers against the kids. They had the gall to accuse teachers of being against equal opportunity for poor kids when teachers questioned the spending on I-pads. They said we were against Deasy because he held our feet to the fire of “accountability”. They seldom publish stories of the amazing victories and accomplishments of our students. And now, three more reporters on the Eli Broad payroll??? This is the same way he gets the United Way to support all his candidates – he buys the support. It’s awfully hard to bite the hand that feeds you!
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They should take over the state of emergency and just constantly disrupt each other. They could literally sling mud at each other, or money, while warning of imminent cataclysms and present disasters. It should be filmed, really.
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They should work on a way to make manufacturing profitable in America again. When we had decent union scale paying jobs, we were in better shape. Greater prosperity for all leads to a stronger, healthier economy due to the buying power of the middle class. They should stop trying to cannibalize government services. http://www.projectcensored.org/privatization-of-free-market-industry-costs-billions-more-than-public-services/
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Or stabilize public pension funds?
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The billionaires have engaged in the destruction of public education in our nation for a variety of reasons:
1) Taxes have always been used to provide funding for public education. With the stroke of a governor’s pen, monies are channeled from public education to the charter industry.
2) It is more profitable to thrust their “technologies” onto the approximately 50 million students to:
a) reap immediate financial benefits.
b) “educate” the children according to their needs at present, and for the future.
c) to track students while violating their, and their families right to privacy.
d) create a new “base” of both consumers, while developing a work-force in their own image.
3) Destroy public school teachers by crushing the unions, setting a precedent of future aggressive actions against the middle and working classes.
4) To grab the $800,000,000 spent annually on public education in the United States.
5) To push themselves into other countries to add to their consumer and student inventories.
6) They have run out of ideas to grow their businesses, so why not steal from the public with their check books, buying politicians from both the Republican Party (Scott Walker, John Kasich, Chris Christie) and Democratic Party (Andrew Cuomo, Daniel Molloy).
Thus, we are witnessing on an attack on the public, the citizens of the United States, for profits and power.
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“Eli Broad, one of the group, recently announced his intention to get at least half the city’s children into charters.”
But they’re not privatizing schools. No sir. That’s a conspiracy theory.
How embarrassing is it that the US has ceded their public education system to these people? My God. It’s like we don’t have any self-respect. I know they purchased all the politicians but did they also purchase the rest of us? I wasn’t paid anything.
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Sacken might be on to something. What if the Waltons went into Detroit, bought up some properties, sold them to people who could afford to make payments and held the mortgages, at affordable rates, of course, opened up a Walmart and paid living wages, opened up some other businesses and paid living wages, opened up a theater and paid living wages, opened up a car wash, opened a laundry mat, opened a health clinic, opened up a hospital…….it boggles the mind what good could be done with those Billions of dollars. Other businesses would come, if people lived there and could afford to go to dinner, buy a Starbucks coffee, etc. That’ll never happen though because the 1% would rather buy elections, put people out of business, put people out of work, own the schools and the taxpayer dollars that support them, and create a class of people who don’t know they are downtrodden. They don’t teach script/cursive in most schools anymore. That’s amazing.
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You had me, Donna, until you got to cursive writing. Somehow the lack of teaching of script just doesn’t compete with the magnitude of your plan. What an idea that they be tasked with building a community that could then be self-sustaining. If they built a quality “product,” they would even make a respectable profit even before other stakeholders bought them out, which should be a requirement. …and no buildings or institutions with any of their names on them except for Walmart, which would need to be phased out if small businesses were going to survive. I’m not sure where they can buy up enough property for their experiment. I have a feeling that there are few areas that would cede their lives to the Waltons although if I lived in abject poverty, a chance at more than subsistence would probably sway my resolve.
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🙂 – the cursive thing–that was a toss in. It comes from my anger. It isn’t taught anymore because, one of the reasons, is that then, no one in the future who came from a public school will be able to read historic documents–like The Constitution.
Its like going to the mechanic when you don’t know anything about car repair — the mechanic can tell you, sell you, anything, and you’d be none the wiser. Who are you to argue with the expert? If the kids can’t read, the wealthy can say historic documents state anything they want them to state. Perhaps they can tell the dumbed down public educated kids that they are beholden to the better educated wealthy class? Who knows. Food for thought, that.
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I had a cursive chart posted in my high school special ed class. Being able to sign their names in script was very important to them. I couldn’t write in script on the board because most of them had never been taught cursive, so everything was printed. Every once in awhile, I would notice one of them practicing and occasionally they had me write things on the board.
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Cursive isn’t taught any longer because it can’t be graded on a standardized test.
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This discussion depresses me beyond belief. Not because I don’t already know this, and not because I don’t already tell anyone who will listen that “education reform” isn’t either – it’s really about the corporate take-over of public education.
The issues are so much bigger than education. (of course they would be…)
This is just another way for the wealthy elite to do an end-run around the people and our constitution. Wherever money and influence can be had, there are people willing to buy their way into another market for profit and power. But this time it’s our kids that are the targets. This has got to stop.
Surely there must be enough un-bought voices out there to make this the center of the public conversation about teachers, testing, evaluations, unions, CCSS, and charters. It’s time to reframe the discussion. We need to take some lessons from Newt Gingrich’s “Language – A Key Mechanism of Control” and some from George Lakoff’s “Don’t Think of an Elephant.”
Anyone want to participate in a group to reframe?
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Rather cede control of a state to the bored billionaires, I’m really hoping that Elon Musk and SpaceX will succeed-and then I propose sending ALL of these bored, wealthy meglomaniacs out on a mission to deep, deep space.
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It’s already happened at the Seattle Times which has an “Education Lab” sponsored by the Gates Foundation (for two years). In the beginning, they carefully explainined that the money from Gates would have NOTHING to do with the coverage which is, of course, nonsense.
It’s a lot of “what works” coverage but it’s all over the place with little focus on how to expand what works.
They have a blog as part of it which amuses me b/c there are rarely any comments. I don’t think it’s working but I regularly call them out on it.
One thing to note is that their regular reporting is now far less balanced. They do not cover all sides of stories in-depth and this is an occurance that happens frequently.
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LA Times and Seattle Times – just say no.
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