Readers of this blog have followed the advance of privatization of public school funding for nearly a decade. We know the big foundations and individuals that support privatization. We have followed their activities and watched as all of their strategies have failed to match their promises. The great puzzle, to me, is the indifference of the mainstream media. While they cover political scandals of every variety, they are just not interested in the sustained campaign to divert public money to schools there privately managed,to religious schools, to other private schools, and even to homeschooling. The media rightly criticized Betsy DeVos’s crusade for school choice, but as soon as she left office, they lost interest in the issue. Meanwhile, red states are rushing to open more charter schools and fund more vouchers.
Maurice Cunningham explored this issue in a recent post on the blog of the MassPoliticsProfs. He chastises the Boston Globe, but the same complaint could be directed to most mainstream media.
He begins:
Suppose WalMart swept into Boston and spent millions to acquire Market Basket. The town would go ballistic. It would be covered every day in every media outlet, front page of the Boston Globe. But the Walton Family Foundation of Arkansas—the exact same heartless* mercenaries—spends millions of dollars to take over public schools and it gets ignored. Why is that?
He discusses “Hidden Politics” and “the Politics of Pretending.” He has written frequently about astroturf groups and how they present themselves to a gullible media as authentic spokesmen for parents or for some other groups.
That’s the PR facade, he says. What really matters is: who is funding these groups? Why doesn’t the media care?
I always thought that if out-of-state billionaires could be proven to have entered the state using local fronts to change Massachusetts education policy that would be a great, great, great story. I’ve been proven wrong again, and again, and again. I still think it’s a great story, it’s just a great story that only gets told at a small political science blog. Why is that?
Why is that?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s not that they are UNinterested in corporate invasion of public education. They are actually very interested in it. The news media (including Boston Globe) are owned by just a very small number of individuals and corporations with VESTED interests in privatization.
The news media are interested in ensuring that the public does not learn about the privatization.
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As with other topics that the media owners have decided are off limits, most journalists who take an interest in reporting on privatization are made to feel unwelcome.
It’s more than a little like the phenomenon of “control fraud” described by William Black, whereby the directors of an organization create an environment that rewards those who go along with the fraud and push out those who do not. And make no mistake, when a “news” organization purposefully disregards or even hides the truth it is a form of fraud.
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In some cases , main stream media organizations will actually team up against individual journalists who have threatened the ” acceptable” stance on this that or the other.
That’s what happened to Gary Webb, whom they (NY Times, Washington Post, LA Times) went after with a vengeance, not just to “prove he was wrong ” (which they quickly realized they couldn’t do through honest investigative reporting), but to destroy his reputation.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/new-york-times-wants-gary-webb-stay-dead/
Mainstream journalism has been in a steep nosedive for a very long time in the US and I seriously doubt that it will — or even can — pull itself out at this point.
If anything, it has gotten worse in
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In the American news media, what is not covered — or if it can’t be ignore it, what is dismissed — often means as much as if not more than what is covered.
Mainstream media in the US have raised “propaganda by omission” to an art form.
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You provide a worthy analysis of the U.S. press which is less independent than democracy deserves.
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I think the operative concept here is COI = Conflict Of Interest.
(Not that they feel all that conflicted about it anymore …)
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Last Week Tonight did an important and hilarious piece about astroturfing a few years ago, and somehow failed to mention all the edu-privatization astroturfing, like doing a piece about Bill Gates and neglecting to mention that he SUCKS. The Waltons spent at least $2 million in Boston on fake groups for marketing, and the Globe missed it. Heck, with everything public education being synergisti-fragile-istically attacked, we never know if it’s The Globe, AP, or Sinclair doing the muckmissing.
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Some people would undoubtedly think it’s “conspiracy theorizing” to suggest that large media organizations controlled by billionaires and corporations purposefully avoid covering certain subjects.
But that’s the beauty of control fraud. The ones at the top don’t have to make it explicit that a journalist “shalt not cover x, y, or z”. All they need to do is create an environment of incentives and disincentives that steers journalists away from such coverage.
For example, when Bernie Sanders suggested that the Washington Post was publishing so many negative stories about him at least partly because the Post is owned by billionaires Jeff Bezos , whom Sanders has criticized over worker treatment, the Post cried “conspiracy theory”.
But it does not take much to realize that keeping ones job and otherwise staying in the good graces of the one who pays you might have some impact on what one does and says. And this goes all the way up the line, from the one who writes a story to the editors and others deciding whether the story gets printed. It’s a self censoring process that favors those who print what the owner wants — or more precisely, what those in the trenches perceive that the owner wants.
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And when those who write stories that are in sync with the stance of the owners are rewarded and those who do not are either sidelined or pushed out, those in the trenches get the hint pretty quickly.
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Local newspapers in Ohio do a pretty good job covering the ed reform lobby and the impact of the ed reform lobby on the state’s public schools.
This is all over Ohio news today, although you won’t read a word of anywhere in ed reform:
“The state budget, recently passed in June, increased the amount a student can receive from a school voucher. K-8 students can now receive $5,000, an increase of $350, and high school students can now receive $7,500, an increase of $1,500. As recently enacted in the budget, the state is spending $6,110 per public school student.”
Ed reformers lobbied for and got MORE funding for private schools than the state share for public schools.
They now fund private high school students at a higher rate than they do public high school students. Attend a private school? You get $7500 in state share funding. Attend a public school? You get $6110. That’s the work ed reformers did this last session.
Every public high school student in Ohio now receives less state funding than the state pays for private high school students thanks to the hard work of the ed reform echo chamber- the whole echo chamber now lobbies for vouchers. There’s no dissent.
They may actually lose this lawsuit. Their voucher scheme blatantly disfavors public school students in favor of private school students. And the entire ed reform echo chamber backed it- they knew they were harming public school students- they simply didn’t care.
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2021/08/02/ohio-public-schools-plan-file-lawsuit-over-school-vouchers/5452335001/
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The local education news is much, much more public school focused than the national ed reform narrative – I think that’s because the local news reflects the reality on the ground, where most students attend public schools while the ed reform echo chamber mostly reflects the ideological “reimagining” project of the ed reform lobby.
National news will often quote ONLY the same three charter/voucher promoting ed reform orgs with no input at all from anyone in a public school.
It’s true of ed reform “forums” too- public schools are completely excluded, which leads to the ludicrous result of ed reformers discussing “public schools” where no one who is even within shouting distance of a public school is invited. They hold thousands of these things- one echo chamber member talking to another about “public education” where they deliberately omit all public school input. They talk to each other.
If you want to know what the ed reform lobby thinks about the public schools they don’t use, don’t support and don’t work for, you should listen to ed reformers- that’s the sum total of their output. They promote each other.
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This is a typical national news story on “public schools”.
Not a single person who represents a public school was contacted.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/31/politics/back-to-school-covid-explainer-what-matters/index.html
It’s nuts. But that’s what happens in an echo chamber. Only the ed reform lobby may opine on public schools. They must do this opining from afar, because none of them use public schools or work in or for public schools, but this is fine with CNN.
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The rght and the left seem to agree on one matter. The media are ignoring the real news. The right thinks that the media are ignoring vast networks of voter fraud, child abuse in a pizza parlor, and underhanded efforts to teach children to hate America. It is out there, its just that nobody really wants a news story on how Jewish lasers start forest fires in Australia. The left wing has its own worries, not one of which rises to the levels described above, but al of which feel threatening to the people who feel ignored by the fourth estate.
It seems to me that the problem is that you have to sell news to make news. When the devil is in the details, and the details are not lurid, the public sleeps. If it bleeds, it leads. Stats are boring, but true. Gun fights are exciting, and are always the fodder of the local news. You would never notice the general decline of violent crime since the 1980s on the local news.
All politics is local, and all local news drives local politics. Drawing a direct line from the Waltons to the poor funding of your local school is a hard story to make lurid. It is true, but no one will read it because the average consumer of news does not notice if the truth is in a complex statistical pudding.
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A typical ed reform “discussion on public schools”:
“When the coronavirus pandemic hit late in the 2019-2020 school year, its impact on student learning didn’t take a summer vacation. One year later, with Covid retreating and vaccination efforts well underway, what does summer learning look like? And what effect might summer programing this year have on remediating Covid learning loss?
Christine Pitts, a resident policy fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a 2021 EEPS cohort member, discusses these questions and more on this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus.”
An ed reform group and a conservative think tank will now set policy for the public schools they didn’t attend, don’t use , don’t work for and don’t support.
No public school voices or input permitted in this closed echo chamber- only charter/voucher promoters may weigh in on public schools.
They set policy for our public schools but they don’t support or value our schools. Why do we put up with this? Would private schools accept this?
Public schools should tell Team Ed Reform to go pound sand. If they don’t respect you enough to include you in discussions about YOUR OWN schools why are you taking direction from them, or God forbid hiring and paying them?
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The White House recently criticized the news media for reporting about breakthrough covid cases. He influenced the news outlets with his bully pulpit. They’re probably influencing privatization too, and it’s not so bully, is it.
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It’s kind of funny, in a way.
The mainstream media have gotten so many conflicting messages from the President as and CDC over the past year, they have become thoroughly confused about what is acceptable to print and what is not.
And incidentally, why was it only through a “leak” of the CDC report that the public learned that the delta variant is readily transmitted by those who have been vaccinated?
Why should such information only come out through a leak? If it had not been leaked, how long would the CDC (and presumably the White House, given how ticked off they clearly are) have sat on the information? Would they EVER have revealed it? Or would they just have continued to deny that the delta variant posed a problem?
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Not that we really even had to find out from the recent leak that those who have been vaccinated can still get infected, since the Israelis have been reporting this for a while now and Fauci was even asked about it a couple weeks ago but downplayed it’s significance by steering the conversation toward the continued effectiveness of the vaccines against hospitalization and death — as if those are the only important factors.
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The best example of mainstream media confusion ” about what is acceptable is their stance toward the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of SARSCoV2.
A year ago, they were all dismissing it as little more than a crackpot conspiracy theory.
But then two months ago, Biden said he was instructing US intelligence agencies to review the possibility and the news media were forced to do a 180 degree turn at least with regard to whether the lab leak was a legitimate possibility.
If they were not so pathetic, the backflips these organizations have been doing to rationalize their change of stance would’ve hilarious.
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Just because Biden authorizes an investigation doesn’t mean anyone was lying about the possibility of a leak from a lab. Epidemiologists who study this sort of stuff said early on that SARS-CoV2 was very likely to have jumped species. That doesn’t mean an escape of an infectious disease was completely off the table. It is a well documented fact that the SARS virus groups have been studied in labs for years. No one denied that. The likelihood of an escape as opposed to a species jump was very small and therefore not worth their attention. The thing about science is that as we learn more and more about something, scientific recommendations (like democracies) change with the new information.
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SomeDAM Poet,
You are repeating the right wing narrative of the “stance toward the lab leak hypothesis for the origin of SARSCoV2.” Not the facts.
The true narrative: A scientist thought that was a valid theory. The right wing made it sound like it was already proven to distract from Trump’s horrible response. In fact, after further investigation, that very same scientist who thought it was a valid theory did not find the evidence he expected that would have confirmed it — in fact, he found just the opposite. But the right wing was still exaggerating this as a proven thing that was “covered up”. (Not sure if the scientist was a woman, so please excuse the use of “he”)
As more information came to light, there seems to be more evidence that a lab leak could be possible again. Like normal, concerned people, the Biden White House wanted that fully investigated.
For the record, I don’t think that the investigators are finding the evidence that they thought to confirm the lab leak theory – they seem to be finding evidence that contradicts it, just like the first scientist who proposed it did. But they haven’t given up and it is still certainly possible that there was a lab leak. But far from certain.
Making this political is feeding into the right wing narrative. Changing your mind as new evidence arises is a GOOD thing — it isn’t the cover up that the far right wants to pretend it is. If the Republicans actually believed in evidence, this country would be in much better shape.
But repeating this false narrative is just a recipe for the Democrats and the progressives to do what the Republicans do and ignore evidence and just keep insisting that what is demonstrably false is actually 100% true and doubling down because they know that the false narrative that they were “covering up” something will take hold.
There was no real evidence for a lab leak when people were saying there was no real evidence for a lab leak! That isn’t a “cover-up”. That is actually the truth. When there seemed to be evidence, the scientists and Biden White House followed the evidence. If that evidence turns out not to hold up to scrutiny, it isn’t a cover up. It is science.
I admire people who change their minds when new evidence arises, just like Diane Ravitch did with school reform. The people who are not trustworthy are those who refuse to look at or consider any evidence that contradicts their claims of certainty about something. This is why I know the ed reformers and people like school re-opening advocate Emily Oster should be marginalized instead of elevated as experts. They only want to see evidence that confirms what they want to say is a certainty, because that benefits them, not anyone else.
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You probably want to take up your brilliant argument with President Biden,
He’s the one who ordered the intelligence review of the “right wing” lab leak possibility after so many mainstream media organizations had dismissed it as a “crackpot conspiracy theory”.
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It should be obvious (but apparently is not) that to call for due consideration of a possibility is NOT to claim that that is what actually happened.
That is the whole point of investigation.
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You know, when I was studying science (physics) at university, none of my professors ever informed me of what I can now see is a crucial fact: that there are ” left wing” and “right wing” hypotheses and that the right wing hypotheses are just crackpot conspiracy theories that can safely be ignored without investigation.
So, I have learned something very important here.
Thanks.
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SomeDAM Poet,
“there are ” left wing” and “right wing” hypotheses and that the right wing hypotheses are just crackpot conspiracy theories that can safely be ignored without investigation.”
The only thing that is “right wing” is misrepresenting the facts by insisting that a theory that no one can find any evidence to support “hasn’t been investigated.”
There are scientific theories that may or may not be true. A “right wing” approach is to present a hypothesis as if it was already supported by clear evidence and accuse people who point to the fact that this theory has already been investigated without any evidence coming to light as “covering up” or “not allowing an investigation.” Haven’t we already seen how this works with so-called “voter fraud”?
The approach you call “left wing” and I call evidence-based science is to refrain from claiming that something is likely to be true when people investigating it have yet to find evidence to support the theory that it is true. That’s what has happened with voter fraud. That is what seems to be happening with the new investigation into the lab leak theory.
It is still within the realm of possibility that there was massive voter fraud somewhere. We can’t prove the negative. But it is certainly wrong to claim that it “hasn’t been investigated” or “there is a cover up” when there is no evidence of it.
And it is wrong to falsely make that innuendo about the lab leak theory. It might prove to be true, but claiming that “it hasn’t been investigated” or has been “covered up” is a right wing crackpot theory. Sorry, but it is.
And I doubt very much that any physics professor would tell students that even though their hypothesis had been investigated and no one found any evidence to support it, the proper way to react is to insist that there was a cover up and it was never properly investigated. I do think your physics professor would, like the Biden Administration, want to investigate more if new knowledge came to light that was unknown previously.
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nycpsp– “There was no real evidence for a lab leak when people were saying there was no real evidence for a lab leak!”
There’s a bit more nuance there. I mean, where do we get the evidence if China cuts off intl lab observers?
Back when China was still conferring with WHO scientists, there was a bevy of emails among WHO lab observers that the Wuhan facility was understaffed and not observing all safety protocols for a level 4 facility, especially concerning the high level of gain-of-function research there. That in itself is enough to warrant a close look. Add to that the great distance from Wuhan (where 1st cases were observed) from corona-infested bat sources. The scientific community (including in China) has been stymied by why this virus should have shown up first in Wuhan. There are reassuring reports from Wuhan researchers like that of Shi Zhengli in Scientific American 3/11/20 that “none of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves.” But in July 2020 China rejected WHO’s plan to investigate further.
China’s rejection of further lab investigation is the problem. The whole world studies viruses in labs and needs to know what works and what doesn’t. It’s nice to hear that preponderance of evidence shows virus jumping species is more probable, but that conclusion is undermined & remains so unless we can cross off the lab-leak possibility.
The MAGA hats or anyone else in the world claiming China did this on purpose are fringe tinfoil-hats & should be ignored.
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bethree5,
I agree with all your points! I was just pointing out that what was being rightly characterized as a “crackpot theory” was the right wing claim that the evidence pointed to a lab leak and was being intentionally covered up. You are correct that evidence was hard to come by, but the very same people who first hypothesized that it was a lab leak then did sequencing that didn’t support it, and they were the ones who then said “actually, we don’t know it is a lab leak, and it may not be given the evidence we have so far.” It’s fine to say that the possibility is still open that it was a lab leak and that has certainly been the position of most of the respectable scientists and Biden’s government officials – that’s why they wanted to investigate when more evidence came up. But the way the Republicans politicized the possibility – with no evidence – is similar to the way they politicized the possibility of voter fraud. The absence of evidence was presented as evidence of a cover-up or as evidence that this was never investigated at all.
Watching Rand Paul push his false narratives to Fauci is the problem. Fauci is trying to get to the truth, but it’s hard when Rand Paul is not trying to get to the truth but instead manufacture some scandal to distract people from Trump’s horrible response and the Republicans’ general awfulness.
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I must say, I tire of the phrase “false narratives”. A lot of people try to find a political narrative in everything. Medicine doesn’t have narratives. MDs study results. Scientists publish results. If a narrative is needed to explain the results, then the results were inconclusive.
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LeftCoastTeacher,
A false narrative would be presenting inconclusive results as if they were a certainty.
A false narrative would be saying that we should interpret inconclusive results as being very likely because there was a cover-up and that is the only reason that the false narrative wasn’t 100% proved because the evidence is absolutely there, but just being covered up.
A true narrative would be saying that we have inconclusive results that seem to be pointing to our first hypothesis being wrong, but we do think there is more information there that we have not yet been able to access, and when we do, it is possible that our hypothesis is backed up by actual evidence, but we have yet to find any in our investigation so far.
This has always been science. It is the right that politicized this as being “left”. Good science is not making claims when the evidence doesn’t support that, and it is also being willing to listen and investigate new evidence and not ignore it.
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I agree, not everything is Left v Right.
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Once the news media starts concerning itself about what is and what is not acceptable to print, it’s pretty much game over for journalism.
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What is and what is not acceptable based on what the White House says.
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Of course this news shouldn’t be suppressed. However, with the way a segment of our country processes news – focusing too much on breakthrough cases could lead many people to continue to avoid being vaccinated. I am guessing the fear was that those who were resisting being vaccinated would push back even more.
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Suppressing scientific information is NEVER a good idea.
In fact, it goes against everything that science is about.
And it is more likely than not to actually backfire.
This is actually very reminiscent of the CDC and Surgeon general original stance against masks for the public. Regardless of their reasons (they said they were concerned about the shortage of n95 masks for health care workers early last year), they should NOT have implied that masks wouldn’t help the general public . Instead they should have been upfront about the shortage and told people that it they wanted to get non-N95 masks, that such masks WOULD make a difference.
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Trying to second guess irrational thinking is a futile endeavor.
The public are perfectly capable of understanding that some situations are neither all good or all bad.
There is nothing wrong with explaining to people that the vaccines still prevent hospitalization and death, but also can allow someone to still be infected, a reason for a continued mask recommendation even for the vaccinated.
Of course, when you just told the vaccinated a coup!e months ago that they don’t need to wear a mask indoors, it’s hard to change the policy (yet again).
The CDC mask policy is like a fish on the dock trying to flip-flop it’s way back into the water.
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Once trust is lost- game pretty much over.
Masks were evident in Asia, protecting citizens. When CDC affiliated people initially said evidence didn’t show mask efficacy and, it was subsequently explained as an attempt to assure scarce masks for medical personnel, many shook their heads knowing what would be coming.
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Linda– which points up a difference between Chinese & Korean culture/ experience vs ours. For whatever climate-related reason, their Eastern end of a vast continent is ground zero for global virus, & learned long ago the efficacy of mask protection. [That ingrained habit has served them well during industrial smog as well]. We, against all recent evidence, continue to think of ourselves as some sort of protected island nation.
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Needing to be skeptical about what is and isn’t being reported honestly leads dangerously to cynicism. When people feel they are being manipulated, they look to conspiracy theories to explain the cognitive dissonance, or they just tune out. Game over for more than just journalism. Honesty is the best policy.
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When the line between “being wrong” and “being dishonest” is blurred, as the Republicans have done to their great benefit, we all suffer.
Diane Ravitch changed her mind as new evidence arose. That isn’t “being dishonest”. But that is how some people portray Dr. Fauci. It is mispresenting honesty as if it was not be trusted.
The reason some people “trust” Trump is that he doubles down on lies. They don’t trust someone who changes his mind as new evidence arises because that person “lies” and Trump is “honest”.
It is a real problem that we all need to fight.
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It’s all about life experiences, role models and the developing the ability to think critically. This is what will support people to be able to understand that adjusting recommendations based on new information – is a sign of intelligence, not dishonesty.
In addition to doubling down on lies (and often contradicting themselves) – leaders like Trump speak with brazen confidence. That makes some people feel like they are strong leaders, in control and “know what they is talking about.” I guess this authoritative manner makes some people a sense of order in a chaotic world.
If a thoughtful, expert, intellectual like Fauci just tells the truth based on ever changing and unpredictable information….. and doesn’t try to posture and spin – to some that is interpreted as flip flopping and weak.
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beachteach,
Well-said! Thank you.
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Nycpsp– Unfortunately that is a feature of the lower-educated & lesser-experienced, provincial folks who form DJT’s core base: “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
Real factual info, which changes constantly, comes at us way too fast these days for such folk to ponder & digest & perhaps change their minds. They buy into a data-set that aligns with their experience for a rather long haul. Doesn’t have to be “lies,” just assumptions drawn from very first set of data at the horizon of a radical change, based on decades of life experience [which unfortunately do not align].
DJT’s covid assumptions in Jan 2020 could be seen in that light. He is not such a provincial person, but even though he understood differently within a month or two, he imagined that his core followers [or perhaps all Americans?] would be thrown into fear & disarray if confronted with facts on the ground. So for him, doubling down on what evidence soon revealed as “lies” was in his limited mind a way of calming folks down– calming the market– a misguided effort soon undermined by on-the-ground reality.
Right there is where the rubber meets the road. It takes an extraordinary national leader to announce a radical global change to the populace, while at the same time presenting a plan to meet unprecedented events, with bracing self-confidence, exhorting all to cast aside their fearful insistence this cannot be true, & rise above themselves to meet it—and get buy-in. One thinks of an FDR or a Winston Churchill. Certainly not a DJT or a Boris Johnson.
Few democratic nations have had such a leader to confront covid [any?—tho certainly better than ours]. What has helped some of them do better is simply a higher concentration of highly-educated, data-savvy populace. Some of those with autocratic leaders (i.e., China) have benefited simply from population’s previous experience with pandemics. Some autocrats (e.g. Bolsonaro in Brazil) have failed for a combination of DJT-type lack of leadership compounded by poverty & low-educated populace. And some have failed regardless of govtl type simply by being among those nations who do not have the mfg or $ or political clout to get the help they need.
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I traced that story back through a couple of CNN articles. On Fri, 7/30, 2 senior Biden admin officials advised reporters of Biden’s choler over this issue. He should learn to button his lip when things are moving quickly. The same day, CDC early-released details on the Provincetown, MA July ‘super-spreader’ events [7/3-7/17]. A full 74% of the 469 who caught it were fully vaccinated [90% of cases were delta variant]. Of the 346 breakthroughs, 21% had no symptoms. The other 79% had symptoms described as ranging from those of a slight cold up to a very light flu – except for the 4 who had to be hospitalized (no deaths). The CDC also studied viral load between vaccinated & unvaccinated, & determined that the loads between the two were similar– more evidence for the observation that Delta seems transmissible by the vaccinated.
Within two days of Biden’s scolding, Rochelle Walensky tied up the info into a nice neat message– ‘vaccines working as advertised — better get yours– and mask up even if you’re vaccinated.’ Of course MAGAs conclude ‘why bother’?, ignoring the manyfold x transmissibility of Delta– & without acknowledging the vastly improved stats on severity of symptoms.
MA was an ideal place, Delta-data-collection-wise, for this to happen. The state is 72% vaccinated, & has good data-tracking on vaccinations. And Cape Cod has lots of retirees who are mask/ vaccine/ testing- conscious. Plus credit to CDC for being all over this promptly.
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OOPS. I meant this to go under LCT’s 9:43 a.m. comment on how Biden was annoyed at press’s ‘hyperbolic’ coverage of breakthrough cases…
BTW, p.s.: tho I have vacationed at the Cape annually lifelong, I haven’t been to Provincetown in 40 yrs — except for one whale-spotting excursion when kids were little 25 yrs ago, & here’s why: forget special July events– the place is a jam-packed mess 7 afts/ nights per wk from early July through mid-August. I’m talking crowded like, you have to turn sideways and hang onto your kids for dear life & hope not to get trampled crowded, just to walk down the street.
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Trying to get people vaccinated makes sense. It makes more sense to inform people that the vaccines work, but imperfectly, and inform the vaccinated that we still need to take precautions, especially if we are elderly or have underlying conditions.
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What ed reform has accomplished this past year is what they talk about in the echo chamber and what ed reform has accomplished this past year is voucher, vouchers, vouchers. They got nothing at all done for public school students.
They’re busy celebrating their work on privatization:
https://www.educationnext.org/school-choice-advances-in-states-advocates-describe-breakthrough-year/
No positive returns from this “movement” to any public school student in the country and here are HUNDREDS of full time, paid ed reformers and tens of lavishly funded ed reform orgs.
If you’re a public school and you’re paying these people as consultants or taking direction from them, you need your head examined. They return no value to your students. It’s a bad investment.
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Not to oversimplify the answer, but…follow the money. Who is funding the major news outlets and what do they stand to lose if the topic became mainstream?
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In a society like ours where money decides almost everything, to assume that was oversimplifying would be to oversimplify.
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Yes, and thank you. I prefer less words on this topic.
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scariest reality. And even PBS has its puppet strings
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Have you ever tried “Newsy”? It’s on the basic cable channels. The announcers are all young folks FWIW. I like it because, well, there’s no commentary! Just the news. They have supplementary pieces that demonstrate younger, progressive interests, but the news is just the news. Refreshing!
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My local school district may participate in the lawsuit over the inequitable state share funding ed reformers lobbied for and got, where public high school students now receive less state funding than private high school students.
This is an overwhelmingly conservative area and they’re fighting the far Right ed reform “movement”. It’s a conservative area but not a far Right area and they support public schools. We’ll have pro public school Republicans versus ed reform anti-public school Republicans in my area of the country.
I think they’ve finally gone too far in Ohio. This is a conservative state but it isn’t far Right enough to support ed reformers anymore. The ed reform “movement” has really lurched far Right- they blatantly oppose public schools and public school students now- it’s lockstep too- there’s been no pushback at all from supposedly “liberal” ed reformers. They’re happy to throw public school students under the bus too.
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I’m glad to hear that this seems to be happening despite (or because of?) the Fordham Institute pressure– are folks finally finding their own voices (& checking to see if they’re being pickpocketed)? As indicated in your steady press coverage over gthe years, sounds like Ohio may be turning a corner. Thanks for keeping us posted.
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Did no one point out to the gentleman that the selfsame corporate interests invaded the news media and won, so that they control content now?
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This article sums up my frustrations very well. It’s been more than a decade since I became aware of Diane’s critiques and considered understanding and acting on them to be essential to the long-term survival of our nation. I have yet to meet anyone in my community–teachers included–who feels the same way. When I explain to people why I would never ever consider setting foot in a Walmart or Sam’s Club, I get bemused looks. The fact is that people very, very rarely think of education as an existential issue. They only care about it when it’s their kids and they forget about it as soon as graduation comes.
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Possibly right, Greg. But the recent NPE report on for-profit charters inspired legislation to ban federal funding of them, even if they are technically nonprofit but managed by a for-profit. It passed the House. The charter lobby is fighting it tooth and nail.
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Exactly. When I bring up legitimate criticism about privatization/charters citing evidence/data I learned here with other parents, some parents tell me that I’m wrong and I don’t know what I’m talking about! You are right that only current parents care about education. AND my mother still shops at Walmart! Argh!
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I share your frustration, Greg. Although my friends seem to be interested in local ed issues beyond their kids’ K12 experience, their opinions are entirely framed by that experience. The bubble never pops. Here, in a wealthy NJ town, they didn’t even register the effects of stds/ aligned annual testing on the curriculum, as teachers were able to basically sidestep all of it [except for the horrible ppwk I knew about, knowing some local teachers], because most kids in an area like this do fine on tests regardless, & those that don’t are well-covered by well-funded SpEd. These liberal friends tho interested in broad-brush national equity issues like the US immigrant experience are clueless about privatization’s existential threat to pubschs despite One Newark travesty 20-min drive away. We have no charters, & they don’t even get why not; charters/ vouchers they seem to figure are OK for ‘those people;’ they can’t see beyond their own noses & seem to have no sense of systemic national perspective when it comes to education.
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Dr. Leana Wen was on Morning Joe this morning. She was asked about schools opening and had a response that I was not expecting. She first said children need to be in school, and they should wear masks – however, unfortunately we were more concerned with opening bars than putting enough money in school infrastructure (new ventilation, robust testing systems etc.)….. and that we (govt) need to start showing we care about schools and children.
I was very happy to hear this message – from a respected voice. It’s a message we don’t often hear on MSM.
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Duh, the Mainscream Media Is Corporate.
Have we forgotten NBC’s Education Nation Machinations? They are licking their chops at their market share opportunities for becoming one of the delivery platforms for the New Commercialized Monetized Public Broad (pronounced “Brode”) Education Medium.
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edit: Broad (pronounced “Brode”) Cast
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I am guessing that NBC’s Education Nation, featuring the stars of education “reform,” funded by Gates, was canceled for low ratings.
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The profound irony of the rAGONY…
Ragging on the rags for their failure to spotlight
the proper dots, seems to be a misstep.
The failure to “somehow” cultivate the masses
with the ability to “connect the dots”, seems to
be the greater faux pas…
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So-called reform is all about “Hidden Politics” that manifests itself as dark money. The billionaires prefer to hide in the shadows while they are the puppet masters of various stink tanks and astroturf groups. So-called reformers have equally mastered the “Politics of Pretending.” They pretended that choice and market based alternatives will make all schools better, but the opposite has happened. So-called reform has nothing to do with improving education or forwarding social justice. The real objective is to transfer copious amounts public money into private pockets at the expense of local communities and public schools. The mainstream media mostly owned by billionaires and corporations ignore all the waste, fraud, embezzling in the charter sector.
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“Stink Tanks.” I will be using this term often from now on.
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A few posters have tried to draw parallels to the media coverage of COVID being a lab leak, but if anything, it demonstrates that science reporters – while not perfect – are journalists while education reporters are more like stenographers.
If a drug company was touting some new drug as a miracle cure, and pointing to studies of it where half the patients using it disappeared from the study, I doubt any science reporter would demonstrate their ignorance by touting what a miracle this new treatment is that cures 99% of the patients who take it. They would ask the obvious question — if this drug cures 99% of the patients, why did half the patients drop out of the study? And science reporters would certainly not accept without question that half the patients in the study changed their mind and decided they preferred to die when remaining in the study would have guaranteed they would be cured.
But education reporters do accept wild claims of success without question. They have no clue how to understand studies — they simply repeat what the expert who is offered to them by the study’s promoters says about it. And then they present the actual unbiased expert view as coming from “the union” or “people who hate charters with an agenda who shouldn’t be trusted”.
It would be a very bad thing if science reporters acted like education reporters and had a scientist who supports this drug to be the sole interpreter of the study, presenting that as expert opinion, and then including a disclaimer that “someone else who is very biased disagreed” without even bothering to include the evidence and analysis that supports why that expert – not a “biased hater of the drug company” — believes the study is flawed and being misrepresented.
An excellent NYT reporter demonstrated the difference between science and education reporting in a story about Trump’s claims that there was scientific evidence of how wonderful hydroxychloroquine cured COVID. The reporter presented a full analysis that made it clear that the hyped studies “proving” this claim were seriously flawed, because he understood studies.
If education reporters had covered science, they would still be reporting that “studies demonstrate how miraculously hydroxychloroquine works to cure COVID, but some Trump-haters challenge those studies”. And since they would be former education reporters, they would defend their reporting as true — after all, nothing they wrote is a “lie” — and therefore demand to be praised instead of criticized. After all, it is technically true that a (very flawed) study did say that hydroxychloroquine worked, and it is true that someone who didn’t like Trump criticized the study for reasons that the former education reporter was certain are not worth knowing about. In the minds of former education reporters, that would be “accurate” reporting that they believes deserves to be praised and not criticized! How dare someone criticize them for just reporting that studies proved that hydroxychloroquine worked and some people who hate Trump challenge those studies. A science reporter would understand the problems when education journalists hype pro-charter studies and say they are being “fair and balanced” by including a disclaimer that “a biased person disagrees”.
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Nycpsp—do check my 7:21pm reply to you above on lab-leak theory.
But… I think what you are observing is not about media coverage, it’s about the studies they report on– scientific vs educational.
(1)Far be it from me to dump on soft-science studies, but let’s face it: GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. It’s a he*l of a lot easier to acquire authentic, provable data to support scientific theories than on educational [or other sociological] theories. That’s because there simply is no accepted definition of what education is, or how to measure it. You & I would probably measure it by whether or not it graduates curious, lifelong learners capable of becoming autodidacts– but that takes many years to prove out, & will vary wildly based on many factors, only some of which can be traced to certain schools, or teachers, or their particular pedagogies. Meanwhile in MSM & Congress it’s all about test scores, which we all here understand represent a faded snapshot of how a kid regurgitates certain ‘skill sets’ on a certain day on a MC computer-scored assessment whose value is less than nil [GIGO]—or even worse, how that pertains to their future income [which ignores socio-economic factors].
(2)Because of the impossibility of defining or measuring education, it’s an open field for any idiot or politician or study-grant-recipient to define it at will [or per the agenda of their grant donor]. That makes this field entirely susceptible to statistical manipulation to whatever agenda. As long as big $ defines ed research — & that means ed-industry big $ with a product to sell– that’s going to be how things roll here.
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bethree5,
I agree with most of this, but there are certain basics that all ethical studies follow. And closely examining attrition is one of the basics. The fact that we have now had decades of ed reform studies where the researchers intentionally ignore attrition is beyond happenstance.
Almost anything can be made to seem very good if attrition rates are intentionally ignored. Like there being a strong relationship between giving students vanilla ice cream and their doing well academically. A study where attrition wasn’t considered could “prove” this was true.
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The GOP elected leaders of the Red States want to maintain their 1st place ranking for states with the most corruption, highest rates of crime, legalized violence through stand your ground laws, high poverty rates, high unemployment rates, high rates of COVID infections/deaths, and to keep first place in lowest educated states.
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Illinois is a blue state. Sadly, it has the same problems listed above. ☹️🤔
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New York and the Cuomos???
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Thanks to decades of failure to enforce antitrust laws, today’s media are owned by a handful of corporate octopuses. No one expects corporate media to investigate corporations taking over public education. That will only be done by the independent media on the Internet. However, neither Congress nor state legislatures will pay any attention to the results of such independent investigations because America also has a Corporate Congress.
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scisne
Exactly- your final sentence.
The follow-up point is, who leads the voters to the corporate candidates and what will drive them to other candidates.
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scisne– Thank you for getting us back to ground zero. IMHO, there will never be any attention paid by Congressional reps to quality public education—or any other public good—until big $$$ is pulled out of our political process.
Step 1 would be 100% publicly-supported [tax-paid] elections (at every level). That may require repeal or legislative workaround the Citizens’ United decision right off the bat. There are other measures that need to be taken, but that is the start.
Why? Because since late 1970’s there has been a steady onslaught of union-busting, deregulation, new legislation, & underfunding of oversight for remaining protective legislation, that has resulted in national & state policy dictated by $big money interests. These corporate interests [supported by a few retired multi-billionaires] view the nation as a corporation with an unwieldy overblown overhead [= middle class & their public goods, & govt in general] which needs to be chopped down to size in order to… whatever. Compete globally—or simply provide them with higher profit.
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I presume at some point realization will dawn that the billionaires’ takeover doesn’t make for an enemy the public cares about and, that the business of media, owned by corporations, isn’t the generation of public interest topics.
Even after the Biel and Espinosa decisions, there is no influencing group in the public school camp that is willing to develop a wedge issue creating public opposition sufficient to attract media attention. Religious tribes have emotional, vested interest. Others loathe religion or are wary of it because of its abuses. The taboo against tapping into the conflict is self-imposed and pervasive but, it can be broken down.
A failure to talk about race is a failure to progress. With Trump in power, it’s a move backward
A failure to talk about the wins of conservative religion against public schools is a failure to progress. With Walton heirs and Gates in power, it’s a move backwards.
People with placards outside of religious schools chanting, “none of my taxes for your clerics, your priests, your pastors, your imams, your rabbis”…
Given the experience of the past 20 years, what’s the alternative for attracting attention and encouraging people to take sides?
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Linda– See my response to scisne above. We are no question in the midst of a devolution into tribalism– which includes issue of separation of church & state. This is a direct consequence of how our govt has decided to deal with a suddenly-shrinking economic pie [since late ‘70’s], the consequence of rising global mfg competition (mainly from Asia), combined with the simultaneous digital revolution that sped up mfg automation, while also decimating various industries & jobs.
Since late ‘70’s we’ve had an onslaught of legislation/ deregulation/ underfunding of taxation et al laws that swiftly sent national assets to the top, establishing an überclass that deemed the middle/ working classes and their public goods as overhead to be put on the chopping block, so as to compete with rising 3rd-world mfrs. No planning ahead: no ‘what kind of society do we want, going forward under these new conditions.’ Just ‘sauve qui peuve,’ send the $ to the top & let them grab the biggest pieces.
Concurrent result: democracy is screw*d: a citizen’s vote can’t compete with $clouty influence on govt policy. This is, historically, the prelude to some sort of regime change. Democracy can maybe hang on against autocracy [whether socialist or fascist] by flooding the economy with $$$ grabbed from the rich to plump up the poor/ wkg/ middle class, as Biden is trying to do.
The focus on religion vs state– or CRT/ racism—or the pettier crap focused on by libs—is beside the point, & allowing ourselves to be distracted by what’s really going on here. My only hope is with those progressives who are pushing to get the $ out of politics & go for publicly-[tax]-supported elections—for a start.
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Yesterday, in Ohio, Trump’s candidate was elected in a congressional GOP primary and in a Democratic primary, the candidate funded by fossil fuel and favored by Republicans beat out Nina Turner.
It’s a lovely wish that the tide will turn toward democracy. As you note,
SCOTUS has 6 conservative Catholic judges. Would you elaborate on the coalition in Congress who want campaign finance changed and their strategy for winning?
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I expect it’s obvious from what I said above, but if not: my sense is that our devolution into tribalism is a direct result of fear—economic insecurity—rippling through our poor, working, middle, & even upper-middle classes, after a number of decades have shown that the assumptions of upward mobility we had from earlier eras, most recently post-Depression through late ‘70’s, have disappeared. We have no more upward social mobility, which has long been an assumption of the American project. [Check the chart at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwards-decline-usa-us-america-economics/ ] That eliminates hope. It creates a different, zero-sum paradigm. Zero-sum = the 90+% fighting over the floor scraps from the 10% table. Enter tribalism.
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Conditions are right for the uprising that topples regimes as predicted by history. The payouts during Covid pushed the reckoning out. The surveillance state gets more sophisticated hourly. There is no regulation of social media and big tech’s control of communication.
And, your feasible solution for change is?
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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
-Upton Sinclair
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Great quote.
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“ It’s not that they are UNinterested in corporate invasion of public education. They are actually very interested in it. The news media (including Boston Globe) are owned by just a very small number of individuals and corporations with VESTED interests in privatization.
The news media are interested in ensuring that the public does not learn about the privatization.”
^This ^
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Yesterday, CNN reported about a story from Dallas Texas that was picked up by Fox, Breitbart News, Daily Mail, etc. CNN, in investigating the reality behind the organization at the center the story which inflamed racial tensions, tried to find out if it was “real or a hoax”. The CNN investigation presented a lot of information suggesting a hoax. One of the people mentioned in the story is a conservative media tycoon, Brian Timpone, (graduate of Marian Catholic H.S.).
Catholic Philly wrote about Timpone on June 15,2020. His business is described as including, “low cost automated story generation.” As an example, Catholic Philly provides Timpone’s Catholic Tribune Wisconsin (with parallel sites in Minn., Mich., and Florida).
The Wisconsin site “duplicates info. all five Wisconsin dioceses provide.” Because the Catholic Tribune Wisconsin site has no ads, it’s speculated that its purpose is the harvesting of e-mail addresses. At the site, readers are invited to provide e-mail addresses to receive alerts about new offerings. The site also posts its content on Facebook.
Wikipedia adds the following info in its Timpone entry, “Articles with heavy conservative and Republican biases would appear in targeted areas…His companies have received funding from Liberty Principles PAC (Uihlein).”
What is described appears to be a promotional effort similar to Steve Bannon’s geofencing of Catholic Churches for Republican messaging.
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fyi- the dioceses’ bishops have state Catholic Conferences that politic for school choice.
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Info at Crux- “Crux was founded as project of the Boston Globe in 2014 but has been fully independent since March 2016.” Crux is “a news site dedicated to…coverage of the Vatican and Catholic church.”
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2015- “Crux, Cuomo and the Cardinal: Will school choice save Catholic schools”, posted at Notre Dame’s ACE, quote from ACE Director, “Educational choice is good for everyone”.
Ohio taxpayers lost $1 bil. to the charter school, ECOT. The school is now defunct with financial recovery unlikely. Choice is not “good for everyone”, not good for most. It is “good” for the few who want tax money for private schools that discriminate.
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Boston Globe- staunch ally of privatization
From the Knights of Columbus site, “Crux and Knights of Columbus to Partner”, a quote from Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, “We appreciate The Boston Globe having provided the start up of Crux and are confident that the Knights of Columbus under the capable leadership of Supreme Knight Carl Anderson will achieve new levels of success with this new important communication tool, on behalf of the Church and the good of the wider community.”
BTW- Carl Anderson was a legislative aide to Jesse Helms.
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Linda, to be fair, the Boston Globe investigative journalists exposed the pedophile priest problem. The Globe is not a tool of the Catholic hierarchy.
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Shinning a spotlight on criminals and those who cover up for them (more newspapers sold and prestige garnered) is in a different category than the promotion of predatory capitalism. Spotlight exposed individuals engaged in wrong doing. In contrast, privatization is an economic and social system.
Tim Busch, SCOTUS judges, Leonard Leo and many, many others rely on their understanding of their sect’s tenets as basis for the model they believe is ideal for the nation and there is a record of their statements corroborating it.
There are individuals and organizations engaging in activities based on their own initiatives, not operating as tools of a hierarchy. JFK successfully dispelled that erroneous notion about Catholicism and politics 60 years ago. Pat Buchanan and Jerry Falwell are not tools of a hierarchy either.
The USCCB does take action as a collective. A recent example was the discussion about Biden receiving communion (2/3 of the bishops opposed it). In a second example, the USCCB took action in donating $2 mil. to a clinic that advises a birth control method (monthly cycle) that fails 25% of the time.
The Boston Globe created a website that they thought would appeal to people interested in the Vatican and the Catholic Church. I’m not clear if the Globe anticipated a piece of profit for its own investors or merely wanted the site to reach a breakeven point so that the Globe would be relieved from supporting it. From a business standpoint, the site was a very poor financial decision. Many may have anticipated its inability to generate revenue. Globe’s management would have had familiarity with the difficulty of convincing advertisers to spend on web content.
As a side note, the person at Crux’s helm at its inception, who presumably the Globe supported, wrote a book, the War on Christians…
Church members or religious loyalists can have the view that pedophiles weaken their institution and simultaneously they can want to strengthen an authoritarian system or a system that they believe benefits society. The point was made at this blog by tribalists who were unable to separate political initiatives from the religion and so defended their church. I will repeat to no avail, political policy e.g. two executive directors of state Catholic Conferences taking credit for the school choice legislation in their states speaks to an important issue. If a pattern is found as in the Scielo article about Mexico that I have referenced on prior occasions, ignoring it, won’t make it go away and it won’t stop its advance.
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John L. Allen’s book, “The Global War on Christians…” was published in 2013. 2014 was the year that The Boston Globe introduced Crux with John L. Allen at the helm.
I assume Allen writes what he wants to and is not a tool that is directed by others.
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