Maurice Cunningham, a retired professor of political science, reviewed the Boston Globe’s bad habit of treating billionaire-funded groups as authoritative on education issues.
He wrote recently, as posted on the blog of the Network for Public Education:
Maurice Cunningham finds that looking at the Boston Globe tells us too much about the folks who think education is just to prepare children to become useful tools for business. Reposted with permission.
When I was a kid in the Sixties we’d occasionally hear stories about some poor Japanese soldier, abandoned on a Pacific island after WWII, finally being rescued while believing he was still fighting the war. That’s sort of where the Boston Globe’s post-MCAS coverage is. But as a lesson in the biased media approach to interest group coverage, it is a real education.
The latest is by reporter Mandy McLaren, With no more MCAS requirement, graduation standards vary widely among state’s largest districts. What interests me is the sources used in the story, which include a heavy presence of billionaire funded and tax deductible “non-profits” aka interest groups. That’s because non-profit, while it sounds eleemosynary ( I just wanted to use that word in a sentence) actually represents the policy preferences of the moneyed few; or as the media like to say the Massachusetts business community; or as I like to say: capital.
Let’s meet the Globe’s eleemosynary sources starting with “The risk moving forward, said Andrea Wolfe, president and CEO of MassInsight, a Boston-based education nonprofit.” Mass Insight’s donors include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Boston Foundation (you will remember them from The Globe Puffs Up Another Dubious “Science of Reading” Program) and Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund (also from Puffs Up).
Then there is “Erin Cooley, Massachusetts managing director for Democrats for Education Reform, a group that advocated against Question 2.” Don’t make me go through the Oligarch Party funding of Democrats for Education Reform again, but you can catch the gist at Democrats for Education Reform: Let’s Meet the Funders and How to Understand Democrats for Education Reform Using Two Quotes from Democrats for Education Reform.
Finally,
Erika Giampietro, executive director for the Massachusetts Alliance for Early College, said she hopes whatever path the state takes next focuses on the ‘competencies’ students graduate with, especially those that truly matter in the real world.”
“[Employers] are not saying, ‘I wish kids had taken two years of foreign language, four years of English and four years of math.’ They’re saying, ‘Yeah, kids aren’t coming with strong enough executive functioning and clear enough communication skills and showing up to work every day and realizing how important that is to be on time,‘” Giampietro said.
Funders include Gates, Boston Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Gift (also in Puffs Up).
Employers=business=capital. Ms. Giampietro offers the interest group frame: employers would like taxpayer paid employee training (while not increasing taxes). The focus is employers and not children. If you read enough of these stories, that comes through. Not that kids should be introduced to foreign cultures, discover a love of literature or art, or heaven forbid, question the prevailing structures of society. Such concerns are not the “the real world” issues of business.
The article did quote Max Page, president of Massachusetts Teachers Association. But when you also quote two superintendents who miss MCAS and three eleemosynary business group interests, well . . . does three from capital equal one from labor?
Money never sleeps. Follow the money.
“Imagine movie critics who either did not know, or did not care to know, that movies have producers, script writers, directors, financiers, or casting directors, and so based their reviews on the premise that it was the actors alone who created the storyline, dialogue and mise en scene, and that the most successful actors were those who best understood the audience. That is essentially how all politics is covered in 21st century America.”—Michael Podhorzer.
Network for Public Education
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Diane Ravitch's blog 
eleemosynary: you have to love a good word.
Thom Hartman is right. Until we get big money out of political activity, we will live in a new guilded age, where donations to candidates are thought of as charity instead of bribes.
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“Favor the Voices of Plutocrats”? Guilty as charged, but why single out the Globe? Who doesn’t? Wall Street Journal? NY Times? WaPo? LA Times? I’ll wait.
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When students from Howard High School in Chattanooga in 1960 decided to follow the lead of their black counterparts in Greensboro, NC, and conduct sit-ins at local lunch counters, my father, the rector of the wealthy downtown Episcopal church, decided to use his network of black ministers and wealthy business owners to collaborate on a plan that led to the integration of those diners 6 months later. At the time, Birmingham, AL, another mid-sized southern industrial city, was getting national attention for its bigotry and mistreatment of its black citizens. The business leaders in Chattanooga decided it wouldn’t be good for their wealth to earn a similar reputation and thought it prudent to quietly resolve the conflict.
Chattanooga soon earned a reputation as the exception to the rule of urban civil strife that roiled throughout the South in the 1960s. I later got to know many of those wealthy families and discovered that they saw civility as a benefit to their bottom line. Later, as the steel factories along the Tennessee River began to fail, those same wealthy families determined it prudent to reinvest their golden parachutes in Chattanooga and it soon became a thriving regional destination known for its eco-tourism. I was naive enough to believe that this was how capitalism worked. That the wealthy families believed in sustaining community. Such is not the case.
We are now in a global economy that values disruption over production and the common good. We have multi-millionaires and billionaires who have discovered that a world in disarray means that they get to keep more of the spoils while the rest of the world is too busy struggling to live day to day to pay attention to this theft. This is what has led to the rise of Donald Trump as he acts as the laundry man for international grift. It puzzled me for some time that many of the “captains of industry” were so critical of public schools that, if properly funded, could result in a society less dependent on government scraps while the wealthy continued to build their stock portfolios. Once plutocrats discovered that a society in turmoil actually meant they were left to their own devices, then the party was on. This global cabal of autocrats and business technocrats have determined that maintaining their dominance depends on the disinformation of social media and a fat and happy corporate media that keeps the masses uninformed. The other part of this is defunding opportunity while overseeing the demise of universal education.
The collapse of legacy media has presented an opportunity to exploit the information stream so critical for a democratic society. A healthy public schools that prepares citizens for a self-actualized adulthood is a threat to a caste establishment that never has enough. The role of the contemporary fourth estate is no longer to speak truth to power, but to lead interference for the powerful. The demise of the public schools is critical to the success of this enterprise.
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