Jeb Bush, Rupert Murdoch and the “business” of education

by David Safier

I could easily begin and end this post with the following sentence:

Rupert Murdoch will deliver the keynote address at the Jeb Bush's National Summit on Education Reform.

What more needs to be said? And yet, I can't resist saying more.

Jeb Bush's group is the Foundation for Excellence in Education. Its purpose is to use the trumped-up triumphs of the "Florida Education Miracle" to push a nationwide privatization/voucher agenda, and he's got big money donors behind him. One of my favorite targets, Matthew Ladner, who used to be the education guy at the Goldwater Institute, works for Jeb now, which gives me greater insight into the agenda and methods of propaganda which are FEE's stock in trade.

Rupert Murdoch has recently joined the "Gold in them thar schools" crowd, staking his claim with the company, Wireless Generation, which he bought for $360 million. It's a data mining company whose purpose is to compile test scores and other student information for school districts and state governments. The level of irony in trusting someone involved in a huge information hacking scandal to compile information on minors is beyond my ability to calculate. In a reasonable world, Murdoch would sell his newly acquired company for pennies on the dollar and slink away. But we don't live in a reasonable world.

In that same reasonable world, Jeb Bush would decide Murdoch is an educational untouchable, at least until his current scandal is put to rest one way or another. But the bond between today's educational "reformers" and those who want to cash in on said "reform" is so tight, it actually makes sense to have a man with absolutely no educational experience or expertise headline an educational event, so long as he's rich and powerful. These are the people who are being pushed to the forefront of the education "reform" movement because, somehow, if they've made lots of money, they're more credible as education "experts." If they plan to make even more money from the "reforms" they're pushing, that somehow doesn't put a dent in their credibility. After all, if I'm so smart, why ain't I rich?