The goal has more to do with changing school governance and giving opportunities for some of these organizations to get control of the public dollar

"Won't Back Down" Film Pushes ALEC Parent Trigger Proposal

Parent Trigger laws are a "clever way to trick parents into seizing control of their schools and handing it over to private corporations"

Rupert Murdoch, Media Mogul and Owner of Education Testing Company, Distributes Film

The film is being distributed by 20th Century Fox, owned by News Corp. and media mogul Rupert Murdock. News Corp. owns Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post. Murdoch formerly owned the British newspaperNews of the World, which imploded once it was revealed that reporters hacked into the cell phones of the family of a murdered child, as well as the cell phones of the royal family, politicians and celebrities. The paper's top editors and reporters were arrested although Murdoch himself has not been charged.

As CMD previously reported, News Corp. has been a member of both ALEC's Education Task Force and Communications and Technology Task Force. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Stephen Moore, is an ALEC “scholar” and both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News have gone to bat for ALEC as member corporations began to flee earlier this year. What is less well known is that News Corp. owns Wireless Generation, a for-profit online education, software, and testing corporation, acquiring it in 2010 for $360 million. Wireless Generation is also an ALEC member. Apparently, Murdoch was anxious to get a piece of the nation's education system, which he describes as a "500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed." News Corp's senior Vice President in charge of its education division is none other than former Chancellor of New York City Schools, Joel Klein, who promoted a corporatist model of education reform.

Lubienski, for one is skeptical of "self-proclaimed experts on the topic of education" like Murdoch who "aren't accountable to the public" and who have a profit motive coupled with a political agenda of widespread privatization. more

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As for schooling, where we're going, I contribute this:

Crushed, bite-sized, or juiced?

When she was seven years-old, my oldest came home from school with a paper testing her reading ability. She'd gotten a True/False question wrong and was irate -- as in stomping mad. Ranting.

The question? "A puppy is a small dog. True or false?"

How would you answer?

A first-grader was expected to choose "true," but my daughter chose "false." She'd thought about it, and insisted that a puppy is not a small dog; it's a baby dog.

And she was right.

No Child Left Behind. Underfunded from the beginning, it's been a witch hunt, forcing schools to teach to tests or lose their autonomy and funding. Critical thinking skills -- real writing to express and respond, even the involvement required to read novels and be able to stay with something, plunder its depths -- are also getting lost. Ah, but No Child sounded so good, so empirical and scientifical, tasty enough to sell to a public that loves bite-sized nuggets that, at a glance, tell them where their school ranks. Rankings that mean nothing except that students have been taught to pass tests, tests that don't and cannot measure real thinking.

Makes me dizzy. Part of the plan to drown government in bathtub, yes? And plays well to the voucher hungry, the Santori who want to inflict a Reformation-era education on all children. They just born bad, he says.



Funny. Mine weren't.

And there was another reason. Rhymes with munny: just ask the pineapple.