Monday, Mar 11, 2013 10:36 AM CDT

Getting rich off of schoolchildren

Stop pretending wealthy CEOs pushing for charter schools are altruistic "reformers." They're raking in billions

By David Sirota

News Corporation Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch (AP Photo/Cliff Owen) (Credit: AP)

Last week, Los Angeles provided yet another example of a cadre of anti-public-school millionaires swooping in to try (and in this case, fail) to buy a big-city school-board election. And once again, that sparked a round of Orwellian newspeak that distorts what’s really happening in education politics.
You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”

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