Why does media treats Michelle Rhee as education "reformer" when she's really a corporate lobbyist?

[yurbud]

The tide is turning on the education "reform" movement that isn't so much about "reform" as "removing" our tax dollars from public schools and putting them in the pockets of the already wealthy.

This article cites polls showing the public backed the teachers in the recent Chicago strike as opposed to the corrupt corporate agenda of Rahm Emanuel.

It also mentions that 49 Democrats have recently dropped their affiliation with ALEC, who has crafted the corporate education "reform" bills, and that Obama and Arne Duncan largely remaining on the sidelines in the strike was likely because Obama finally saw how unpopular those ideas really were.

What passes for education reform in Washington and the MSM is really
"a brie-and-chablis 'reform' movement" that is "portraying teachers as villains" as Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson put it. After outsourcing our jobs, and playing craps with our mortgages, now they want to do the moral equivalent of pulling out our fillings and melting them down for the gold by stealing our children's education.

Democrats need to drop this corrupt right wing shit NOW.

Obama, we can forgive you.

America forgave JFK when he admitted he was wrong to initially back the Bay of Pigs invasion, and changing course here and putting education policy in the hands of educators instead of hedge fund managers and trust fund babies is a much smaller reversal.

You already gave Wall Street a big present by not breaking up their banks and prosecuting their execs. You don't need to sacrifice our kids to them too.

First, let's be clear about Rhee's role in this debate. Although Rhee heads an organization called Students First, most of what she actually does is to advocate for specific types of legislation, i.e. lobby. In Chicago, Washington DC, New York City, and numerous state capitals, Students First has focused its considerable resources—including many hundreds of thousands in donations to candidates for public office—on passing laws and promoting politicians that advance policies which restrict teachers' collective bargaining rights, tie their job security and pay to scores on students' standardized tests, and allow more public taxpayer money to be redirected to privately run entities such as charter schools.

As reported by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the source of many of the bills Rhee campaigns for is the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC), a corporately backed nonprofit that drafts "model bills" that favor the interests of the organization's funders, which include many of the largest corporations in the U.S. as well as conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation. For every piece of legislation Students First backs, ALEC has a model bill.

So Rhee is essentially a lobbyist working principally for the interests of conservative Republicans and corporations. Although colluding with conservative Republicans on public policy could be an example of "crossing the aisle," not very many Democrats have chosen to make that crossing. In fact, according to the website of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, 49 Democratic state lawmakers who did belong to ALEC recently dropped their memberships due to ALECs controversial model bills.


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Another poll found that 66 percent of parents of Chicago Public School students supported the strike, with 55.5 percent of Chicagoans in general supporting the strike and 40 percent opposed. Interestingly, that second poll was conducted by We Ask America, "a generally Republican pollster," according to Laura Clawson, labor editor at the blogsite Daily Kos.

http://ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2012104111/michelle-rhee-misreads-shift-among-democrats-education

[alarimer]

1. Because that's what the Village has decided the narrative should be.

People in Washington live in a bubble, surrounded as they are by corporate lobbyists and corrupt politicians, as do the so-called journalists who cover them.

Michelle Rhee as reformer is the accepted narrative in the mainstream media. Only alternative media outlets have bucked this trend.