StickWithANose

I’d like to apologize to readers [all 20-30 of you!] for my recent excursions beyond education policy and issues related to schooling [my areas of expertise], but this week’s news offers us some perspective on the Orwellian state of public discourse that impacts everything in our society, including debates over public education.
Yesterday, I posted on [...]

Today’s news offers yet more evidence to back up the central claim from yesterday’s post… The political machinery of think tanks, policy institutes, and foundations created by the Captains of the Universe over that past 30-40 years do not even rise to the title of intellectual frauds but are, instead, the propagandists of early 21st [...]

There is perhaps no better measure of the absolute failure of elite journalism and the Fourth Estate than the career trajectory of New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman. From the now infamous Friedman Unit to his very serious prognostications on the federal budget, Friedman represents the pinnacle of absolute ignorance branded as elite wisdom as [...]

Think tanks are marketing machines. Their sole function is to communicate and cement “common sense” understandings of socio-political reality that do the bidding of their corporate masters, and they do so across media via both digital and traditional routes. The key to their success is self-referentiality. In the relatively closed system of think tanks and [...]

Today, Dean Baker offers his readers concrete evidence that there are still good paying jobs to be had by un-skilled laborers.
[Thomas] Friedman shows that the U.S. economy still has good paying jobs for people without skills by writing a column that addresses economic issues with no apparent awareness of most of the relevant [...]

Today, Schools Matter introduces us to one of the major players behind ‘Waiting for Superman’, Philip Anschutz. Turns out that Mr. Anschutz is a big player in the dark world of conservative think-tanks and edu-philanthropy.
One of the key players in the distribution of Waiting for ‘Superman’ is Walden Media, a film company owned by [...]

Two points that I consistently discuss on this blog are: one, the current trajectory of policy proposals coming from both political parties is almost totally lacking in scientific evidence supporting the efficacy of those proposals; and two, the “evidence” used to justify the policies being pursued by both political parties comes from privately funded think-tanks [...]

Team Obama starts a week long PR campaign today to breath life into its republican education policies by building on the buzz over “Waiting for Superman”. This morning President Obama made the case for a longer school year by quoting misleading statistics.
President Barack Obama started the school week Monday with a call for a [...]

With yesterday’s release of Vanderbilt’s POINT study, the knowledge industry has kicked into high gear in order to put a happy face on data that undermines much of what they’ve been telling the nation about incentives and education for the past two decades. Today, that great fountain of village consensus thinking Matt Yglesias does his [...]

As I’ve noted previously, one of the primary functions of a think tank troll is to not only promote the agenda of the organization and its funders but to also attack its perceived enemies. Yesterday, the Education Sector’s Bill Tucker offered us yet another example of this dynamic in action. Noted educator and critic Alfie [...]