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Expose of "Parent Revolution" charter law connection to right wing think tanks
via Schools Matter blog:
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2012/01/on-huffington-post-censorship-and.html
Today I noticed charter charlatan Ben Austin had snuck in a years' end privatization piece reminding everyone about his John Birch Society inspired trigger law. In this latest school privatization infomercial he has the unconscionable gall to compare educators to billionaire bankers and Near East dictators, while casting his charter school public relations outfit as one of the occupy movements. My response to his highly offensive analogies, which were rejected by Huffington Post moderators even after several revisions, were as follows:
'Interesting seeing a highly paid advocate of school privatization try to rhetorically co-opt the occupy movements in order to prop up their astroturf agenda. To be sure, none of the the right wing foundations funding Parent Revolution have a "revolutionary" agenda in mind. They are, to a funder, members of the one percent.
The real magic trick here is how Austin tries to couch his neoliberal agenda in the guise of supporting parents. Parent Revolution's sister organization, the racist reactionaries at The Heartland Institute, hail Austin's "trigger" thusly: "This might just be the most powerful education reform policy since Milton Friedman advocated the school voucher. Begun in California, the Parent Trigger allows a majority of parents to petition to have their local school reorganized or transformed into a charter, or even to receive vouchers to choose private schools."
When organizations ideologically right of the teabaggers cheerlead your policies and compare your agenda to that of arch-reactionary Milton Friedman, you can be sure it has nothing to do with putting "kids-first."'
The real magic trick here is how Austin tries to couch his neoliberal agenda in the guise of supporting parents. Parent Revolution's sister organization, the racist reactionaries at The Heartland Institute, hail Austin's "trigger" thusly: "This might just be the most powerful education reform policy since Milton Friedman advocated the school voucher. Begun in California, the Parent Trigger allows a majority of parents to petition to have their local school reorganized or transformed into a charter, or even to receive vouchers to choose private schools."
When organizations ideologically right of the teabaggers cheerlead your policies and compare your agenda to that of arch-reactionary Milton Friedman, you can be sure it has nothing to do with putting "kids-first."'
Why would this be censored? Perhaps Huffington Post is frightened that once people know that ideas like the trigger originated in fringe-right-wing think-tanks like Cato Institute, Hoover Institution, and The Heartland Institute that they might lose credence with their ostensibly liberal audience.
Parent Revolution has hosted conferences with The Heartland Institute. Heartland, which are essentially Birchers with a budget, unabashedly claims "Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems." Heartland and other far right thank tanks are such big fans of Parent Revolution and the Trigger Law that they write gushing policy papers and have even created a website entirely dedicated to pushing this latest privatization trend.
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