My blog reading habits took a political turn after I started reading Tom Hoffman’s shared feeds. I now have a folder in my reader that’s bursting every day, because as we know, one feed leads to more.

One of my new favorites is David Sirota’s blog on WorkingForChange. Sirota, according to Newsweek, is a Man with a Mission. I started paying attention when this post, Questioning the Planet’s Richest Man to his Face rolled by. Sirota said:

I got up and asked a simple one: Why does he think Montanans - or any Americans, really - should be optimistic about the economy he describes and the “good-paying” jobs he says he offers when we know that companies like Microsoft are aggressively trying to outsource more and more jobs to cheap overseas labor markets?

My question followed Gates’ regurgitation of the Great Education Myth (aka. the myth that all a state like Montana needs to do is better educate its workforce in order to compete). Using what I learned when researching my recent San Francisco Chronicle column (which is a prelude to a section of my new book out in 2008), I specifically cited a series of articles (here and here, for example) in which the group WashTech uncovered official Microsoft documents proving that the company is telling middle management to look to outsource as much high-tech work as possible.

There’s a convergence of thought around the idea that public funding allocations are being directed by business interests who’ve got a foot in the door in DC, coming in loud and clear from a variety of sources. The idea goes back to Eisenhower’s caution about the military industrial complex. Take this Truthdig artcle, for example, which features a four minute video by Robert Greenwald that documents war profiteering in Iraq.

Applying the concept to education policy, Mike Klonsky shares how Checker Finn bragged about using the US Dept. of Education to facilitate political cronyism with an ends-justifies-the-means argument for promoting specific education products and services suppliers.

Ken Goodman explains that creating a “scientific” definition of reading makes it easier to direct public money to certain suppliers.

Gerald Bracey makes the case that school failure is good for business:

So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The “Leaders and Laggards” report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future — and you can control them.

In the 1980s, the “schools suck” bloc used such numbers to make us fearful that Japan, now emerging from a 15-year period of recession and stagnation, was going to take our markets; today, India and China play the role of economic ogres.

Recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Post that constant references to a “war on terror” “stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of policies they want to pursue.” Happens all the time in education. The most recent phony alarm comes from Eli Broad and Bill Gates, who are putting up $60 million hoping to “wake up the American people.” If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase “failing schools” in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

Stephen Krashen sees the Democrats as pawns in the game, and Michael Green published an apocalyptic rant, One Day You’re Gonna Wake Up, that less poetically reminds me of part II in Alan Ginsberg’s Howl.

Back to Sirota, commenting on the state of journalism today,

I went to journalism school because I thought journalism was about sifting through the B.S. in order to challenge power and hold the Establishment accountable. Bill Moyers and the folks I’ve gotten to know at McClatchy Newspapers who Moyers highlights show that that long tradition still exists. But the fact that they are such rare exceptions to the rule also show that the incentive system in journalism today is to reward not the people who challenge power, but the people who worship it.

At the moment, the media/government version of “school failure,” as indexed by test scores, doesn’t bother me as much as the achievement gap that’s measured by poverty, unemployment, health, and incarceration statistics, which is a big concern. And the way those issues are taken for granted by corporate media is particularly galling.

Reading on the web gives me a chance to see what’s happening at a distance in a way that isn’t possible from watching TV or reading the newspaper. The variety of voices and points of view on virtually any topic allows me to connect public policy to problems in teaching in answer to my own questions and not someone else’s editorial whims. Charles Wright Mills called this an exercise of the sociological imagination, which “stresses being able to connect individual experiences and societal relationships”.

I feel like a conspiracy theorist sometimes. I’m not a pundit, just a schoolteacher trying to make sense of the world, and I know I’ve got a lot to learn. This post is an example of the things that have grabbed my attention lately. Thanks to the real political journalists out there.