Jeb Bush on disrupting the education monopoly so he and his friends can take over.

Let me see if I can keep this simple: Most of these "reform" education organizations are in it to make money. Period. They dress it up, they make inspirational movies about "choice", they talk about "the children," but it pretty much comes down to the basic conservative philosophy: Take a public institution, privatize it, strip it of assets and turn it into a cash cow for investors. It's not about quality, and it's not complicated.

And so the Bush family empire has expanded from the oil business into the education business. No need to give them the benefit of the doubt, we already know what they and their cronies are about: And that's why ALEC is in the thick of this pseudo-reform movement:

A nonprofit group released thousands of e-mails today and said they show how a foundation begun by Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and national education reform leader, is working with public officials in states to write education laws that could benefit some of its corporate funders.

A call to the foundation has not been returned.

The e-mails are between the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) and a group Bush set up called Chiefs for Change, whose members are current and former state education commissioners who support Bush’s agenda of school reform, which includes school choice, online education, retention of third-graders who can’t read and school accountability systems based on standardized tests. That includes evaluating teachers based on student test scores and grading schools A-F based on test scores. John White of Louisiana is a current member, as is Tony Bennett, the new commissioner of Florida who got the job after Indiana voters rejected his Bush-style reforms last November and tossed him out of office.

Donald Cohen, chair of the nonprofit In the Public Interest, a resource center on privatization and responsible for contracting in the public sector, said the e-mails show how education companies that have been known to contribute to the foundation are using the organization “to move an education agenda that may or not be in our interests but are in theirs.”

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