Joel Klein, Hoowah

I realize that headline may be a little harsh—so my apologies in advance to hard-working prostitutes who may feel insulted by this association.

Klein, a former Bloomberg favorite as commissioner of education for eight years, has kept a fairly low profile lately given his embarrassing timing in becoming a highly-paid minion of scum Rupert Murdoch just as the appalling tabloid scandals burst open in Britain, you know, the ones where Murdoch’s employees were caught tapping the cellphones of the parents of kidnap/murder victims.

But that blew over, so Klein now has resurfaced to promote the Amplify Tablet, a device that is to be placed in the hands of K-through-12 pupils to improve their educational performance and, not coincidentally, the earnings of the Murdoch empire.

So there we have it: all that propaganda about how to repair ‘failing’ schools, all those diatribes against selfish teachers who refuse to be graded by test-score matrices, all that campaigning against unions, all those school shutdowns dictated from on high by King Mike with no community input—it was a marketing strategy to sell new gadgets.

Klein’s in the Business section of the Wednesday NY Times [no link--paywall] proudly showing off the handy-dandy device. Murdoch & Co. no doubt hope the Amplify will be forced onto the laps of millions of kiddies to the tune of many wonderful millions of dollars in diverted education spending, once teacher unions have been crippled and that $500 billion cash stream can be channeled away from frontline workers over to the private sector. This will be accompanied by reams of optimistic pronouncements about how much learning will emerge from little electronic boxes full of magical data and, no doubt, vast new testing procedures.

The possibilities to refine and automate testing and other types of vigilance are ample. As the Times piece explains,

If a child’s attention wanders, a stern ‘eyes on teacher’ prompt pops up. A quiz uses emoticons of smiley and sad faces so teachers can instantly gauge which students understand the lesson and which need help.

Gosh, we adults really missed out by being born too early! Just think how much fun it will be for schoolchildren to plug themselves into electronic monitoring devices that track their attention levels second by second! No wool-gathering there, Charlotte, you’re not going to earn your smiley-face!

No doubt the Klein/Murdoch hordes, fresh from finding out what distraught parents were saying on their cellphones when their children went missing, are also looking forward to the data mining possibilities when kindergarteners start using their devices. I can’t wait to hear about the algorithm some smarty-pants grad student is writing somewhere to figure out what brand of tennis shoes kids will want to buy based on their Amplify test scores.

Will the Klein/Murdoch sales pitch work? Well, as the article reminds us, Obama’s ‘Race to the Top’ program to bring technological innovation to the classroom is a potential funding source.

So I take it back, Klein isn’t really a whore. He’s actually a pimp, the guy who provides access. After eight years of faithfully carrying out Bloomberg’s attacks on teachers, Klein has transitioned smoothly into the next phase of the plan: to get teachers out of the way and install computer screens with Murdoch-produced curricula. Klein is therefore a remarkably successful example of a high-end procurer—opening the door for the marketeers to get their hands on millions of children.