Gingrich Chooses Keegan for Her Strong Corruption Credentials?

Lisa G. Keegan has come a long way since her feature in the Peoria Times in 2006, which followed many months of avoiding questions emanating from a federal audit that noted the missing millions that someone raked away while she was running the Education Leaders Council during the champagne popping days for the ed industry under Bush II.

Keegan served as McCain's mouthpiece on education 4 years ago, and this time around she has hooked up with someone whose corruption credentials make her look like a paragon of virtue.  Hey, everybody's doing it!

When Gingrich loses, will Keegan leverage her new visibility into a job in the post-partisan corporatist ED?  Maybe the new Secretary of Education?, since Party labels are meaningless in the brave new corporate ed world of pushing the same old bullshit to benefit the same 1%ers.


My post from June 14, 2006:

In a NOW segment aired March 26, 2004 that introduced the Bush cronies who had just been handed $77,000,000 in ED funds to seed school privatization ventures, Lisa Graham Keegan, head of the Education Leaders Council, gushed to reporter, Michelle Mitchell:

You don't think anybody's making money off of education? Big secret, it's happening. People make millions.

This admission came even as Mitchell was reporting that an audit had showed that the $16,000,000 that ELC had squeezed from ED (with the help of former ELC chief, Gene Hickok) was going to pay big salaries that Lisa and her friends were doling out to one another.

It wasn't long after that, however, until Keegan took her cut and split, leaving a big mystery as to what happened to the other millions that ELC had received for the impressive-sounding programs pumped on ELC's spiffy website, before it went black last year.

Now it seems Keegan is back, this time looking for more federal infusion for her version of virtual education. On the website for her company, e2020, Inc., it appears that e2020 is a form of on-demand teacher in a box, marketed heavily to urban areas where high schoolers find it too dangerous to go to school. One might think of e2020 as the Iraqi model for education: keep the students and the teacher in their virtual green zones, where they are free to learn all they desire to know.


One can expect, too, that there will lots of federal dollars to fund this new kind of powerful school choice--and, of course, to close the achievement gap. You know.

You can read about Lisa's new adventures in today's Peoria Times.

Career Education for the Poor: Child Janitors

As the biggest out-of-the-box thinker that the Republican sideshow can muster, Newt Grinchish is using some well-worn, yet reliable, racist rhetoric to justify a push into new corporate education terrain.   But the Newt is not backing down--he is all about breaking the cycle of poverty, if it means breaking the backs of children in the process--as they "pursue happiness."

From ABC:

Des Moines, Iowa — Responding to controversial comments he  made about child labor in late November at Harvard University, Newt Gingrich today told a crowd in Des Moines, Iowa, that children in poor neighborhoods have “no habits of working and nobody around them who works.”

Gingrich was asked by an audience member to clarify the comments he made last month in which  he called the current child labor laws  ”stupid” and would replace janitors with schoolchildren to work in the community school.

“They have no habit of showing up on Monday and staying all day or the concept of  ’I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich said that successful people he knows started work early by doing small jobs like babysitting and shoveling snow.

“You have a very poor neighborhood. You have students that are required to go to school. They have no money, no habit of work,” Gingrich said. “What if you paid them in the afternoon to work in the clerical office or as the assistant librarian? And let me get into the janitor thing. What if they became assistant janitors, and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”

Gingrich talked about a program around while he was in Congress called “Earning While Learning,” which paid students to read books. He said it was the same concept of students gaining money for doing acedemic work that he would like to see students to invest in.

“They wanted the money. The kids were showing up saying, ‘I demand you let me read. You can’t keep me from this program,” Gingrich said.

 Gingrich said there would be a lot of details to work out, but the general principle was “exactly the right direction for America’s future.

“If we are all endowed by our creator with the right to pursue happiness, that has to apply to the poorest neighborhoods in the poorest counties, and I am prepared to find something that works, that breaks us out of the cycles we have now to find a way for poor children to work and earn honest money,” Gingrich said. . . . .