MURDOCH WANTS THE SCHOOLS

Spotted this a while ago:

Justin Hamilton, who recently stepped down as Arne Duncan's press secretary, has accepted an executive position at Rupert Murdoch's Amplify. This division, headed by Joel Klein, sells technology to the schools.

If you're Murdoch, how do you get pull in this field? You hire a top aide to the U.S. secretary of education ... after hiring Joel Klein, who'll be the aides boss and spent eight and a half years as New York City schools chancellor under Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Klein's first job for Murdoch after leaving the NYC school job was as Rupe's top legal adviser on the phone-hacking scandal; after that, he became head of Amplify.

Oh, and Amplify also donates to Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, which promotes Jeb's favorite education policies, such as, um, mandatory online education. So Rupe's got a lot of political bases covered.

Let's hope Murdoch does as poorly with this as he's done with a lot of his other forays into the digital world (MySpace, The Daily). I suppose we're screwed no matter which lucre-craving opportunist eventually dominates online learning, but I think it would be especially horrible if the opportunistic greedhead also happened to be someone who sleeps soundly every night after amorally peddling 24/7 paranoid right-wing propaganda.

(Via David Sirota.)