Satire: Gary Rubenstein on the National Educational Media Crisis

At the recent ‘Skinny’ Awards ceremony in New York, Gary Rubenstein was one of the honorees. He gave some very funny remarks, which I listened to on Vimeo/Youtube and have attempted to transcribe. (I wasn’t there.)

(The humor, if you don’t get it, is in how he echoes the rhetoric of the current crop of Excellent corporate Educational DEformers.)

The United States currently faces a crisis that threatens both our economic stability and our national security. I’m talking, of course, about the status quo of mainstream media education reporting. 

For too many years, Americans have had no choice but to suffer with ineffective reporters accountable to nobody. 

This is why I am proud to be part of a growing blogger movement. Blogs are incubators of innovation that give a high quality choice to those once trapped with their failing newspaper because they have the misfortune to live in a certain zip code.

A highly effective blogger, research shows, provides three times the amount of truth in a single quote.

This is because we have the flexibility they don’t, like word count and proper grammar.

And while union dominated ed reporters require salaries where they get periodic raises, bloggers seem to have no interest in making money in that sense, instead thriving on a free currency known as a ‘Ravitch Re-Tweet’.

Yes, blogs in a sense are the charter schools of educational reporting.

Minus, of course, the cheating and embezzlement.

[Note: because of background noise and poor lighting in the videos, I made a few transcription errors. Gary R was kind enough to point them out to me. GFB]