[Header Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash]
Some people have recognized that Elon Musk has willfully or ignorantly misread and misrepresented data on social security to create a story to support an ideological agenda—cutting social programs in the US government.
Note this thread on X/Twitter, notably Wolfer’s final post: “When everything they say is designed to mislead, you’re left to wonder why.”
Manufacturing crises to perpetuate stories for ideological agendas is very effective (and nothing new).
Why?
“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes” (a quote misattributed to Mark Twain, somewhat ironically).
Certainly, the Trump/Musk era of this strategy is an extreme moment in history; however, this is exactly how education reform has been conducted since the 1980s and how the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement is being orchestrated.
The entire education reform movement was grounded in a data lie manufactured by a political report, A Nation at Risk, to create a story of public school failure in the US in order to perpetuate Reagan’s ideological agendas (school prayer, school choice, etc.).
Now, as a subset of the manufactured education crisis, the SOR movement has misread and misrepresented NAEP data to manufacture a reading crisis in order to perpetuate a story of student literacy and “bad” teachers in order to perpetuate ideological and market agendas for teaching reading.
If evidence is being ignored, then it isn’t really about evidence.
It’s about ideology.
If you see through the manufactured crises of the Trump/Elon answer, you have a template for seeing through the manufactured education and reading crises.
In short, don’t buy any of it.
Note
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dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 