Americans Should Idolize Great Teachers
GLEF’s Milton Chen has challenged Rupert Murdoch and the Fox network to showcase the talent of America’s best teachers. Photo courtesy of GLEF.
“More than 40 million Americans watch American Idol,” Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF), says in the Summer 2006 issue of NRTA Live & Learn: “I would challenge Fox to do American Teacher.”
Hollywood mogul George Lucas, famous for Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies, toys, and video games, set up the George Lucas Educational Foundation in 1991. The Fox channel is part of Fox Broadcasting, a property of global media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Milton Chen is serious about his challenge to Murdoch’s Fox network, asking, “Why do so many million of us know the names of the American Idol finalists when not a fraction of 1 percent could name the last two National Teachers of the Year?”
Not everyone’s a philanthropist
Last year, when Forbes magazine listed Rupert Murdoch as the 32nd richest American, the Sydney Morning Herald wrote that Australian-born “Murdoch is more world citizen than community man – a work-obsessed mogul who is still interested in the pagination numbers or he sales figures from all parts of his far-flung empire.” The newspaper suggested that Murdoch is “someone who will be carried out of his office in a box.”
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, also regulars on the Forbes list, recently made headlines for the sizable fortunes they have committed to the charitable Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Cable television entrepreneur John Malone, a frequent Murdoch rival for media acquisitions, has said he intends to put his fortune into a charitable foundation. CNN founder Ted Turner has given financial support to charitable causes.
Despite the argument with his son Lachlan last year, Murdoch still appears intent on keeping the empire in the family rather than rolling his fortune into philanthropies. In July, he told interviewer Charlie Rose that his four oldest children will someday control the family trust that stakes his media empire, and the two youngest ones will have financial equity though not control.
Who are the Teachers of the Year?
Milton Chen knows who the Teachers of the Year are, naming them in his recent interview with Jane Ciabattari for NRTA Live & Learn: “Jason Kamras, an expert math teacher who improved students’ mathematics learning in Washington, D.C., and Kimberly Oliver, a kindergarten teacher from Maryland. They both represent the best and brightest of our nation’s young people who are committed to education,” he said.
“Their names should be on the front pages of every newspaper,” Chen added.
Kimberly Oliver did recently make news in science and style pages – not for her teaching, but by challenging gravity in one of Northrop Grumman’s aptly named Weightless Flights of Discovery. Oliver promised to “float and tell” by sharing her experience with her kindergarten students
