John Oliver Standardized Tests H 2015
HBO/ScreenshotSunday night’s episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver jabbed at the media coverage of the protests following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray from injuries sustained in police custody.
“It has been a delicate situation handled by the media with all the deft, not-at-all racist touch that they’ve become known for,” said Oliver, highlighting how Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera and CNN’s Brian Todd mistakenly identified former Def Jam Recordings executive Kevin Liles as Russell Simmons in on-air interviews. “You do realize that when African Americans stand together as one, that doesn’t mean they’re all literally the same person.”
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Oliver also noted how an African American teen protester’s bail, after smashing car windows, was set at $500K — more than that of the actual officers arrested for Gray’s death. “To put that in context, even Robert Durst had his bail set at $300K after definitely not killing that guy in Galveston, Texas. That amount of money makes absolutely no sense! That kid’s crimes were misdemeanors, he turned himself in — in fact, the only explanation for his bail being set that high is that, just like Geraldo Rivera and that guy from CNN, judges in Baltimore can’t look at black people without seeing millionaire Russell Simmons.”
And of Bud Light’s recently-pulled, offensive “Up for Whatever” campaign, Oliver said it shouldn’t just be considered “rape-y” by the media, as that description is somewhat “diminishing — it’s like saying Floyd Mayweather is a smidge assault-y. It’s technically correct, but it’d be more appropriate to say he’s a woman-battering human landfill.” He reframes the ad with the help of Alex Karpovsky and Wyatt Cenac, who won’t get their epic night started by drinking a beer that tastes like “the liquid version of a John Mayer song.”
For the episode’s main story, Oliver blasted schools’ absurd affinity toward an oddly high amount of standardized testing. “At this point, you have to ask yourself: if standardized tests are bad for teachers and bad for kids, who exactly are they good for?” he asked, before answering with a list of testing companies, leading with the largest. “Pearson is the education equivalent of Time Warner Cable: either you’ve never had an interaction with them and you don’t care, or they have ruined your f—ing life.”
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He concluded, “As far as I can see, this is a system which has enriched multiple companies, pays and fires teachers with a cattle birthing formula, confuses children with talking pineapples and has the same kind of rules regarding transparency that Brad Pitt had for Fight Club.”
Watch it in the video below.
Twitter: @cashleelee
