Residents of Bridgeport, CT, will soon vote in an election for members of their school board.
For reasons to complicated to get into here, the previous unelected school board was declared illegal by the state’s highest court, which ordered a new election.
If you read Jonathan Pelto’s blog, you will get the full story of how an illegal board was put in charge of the district, hired Paul Vallas to be a superintendent for $229k a year at the same time that he runs a consulting business on the side.
Now as the election approaches, one of the members of the illegal board is running for the elected. Although he is a Democrat, he declares that he favors vouchers, which is a historic Republican plank. He favors vouchers even though the money to fund them will decrease the funding of the public schools he want to oversee.
This election will test the residents of Bridgeport. That is, unless the electoral process is not corrupted by an infusion of big money from the Wall Street hedge fund managers who seem to grow on trees in places like Darien, New Canaan, and Greenwich.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Bridgeport’s newspaper, the CT Post has an education reporter who reports nothing but biased positive puff pieces on the annulled board of education. I do not think the paper published anything on last night’s Board of Education meeting– the last one before the election.
The puff piece that was printed shows intentional bias– it showed the board on a wonderful light, was photographed and interviewed to time exactly with the morning after the meeting. Every board of ed meeting is like this, with a prepared piece ready to run the next morning.
A commenter pointed out that two local private universities that are to get money from Bridgeport to run classes ofor our best high schoolers on their campuses both advertise heavily in the paper.
It’s sad to think that the newspaper’s role in reporting on democratic civic matters can be so cheaply bought.
Correction– I see that the puff piece I mentioned went up just before the BOE meeting, not after.
It is always valuable to write up an event before it happens. That way, the reporter won’t be confused by the actual events that transpire. That happened to me last January in Sacramento. I was interviewed by the SacBee reporter in the morning. That evening, 3,500 people turned out for a great rally where I spoke. The next day, the reporter’s story said there were “hundreds” there–because she wrote the story before the event.
It may not be accurate, but the public never knows. Who will tell them?
I think it is so sad that newspapers don’t print the ALL of the stories. Advertisers bring in the money.