Leonie Haimson is fed up with the line that the mainstream media has taken about education controversies. Reporters usually think that every protest is organized by the unions, defending their self-interest, and they are warring with high-minded reformers. She says this is balderdash! (Sorry, Leonie, my word, not yours.) If parents hold a protest against high-stakes testing and against test-based teacher evaluations (which causes more time to be devoted to testing), most reporters will say the union made them do it, the union doesn’t want to be held accountable. Well, guess what? The unions are not leading the Opt Out movement. Many teachers support it, because they know how pointless the new tests are, but the great majority of people leading the movement are parents. They don’t want their children to be pressured by fear of the Big Standardized Test, they don’t want them to be ranked and labeled, they don’t want them to hate school because of the endless test prep. Leonie was especially irked by a recent story in the New York Times about the two forces trying to win Hillary Clinton’s allegiance: on one hand, the teachers’ unions; on the other, the Wall Street tycoons who might finance her campaign. One has the votes, the other has the money. In the middle of the story, the reporter Maggie Haberman inexplicably refers to the hedge fund managers’ group Democrats for Education Reform as “left of center.” These are the Wall Street billionaires and mere multimillionaires who are pushing the privatization and high-stakes testing agenda; they dearly love charter schools and look on public schools with disdain as places that one must escape from. What you would expect from people who mainly went to Exeter, Deerfield Academy, Groton, and other tony private schools. Left of center? Hardly. Corporate style reformers? Yes.
A Tweet that fits:
Is the Battle Over School Reform Between Unions & Rich Liberals
Or Between the 1% and Everyone Else
#EdBlogNet
I’ve stopped taking NYT stories, especially editorials, too seriously. Seeing how off base their editorials and news reporting on education are, I read everything with a big dose of skepticism.
It is a horror to think that the Unions would support Hillary as they kowtow to Bill, do you think Hillary supports Opt Out? Is she not the 1% with her World Foundation and Wall St. backing? Was Bill pro labor with NAFTA and eliminating the Glass Steagal Act? Labor has gone down the rabbit hole if it can not see a potential ally in Elizabeth Warren. Rand Paul looks better before the likes of Hillary. Oh, I forget, she’s a woman.
Cross posted at OEN http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Leonie-Haimson-Is-the-Bat-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Billionaires_Education_LIES_Media-150329-826.html#comment539129
with this comment:
HERE’S A QUOTE FOR YOU BY A GUY WHO KNEW HOW TO SELL LIEs: “The receptivity of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan.”
That slogan today is that PUBLIC SCHOOLS ARE FAILING and charters will fix them.
The media is owned fully by the billionaires who are stealing our schools out from under our noses, because as Leonie points out, they lie and perpetrate the myth public school failure.
We must get the story our… YOU an me, and teachers and parents… share this with others.
and FYI, Hitler said that quote!
Submitted on Sunday, Mar 29, 2015 at 12:37:09 PM
Both parties are involved with this. Money seems to have bought off the wealthy of both parties. In Ohio, the problem is Republican influence, not Democrat influence. Our governor, the legislature, the state BoE are Republican supporters and privatizing peddlers.
“The Presstitutes”
The presstitutes
Dress up in suits
And go to work at Times
While journalist
Is simply dissed
‘Cuz truths are simply crimes
😎
No surprise that the NY Times has again, this time through reporter Maggie Haberman, misrepresented reality. Remember Judith Miller and Michael Gordon’s propagandizing about Saddam Hussein’s WMDs? The Times is a corporate rag; no more and no less.
“misrepresented reality”
Made up out of whole cloth? Concocted?
Judith Miller got caught because she told a very big lie that became painfully obvious even to people who were not paying any attention — technically, she “channeled” a very big lie from “The Great Beyond” (Dick Cheney)
Most of the folks at the Times get away with it because they either tell smaller lies that no one cares enough about to check or they tell so many lies that it’s virtually impossible to keep up with all of them.
Reporter Mulholland, in the Harvard Review, this month surmised that those voters who support public education will vote Democratic because the alternative is a Republican vote. He also noted that there has been little press coverage about the privatization of public education.
Haimson’s point about the 1% vs. the rest of America, IMO, is borne out by the 2013 Fordham Institute IRS filing, “Grants …to…Organizations”, listing $45,000 Center for American Progress, which is also funded by the Waltons.
(Data posted at Fordham website)
With few exceptions – Michael Winerip, who was eventually taken off the beat, being the most notable example – the policy of the Times seems to be to place inexperienced reporters (clueless, ambitious ingenues, really), on the education beat, who then uncritically recycle the buzz phrases, talking points and outright lies of the so-called reformers. Then, having established their ability to report the lies of the powerful with a straight face, they then move on, like TFAers, to “better things.”
For example, David Herzenhorn, who was the NYT’s faithful stenographer for Bloomberg during that mayor’s initial destabilization of the NYC public schools, has now moved up to being a media echo chamber for the US State Department and CIA in Ukraine, where Putin is the New Hitler, and there’s nary a Ukrainian fascist in sight.