The Néw York Times editorial board gave its opinion of what the next mayor must do about education, and its opinion is woefully uninformed by contact with the real world of students, teachers, principals, and parents.
Bear in mind that only 22% of NYC voters want more of the Bloomberg school reform style.
The Times thinks he might have listened a bit more to parents, although it was a central tenet of the mayor’s rule never to listen to parents.
The Times looks forward to the installation of the new, harder, more rigorous Common Core, while acknowledging that most students now are not graduating “college ready.” No need to explain or even consider how more students will succeed as tests get harder.
The Times notes the mayor’s rush to close down many schools, and thinks most of those schools deserved to die. It brazenly compares the low graduation rate at a school marked for closure, from which students and teachers have fled, to a brand-new, well-resourced small school.
The Times notes the controversy over co-location of charters into public schools, which some call “education apartheid,” and the Times thinks this is a problem only in a few “extreme” cases. The Times gives no thought to the consequence of having two public-funded school systems, one of which is free to kick out slow learners and behavioral problems while excluding children with high needs.
The best thing about the editorial is the comments that follow, most of which attempt to inject a smidgen of reality into the Times’ world.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yesm Times editorial is horrendously one-sided and dishonest, obscuring the terribly unequal impact of overfunded, under regulated pvt charters getting free space but still compared with over regulated, underfunded real public schools. This is indeed Big Lie propaganda in picturesquely refined discourse.
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It should be noted that the editorial board of a newspaper can well be independent of its staff writers. The foil of Michael Winerip’s pieces and that of the editorial board at the NY Times is nothing eventful.
Still, the NY Times is a corporate machine and relies on many of Mr. Bloomberg’s big business friends to advertise in their publication. There will always be ties like this now that Bloomberg has been mayor.
Still, the mayor’s despicable, loathesome existence motivates the possibility of paradigm shifts in NY City. People are eager for such change, but it will be up to New Yorkers to shadow their elected officials well after they finish their campaign and start governing.
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Gotta love those dog and pony show, charter schools being compared to public schools. To say it’s a rigged game would be an understatement! Charters can filter their student body. That alone is an absurdity in public institutions and insures an unfair comparison. Seems “elementary” to anyone that such select students will outshine the public schools requirement to take all comers! Doesn’t the public think beyond the end of their conjured hatred for public schools? How absurd to press the case for Charters on this unfair basis. Of course, beyond that, the glow of corporate concerns in charters is the near Robber Baron era dogma of no rights, decent pay and health benefits for the teachers who labor in these factories of corporate education.
Fudging the figures of success within these schools is standard practice. Who would ever question their miraculous accomplishments? And, the show goes on! The public will ultimately get their just desserts for blinding following the charter school charade.
Sadly, the children and devoted teachers will be the victims…and the corporate treasure chests will overflow with public funds. What an Orwellian ordeal!
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“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic [sic] society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . . We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic [sic] society is organized. . . . In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
–Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928
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Authoritarian regimes find policy like that championed by Bernays unreliable in and of itself. It has to be backed up by brute force, by violence, and this becomes increasingly so over time.
If you doubt this, just think of what would happen in most states in United States today if teachers went on strike to protest turning their classrooms into test prep factories for producing standardized minds.
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I’d love to see that happen. … the strike, not the violence. . . . .
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That really describes perfectly the neo-liberal mechanisms used to further their agenda.
And now with the advent of information technology, getting the manipulated messages out there is so much easier and faster. . .. talk aboud an efficient propaganda machine!
Thank you, Robert. You’re always on the mark.
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I can only add my “YES!” to Robert’s revelation about the invisible government. A force Disraeli alluded to as did Wilson and a host of other leaders. The dark purposes of this small, unknown elite is far beyond shaping our desires for Twinkies or Kardishian excess. They and their corporate cronies filter our news, force often false dichotomies,
such as Charter vs. public education. Further, they are not national in perspective, but international globalists who fleece us into buying the kool-aid of NAFTA, outsourcing and all the other Trojan horses we have bought, hook, line and sinker! What have been the sad results…just look at the ravaged middle class and trace its demise…
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Excellent, Sweetpea62013! True!
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Please read the comment by Andrew Wolf responding to the Times editorial on the nexr education mayor. It is an all too true evaluation of the Bloomberg administrations control and results over the NYC school system
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http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/they%20live!?language=es_ES
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Bernay’s book can be thought of as the house ethics manual of the American press.
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Oops. Bernays’s
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Read the comments to this editorial. The people are not fooled.
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Indeed! We are not the easily manipulated idiots that the deformers think we are. Their hubris is self-defeating.
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Dang it LJ, Robert was on a roll, you broke his five going onto six run. Not that I disagree with him as he is quite correct to assign to Bernays (Freud’s nephew) some of the worse/best propaganda, called public relations, techniques of the 20th century.
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Here’s a link to my blog post, which elaborated a bit my 1500 character comment that was “picked” by the NYTimes:
Here’s hoping the Times starts to examine the Bloomberg legacy in more depth…
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And I enjoyed reading your definition of “reform”:
The term “reform” has been expropriated by privatizers and is NOT reform in the sense of the term Ted Sizer and Ron Edmonds used in the mid-1980s. Instead of reforming the structure of schooling, “reform” is all about transferring control from the democratically elected boards of education to shareholders of deregulated for profit corporations. The result is an over-reliance on standardized test that seemingly measure “student performance” with mathematical precision but fail to measure learning in the true sense of the word. I hope that one of the candidates for mayor will elevate the dialogue in the months ahead and the Times will provide comprehensive coverage when that happens.
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It was no coincidence that the Times moved Winerip out of Education and hid him on some Baby Boomer column. I suppose that was punishment for writing articles that went against the grain of their editorials. But it seems like the Times no longer cares about the truth. The piece read like a PR statement straight from Bloomberg’s camp. Thankfully, the comment section tried to bring facts to light.
I wonder what would happen if the BATS called or emailed the Times demanding that Winerip be reinstated with no bars to his observations and reporting??
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Diane — would love your take on the Casey Wasserman article in the NYT Sunday Business section yesterday. Specifically the mention of his generosity as is pertains to Los Angeles ‘public’ education and his association with the now (thankfully) former LA mayor. While CW is known for his philanthropy and business savvy, I think he needs to be educated and shown where his contribution is best needed…for real LAUSD public education in his own backyard.
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