The blogger called Raginghorse has noticed some important facts about the opinion writers in the New York Times:
Several have written glowing articles about the Common Core standards.
None offers any evidence that they have read the standards.
All report what the press releases say about the standards.
Most ridicule their critics as extremists and pay no attention to parents or teachers, who arguably know more about the standards than writers for the Times who are unfamiliar with the standards.
None seems to have undertaken any research into the issues.
In short, their opinions are shallow and uninformed.
One might reasonably say that pontificating without research or knowledge indicates the musings of the coddled.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Said before and I’ll say it again: since the NYT stopped carrying Richard Rothstein’s contributions on education c. 2002, it’s been slim pickings for anything sensible on the subject from “the paper of record.” Maybe that slogan should now be, ‘The Paper of Broken Record”?
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Beginning in grade 6, CCS expects students to be able to write arguments in which they: “introduce claim(s) and organize the reasons and evidence clearly”. By ninth grade students should “write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.”
NY Times, you need remedial help..time for JFA: journalists for America.
Cut the dead wood.
Friedman, punch out; Bruni, go home; pimping for Gates is not admirable.
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The editors, up the food chain, seem to be missing-in-action. Do these down- the- chain writers have ‘no edit clauses in their employment contracts, or has the formerly ‘liberal ‘ NYT devolved into being just another ‘neo-liberal rag’ when it comes to reporting and opining about ed reform (as well as other topics)? Some one is responsible, but who?
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When the times demoted Winerip and sent another good ed reporter out the door, can’t remember her name, but Norm Scott might recall it, I knew we were headed for disaster.
Every editorial went against anything Winerip wrote about and usually was carried on the same day a Winerip article was published. Coincidence? I think not!! They did the same thing with the mayoral race trying to paint Bloomberg as a hero of this city while putting down de Blasio.
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Congrats on being on deBlasio’s inaugural team.
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God, I hate to do quotes, but ‘back in the day’, Bobby Zimmerman, wrote “Subterranean Home Sick Blues : An often repeated line from that song, ” …You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows”.
The decline in the NYT has been unmistakable cross content and layout. I do hope that DiBlasio REALLY has not forgotten his past.
Wouldn’t that be a hoot!. Seriously, I am not a naif: governance issues tend to ‘trump ‘lolol ideology, and trade (sell out ) one’s beliefs on the alter of deal making.
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Validation by the NY Times of the Coleman and supporters ‘spin’ on Common Core detractors as “Tea Partiers” has worked well for all of them.
It reaches into communities such as mine where, recently, I attended a Democartic Club meeting where Common Core was to be explained, and lauded, by a teacher hired to coach teachers re CC, and a School Board member who is a specialist in equine husbandry, not K – 12 education.
These two were not balanced by anyone who had real facts about the dangers and outcomes of the mandated system….and they made sure no one in the audience would challege them.
As an educator of 40 years, I asked to make a comment at the end of their long, inaccurate, and convoluted presentations. When I started to speak about the misconceptions and actual results in NYC, I was shouted down by the 2 speakers and Dem Club president and asked to leave the room since “I was a Tea Party spy sent to disrupt their meeting”. I was in shock as a lifetime Progressive Dem. This is the closed minded result of a CC promoted program of determined misinformation.
The NY Times is far from the great news source it once was…but they are in bed with the rest of the business promoters of this part of privatized public education. It is all about money!
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Parents are all-knowing about schools and parental involvement and preferences should be paramount, unless they want to keep the public schools they have in which case parents are stupid and silly and delusional.
We saw this same dynamic in Chicago and Philadelphia. Those parents were stupid and silly and delusional too. Conspiracy theorists! Special interests! Coddling!
Reformers assessment of parental wisdom seems to closely track parental agreement with reformers. We’re brilliant and empowered when we’re “demanding” a charter or a voucher, but we’re dumb as rocks and need stern, patronizing lectures when we’re defending our local public schools from reformers. Funny how that works.
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Just a few comments. First, the nyt was never liberal. It was sometimes reasonable in terms of civil rights and printing the Pentagon Papers (this is really where it was seen as “liberal”). Second, the nyt is a water carrier for the fed govt. Defending the ccss without knowing anything about them is typical. Just today the nyt has decided that military personnel compensation needs to be cut. Not a word about raising taxes. Third, the nyt and reporter judy miller acted as independent reporting functions to allow the govt, especially dick cheney, to spout propaganda. This relationship with the ccss is simply part of their mission.
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This is appalling. The US Department of Education are planning a huge PR push to use test results to promote their very specific version of market-based ed reform.
Celebrity author Amanda Ripley will be conducting interviews.
It’s just disgusting, and Duncan should be ashamed:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/12/01/how-public-opinion-about-new-pisa-test-scores-is-being-manipulated/
One opinion, one lockstep message, and they’re using the Department of Education to sell it. I resent paying for what is a campaign for public school privatization. Duncan should tap his billionaire donors for the propaganda nonsense.
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Thanks for the link. It is amazing that the wapo would allow, and even encourage, such an op-ed to be published in their pages. Could there be a little backbone transplant there?
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Chiara Duggan: thank you for the link.
One of the points made in the linked piece is very basic: when comparing groups, make sure the groups are comparable [see Gerald Bracey, READING EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH: HOW TO AVOID GETTING STATISTICALLY SNOOKERED, 2009, p. 31).
One of the worst features of the edubullies and edufrauds is their complete contempt for the vast majority of people: they engage in the most elementary, transparent massaging and torturing of numbers and stats and smugly assume that we will automatically believe their contorted fantasies.
When we don’t—they refer to us as “special interests” and “extremists” and the like.
Psychological projection, don’t you think?
😎
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it must be said as many times as it takes: standards-based teaching is insidious, as anyone who has watched it suck the joy and the energy and the nuance out of teaching and learning, will attest.
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Is it not ultimately ironic that common core supposedly preaches “high order” thinking and yet our very own journalists tooting its praises are not doing much higher order thinking these days! I will repeat a line I read in the Economist that I really liked in regards to the news, “I want to be informed by the news not influenced”. It sounds hopeless that we are going to be informed by news these days when journalists are just taking press releases and repeated them verbatim as if they were news. Let us read a viewpoint by David Coleman, a viewpoint by a title one public school teacher, Diane Ravitch, a parent, a student, what private schools think etc and let us form our opinions. What is being taught in the journalism programs today, I wonder?
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I always love to read your ideas here, but . . . Pardon my neediness on this point: Please fix the typo in your otherwise appropriately rhetorical headline.
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Thanks, Gigi. Consider my typos as evidence that I have no staff.
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Perhaps we are looking at the situation the wrong way, this is not an education issue for NY Times writers, but a financial one.
Many newspapers have struggled to survive and maintain staff while increasing their readers/subscriptions as they have “moved” from print to a digital format.
Why would any writer for the NY Times criticize an education reform that requires all students across the nation to read complex informational text?
Here’s an excerpt from the Learning Network page, 14 Ways to Use The Learning Network This School Year…
Drum roll please…..And the #1 way to use the NY times this school year is????
“Find a fresh Common Core-aligned lesson plan or activity every weekday.
Our lessons resume on Monday, Sept. 9, and, like last year, each lesson will be aligned to the Common Core Anchor Standards.”
http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/03/14-ways-to-use-the-learning-network-this-school-year/?_r=0
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My city and neighboring cities have a small newspaper that is put out twice a month, although it will be going weekly in the near future. I have been wondering when it would have an article on Common Core. The most recent edition did. Because CC is praised by my city’s public school system as well as being used in the Catholic schools, the article was one sided and praised it, too. There was no mention of any of the concerns I’ve been reading about since back in June.
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Who would provide the “back bone to wapo”? John Henry? Of course you are spot-on re the NYT’s umbrella ideology, with and from time -to – time, idiosyncratic, ‘liberalism’.
Thanks for a correction before I collided with a proverbial ice berg of an error. I was being uncharacteristically generous (to a fault… my own).
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The Editorial Board of the NY Times is biased toward corporate reform of our education system, as are the editorial boards of the NY Post and NY Daily News, so it’s no surprise that they laud CC. The difference is the readership of those papers. The Times, unlike the Post and News cater to a very upscale clientele, as a perusal of their ad space would indicate – Sachs, Tiffany, and the like. The News and Post on the other hand rely on a different client base to buy their papers, and so will every once in a while run a story in the best interests of their readers. That’s why the fifth grade tests were leaked to the News, also the story of Castle Bridge parents opting out of testing appeared in the News as did an opinion piece, Teacher Against Mayoral Control, by education blogger Arthur Goldstein. Even the Post ran an opinion piece entitled Childhood’s End about damage being inflicted on young children because of CC in the public schools, something many readers of NY Times would know nothing about.
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It’s not just education, it’s also pensions and benefits. The Sunday editorial was about cutting pensions and benefits to the brave men and women who serve this country just so we can cut the Pentagon’s budget. It’s the same argument they use on teachers.
Here in NYC we see how Bloomberg uses no-bid contracts to further bloat the budget but nothing of substance going directly to schools. Our classrooms are overcrowded and teachers have not had a raise in many years.
We have seen a war based on some phony excuse that not only cost billions, but have also taken thousands of brave souls. Many of these men and women come home maimed physically or psychologically. Their spouces and children are not living off the hog on a military salary either.
I would love for the editorial board to put on a uniform and go off to war, or just show up to an urban classroom and teach for a week. Instead they sit in their Manhattan apartments or home in the suburbs writing up columns they probably discuss at cocktail parties like the ones given by Cathie Black.
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“spouses”
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The NY Times has been HAD. I cannot begin to count the outrageous statements here, and out right lies about senior teachers and subs. Imagine if hospitals threw away their senior practitioners, or law firms.”The New Mayor and the Teachers” Mon Dec 2 2013
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With virtually the sole exception of the Pentagon Papers, published over forty years ago and atoning for its credulous prior reporting on Vietnam, the Times can be predictably counted on as a vehicle for official obtuseness and lies.
Remember Judith Miller and the lead up to the Iraq War? Where was the Times’ mythical liberalism then? With the exception of Paul Krugman and Gail Collins, who covers politics as a shallow burlesque, the Op-Ed page is in the hands of conservatives or neoliberals with 70’s porn star mustaches (apologies to Matt Taibbi).
When it comes to local issues, the Times has all the objectivity of a small town booster rag, and can usually be relied upon to take the Giantist view of development issues, (although to their credit, the editorial board did come out against Bloomberg’s demented West Side football stadium).
Take a look at their “lifestyle” sections – food, home, style/fashion – and you’ll find nothing but unconscious self-parodies of bourgeois self-satisfaction.
No, there’s not much that’s liberal about the NY Times.
Or, maybe even worse, there’s much that is.
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I suppose the focus on evidence only applies to students. The Common Core adults are exempt from providing evidence for their arguments.
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