The New York Times published a story about the political consultants to Mayor de Blasio who have been paid $236,000 to lobby in Albany for universal pre-kindergarten, which would help poor children across the city.

The New York Times has not written a story about the more than $4 million spent by hedge fund managers to gain preferential treatment for privately managed charter schools and to guarantee that they will never be moved out of public space without their consent and never be required to pay rent and never be subject to public audit. Some of the details about the billionaires behind the ad blitz were used as background in a Times’ story about de Blasio’s conciliatory speech at Riverside Church, where he reached out to the charter sector. There is an irony that a church associated with social justice was the setting for the city’s first progressive mayor in decades to be compelled to humble himself to the titans of Wall Street.

Why does the Times finds it newsworthy that the Mayor and his allies paid $236,000 to lobby for pre-school for all children, but it is not newsworthy that Wall Street billionaires shell out $4 million to protect schools that enroll 6% of the city’s children, schools that have the power to kick out any students they don’t want, schools that take few or no children with disabilities, and half as many English language learners?

A reader notices that the New York Times discovered that $236,000 of private money was spent to advocate for Mayor de Blasio’s plan for universal pre-kindergarten. But the Times did not find it newsworthy that $3.6 MILLION was spent to dramatize the plight of Eva Moskowitz’s charter schools. From a confidential source, I know that the Times’ reporters had the information about the $3.6 million but either didn’t understand it or didn’t care about it.

And here’s what the NYTimes reported on today: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/20/nyregion/familiar-consultants-hired-by-the-mayors-pre-k-drive.html?emc=edit_tnt_20140319&nlid=26825267&tntemail0=y
Here’s the question the Times needs to answer: why are they harping on $236,000 of PRIVATE funds being used to “promote” pre-kindergarten— a bona fide need for children that clearly promotes learning— while missing the story that for-profit charter proponents are spending $3,600,000— FIFTEEN TIMES AS MUCH— to promote the use of space funded by taxpayers to subsidize their schools???

Meanwhile, the $3.6 million ad campaign has driven de Blasio’s poll numbers down. Just a few months ago, he won in a landslide. Now, the latest poll shows the public disapproves of his handling of education. The public has been bombarded repeatedly on television with slick ads showing adorable black and brown children “evicted” from their charter school, making the implicit and preposterous claim that the Mayor–who is married to a black woman and has biracial children–is a racist. Two of the charters that were turned down had not opened; no one was “evicted” from them. In the one school that was not allowed to expand into a middle school, those “evicted” children are being exploited. If the mayor allowed their school to expand inside a public school in Harlem, as Eva demands, children with disabilities would have to be evicted from the public school to make room for the charter middle school. Meanwhile, Eva is outraged that the mayor expects her to pay rent, yet her friends could have bought a new building for her with that $3.6 million.