The most interesting aspect of the Daily News article that was spiked in the middle of the night was not that some top education officials are wealthy, but that only two of the Chancellor's 20 senior aides are educators. This is a stunning admission. Only two of twenty top aides are educators!
Since we know that the Chancellor is not an educator, this means that he is getting advice largely from people who have never worked in a school and know nothing about education. This explains why so many of the Department of Education's policies have failed, from its abortive attempt to create a citywide curriculum, to its failed reading program, to its efforts to distort and hide the city's mostly flat NAEP scores, to the mess with the ATRs, to the disastrous centralization of admissions to gifted programs, to the horrific and ignored overcrowding of classrooms, and on and on.
With so few educators advising the Chancellor, he obviously is not adequately informed in advance about the predictable consequences of many of his policies.
-- Diane Ravitch
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