Diane Ravitch emerges victorious against the billionaire bully

Though at first it seemed shocking that the administration would try to stamp out dissent by taping Diane Ravitch at speaking events, developing the sort of research file on her that candidates create on their opponents, and then having Kathy Wylde of the NYC Partnership try to smear her in an oped in the NY Post. In retrospect perhaps it’s not surprising at all.

Bloomberg and Klein run their respective fiefdoms as though they're involved in a non-stop political campaign. Many of the top officials in the Mayor's cabinet are PR people rather than policy experts – including most of his deputy Mayors. And as we know, Klein has the most extensive -- and expensive --PR staff in city government, short of the Mayor.

And while both of them may pretend that they believe in competition, clearly they only allow this notion to prevail when it means leaving schools, and students, to succeed or fail on their own, without throwing them a lifeline. When it comes to their own turf, they refuse to allow the sort of free exchange and expression that real democracy depends upon.

As Leo Casey writes in Edwize: “It seems that for some, markets should rule all education — except for the free marketplace of ideas. There, their monopoly must go unquestioned and uncriticized.”

Remember how Bloomberg won office in the first place– not on his qualifications or political experience, which were nil, but because he was able to use his own personal fortune to ruthlessly dominate the airwaves? In 2001, he spent a record $71 million; even though early in the campaign, he himself said that spending more than $30 million would "look obscene." He went on to spend more than twice that amount.

Four years later, even though he was the heavy favorite in the race, he broke his own record --- spending $78 million, more than any other nonpresidential campaign –nearly ten times as much as his opponent, Freddy Ferrer. During the 10 days before the election, he spent $12 million, mostly for television, radio and newspaper advertising.

Remember how he fired three of his appointees on the Panel on Educational Policy, the day of the vote about third grade retention? The man uses brute force when he cannot persuade. Never does he stop to think that perhaps he might be wrong. The absolute power that he wields when it comes to our schools is not enough -- he also feels that he should own public opinion as well.

Now, whether its our taxpayer money going to develop dossiers against dissenters, or persuading charities that were originally set up to help the public schools (the Fund for Public Schools) to spend millions more to burnish his image by spreading disinformation, precious resources that should have been devoted towards improving education for our kids is being diverted – and perverted – into his narrow political ends.

Only in this case, the good guy won, and rather than besmirching Diane’s reputation, the administration has sullied their own . No one seems to have told these bullies that you don’t treat a national treasure like Diane as you would a political foe.

Commentators of every political stripe have come out in her defense. Not that she needed them. First, you must read Diane’s eloquent response in the NY Post.

Also, the Daily Kos, Steve Koss in our own blog; Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute, the National Review, Eduwonkette, Education Notes, and Gotham Gazette : all of which decry Tweed's underhanded tactics to suppress dissent.

The only person not in his payroll of the Mayor who seems to support the administration is Whitney Tilson, former hedge fund manager and charter school proponent.

Last but not least, check out one of my favorites -- The Neighborhood Retail Alliance:

The real issue here, and its one that we've commented on before, is the way in which the DOE acts more like the DOD in its ruthless approach to dissent. …It is, as Ravitch, Sol Stern and Andrew Wolf have all pointed out, the way that an agency behaves when it has a good deal to hide. It is an agency that will go to great lengths to do bureaucratic sleight-of-hands, and when that doesn't work on seasoned educational experts, the agency will bring out corporate toadies to do ghost-written character assassination.

Thanks to David Bellel for the illustration. Yes, that’s Kathy Wylde down for the count.

Bush, Rove ... and Wylde??

For the past decade or more, the radical Right’s playbook – perfected by Karl Rove on behalf of George Bush – has been the same. If you don’t like the message, attack the messenger using conservative media outlets like Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the Washington Times. In that shameful Bush/Rove tradition now comes Kathryn Wylde with an acrimonious public attack in the shameless NY Post on Diane Ravitch’s criticisms of Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s education policies.

Diane Ravitch is arguably the nation’s leading educational historian, a fierce defender of public education and a constant voice of reason in assessing education policy. What are Ms. Wylde’s educational credentials? President & CEO of the Mayor’s Partnership for New York City (an organization of corporate CEO’s who scour up private funds for Mayoral initiatives so they do not have to be approved by the City Council) and a board member for the corporate-funded NYC Leadership Academy and the Research Partnership for New York City Schools. In a prior email, Ms. Wylde wrote that her involvement (in the new Research Partnership) was “intended only to provide some additional tools to help out the schools and the experts in the educational field (which I am definitely not!).”

In a lengthy editorial reputedly crafted with the assistance of the Department of Education and uncharitably titled “Hypocritical Critic,” the ostensibly independent Ms. Wylde implies that Ms. Ravitch’s criticisms are personally motivated. She writes that Ms. Ravitch’s “reversals … seem more tied to her unhappiness with the personalities in the Bloomberg administration than its policies.” She draws inappropriate inferences by lifting Ms. Ravitch’s writings out of context and makes patently ridiculous, Rush Limbaugh-like assertions that Ms. Ravitch “appears not to share the core belief of the mayor's reforms - that every child can be educated and there are no excuses for failing to provide a child with the opportunity for a great education.” This is an insult to a true proponent of child education, coming from an uninformed, elitist dabbler, because Ms. Ravitch has the temerity to question the Mayor’s methods and approach.

According to the New York Sun, Ms. Wylde’s editorial was crafted with the explicit assistance of the DOE. In a manner disturbingly reminiscent of Nixon’s enemies list, spokesperson David Cantor flatly admitted that the DOE has compiled a dossier on Diane Ravitch (with taxpayer money, naturally). Mr. Cantor’s defense of this tactic was indeed priceless: that she’s “either distorting what we’re doing” or “attack[ing] us.” Has anybody seen J. Edgar Hoover hanging around Tweed lately?

Mayor Bloomberg and a handful of his millionaire/billionaire friends are actively recasting the City’s public school system in a corporatist image of their own devising. They seek no input beyond their own well-heeled coterie, brook no dissent, dismiss parents as ignorant or irrelevant, spend millions on misleading and self-congratulatory public relations campaigns funded by the same cronies, and now attack those who dare speak out. Public and private moneys intended to help the public schools are being diverted into a personal PR machine that simultaneously touts the Mayor’s purported “successes” while stamping down dissent from any and every quarter.

Mayoral control has morphed into Mayoral dictatorship, and the NYC school system is being transformed into little more than a Princeton Review-styled test mill. It’s time for those who would never deign to send their children to the City’s public schools to stop imposing their blindered will on those parents who do. Mayoral control as currently devised – arrogant, belittling, non-responsive, so pro-standardized testing as to be anti-educational – cannot continue to stand.