New York Times editors sadly return to cheerleading Bloomberg's status quo

Today the NY Times editors returned to their status quo ante position when it comes to the city’s public schools, and sternly warned the mayoral candidates to stick to the dreadful Bloomberg dysfunctional and autocratic policies of school closings and privatization.

Much of the editorial, entitled “A New Education Mayor,” reads like it was written by City Hall PR machine, without any reference to reality: “He swept away a byzantine bureaucracy that had defeated his predecessors and created clear lines of authority.”

Nothing could be more byzantine – and without any clear lines of authority -- than the inexplicable networks that have replaced the district structure.

“Mr. Bloomberg’s policy of closing large, failing schools and replacing them with smaller schools is unpopular with teachers, many of whom have to find jobs elsewhere in the system. And some adults have emotional ties to a school, however terrible it has become.”

This is totally dismissive of the terrible impact school closures have on communities and the children in these schools. 

The editorial is similarly dense about the damaging impact of charter co-locations:

“In a few extreme cases, critics say, the regular school students are treated like second-class citizens in a building that once belonged to them.”

A few extreme cases, critics say? The loss of classrooms, art rooms, access to library and gym – and the inequitable conditions that result -- are all too common among co-located schools.

This editorial is a huge contrast with the far more accurate May 19 editorial that clearly recognized the failure of the Bloomberg policies and criticized administration figures who complained that some of the mayoral candidates wanted to take a different tack, called “Education, Vision and the Mayor’s Race.”

Here’s what that earlier editorial said about school closures, less than two months ago:

“Yes, Mr. Bloomberg has shown disdain for consultation, as in his rush to close underperforming schools without the full and meaningful involvement of affected communities. The system needs to strengthen neighborhoods’ connection to schools and reconnect with parents who feel shut out.”

And here’s what it said about the awful co-locations:

“And while charter schools can be a path to excellence, they can also cause problems. Shoehorning them into existing school buildings over local objections can alienate parents and reinforce among students a harmful sense of being separate and unequal.”

But my favorite sentence in the earlier editorial was this:

“But after 12 years, this mayor’s ideas are due for a counterargument. The critiques the candidates are offering hardly shock the conscience, and their complaints about the Bloomberg administration can be heard from teachers and parents in any school in the city.”

Exactly.  The fact that the New York Times editorial board, which had consistently ignored the protests and discontent of parents and the evident damage that Bloomberg had done to our schools, and had now appeared to awaken from its somnolence and emerge from its insulated fortress, made me hope that the situation had improved.  I speculated that perhaps there was now a Times editorial writer who actually knew a NYC public school parent, or even had a child in a city public school herself.

No such luck. Inadvertently or not, this earlier editorial has now been omitted from the list of Times education opinion pieces here.

What explains this schizophrenia? Was Brent Staples, the Times education “expert” and reliable Bloomberg ally, on vacation when the May editorial was written? Will we see any more trenchant education critiques from the Times before the election?  Sadly, this prospect now seems unlikely.

The 40% solution? NYT editors parrot the Billionaire Boys Club and ignore the research

Today, in an editorial, the NY Times inveighs against the recent court decision that held that the new teacher evaluation system should be based 20 percent rather than 40 percent on state test scores, as mandated by a law passed by the Legislature.  

Somehow NY Times editors are under the delusion that teacher evaluation system based 40 percent on  state test scores, which themselves have been absurdly manipulated over the last several years, would be a more “rigorous” system.  They even appear to agree that if any teacher  did poorly on the that one portion of the system for one year only, he or she would deserve the lowest of ratings – as the Commissioner King would prescribe – in a perversion of the entire notion of multiple measures.

It is sad that none of the research showing the fallibility and potentially destructive effects of such a simplistic rating system has managed to penetrate into their heads.  Thus the Times shows itself as averse to research and expert opinion on the subject as the Wall Street Journal and the Daily News – and as firmly under the sway  of the oligarchy of ignorant billionaires and hedge fund operators who are now making education policy in this nation.

As Marc Epstein  put it, “If the issue is education reform, put Governor Chris Christie in a room with Governor Andrew Cuomo; Joel Klein, the education reformer and lifelong Democrat; Secretary of Education Arne Duncan; and the editorial boards of the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Post and New York Times, and you'd think you're at a family reunion straight out of "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet."

For a far more reasonable analysis of this eminently fair court decision, that merely ratified the notion that the Regents and the State Education Department should respect  the legal framework informed by their own advisory task force and negotiated by themselves, the legislature and the unions, see Mike Petrilli of the conservative Fordham Institute in NY Regents: Stop the madness!
 
Too bad the editorial board of the NY Times continues to show itself as averse to the expert consensus as embodied in this letter from the National Academy of Sciences on “Race to the Top”, that warned against a reductionist and ultimately unreliable teacher evaluation based heavily on standardized test scores,  as well as this letter from renowned academics, protesting Commissioner King’s unilateral decision to ignore the law.

The NY Times editors should recall their principled stance they took when the Bush administration allowed the influence of politics and big money to overwhelm research, science, and good sense.  Instead, on the issue of education policy,  they seem headed in the same ignorant and profoundly damaging direction.