MEDIA WATCH: New York Times Business writer published simplistic propaganda for mayoral control and charter schools models
Everyone in Chicago knows that the city's two main daily newspapers — the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune — are basically propaganda organs for capitalist propaganda against unions and public education. The evidence is clear every day, from the plethora of stories touting charters (and ignoring public schools) in the Tribune (which features Urban Prep's lies every three months or so) to the dishonest studies showing that Chicago and the USA are "behind" in some thing (most recently, the Tribune story about how "behind" we are in "advanced math").
However, some people still turn to the pretentious New York Times in hope that someone will provide news without the propaganda insertion. Why is another question, but from a reading of scholarly articles, it's clear that a citation from The New York Times is as valuable a footnote as evidence from a seriously peer-reviewed study.
Most recently, the Times's propaganda went all out to publish both the "news" and analysis that celebrates the mayoral control model of "school reform." This has become current events because last week, Mayor MIchael Bloomberg announced that his chancellor Joel Klein was resigning and that Bloomberg was appointing a veteran publishing executive to head the nation's largest public schools system.
The Time propaganda machine works in both the front "News" sections and in the other sections as well. No more clear can it be than in an article by Joe Nocera that ran off Page One of the Times Business section on November 13, 2010.
The article (complete) follows:
Lesson Plan From a Departing Schools Chief
By JOE NOCERA
“This isn’t rocket science,” Joel I. Klein was saying, too modestly.
It was Wednesday, the day after he announced he was resigning as chancellor of New York City’s gargantuan, long-troubled school system. We were sitting in a conference room in the old Tweed Courthouse in Manhattan, the ornate city landmark that became the headquarters for the Department of Education in 2002, shortly after Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor and jolted the city by naming Mr. Klein, a lawyer with virtually no education experience, to the job.
In the intervening eight years, Mr. Klein transformed both himself and New York’s $23 billion school system. He will leave his post with a reputation as the country’s pre-eminent education reformer. He has welcomed the charter school movement with astonishing fervor — some 30 percent of Harlem’s schoolchildren now attend a charter school. He spent millions on technology so that the school system could distinguish between schools that were improving and those that weren’t. He has closed down dozens of the worst schools, replacing them with smaller schools that have more intimate classroom settings. He empowered principals, making them, as he puts it, “the C.E.O.’s of their buildings.”
And, as any education reformer must, he fought endless battles with the teachers’ union. He eliminated New York’s infamous rubber rooms, where bad teachers literally spent years waiting, at full pay, for the hearings that would determine whether they could be fired. And he wrenched some important concessions from the union, like gaining for his principals the ability to hire the teachers they wanted, rather than those imposed on them by the union’s seniority system. (Alas, seniority still rules when it comes to letting teachers go.)
The improvement is unarguable. Graduation rates are up over 20 percent since he took over. Thousands of parents sign up for the lotteries each year that decide whether their children will get into a coveted charter school slot. Test scores are up.
Though how far up is a matter of some controversy: critics point out that scores dropped this year when more challenging standardized tests were used. Even so, the gap between New York City and the average for the rest of the state has narrowed, while the city has widened the test-score gap over the state’s other big urban school systems. Though the job is far from over — don’t drop the ball, Cathie Black! — you’d have to be blind not to see the progress.
So how did he do it? Mr. Klein shrugged, as if nothing could be more obvious. “It was a system based on politics and power,” he replied. “We moved it to a system based on accountability and coherent management strategies.” And, he added, “competition” — namely, those charter schools. This was another area where Mr. Klein engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the teachers’ union.
“Monopolies hate competition, as you and I both know,” Mr. Klein said. He let out a small chuckle. So did I. I’d never thought of a big city school system as a monopoly, though it plainly is for parents without means. Upon reflection, though, I wasn’t surprised that Mr. Klein saw it that way.
•
My first encounter with Joel Klein came more than a decade ago, when he was taking on another entrenched monopoly, Microsoft. He was the head of the antitrust division in the Clinton Justice Department, and he made the controversial decision to sue the company for abusing its monopoly power. Although he did not try the case himself — it was his brainstorm to bring in David Boies to serve as chief litigator — he was its mastermind and chief strategist.
(For the record, this was long before my fiancée, whom I hadn’t yet met, went to work for Mr. Boies.)
After leaving the Justice Department, Mr. Klein spent a short interregnum at Bertelsmann, the German media company, before being picked by Mr. Bloomberg to run an education department with 1.1 million students and 138,000 employees. It seemed an astonishing choice; Mr. Klein not only lacked education credentials, he had never managed anything larger than the thousand-person antitrust department.
Mr. Bloomberg could not have cared less. “Joel had all the qualifications,” the mayor told me a few days ago, adding: “He knows how to attract good people, motivate them and make them accountable. You can always find someone to do the technical stuff.” The fact that Mr. Klein did not have preset ideas about how to fix public education was, in the mayor’s view, a plus.
In fact, Mr. Klein had always been passionate about education. “I grew up in public housing in Astoria,” he told me — and he had never forgotten the difference his teachers made. Mr. Klein recalled a physics teacher named Sidney Harris who “told me I was a lot smarter and more capable than I was showing. He stayed after school and taught me Einstein’s theory of relativity.” That teacher pushed him to apply to Columbia University, where Mr. Klein was accepted. Mr. Klein added, “I believe in the transformative power of education.”
Four decades later, however, very few students were being transformed by the New York public school system. Steven Brill, the author and entrepreneur, points out that the school system that Mr. Klein — and his boss, Mr. Bloomberg — inherited could not have been more different from the business world the two men had just left.
“At Bloomberg, nobody has a contract,” said Mr. Brill, who is writing a book about school reform. “He built a multibillion media empire in part on the idea that you can quit and he can fire you.” In the New York school system, nobody could be fired. Not only was there no accountability, Mr. Brill said, they had nothing to be accountable to.
“There wasn’t any data in the entire system that could tell whether a student or a school was improving,” he said. “It didn’t exist.” Mr. Brill added: “I was talking to Bill Gates about this just last week. He said, ‘name a business where you have more than 100,000 employees and you have no idea who’s more effective than others.’ “
Mr. Klein changed all that. First he built the systems so that the appropriate data could be gathered. He began stressing test scores, knowing they were an imperfect measure, but that they offered at least one objective measure of improvement. Then he began demanding results. “If you are a principal whose school gets D’s or F’s, we’ll fire you, and shut down the school,” Mr. Klein said. The first time he closed a failing school, it sent shock waves through the system. Now, however, principals and teachers understand that if they don’t show improvement, there will be a price to pay.
(On the other hand, after a school is shut down, Mr. Klein has to keep paying the teachers, even if no other school will hire them. “It is costing us $120 million a year,” Mr. Klein complained. “The only thing worse would be forcing them onto schools that don’t want them.”)
That was the accountability part of the equation. The competition part came in the form of those charter schools. As part of his drive to open charter schools, Mr. Klein courted an important ally: New York’s wealthy hedge fund community, which has backed them with tens of millions of dollars.
Charter schools, explained Whitney Tilson, the founder of T2 Partners and one of their most ardent supporters, are the perfect philanthropy for results-oriented business executives. For one thing, they can change lives permanently, not just help people get by from day to day. For another, he said, “hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital.”
A wealthy hedge fund manager can spend more than $1 million financing a charter school start-up. But once it is up and running, it qualifies for state funding, just like a public school. Except that in most cases, charter schools save the taxpayers money because they are much more cost-conscious than the typical big city public school. “It is extremely leveraged philanthropy,” Mr. Tilson said.
Another hedge fund manager, Boykin Curry of Eagle Capital, sent me an unsolicited e-mail describing Mr. Klein as “a hero” for championing charter schools — even though it meant they competed with the public schools he presided over. Of course, for Mr. Klein, that was the whole point.
Mr. Klein has had another powerful business ally: Bill Gates. The reason Mr. Brill went to interview Mr. Gates was that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had poured a staggering $150 million into the New York public school system. The irony, of course, is inescapable: the bitterest of enemies during the Microsoft trial, the two men have made common cause to improve the lives of New York’s public school students.
Although I was unable to speak to Mr. Gates on such short notice, Vicki Phillips of the Gates Foundation said that the foundation supported Mr. Klein’s efforts because “we saw very impressive gains in New York.”
To be sure, Mr. Gates and Mr. Klein are aware of the irony. Once, when Mr. Klein had dinner with the Gateses at their home in Seattle, “they showed me a pinball machine they used to call the Joel Klein,” he recalled with a laugh. In September 2003, Mr. Gates and Mr. Klein went to a school in the Bronx to announce a $51 million grant from the Gates Foundation. After the event, a teacher went up to Mr. Klein and said, “Imagine what he might have given if you hadn’t sued him.”
Although Mr. Klein is joining the News Corporation, he insisted that he was not abandoning education. “I am part of the reform movement,” he said. “That is not going to change.”
For the sake of the city, and the country, let’s hope not.
