Re: Richard Rothstein's New York Times Column Cancelled

["Dr. Leo Casey" <LeoCasey@AOL.COM>]

Dear George:

You have been reading Andrew Sullivan too much if you think that the New
York Times has become a liberal house organ. And if you read him that much,
you should know by now that it his narcissism -- how could the Times not
publish a writer of his caliber on whatever strikes his fancy a given day,
except for its political bias [maybe because of his whining attacks on the
Times] -- and not the Times politics, which is the issue.

As for the reasons for the cancellation of Rothstein's column, I can only
say that the anti-testing movement is not the only thing happening in
education, and that Rothstein's columns on the subject were quite measured,
not given to the extremes one finds in other quarters. As a matter of fact,
I have to say that the one time I disagreed with him in recent memory was
when he spoke of the relative merits of norm referenced, as opposed to
criterion referenced, tests.

Far more likely, if a political reason is to be sought, is Rothstein's
willingness to expose narrow propaganda from the far right, such as when he
demonstrated that the spate of right wing attacks on the NEA for having
a "blame America" approach to teaching the lessons of September 11, was
fundamentally dishonest. The attacks took out of context a single lesson
plan, one of hundreds to which the NEA web site had a link [along with
links to the Red Cross, CIA, and Departments of State, Defense and Homeland
Security]. They had their source in that paragon of reponsible journalism,
the Washington Times, which did a "cut and paste" job on the web site [and
did not even provide an ellipsis to indicate what it had done] in order to
make what was, on that single lesson plan, a call for teachers to ensure
that their students understood that it was wrong to blame an entire
religious faith or an entire ethnic community for the September 11 attacks
into a call for not blaming Al Qaeda for the attacks. It was so obvious a
distortion that Rothstein felt obliged to call it what it was, but I can
not imagine that the denizens of the right were very happy when he
announced in his column that their emperor had no clothes -- and the
nakedness was too obvious to even mount a defense.

Leo Casey

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