New York Times corporate propaganda -- Maverick Leads Charge for Charter Schools

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu>]

Reply from George Schmidt, publisher of Substance newspaper in Chicago...

(By the way, when there is no tenure, the main targets of firing and 
harrassment are the outspoken teachers who want to change the system, 
or who criticize the boss, NOT the lazy, incompetent teachers, who 
are portrayed as the chief beneficiaries of tenure.)


> From: Csubstance@aol.com
>
>
> In a message dated 7/24/07 8:20:20 AM, pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu writes:
>
> << It looks very suspicious and too good to
> be true.  The "maverick" is financed by the Gates
> Foundation, his happy teachers have "more
> flexibility" but no tenure, and a principal who
> is working with him has the same name as a
> notorious standardista opportunist who operated
> in Northern California 7 years ago.  Pardon my
> skepticism, but this reads like a propaganda piece to me. >>
> **********************************************************************************************************
> It looked like a propaganda piece to me, too, since the "union" featured in
> the story was a company union, founded by Mr. Maverick and his buddies.
>
> Is there any other "union" in the USA representing teachers that opposes
> "tenure" and other forums of job protection?
>
> Generally, I've come to expect The New York Times to promote corporate
> propaganda in its "news" columns. I have two favorite Chicago "school reform"
> stories from years ago. The first talked about how the opening of 
> the privileged
> "Northside College Prep" (public) high school was reversing a "brain 
> drain" from
> Chicago's public schools to parochial schools. Trouble was, there never was a
> "brain drain" of that type. What there was was a "puberty check" that
> Chicago's Catholics didn't want to talk about. Basically, by the 
> Middle School years,
> some parents worried about the socializing their children would be doing as
> they reached  puberty, so they would pull the kids out of schools 
> that were too
> diverse for their tastes. (Being a white guy living in this part of town, I
> could hear some of the conversations, and they were as racist as any 
> you'd get
> from the Old South, only using some New Age code words).
>
> The New York Times promoted the $60 million creation of an almost all-white
> selective enrollment public high school (Northside College Prep, which still
> has the smallest number of black kids of any public high school in Chicago)
> according to the racist spin Chicago had put on the thing. Nothing 
> -- not nothing
> -- in the story reflected the reality of the underlying racism, or even the
> controversy.
>
> That became "news" from America's newspaper of record.
>
> The second of my favorite New York Times lies about Chicago came as a story
> about Paul Vallas after he'd been dumped as "CEO" of Chicago's public school
> system and was running for the Democratic Party nomination for 
> governor in 2002.
> The Vallas "news" story the Times ran was straight out of Vallas's PR stuff,
> simply recycled. In the photograph the Times ran with the story (which was
> widely circulated by the Vallas campaign as "proof" that even The 
> New York Times
> could see how great Vallas was) had Vallas standing in his office. 
> On the wall
> behind him were photographs of Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy.
>
> One of the things that's always disturbed me is that so many otherwise
> intelligent people clip The New York Times and cite it as truth 
> without considering
> that a closer look might be necessary. Although some Times reporters have
> gotten closer to the truth than others, in general, when covering corporate
> "school reform", The New York Times is just another voice in the chorus of
> millionaires and billionaires singing the same tune, bashing publich 
> schools and pubic
> school unions and praising "choice" and "free market" alternatives to public
> services and public service.
>
> George Schmidt