NYTimes Says Dems Should Appeal to Moderate Fascists?

WHAT HE SAID!!!!!!

[image or embed]

— James Horn (@schools-matter24.bsky.social) October 26, 2025 at 11:31 AM

Trump's Bullying Continues to Control The Washington Post

America's only former president and wanna-be dictator has been berating and threatening the media for years, and even today, just days before the most important election in American history, his bullying continues, and it continues to pay off for him.  

I offer Exhibit 1 from today's Washington Post online edition.  Here's the lead story, page 1:

Now let me ask you, regardless of your political persuasion: Is there any news to this story, the single one that WaPo's Editorial Board decided is the most important in the entire world, not just the U.S., but the entire globe? Hasn't the aged and senile speed freak and former President been attacking the media for correcting his endless Niagara of lies for the past decade at least?? 

Of course he has. And that is exactly why he gets front page, above the fold, and with a presidential-looking photo as well.  Just goes to show: the squeaky psychopathic bully gets the grease.

In contrast, where is WaPo's big story about Kamala Harris today? Well, you have to scroll down, past other news stories, beyond the opinion pieces, past the banner ads, past "More Top Reads," past "Better Living," and finally this, a story that actually is about a proposed policy by the leading presidential candidate:

Would Harris get better placement for a real story if she berated the media, threatened the First Amendment, belittled and besmirched reporters, and made a mockery of common sense and the truth?  No doubt she would, if the recent history of the New York Times and the Washington Post can serve as a guide.

 

WaPo and New York Times Duck and Cover to Protect Their Cowardly Asses

Chris Hayes asked last evening, Why must we read this news in a British newspaper? 

Well, Chris, it's because American newspapers self-censor, thus hedging their bets in case the authoritarian gangster clown, Trump, wins the election and tries to shut them down.  Cowardice, plain and simple.

Mark Milley, the US Army general who Donald Trump appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now says the current Republican presidential nominee is a “fascist to the core” and says no person has ever posed more of a danger to the United States than the man who served as the 45th President of the United States. . .

NYTimes Economics Columnist w/Physics Degree Has Ed Solution

by Jim Horn

As a veteran educator of educators, I am accustomed to hearing how much people, regardless of education, training, or native wit, believe they know about education and school policy, especially when they find out how I make a living. 

"History and philosophy of education, huh?  Well, let me tell you why schools are so bad. . ."

And listening to them is easier than explaining how history or philosophy may be relevant to policy talk, implementation, and practice, if the powerful elites who make policy were not committed to remaking the same self-serving system that the protectors of the social status quo have been imposing for 150 years at least.  

Today's businessmen who run the paternalistic and segregated schools for the disadvantaged are no less enthralled by rote learning and soul-crushing discipline systems than were the Latin grammar school teachers of the 19th Century, who cried out in protest when Horace Mann suggested "moral suasion" as an alternative to beating schoolchildren into submission.

Nor are today's edupreneurs any less excited about the use of racist "achievement" testing than were the social efficiency zealots like Stanford U.'s Elwood Cubberley a hundred years ago, who declared in the foreword of Louis Terman's 1914 classic, The Measure of Intelligence,

Questions relating to the choice of studies, vocational guidance, schoolroom procedure, the grading of pupils, promotional schemes, the study of the retardation of children in the schools, juvenile delinquency, and the proper handling of subnormals on the one hand and gifted children on the other— all alike acquire new meaning and significance when viewed in the light of the measurement of intelligence as outlined in this volume. . . .More than all other forms of data combined, such tests give the necessary information from which a pupil’s possibilities of future mental growth can be foretold, and upon which his further education can be most profitably directed. 

Take, for instance, the ignorant remarks by modern day efficiency "expert," economics reporter, and former NYTimes editorial board member, Eduardo Porter.  Porter has taken Cubberley's fascination with data one step further, to claim that raising test scores, in fact, is the best indicator that inequality has been, or is soon to be, eradicated:

Narrowing proficiency gaps that emerge way before college would probably do more to increase the nation’s college graduation rate than offering universal community college, easier terms on student loans or more financial aid.

How does Eduardo know this?  Can't say, since he does not offer any evidence to support his outrageous claim.  

Nor does Eduardo, whose degree is in quantum physics, say anything about new evidence that points to more and more underemployment for those who do graduate from college:

The dire experience of these workers with college degrees displacing workers with less formal education stands in strong contrast to the widely-held view in economic and policymaking circles that the main problem facing the U.S. economy is a shortage of highly-educated workers. If college-educated workers were in short supply, then we would expect their wages to rise as employers attempted to lure them away from their competitors. Yet the inflation-adjusted value of the wages of college-educated workers has barely increased in the 21st century.

What’s more, between 2000 and 2014 (the last year for which complete data are available), the employment of college-educated workers has increased much more rapidly in low-earning industries than in high-earnings ones. If there weren’t enough college graduates to go around, then the opposite should be happening because high-earnings industries would presumably be outcompeting low-earnings industries to hire college-educated workers. Our new analysis of the data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators strongly suggests that college-educated workers are more likely to “filter down” the job ladder than to climb it.

Eduardo does offer some data, however, that suggests that our past three decades of fixation on testing proficiency while forgetting about rising resegregation contributes nothing positive for either test scores or diversity in schools.  

Extrapolating from Sean Reardon's paper on NAEP trends, Eduardo claims the black-white achievement gap has dropped by "as much as 50 percent compared with what it was 30 to 40 years before." 

What we see in NAEP trends, however, is that the test score gaps were lowest when school desegregation was at its highest (click charts below), a correlation that is entirely lost on the middle class neolibs at the New York Times who require education fixes that don't work in order to maintain and grow the class divisions that provide the unscalable wall between Eduardo and those he presumes to save by raising their test scores.

NYTimes Editorial Board Embraces New Orleans Abusive Charter Caste System

Education is ground zero in the systemic exploitation of black people in New Orleans--ground zero because public schools are the direct feeder for the necessary, albeit unskilled, labor needed for the tourist-oriented economy. . . . In New Orleans they are building more hotels every day.  Where will the bellhops and maids come from? . . . . Our schools are the way they are because the economy. . . continues to require a labor force to clean, cook, and serve.

  

 --Kalamu ya Salaam, quoted by Buras, 2010, pp. 66-67

In December 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report filled with grisly and harrowing details of student abuse, miseducation, segregation, and exclusion in the schools of New Orleans.  The first paragraph:

New Orleans students are supposed to be learning in one of the most advanced, innovative educational environments in the country. When it comes to school safety and security, however, many New Orleans schools employ ineffective discipline practices that were discredited by education policy researchers decades ago. School staff react to minor rule violations by forcibly handcuffing children to furniture, brutally slamming them, banishing them from their schools and cutting short their education. Far from keeping New Orleans schools safe, these policies actually reinforce a culture of violence and disengagement from schools and communities.

What has emerged since Katrina wiped out New Orleans Schools is the quintessential corporate education model, with corporate charter schools now constituting 3 out of every four schools in the Big Easy.  This system based on the "portfolio model" was developed under the leadership of Paul Vallas, who became the highest paid superintendent in Louisiana history (over $400,000 annually) at at time when large numbers of children in New Orleans did not have textbooks and teachers bought their own chalk.

While Vallas and his toadies claimed the new charter system was open to all comers, what quickly emerged was a school caste system, with the poorest and neediest children shut out of schools where their test scores could damage the charter brands that were set up as the urban model for the nation.  A clip from an article that appeared in the Harvard Education Review, Summer 2011, by Kristen Buras (click on clip to enlarge):

RSD stands for Recovery School District, and this lower caste of NOLA schools has its own internal caste system as well.  There are the charters and the publics within RSD, with the regular public schools left to take those that even the RSD charters don't want.  A number of these regular public schools will continue to operate, as they are necessary dumping grounds for children who have special needs, lower test performance, or are resistant to the total compliance instructional regime that is based more on behavioral modification and test prep.  The children of these schools of last resort will be contained and miseducated until they can be driven out of school entirely and into the Louisiana correctional facilities.

With these kinds of problems remaining for a system that touts itself as the urban solution to schooling in America, it is disturbing, though not surprising, to see the New York Times come out strong for such an obviously unfair, unethical, exploitative, and oppressive system, without ever mentioning any of the glaring inequities or crimes being committed against children.  Brent Staples as Editorial Board ed guy has always been a reliable rubber stamp for corporate ed reform, but really?  Is this what the New York Times endorses?

Staples' latest press release for corporate ed reform shows up today in today's Sunday edition as its lead editorial, and it begins with a whopper of a lie:

Before Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 percent of children in New Orleans attended a failing school. Now, only about 18 percent do. 

Prior to Katrina's wipeout, the New Orleans Schools reflected decades of malignant neglect, having been left to the African-American population and vastly underfunded after Southern desegregation took hold following Brown v Board of Education.  The white folks simply left the public schools.

The New Orleans public schools, however, were beginning to make strides before Katrina.  Yes, 60 percent were deemed AUS (Academically Unacceptable Schools), but just before Katrina, the State ranked Orleans School District 11th out of 68 districts in terms of annual achievement growth, even though the district remained at the bottom of the barrel in terms of raw scores on the LEAP test.

As for Staples' other claim that 18 percent of kids now attend an AUS school now in New Orleans, that's a magical number--pure fabrication.  The State of Louisiana's Preliminary 2009-2010 Academically Unacceptable List PDF lists 22 New Orleans schools.  Using state data here, I was able to find 5 other New Orleans schools that were also AUS, for a total of 27 schools.  That would be almost 31 percent AUS, but there is a further complication.

Now consider the fact that the corporate-friendly Cowen Institute at Tulane reports [download the report here] that there were 17 schools without data to tell us whether they are acceptable or unacceptable.  So when we divide that 27 schools we know are AUS by the number of schools for which we have data, we get 38 percent as the real percentage of AUS schools in New Orleans.  How Staples got 18 percent, we will never know.  Did he divide the real number in half and add 1?  Or did he just take the purely fabricated number handed to him as truth?

That 38 percent AUS number would still be impressive, were it not for the fact that the corporate ed reformers in New Orleans have contained and segregated the majority of poor test scorers in a handful of schools and then declared the rest superior.  But then selling the charter bill of goods is no different than any other corrupt deal put together by amoral corporate interests with no concern for the well-being of the 99 percent.

The "Teachers Are Built" Non-School of Thought

Last updated 2:30 pm:

Reminds me of the charter school I used to go to, High Tech High. It’s this odd school which is concerned all about image and making things look good. It’s big thing is “project based learning”, however I literally learned NOTHING the whole time I was there, I even forgot how to do some basic skills. If you disagree with them, all staff have this creepy yet cheesy pre formulated response that will involve the word “integrity”. Not all staff are bad, but simply stripped of individual philosophy. --Jacobito14 (student responding to KIPP story here)

The New York Times Magazine has a fondness for giving great swaths of paper and ink to the reform schoolers' mission to turn K12 education over to the corporations, and this week's 8,000 word piece by Spencer Foundation fellow, Elizabeth Green (former ed reporter for the right-wing New York Sun), does not disappoint in that regard. The operative metaphor of the piece, "Building a Better Teacher," follows from the ed deformer's core conceit that teachers are like mousetraps, devices that can be designed, re-designed, torn down and tinkered with to produce a more efficient way to capture and confine, er, educate.

And if you don't like the mouse trap metaphor, how about tinker toys or bricks or computer components, all of which may be assembled by curious tinkerers like charter schooler, Doug Lemov, whose quest to fabricate the best teaching tactics by the nation's champion test score producers is matched by another mission to turn his ultimate "taxonomy" for test score production into the bible for teacher training. Lemov's new bible would be composed of 49 commandments that are to be committed to memory and practiced until perfected. That, for Lemov, would be teacher training aplenty.

It is just too bad that author, Green, did not learn something about education before she landed her $75,000 grant to learn how to write about it. If she had, she would not have spent so many of her 8,000 words oohing and aahing about commonplace practices in teaching like "wait time" and "calling on non-volunteers," which she seems to think were first documented by Doug Lemov. And even though Doug has come up with 49 commandments, Green pretends that educational thinkers over the centuries have been in search of "one essential trait for good teaching:"

But what makes a good teacher? There have been many quests for the one essential trait, and they have all come up empty-handed. Among the factors that do not predict whether a teacher will succeed: a graduate-school degree, a high score on the SAT, an extroverted personality, politeness, confidence, warmth, enthusiasm and having passed the teacher-certification exam on the first try. When Bill Gates announced recently that his foundation was investing millions in a project to improve teaching quality in the United States, he added a rueful caveat. “Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn’t have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,” Gates said. “I’m personally very curious.”

There is enough misleading and dissembling in this one paragraph to make another 8,000 word article in response, but it is the awe-inspiring and cloud-splitting whine of Bill Gates that makes Green's exercise in determined stupidity memorable. Because Bill Gates is not aware of a clear view of good teaching, then one must not exist. Yes, it is that simple for Elizabeth Green. But there is, alas, plenty more propaganda for your crap detector where this paragraph comes from, with Green providing the Oligarchs' gloss on the history of education and teacher training in America, along with the smearing of the work by teacher educators and theoreticians from John Dewey to Deborah Ball.

But the real payoff comes near the end of this 8,000 words of pedagogical pablum mixed with corporate talking points:

Lemov and Ball focus on different problems, yet in another way they are compatriots in the same vanguard, arguing that great teachers are not born but made. . . . A more typical education expert is Jonah Rockoff, an economist at Columbia University, who favors policies like rewarding teachers whose students perform well and removing those who don’t but looks skeptically upon teacher training. He has an understandable reason: While study after study shows that teachers who once boosted student test scores are very likely to do so in the future, no research he can think of has shown a teacher-training program to boost student achievement. So why invest in training when, as he told me recently, “you could be throwing your money away”?

Here, then, was Green's real opportunity to apply some journalistic integrity to educate, rather than obfuscate and mislead. She could, in fact, have pointed to a couple of research studies on the effects of professional teacher preparation that might have provided Rockoff some sorely needed fill knowledge for his canyon of ignorance. She might have cited, at least, Darling-Hammond & Bransford's Preparing teachers for a changing world, or even James Stronge's Qualities of effective teachers. But, then, these titles are surely not on Green's required reading list of materials on how to win a place among the edupreneurs racing to build a simpler and cheaper teacher for the poor, one without the unnecessary knowledge of child development, educational philosophy and history, curriculum theory and practice, methods courses, special populations, and yes, even classroom management theory and practice. For the poor and brown, 49 Commandments will serve just fine.

New York Times Confirms Loyalty to Bloomberg's Charter Propaganda Machine

Brent Staples has been stupid about education for a long time, and today's NYTimes Editorial on charter schools in NYC shows that he is only getting stupider by the day. A recent report on NYC charters showed 51% of students in NYC charters do better in math than the public schools, which means of, course, that in 49% of charters, they do worse or no better than the publics.

In reading, only 29% of NYC charters have higher reading scores than the public schools, which means that in 71% of the charters, reading scores are no better or lower than the public schools.

Now here is how Staples and Co. reports these findings in their corporate editorial today:

. . . .A new study from the center [CREDO] has turned up a brighter picture in New York City, where students at more than half of the charter schools are showing more academic improvement in math than their traditional-school counterparts. The reading numbers were not as strong, but still nearly 30 percent of charters outperformed traditional schools. . . . .

Casino Capitalist Hedge Funders Move All In on Corporate Welfare Charter Schools

(Photo by Nicholas Roberts for The New York Times)

With unrestrained Wall Street greed having devoured the American economy and most of the Wall Street monster's own appendages, new opportunities for casino capitalitsts to cash in are much harder to come by. With encouragement, however, from the Oligarchs who run the U. S. Department of Education, a new gold mine has opened up in the lucrative corporate charter movement, with big opportunities for vulture philanthropists to collect huge tax credits, for charter real estate dealers, bond bundlers and investors, and for charter school management corporations, which are paid millions from tax dollars meant for public education. Happy Days are here again, as reported in a story today in the Times.

What impressed me about the story was not its predictably sychophantic coverage on this new sub-species of corporate bloodsucker, but, rather, the fact that the New York Times has finally mentioned the Stanford charter school study that has so effectively exposed the truth about the vaunted charter school solution:

• Of the 2403 charter schools reflected on the curve, 46 percent of charter schools have math gains that are statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their TPS [traditional public school] comparisons.
  

• Charters whose math growth exceeded their TPS equivalent growth by a significant amount account for 17 percent of the total.
  

• The remaining group, 37 percent of charter schools, posted math gains that were significantly below what their students would have seen if they enrolled in local traditional public schools instead.

How did the Times report the Stanford study after 6 months of ignoring the biggest charter story of the year? Only by giving the Hoxby hoax top billing and with no facts or analysis of that "suggestive" CREDO study. Stunning:

Whether charters do a better job of educating children, even with the extra help from private donors, is much debated. A study released in September by researchers headed by Caroline M. Hoxby, an economist at Stanford who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution, concluded that on average New York City charters outperform local schools. But another study by a different group of Stanford researchers last summer suggested that nationally the numbers are muddier.

In Today's Non-News: NY Times Praises Final "Bribe to the Flop" Rules

We know that when the Editorial Board's pocket reporter, Sam Dillon, wants to know about charter schools, he goes to Jeanne Allen, whose corporate advocacy outfit is dedicated to the promotion of charters. And when he wants to know about teacher quality, he goes to leading right-wing teacher basher for NCTQ, Kate Walsh. And when he wants to get the real dope on ed policy, he turns to prominent right wing prostitute, Rick Hess, of AEI. Here is an article from a few days back that has all three featured in the same piece of "reporting."

Today's headline says it all: After Criticism, the Administration Is Praised for Final Rules on Education Grants.
Upon reading the article, we find that none of the corporate reformer priorities has changed, and the "praise" that Dillon has gone looking for is as scarce as hen's teeth. The facts are acknowleged here by the reptilian Rahm Emanuel:

“Even after all the comments, the rules are as comprehensive and demanding as before, they haven’t changed,” said Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff, in an interview. “We’re seeking reforms, so we haven’t backed off anything.”

The headline, no doubt, was written for the benefit of those who read just headlines.

The Selective Attention of the New York Times

My favorite national corporate newspaper of record, the NYTimes, has a story today by NYTimes reporter, Tamar Lewin, which is on the story researched by the Chronicle of Higher Ed regarding private college presidents' pay (I guess you could say Tamar blogged it for the Times).

The gist of the story is that 23 college presidents make, hold onto your coffee cup, more than a million dollars per year, with the top college exec making almost $1.5 million a year. I know--I am shocked, too, and saddened that in a world of market-based salaries and accountability, there is no accountablity in higher ed. On what profit-based metric can these CEO wannabes justify their exorbitant salaries? Over a million!

I decided to search the Times to see if I could find a similar story on corporate CEO pay, with the neat graphics that the Times staff put together for this public shaming of college presidents. Couldn't find one.

But I did find one at Forbes, where multimillion dollar CEO pay is a badge of honor, rather than one of shame. The latest I found was for 2008, and Larry Ellison of Oracle topped the list with $192.92 million annually. In fact, I had to go 20 pages deep into the chart to find a CEO that made under $1 million per year. Poor Donald Hoaglin of Huntington Banschares comes in at #483 on the list with only $980,000, although he had $7.5 million over the five year stretch.

Oh yes, I found another story that the Times did not bother to report. From UPI, "World's Top 100 Universities Named":

SHANGHAI, Nov. 2 (UPI) -- U.S. universities were tops among the world's top 100 institutions of higher education, a report found.

Once again American universities dominated the world rankings as they have for the past six years, taking all but three of the top 20 spots, The University World News Web site said.

Three U.S. universities took the top three positions. Harvard ranked first, Stanford second and the University of California Berkeley came in at third place.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked 5th, the California Institute of Technology ranked sixth, Columbia University ranked seventh, Princeton University rated eighth on the list and the University of Chicago came in at number nine.

The universities of Cambridge, Oxford and Tokyo ranked fourth, 10th and 20th respectively. Emory University in the United States was allocated the last slot in the top 100 institutions.

The Web site said 67 of the top 100 universities are located in the United States, 13 in Britain and five in Japan.

Israel's Hebrew University in Jerusalem ranked 64th, data released by the Center for World Class Universities and the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai's Jiao Tong University said Sunday.

The rankings were based on criteria which included the number of scientific publications released by institutes and the number of graduates who won the Nobel Prize.

Corporate Media Closely Monitoring the Powerless for a Full Accounting

NEWSFLASH!!

Efforts by the Bloomberg administration to add accountability to the public school system have included moving quickly to shut down schools deemed beyond repair, and rewarding those that make significant progress on standardized tests. Those initiatives seemed to collide last week, when teachers and principals at five of the failed schools earned cash bonuses for their successes.

The New York Times this morning, during Bush Co.'s final crony giveaway ploy, is spending inches of good ink following a big story on whether or not some school teachers did or did not earn five thousand dollar bonuses for jobs done in their crumbling public schools. If the Times or the other media capitulators to corporatism had kept such a close eye on the oligarchs of Wall Street, perhaps we could have entirely avoided the manufactured crisis whose underside still remains entirely uninvestigated by the New York Times. Instead, they are busy connecting the dots on the bonuses-for-failing-school scandal. Excuse me while I puke.