Some days our blog exhausts me. Not writing for it--I'm usually too busy--just reading it and thinking how I would have said something differently myself or would have bitten my tongue and said nothing at all. When we started it, I promised not to edit, just occasionally to point out what I take to be errors--and once in a while to pen items myself that can't wait for next Thursday's Gadfly or aren't appropriate there.
In the past, these are the sorts of??"corrections" I would have sought to make via quiet meetings in the office, but Mike insists that today's fashion is to air our internal disagreements in public. So here are a few that cropped up today (which is just half over):
For reasons not clear to me, Liam wants to prove that the Democratic party is not anti-charter school??or anti-merit pay. So he names a few worthy Democrats and Democrat-leaning organizations that themselves have advanced the charter and/or merit-pay cause. He's right about the names. Indeed, there are more. But a few swallows do not prove that spring has come. Go to state capital after state capital around this broad land and anywhere that charter schools or some form of merit pay are on the table observe which legislators (with rare??and honorable??exception) are trying to make it happen and which (with rare and less honorable exception) are trying to kill it. Case closed. I'd love to see it reopened. But the ground is still mostly frozen.
Speaking of charter schools, I agree with our newest arrival, Stafford, that a two-hour-a-week high school is idiotic ; but far from being a charter school, I read that Los Angeles Times article to suggest that the school system is very likely going to shut down a (somewhat idiotic) charter and then create this bizarre inside-the-system alternative for the displaced kids (and to recapture more state dollars for itself). With a little more digging I'm sure that Stafford, who is very able, can find out what's actually happening in LaLa land rather than simply commenting on two short and less-than-clear grafs in a newspaper article.
And then there's Coby. He's very able, too (as is Liam, by the way), but I surely wouldn't have issued his vigorous defense of the NYC education department's new "truth squad." He suggests therein that the poor mayor and chancellor don't get nearly the media exposure that teacher union chief Weingarten gets (because she buys it) and that the poor, underappreciated bureaucracy thus doesn't get its "sensible reforms" adequately noticed. Balderdash. Some of those reforms are sensible, some not, but??I have rarely seen as overwhelming and relentless a??governmental PR machine as the one that Joel Klein presides over--at least not in what we used to call the free world. Overexposure might be more accurate.
By the by, the Checker quote in the New York Sun that Coby tees off from, while accurately reprinted, originated in my own error. When Elizabeth Green called to ask what I thought of the "Department of Education's new 'truth squad'," I, like any self-respecting Beltway dweller, assumed she was referring to the FEDERAL Department of Education. That's what I was referring to when I said they might better use their money for NCLB repair work or vouchers than to add media watchdogs and blog eagles.??It was Margaret in my imagination, not Joel.
And now I'm truly pooped.
