The Heartland Institute’s Director of Reform and union hater finds a home at the Chicago Tribune.
My brother Mike asked if he could post my piece on teacher pay and the teacher bashing Chicago Tribune in his spot as delegate at the Catalyst Caucus, an online round table that addresses education issues.
“Sure,” I said.
I didn’t think that it would result in a lengthy response from a loony libertarian.
Plus, in my attempt to get people to drop their subscription to the Chicago Tribune in protest of their ongoing campaign of union and teacher bashing, I inadvertently got them a new subscriber.
It is funny how things turn out.
Bruno Behrend describes himself as the Director of the Center for School Reform at The Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is a libertarian think tank.
Man, Bruno is pissed at me! Among his other sputterings, Bruno says I used the term, “problems in education,” as a euphemism.
“Problems in education?!” That has to be one of the best euphemisms I’ve seen in a long time.
Okay. Bruno busted me. In the interest of parsimony I didn’t go into all the social issues that have had a negative impact on public schools. I didn’t talk about poverty. I didn’t talk about violence. Or hunger. Or racism.
I’m betting Bruno didn’t mean those things either.
However, if Bruno wants to get into a discussion of euphemisms, let us begin with the word, “reform.”
Bruno is a Director of Reform.
As the guy in the sweet new movie, The Kids Are All Right, would say, “Shut the front door!”
Or as I would say, “Reform, my ass!”
It can’t be reformed, so just kill it. The students and the dedicated teachers and principals are the “baby.” Everything else (and yes I mean everything) is the “bathwater.”
The Director of Reform for the Heartland is against reform. He wants to kill public education, not fix it. To him a democratic system of public schools is just bathwater. Throw it out.
He certainly has found a home at the Tribune.
It’s interesting to think of those of us who still believe in public education as the conservative family-values crowd, but that may indeed be what we are.
I’m a little challenged by your condemnation of the Tribune. Is the Sun-Times any better? Here in NY, the editorial boards of all three papers pretty much hate us and everything we stand for. Aside from blogs there aren’t many places for us to turn. Yet the News, for my money, has the best mainstream education reporting anywhere, and the Times just got Michael Winerip back doing the education column.
Michael Winerip is a gem. That he is back writing about education for the Times is the best news that’s fit to print.
I am a great fan of Juan Gonzalez at the Daily News. He does great work at Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman.
To say that there is nobody at the two sad excuses for daily newspapers in Chicago is probably not necessary.
BUT, the Chicago Tribune in particular has engaged in a decade long editorial campaign against public school teachers, public school teacher unions and pensions.
The tipping point was about a week ago when they ran, not on the editorial page, but in the news section, an alleged expose on $100,000 teacher salaries. It was totally bogus, and while I am not naive enough to think that the editorial viewpoints of the paper’s owners never intrude on their news writing, this was over the top.
The IEA initiated a response that included encouraging canceling subscriptions. And I support it.
That’s something you’d likely see in the New York Post. I’d cancel my subscription too, if I’d ever had one.
I wouldn’t really call this a “system of democratic schools,” but if the voters decide to change it by allowing vouchers, charters, and more options other than bloated bureaucracies, that those options should qualify as “democratic schools” too, no?
I know of no such votes. But even our Constitution recognizes that the principles of our democratic institutions cannot be overturned by a vote. Luckily Brown vs Board of Education wasn’t up for a vote by those states that practiced legal segregation.