Now maybe you will object to this post just because I watch Morning Joe, but he tries to be civil. (last week was...difficult).
Thursday's special edition of "Morning Joe" was devoted to education reform in the US. Naturally they interviewed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Unfortunately the Morning Joe crew blew their opportunity to make a balanced assessment of Bloomberg's eight years of running the New York City's school system, the biggest in the country with over 1 million kids. Instead the interview seemed more like an infomercial.
The hardest and saddest fact is - Bloomberg's policies haven't really improved the city's kids' scores on real tests . Nobody in the mainstream media has really picked up on that. And nobody notes that parents of kids in NYC public schools overwhelmingly rejected NYC Mayor Bloomberg's re-election bid last fall and voted 60% to 40% against him.
Everyone agrees that many schools that serving our nation's neediest students are failing. But if we don't honestly assess reform efforts we won't be able to fix them.
Although Bloomberg doesn't fool all New York City parents anymore he continues fooling New York's media elite, most of whom (like the Morning Joe anchors) don't send their kids to New York City's public schools. He takes them on tours of charter schools, saying he has created "choice"; he says he has an "accountability system". He says he has community activists on his side. And his team churns out reams of isolated and misleading statistics that cover up the stagnation and waste that continue to undermine NYC schools.
One great example of just how well Bloomberg has fooled the media occurred around 7:30 Eastern time during that morning's show.
During the normal half hour news cast, Anchor Mika Brezinksi reported that despite eight years of "No Child Left Behind" the latest version of "The Nation's Report Card" showed general stagnation across the country. It showed almost no improvement in reading or math scores for 4th graders and 8th graders on the US Department of Education Test.
Yet just two minutes later when introducing NYC Mayor Bloomberg she credited him with leading reforms that have led to an unbelievable 28% increase in city kid's math scores.
Unbelievable, right?
Right. Don't believe it. Its just not true.
If the Morning Joe staff had looked beyond Bloomberg's press releases, they would find that the increase Bloomberg brags about is meaningless. If they looked at the same "Nation's Report Card" they'd reported on just two minutes earlier they'd see Bloomberg hasn't made any real progress in improving the education of the vast majority New York City's public school students. 40% of NYC's eighth graders are still below basic in reading. And 40% of eighth graders are still below basic in math.
And the "Report Card" says there has been no "statisically significant narrowing of the achievement gap".
What's the difference? The "progress" Bloomberg reports is based on the New York State test. Passing grades on that test have been lowered while Bloomberg was in office. Standards on the New York State tests are now so watered down that the tests can be passed by guessing.
That is just one example of spin put out by Bloomberg's team.
(1) Neo-conservative pablums
"Choice" - Neo-conservatives want to implement 'market' solutions to create 'choice' for parents. Bloomberg implies that the charter schools he has created fill this need by providing a superior product that gives parents a "choice".
Bloomberg's charter school program makes some kids an offer they can't refuse.
He has created 30,000 charter school seats. But he has done by closing down neighborhood schools and opening charters in the building to all who apply. The kids attending the closed schools don't get into the charter school that replaced their schools.
Those kids don't have a choice. Those kids don't even a neighborhood school anymore. Unless they get into the new charters, they are shuffled off to some other neighborhood school which is made more overcrowded. And to the kind of school which Bloomberg will never send the media to tour.
Which is why its great that the NAACP and Parents and Manhattan Community Boards and the teachers union sued and won a victory over Bloomberg's attacks on neighborhood schools.
So Bloomberg the politician uses the questionable achievements (though I won't question them today) of the charter schools to divert the media's attention from his failure to help the 1 million kids not in the charters.
"Accountability Systems" Bloomberg has built an accountability system to follow the progress of students and make other management decisions. Unfortunately he has built it on the same flawed state tests he claims show that students have improved and he's forced principals to have their staffs teach to these watered down tests.
As a result Billions are wasted each year as teachers and students spend time preparing for fake tests instead of...teaching and learning.
(2) Skewed presentation of statistics
Bloomberg and his team habitually cite isolated examples to obsfucate their systemic failures.
(a) The claim of a 28% improvement in 4th grade math scores is just one version of "watch my thumb". It diverts attention from his failure to implement any reforms that actually improve the system.
(b) In his interview on Morning Joe he bragged how one charter school had class sizes of 15 in the fourth grade.
What he doesn't say is that class sizes in New York city are exploding. The average class size in fourth grade is 26. Tens of thousands of fourth graders are in overcrowded classes. Nor did he mention that he is being sued for misuse of billions meant for lowering class sizes.
What is Bloomberg doing here? Again he is diverting everyone's attention from the big fact that nearly 50,000 fourth graders are in grossly overcrowded classrooms by pointing to 15 who aren't.
(c) Focus on "increased graduation" - Bloomberg brags that graduation has increased more than 10% on his watch. Again the statistic is misleading - he has watered down standards so much that the really important part of school - education - isn't increasing. Bloomberg is just more efficient at handing out watered down diplomas.
The City University of New York now makes more than 70% of incoming graduates of NYC Public Schools take remedial math and writing. Why? Because the students have been handed diplomas without being taught math and writing to the level expected of an incoming freshman.
Again Bloomberg's PR blitz focuses on the apparently favorable statistic that they've doctored to cover up the reality of their failure to improve the system.
(d) "Social Promotion" - Bloomberg makes a big deal of the fact that he passed a policy saying that kids who can't pass a test won't be promoted. But he leaves out the fact that the standards of the same state tests used are so watered down that even though the federal tests show nearly 40% of NYC Kids can't read and do math at grade level (400,000 kids) his policy catches less than 100 kids.
Again Bloomberg tries to hide his failure to adopt policies that actually help 400,000 children in the system who are below grade level in math and English by gloating about the revolutionary impact of his policy that might help 100.
(3) Neutralizing potential opponents.
To create the appearance of 'objective' journalism, MSNBC also invited community activist Al Sharpton to discuss education nationally and in New York City.
But MSNBC should wonder if Sharpton is going to criticize Bloomberg. Sharpton's foundation received a $500,000 dollar donation from Bloomberg's foundation last year (see this NY Daily News Story.)
Where will it lead?
MSNBC had the opportunity to critically examine Bloomberg's claims and unfortunately failed to do so. They aren't the first to fall for Bloomberg's PR blitz. The Bloomberg PR machine runs a Potemkin Village of a few charter schools. Those are the schools he and his team show journalists.
To understand Bloomberg's record, the media needs to look beyond the questionable achievements of the charter schools and see what's happening to the increasingly overcrowded system as a whole. The charters just divert attention from Bloombergs' real record. (I say the achievements are questionable because the charter schools are so heavily favored by Bloomberg's team. (read story) So its not clear that they function better than existing schools would if they weren't so overcrowded and underfunded.)
When measured across the system as a whole Bloomberg's claims of a great turnaround really seem phony.
So I appreciate the motives expressed by the Morning Joe crew.
But unless they let go of their dogma and start looking at what's really going on with Bloomberg's "Great Leap Forward" and not just at the snippets the Mayor's PR department points them to, they, like most of the rest of the mainstream media will continue to miss the real story.