Sunday, July 5, 2009

NY Times damns the entire Calif. school system -- and gets it dead wrong

Caroline Grannan slams NY Times at the Examiner as she goes after the current Sunday magazine article about the California gubernatorial race, which states:

"Test scores in (California) public schools are plummeting” – in the reporter’s voice, without attribution or elaboration.
Caroline says that all indications are that California test scores have been moving upward (not that we give any credence to any testing results in the age of testing steroids. She says:

It’s an ongoing issue to public education advocates who view ourselves as resisters against efforts to “run schools like a business” that the privatization faction insists on portraying our schools in a far worse light than they deserve. Why would the Times leap into that with a flat-out inaccuracy – stated in an authoritative tone implying that no backup is even needed for such an obvious truth?


Now I love this one:
And speaking of troubled institutions, does the Times staff not realize that its survival is as fragile as the California economy? Sorry to repeat myself, but here's my message, again, to my colleagues in the press: Your existence is fragile. Your credibility is what you have left. Please try to take care of it.

Sorry Caroline, I wouldn't expect much credibility from the paper of record on weapons of mass destruction and BloomKlein are wonderful.