Newsweek: Shouldn't staff salaries be merit-based and depend upon sales, revenues and readership?

Reality Based Educator Nails 'em again in his post:

Newsweek To Be Sold For A Dollar

He concludes with:

I mean, fair's fair.

If that "turnaround" and performance-based strategy is good enough for the Central Falls, Rhode Island school and other schools that Newsweek urges be shut down for "failing," isn't it good enough for the hypocrites at Newsweek?

Newsweek's headline for the famed "Fire Bad Teachers" story was "In No Other Profession Are Workers So Insulated From Accountability."

Oh, really?

What about journalism?

What about at Newsweek?

Read it in full: Newsweek To Be Sold For A Dollar

And Paul Moore has this advice for one of the few lights at the Washington Post in his  

Love Letter to Valerie Strauss in D.C.:

 Ms. Strauss, you are such an earnest and able defender of the public schools, but I wonder if in times of quiet reflection you realize that those driving this blitzkrieg against universal public education in the US don't care what you write.

You can and have constructed a series of reports that are reasoned and rational and backed up by whatever honest research has actually been done in the field. And it's water off the backs of these ducks with all the money. You see the people with the money have decided it's time for the public schools to go! (Check the Venture Philanthropy Partners $5.5 million gift to KIPP so the charter chain can better serve its true mission: to discredit public schools).

On the monied attackers side the truth is of no concern, rationality holds no sway, and they laugh at your stinking research. You've got a charlatan like Gates but the rankest absurdity that comes out of his mouth is treated like a gem from an oracle because he's the world's richest man. It's repeated by all the politicians he owns, up to and including a certain President of the United States and in the case of the District a certain Mayor, until total nonsense is accepted as gospel. And then the complete sociopaths, like Michelle Rhee, are sent in to slay the heretics, read any sane person who dares to stand up for public schools.

You have my undying respect and admiration Ms. Strauss. You're one of the good people. But understand that if you were ever to write something that actually threatened to derail the rich folks, the venture capitalists, the hedge funds campaign to shutdown the public schools, your column would disappear from the pages of the Washington Post the next day. And I pray that's the worst thing that would happen to you.

I too love Valerie.