Here is the link to the Diane Ravitch fabulous dissection of the articles in the NY Times, especially the co-written one by Dana Goldstein who we've considered yet another shill - even when she wrote for the left wing Nation (I remember we sent her our movie for coverage in The Nation and she didn't seem to like it - duhhhh!)
The “New York Times” vs. Senator Bernie Sanders
Below the fold is an entire re-post.
I
have not endorsed a candidate in the primaries. I have not chosen a
favorite. I will vote for any Democrat who runs against Trump.
That said, I’m very concerned about the New York Times’ consistently negative coverage of Senator Bernie Sanders.
We expect the newspaper of record to be unbiased. But when it comes to Sen. Sanders, the Times goes after him in snide ways.
First, there was an article
that delved into his anti-war views of thirty-five years ago. Its
overall tone is hypercritical of Sanders for his leftist views,
especially his efforts to undermine the Reagan administration’s policies
towards the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
A
New York Times review of Mr. Sanders’s mayoral papers — including
hundreds of speeches, handwritten notes, letters, political pamphlets
and domestic and foreign newspaper clippings from a period spanning
nearly a decade — revealed that from his earliest days in office Mr.
Sanders aimed to execute his own foreign policy, repudiating Mr.
Reagan’s approach of aggressively backing anti-Communist governments and
resistance forces, while going further than many Democrats in
supporting socialist leaders.
Mr.
Sanders’s activities during his mayoralty bring into relief the
fervently anti-imperialist worldview that continues to guide him. They
also underscore his combative ideological persona, which has roiled
national Democratic politics as thoroughly as it upended municipal
government in Burlington. As mayor, Mr. Sanders denounced decades of
American foreign policy that he portrayed as guided by corporate greed,
and outlined a vision of international affairs defined by disgust at
military spending and sympathy for Marxist-inspired movements in the
developing world...
Mr.
Sanders’s deep-rooted foreign policy values have the potential to not
only earn him support from voters who have grown tired of overseas wars,
but also make him vulnerable to attack from rivals in both parties who
are eager to depict him as too radical for the presidency.
Mr.
Sanders, a Vermont senator since 2007, initially declined an interview
for this article. But after it was published Friday, he requested a
phone interview, during which he described his opposition to the Vietnam
War and criticized an American foreign policy in the 1980s that he said
had revolved around overthrowing governments and “installing puppet
regimes."
“I plead guilty to, throughout my adult, life doing everything that I can to prevent war and destruction,” he said...
In
the interview Friday, Mr. Sanders called the Soviet Union an
“authoritarian dictatorship” but said that stopping nuclear war was more
important to him in the 1980s.
“I was going to do everything that I could to prevent a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union,” he said.
The
article paints Sanders as an ideological extremist and radical who was
out of the mainstream. Imagine a mayor who is anti-war! What an outrage!
Is
it fair to expect everyone to have exactly the same views over their
entire life? Is it fair to judge a person today by what he said and did
35 years ago? I don’t think so. My views have evolved. Some have changed
dramatically. Most people supported the war in Vietnam when it
happened. I expect many (including me) now see it as a disaster. Maybe
the same is true about the war in Iraq, which turned into the war in
Afghanistan, which might soon become the war in Iran. Bernie Sanders
opposed them all.
Presumably the Times will tear apart Biden for the votes he cast long ago and the views he espoused that he now regrets.
And the Times
will do the same to every other Democratic candidate, thus assuring
Trump’s re-election, since his rabid base doesn’t care what he has done
or said in the past.
Most infuriating recently was the New York Times’ hit job on Sanders’ thoughtful education plan,
which was co-written by veteran education journalist Dana Goldstein and
Sydney Ember, who to my knowledge has no education knowledge or
experience.
He proposed a tripling of funding for Title 1, the funding stream that directly affects the neediest children.
He
proposed increasing the federal contribution to the cost of special
education to 50%. When Congress mandated special education services for
children with disabilities, it pledged to pay 40% of the costs. It has
never paid more than 10-12%. If Congress were to raise its payment to
50%, it would provide immediate fiscal relief to every school district
in the nation.
He made clear that his administration would prioritize desegregation.
He
called for a ban on for-profit charter schools and a moratorium on
charter schools, echoing the NAACP, until it could be determined whether
they are having a negative impact on public schools and whether they
meet the same standards of accountability as public schools. He noted
that But few “billionaires like DeVos and the Waltons, together with private equity and hedge fund executives, have bankrolled their expansion and poured tens of millions into school board and other local elections with the hope of privatizing public schools.” This statement is a matter of fact, not campaign rhetoric.
The millions spent by billionaires like Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg,
Bill Gates, the Waltons, and hedge find managers (DFER) to influence
school board elections and referenda are real.
He committed to rethinking the national reliance on property taxes and to ensuring that all schools are equitably funded.
He promised to work with states to establish a minimum teachers’ salary of $60,000.
Every parent, every educator, every citizen should read his plan.
But consider how the New York Times reported Sanders’ visionary plan.
Dana
Goldstein and Sydney Ember barely mention Sanders’ historic funding
proposals and focus instead on his critique of charter schools, which is
a relatively small part of his plan. They write that Sanders’ support
for racial integration was “overshadowed by more divisive elements of
the proposal: Mr. Sanders’s plan to freeze federal funding for all new charter schools, and the link his plan made between charter schools and segregation.”
It
goes on to say that “Many Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, support
charters as a way to provide more options to families, especially those
that are too poor to move to a higher-quality school district or pay
for private school. The impact of charters on school segregation is
hotly disputed in education circles, and by linking these elements, Mr.
Sanders touched a nerve in a highly charged debate within the party.”
They
then quote Amy Wilkins, a paid lobbyist for charter schools (“a vice
president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and a
longtime advocate in Washington for racial equity in education”), who
finds the linkage of charter schools and segregation to be “galling.”
She thinks that the Brown decision gave black parents the right to
choose where to send their children, ignoring the fact that racist
governors and senators said exactly the same thing and enacted
freedom-of-choice plans that were repeatedly struck down by federal
courts.
The article balances Wilkins by acknowledging that “The
Sanders plan lists a number of causes of school segregation, such as
inaction from the courts and federal government. It also cites data from
a 2017 Associated Press investigation,
which found that 17 percent of charter schools had student populations
that were 99 percent nonwhite, compared with 4 percent of traditional
public schools.
While
no one disputes that charter schools serve high concentrations of
black, Hispanic and low-income children, many charters were founded
explicitly to serve that population of students, some of whom would
otherwise attend segregated district schools with track records of
academic failure. Urban charter schools have demonstrated solid performance, but not without drawing critique for harsh discipline practices and for serving fewer students with special needs.
Some integration advocates celebrated the Sanders proposal, and said its focus on charters was fair.
“I
am actually one of the people who thought Bernie Sanders really missed
the boat on dealing with issues of race in his campaign last time,” said
Gary Orfield, a leading researcher on segregation and professor of
education at U.C.L.A. “But this is a very forward looking plan and a
dramatic break.”
“I hope it is picked up by other campaigns,” he added.
Professor Orfield cited research finding that in cities like New York and Washington, charters are more intensely segregated than district schools. A large body of scholarship
shows that nonwhite and poor children perform better academically at
integrated schools, and go on to have higher incomes as adults.
But here comes a zinger:
Teachers’
unions, an important constituency to Democrats, have long considered
them a boogeyman, arguing that charter schools draw students and funding
away from traditional public schools. The issue helped fuel
a weeklong teacher strike that roiled Los Angeles in January — one of a
wave of educator walkouts that have taken place across the country
since 2018.
Ah,
so now we see that Sanders is pandering to teachers unions by
criticizing charters, because charters are the “bogeyman” of the unions.
There
are plenty of parents and others who don’t belong to teachers’ unions
who oppose setting up a parallel system of public schools. Do the Times’
writers know that? Do they know that voters in Georgia and
Massachusetts overwhelmingly defeated Republican efforts to lift the
charter caps in those states in 2016? The teachers union is strong in
the latter, but not the former.
Doesn't the Times
have an ethical obligation to determine whether charters have a fiscal
impact on public schools? Is it hard to figure out that charter schools
draw students and resources away from public schools? Couldn’t they have
cited Gordon Lafer’s pathbreaking work on the “stranded costs” that charters impose on public schools?
The
real stinker in the Times’ article comes at the end, where the writers
quote someone unfamiliar to me. I know many education activists in South
Carolina, but I have never run across Jarrod Loadholt.
Jarrod
Loadholt, a Democratic strategist who has worked on education policy in
South Carolina, said he appreciated many elements of Mr. Sanders’s
plan, including its support for expanding funding for schools that serve
large numbers of low-income students — “That’s how you break the cycle
of poverty,” he said — and a proposal to invest in school
infrastructure.
But
while the charter-school issue might be relevant in cities, Mr.
Loadholt said, it was hardly top-of-mind for voters in the state’s
expansive rural areas, where charter schools are rare.
“To a hammer, everything is a nail,” he said. “And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.”
I googled.
He is a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, D.C. who was born in South Carolina. I can find no evidence of any involvement by him in any education issues. His specialty seems to be consumer finance.
Why was he called upon to put down Senator Sanders’ factual statement
that the Waltons, the DeVos family, and hedge fund managers are behind
the push for charter schools? Senator Sanders made his statement in
South Carolina, and Loadholt was born there. South Carolina has dreadful
education policy. When did Loadholt work on it and with what results?
To the naked eye, he was called upon as a Beltway insider to cut Bernie
Sanders down with a false statement.
Shameful.
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The “New York Times” vs. Senator Bernie Sandersby dianeravitch |
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