Shook the Spot

D52 STICKS TOGETHER

"Now that Lawrence Summers has resigned, it's time for the editor of The Harvard Crimson to follow his example," wrote New York Times op-ed columnist John Tierney on February 25. "There is no excuse for the paper's decision to publish a poll showing that students, by a three to one margin, wanted Summers to remain the president of Harvard."

It was the first — but by no means the last — volley to be lobbed at the honorable collective known as D52 by the Times' token libertarian, contrarian, and asshole. Tongue-in-cheek or not, the gauntlet had been thrown. But D52 knew this would be a long battle, and a rash reponse would be imprudent. We hunkered down and, as it happened, spread out across the Northeast corridor, stationing ourselves in Boston, New York, and DC. (The specific target of Tierney's assault took off, eventually, for Ecuador.)

D52 was content enough to go about our own business for the summer, figuring Tierney would have more important laissez-faire causes to pursue than keep picking on D52. (Yo, It's . . . , for one, could not avoid the ire of National Public Radio.) Shook, our representative in Boston, was writing about education, including a new study that found students in public and private schools scored about the same on some stupid fucking federal tests. Shook concluded, "The report, which examined test scores in reading and mathematics among fourth and eighth graders, casts doubt on the value of voucher programs that give students public money to attend private schools." And hark, did that rouse the sleeping beast . . .

Thanks to a new federal report comparing public and private schools, there’s no doubt that public schools have one huge advantage: the leaders of their unions are unrivaled masters of spin.

They didn’t merely celebrate the report’s release on Friday, they complained that the Bush administration tried to bury it by releasing it for the weekend. They spun so well that the report was treated as a public-school triumph that “casts doubt on the value of voucher programs,” as The Wall Street Journal described it.

But if anything, the report from the Education Department did just the opposite.

It's like, fuck you, too, dude. But as the title of this long-winded post asserted, D52 — and, of course, its honorary members — stick the fuck together. And so two million people picked up their Times this morning, turned to the back of the Week in Review, and after perhaps catching Frank Rich's take on the stem-cell veto, read this . . .

To the Editor:

I am an alumna of a Bronx private school who just finished a year teaching English at a large Bronx public school. The school at which I taught was dank and crowded, but students absorbed knowledge and passed their Regents anyway. As the report John Tierney discusses demonstrates, students can surmount obstacles to learn — and intelligence is universally distributed.

But test scores go only so far. A child attending a school like my alma mater, in a clean building with attention from her teachers, probably feels good about education. A child who walks through mice-infested halls to fight with 30 classmates for her teachers’ time probably doesn’t. Who is more likely to give up?

Teachers in the maligned unions know that public schools bleed wasted potential. Public schools need more money, not less.

[Fellow-ette]
New York, July 18, 2006

The ball's in your court, Tierney. Don't fuck with the fwavlosphere.