(Guest post by Greg Forster)
The lead editorial in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune endorsing school vouchers is a rock solid slam dunk. My favorite of the many critical hits it scores:
This week, President Barack Obama announced a $900 million plan to reward school districts that overhaul or close failing schools and send kids to new public schools.
We’re encouraged by the Chicago effort and applaud Obama’s aggressive approach to school reform.
But we ask: Why not do more of this, at less cost and with a much larger universe?
That silence you hear in response is the sound of the blob’s moral and intellectual bankruptcy.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!
Boom, indeed. But Greg, come on. A Knicks player dunking the ball? Unless you know something I don’t – perhaps the New York Times is preparing a favorable editorial – can we replace that with a Jordan pic?
I’m just earning my Green cred by recycling.
I originally chose the picture without regard to the team, just because it was the coolest slam-dunk picture that came up in the first few pages of Google Images.
I was on KNPR today opposite a recording of Diane Ravitch who says she is absolutely against closing bad schools – it was unfair to teachers she said.
http://jaypgreene.com/2008/09/07/little-ramonas-gone-hillbilly-nuts/
She also said grading teachers was unfair and what really bugged me about that was that she literally claimed that if you take the teachers out of the troubled schools and put them in the good schools those teachers would be superstars. The reasons the students aren’t learning have nothing to do with the teacher.
I thought to myself, wait a minute, what she just admitted (maybe unwittingly) was that low-income kids and minority kids can’t be taught. What nonsense.
And frankly if teachers go from bad to good based on the quality of students they have, then why do we need teachers at all? Why not some robots, they couldn’t do any worse.
Besides, has she never heard of value-added-assessment?
I have now pinched myself and checked the Trib’s editorial policies to confirm I didn’t mistake that for an op-ed piece. So, ummmm… is there a way to clone editorial boards?