When I was seventeen years old I started to participate in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. The next morning I would check for coverage in the New York Times. Sometimes the protests were ignored. Sometimes the coverage was downright distorted. I wondered if the reporter had even been to the demonstration or if the paper was just lying to the public. The New York Times now has a "Public Editor" who is supposed to work "outside of the reporting and editing structure of the newspaper" and provide some check on the paper's accuracy and biases.
Unfortunately, at least in education, the public editor system is not working. In coverage of the debates over testing, teacher competency, unions, and charters, the Times always seems to come down on the side of Bloomberg, Gates, Duncan, Teach for America, and alternative certification and ignores people with actual classroom experience. On December 14, 2010, a Times headline told us "More and Better Tests" were the answer to improving educational performance.
While I have disagreed with the Times on a number of occasions, and in one blog post specifically accused the newspaper of promoting the latest educational "gimmick of the month," I have also encouraged teachers and teacher education students to use the Times as a literacy standard for their students and as a source of information of about local, national, and global events.
However, the New York Times' latest educational business venture is so insulting to teachers, parents, and students and so corrupting that I cannot recommend the New York Times any longer and I will cancel my subscription.
The Times "Knowledge Network" recently announced a joint enterprise with Rio Salado College, an online community college that is part of the Maricopa Community College system based in the Phoenix, Arizona area and not one of the leading educational institutions in the United States, to provide an alternative path to teacher certification. Rio Salado also offers initial certificates for entry-level positions working with substance abusers, as flight attendants, and in customer service at banks and insurance agencies.
Rio Salado, while a public community college, is not part of the Arizona state university system, and is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, which accredits many of the major proprietary, or for-profit, edu-businesses in the United States. The Higher Learning Commission is now conducting an internal "investigation" of member institutions, including the University of Phoenix, the nation's largest private "university," charged by the federal government General Accounting Office with unscrupulously recruiting people eligible for federal financial aid who had no hope of achieving any type of credentials or jobs.
The Goldwater Institute, a Phoenix, Arizona-based conservative public policy research organization has been especially critical of the Maricopa Community Colleges. It charges Maricopa, which receives local property tax dollars and pays bloated administrative salaries with 460 employees making over $100,000 per year. Goldwater calls Maricopa a "dropout factory" with only 16.9 percent of the community college district's full-time students graduating after three years, although Rio Salado has the best graduation rate in the system.
A quarter-page advertisement in the Times on June 28, 2011, (p. D2) invited readers to "discover new pathways to a career in education" by joining "a community of future teachers who are exceptionally well prepared to shine." However in tiny print at the bottom of the ad, we learn that this online teacher preparation program (a) requires an in-person component in your local area; (b) is available only in approved states; (c) that certification requirements are set individual states; and (d) IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STUDENT TO VERIFY THOSE REQUIREMENTS. New York State requires almost twice the number of classroom practicum hours as this program.
The New York Times Corporation may be financially desperate. In the fourth quarter of 2010, profits were down 26% compared to the previous year. But a newspaper that pretends to provide an objective analysis of educational reform has no business in the business of providing online credentials of questionable legitimacy.
What happened to journalistic ethics? As a reader for about fifty year, I would welcome a response from the New York Times.
This is a new certification program so there's no data on its success yet. It's a program that breaks tradition with typical teacher preparation colleges. I hope Mr. Singer is not so entrenched in his traditions that he dismisses all alternatives.
It isn't just the NY Times. We have the same non-reporting of education issues in L.A. While parroting of privatization party line that lauds charters without any data to support it, L.A. TImes which is reminiscent of party line followed by Pravda, Isvestia, and Tass under the old Soviet Union.
The problem is that the minority which controls public education is able to ignore what we the majority are saying in NYC, L.A., D.C., Atlanta, Huston, Chicago, and elsewhere without any consequences and they will continue to do so until they have to pay a price.
The Achilles heal of this system in California is Average Daily Attendance payments from the state to LAUSD, which will stop if their is a student boycott with the support of parents and retired teachers, who can no longer be intimidated like their unfortunate still working teacher colleagues. At perdaily.com we publish what the NY and LA Times refuse to.
I read the Times response to your posting and the reference that was cited. Couldn’t follow the circuitous reasoning, so I guess I should find another source of news and information.
If you doubt this is true, read the below from an article CBS had on-line,
"The New York Times wants its readers' help going through more than 24,000 of Sarah Palin's e-mails that the state of Alaska plans to release on Friday. In one of its bigger embraces of crowdsourcing, the Times put out its call to action on Thursday under the heading "Help Us Review the Sarah Palin E-Mail Records."
"We're asking readers to help us identify interesting and newsworthy e-mails, people and events that we may want to highlight," the Times wrote in a blog...
It was only coincidence but the Times' very public embrace of a new media tactic came on the same day that we learned that the Huffington Post had surpassed the Gray Lady's monthly Web traffic."
For the record, I also get the majority of my news on BBC.
Thanks for writing and pointing us to your blog post. It's worth noting that Mr. Brisbane wrote about the newspaper's relationship with The Times Knowledge Network already:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/opinion/17pubed.html
But since your complaint is about the Knowledge Network, and not about the intersection of The Times's journalism and the Knowledge Network like in Mr. Brisbane's column, we will not be passing judgment on the programs or courses being offered, as it would fall outside the bounds of the public editor's mandate.
One issue is whether these teacher credentialing programs are defrauding their students. An entirely different question is whether the people who go through these programs are actually getting hired into the public schools, where they are not able to provide quality instruction to their own students. One would presume that local administrators would know to be skeptical of the qualifications of applicants from these online diploma mills--unless, of course, they themselves acquired their degrees through such institutions. Do you have any information on whether 'graduates'/customers of these schools are getting jobs in the NYC/LI area?
Misinformation about global warming. Jason Blair. Shall I continue?
And an ad is the reason you finally give up? Funny stuff. Glad you've quit on them though. While Walter Duranty would be upset with you, perhaps it will spell the paper's death knell that much quicker.
Regards,
Rob Schimenz
While I still glance occasionally when friends who read it point out occasional articles of interest on "the arts", American Journalism needs to cover important events. IT does not. When there has been any type of labor march over the past four years it has not made it into any type of coverage there.
I get my news from the BBC. While they probably don't do the best job on British news, they're pretty objective about this side of "the pond".