Educators Must Stand Up To The McCarthyites And Smear Merchants At The NY Post

The NY Post has another attack article on NYC teachers/NYC schools/Chancellor Farina/Mayor de Blasio that makes the claim schools are teaching ridiculously easy texts to students like "The Three Little Pigs," therefore making a high school diploma in NYC essentially "worthless."

Arwen E at NYC Educator's blog dispatches with this piece of Post yellow journalism here, explaining that the "Three Little Pigs" was used as a five minute DO NOW exercise to discuss point of view and bias in the college-level texts taught in the class, not as the main text.

Educators know that when you have students who struggle with texts, it's useful to use easier texts as a lead-in to the harder texts, but the Post writers either don't understand that teaching technique or care about it.

The idea behind this kind of lesson would be to use "The Three Little Pigs" to show how point of view in a story changes the inherent bias in the text - for example, if the text had been written from the wolf's perspective instead of the pigs' perspective - then use that frame to take on more difficult texts (say Beowulf and Grendel.)

But that kind of explanation didn't serve the agenda of the Post owner, editors or writers, so instead that piece of information is buried in the article and the main gist is "Hey, kids are reading kindergarten texts in de Blasio's high schools, a de Blasio diploma is worthless."

This piece of "journalism" is so yellow it looks like fall foliage and should be called out as such.

But so should the two writers whose by-lines appear on the article.

This is agenda-ridden propaganda, not journalism, that uses any old story they can (no matter how slim on the facts) to try and smear a NYC diploma under Mayor de Blasio as "worthless."

They ought to be embarrassed and ashamed as so-called journalists to contribute their efforts to it but as they work for Rupert Murdoch, I doubt they're capable of either embarrassment or shame.

The Post's agenda is, in the short run, to take away mayoral control of schools from de Blasio, and in the long run, to send him packing in 2017 (as symbolized by the ridiculous countdown clock they have at a website called DeBlasio.fail.)

This piece of yellow journalism is just one volley in a constant barrage of attacks the Post has been launching against NYC schools and teachers, part of a larger war they have launched against Mayor Bill de Blasio (see here and here.)

These are McCarthy-level smears and attacks based on half-truths and lies, they're funded by Murdoch (who is said to be losing $20-$30 million a year on the NY Post) but they're written by the "journalists" at the NY Post and published by the editors and so it's a group effort in McCarthyism.

It's time for teachers and administrators in New York City to stand up to the NY Post and call them what they are - smear merchants and McCarthyites.

They have no sense of decency, no care for the damage that their recklessness and carelessness do - they have only a political agenda and a lack of shame and embarrassment in pursuing it no matter how much they have to twist, manipulate and deceive.

Their agenda is to destroy de Blasio, but they have no compunction about destroying NYC schools and NYC schoolteachers in the process with their lies and smears.