Archive for May, 2005

Fun With the UFT

In other news about people who hate me because of my reporting on them, a New York Post editorial on Monday seems to have been responsible for torpedoing the United Federation of Teachers application to open up a charter school in Brooklyn.

Now, The Post isn’t opposed in principle to the UFT opening a charter school. But with the UFT working day and night to make sure that the 100-school cap in New York state stays firmly in place, the paper has limited sympathy for the union trying to take up one of the few remaining charters.

It’s especially offensive when the school they’re proposing is so, so poorly designed. I like to think of it as the teacher-centered school.

Here’s a broad outline from The Post’s editorial:

UFT officials reportedly visited successful charter schools while designing their application, yet seem to have perverted the schools’ best practices at every turn:

* The absolute most important innovation at the best charters has been to give weaker students radically more “time on task” — a.k.a. class time.

Schools like the KIPP Academy in the South Bronx run from 7:25 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays and a half day on Saturdays; KIPP also has a mandatory summer school that boosts its school year to 220 days, as opposed to the 180-day teachers-contract year.

At its proposed charter school, by contrast, the UFT would give teachers new (paid) “professional development opportunities,” while giving students not one extra minute of class time.

The UFT school’s two-week “Summer Institute,” for example, is nothing more than a way for teachers to pick up extra paychecks. Really: No kids allowed.

* Another key to the success of charter schools is the wide-ranging freedom principals have to pick their staffs and hire and fire as necessary.

Obviously the UFT can’t back such freedom without undermining its own job-protection scheme in regular schools. Thus, the charter’s “school leader” (not to be confused with a principal) would have to deal with just as many, if not more, layers of bureaucracy as his or her public-school counterparts. (Fair’s fair.)

Basically every staffing decision this poor school leader made would be subject to review by various committees made up of UFT delegates, UFT-represented teachers, parents and other “stakeholders.”

Here’s a taste from the application’s section on personnel policies: “Unsuccessful candidates for positions at the UFT Elementary Charter School who are members of the UFT may challenge the basis for the Staffing Committee’s decision through an expedited arbitration before an arbitrator with educational experience, jointly selected by . . . “

And on and on.

* Lastly, many of the most successful charter schools have pursued a back-to-basics approach to curriculum, making use of traditional, as opposed to “progressive,” instructional methods.

UFT President Randi Weingarten has herself been supportive of such an approach and highly critical of the Bloomberg team’s use of the so-called progressive programs.

Yet, for whatever reason, the UFT decided to use relatively “progressive” math and reading curricula. The union, according to sources, essentially admitted its discomfort with its curricula to SUNY’s board and expressed its intention to strengthen the program later.

Pretty appalling stuff, I’d say. And a little sunlight from The Post got the SUNY board members to take the UFT off the fast track to approval.

UFT President Randi Weingarten is not happy, as quoted in The New York Times: “This is a clear attempt to say that the unions should stay out of the chartering business,” she said. “Of course we’ll go through the paces, but don’t confuse politics with the merits of the proposal.” She added, “The political overtones at least to me were so overt.”

Well, she’s partly right. The UFT ought to stay out of the chartering business until they stop trying to deny others the right to enter it.

Once they let the Legislature raise or eliminate the cap — and, yes, in New York the Legislature needs permission from the union — then they can have a shot at their workers’ paradise. Parents can take it or leave it. And everyone will get to see how much their scores go up without any extra classtime.

Treglia Vs. the Truth

So, Sean Treglia — the hapless former Pew program officer who gave the incriminating speech about how Pew worked to “create an impression that a mass movement was afoot” calling for campaign-finance reform — has leveled some ugly charges against me.

In a letter to the editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, responding to William Schambra’s excellent article about how blogs covered Pewgate, he gives an account of a conversation we had before my original story ran in The Post.

He doesn’t mention me by name — worried about libel? — but the account is clearly about me (it was, after all, my article he was talking about).

Anyway, here’s the relevant portion of his letter:

When the blogger presented me with his theory of conspiracy and cover-up, I explained to him that he was misinterpreting the meaning of what I said. In the course of my conversation with him I learned that he had not bothered to watch my entire presentation (someone later took credit for e-mailing him the handful of clips he based his story on); he had not spoken to anyone else in the nonprofit sector to confirm his theory; he questioned no reporters who covered the issue at the time to see if foundation activities were hidden; he spoke with no grantees who worked on the issue; and he had reviewed no grantee Web sites, materials, reports, statements, etc., on which the names of the foundations are displayed prominently.

As it turned out he had not talked to anyone and had not even bothered to conduct any basic research to fact-check and confirm. When I expressed surprise that he was about to write a news story based on some out-of-context clips someone had e-mailed him, he said, “It’s not a news story, it’s an opinion.” I then asked if he wanted his “opinion” to be based on the truth. His response, and I quote, “I don’t have time for all that, I’m going with my story.”

Really, this is too much. I’ve written a letter in response to the Chronicle, but just to put a few things on the record now:

* I of course watched the full video (it’s about 2 hours long) before calling Treglia for his comment. I wasn’t sent clips. I obtained the full video and later created the clips myself to put on The Post’s Web site. Nothing I said to Treglia could have been construed as indicating otherwise.

* How exactly Treglia claims to know what Web sites or reports I looked at or didn’t is a mystery to me. Suffice it to say I looked at plenty of these Web sites and reports and have been careful throughout my writing on this to note that Pew and other foundations’ support was always disclosed somewhere — it was the media that was too lazy to connect the dots (a point Treglia himself made during his talk).

* That last quote (“I don’t have time for all that, I’m going with my story”) is simply made up. I was — as I work at a daily newspaper — of course under time pressure, and I may well have indicated as much to Treglia. But my editors and I were (and remain) fully confident that the story was accurate and well-sourced. The tape doesn’t lie.

For all of Treglia’s accusations, he can’t point to one fact wrong in the story. It’s his right to argue that I’m taking him out of context — but I’m not, and I’ve long been inviting readers to watch the whole tape, which I provide on this Web site.

So, that’s all for now on this. You can also read Winfield Myers’ and Mark Tapscott’s responses to Treglia. Both make a number of excellent points and have been dogged in keeping the foundation folks honest.

Yglesias’ Amusement

Matt Yglesias seems to take some great amusement in the idea of conservatives following how liberal foundations work, since what’s been discovered was “previously, widely-known, universally-acknowledged, and denied by nobody.”

Well, I don’t know how directly this is aimed at me — though I’m named in the post — but what I uncovered about Pew and the wider liberal-foundation effort to pass campaign-finance reform hardly fits the description Yglesias provides. I don’t see any need to recount the facts of the Pew case, but there were two distinct, and contradictory, lines of response to what I uncovered:

1) Everything I wrote was a filthy lie.

and

2) Everyone already knew.

Both responses were BS. People who had been following campaign-finance for years were astounded by the level of coordination of the Pew effort and by the $123 million poured into the effort by just eight foundations.

There’s nothing criminal, there’s nothing necessarily jaw-dropping, but the press — and John McCain and Russ Feingold — had certainly never portrayed the campaign-finance reform “movement” as anything but a grassroots groundswell. Mine, I think, is the far more accurate narrative.

As for The American Prospect being the target of a “pseudo-smear campaign,” all I’ve ever done with regard to the Prospect is bring to light that the magazine ran a special issue on campaign-finance reform, called “Checkbook Democracy,” paid for with a $132,000 check from the liberal Carnegie Corporation of New York — a fact the magazine never disclosed to its readers. I talked to the Prospect’s editor before reporting this, and I believe it to have been basically an oversight (which I said in my piece).

No, no one on the right is shocked by the existence of liberal foundations. And God bless ‘em. As I’ve long said, I’m happy to see anybody and everybody spending whatever money they want promoting anything they want. What I’m not happy to see is the press treating liberal groups as neutral and conservative groups as fronts for Satan — especially when the liberal groups are trying to destroy Americans’ freedom of speech.

And, yes, as Pewgate made clear — scoff as Matt might — some of these groups are most definitely trying to “hide in the shadows.”

Further…

Further on the Newsweek story, it’s also amazing the pissing-match mentality that’s broken out with regard to prisoner abuse in general. It’s like tolerance for animalistic behavior toward prisoners is some sort of stand in for penis size lately. As if insisting on a standard of decency makes one less of a man and less willing to “do whatever it takes” to prosecute the War on Terror.

Now, I have to admit I’m pretty far from Andrew Sullivan’s level of concern with the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. I think the abuses were obviously unacceptable, and they were obviously a huge propaganda blow at home and abroad. But I also think such tragedies are the inevitable side-effect of war — things to be corrected when they come to light, but in-and-of-themselves not arguments against the morality of our cause.

But when some people decide to ignore abuses altogether — and even to argue that the press shouldn’t report on abuses out of blind patriotism — then it becomes necessary for other people to become hysterical. Just to counterbalance the indifference.

If Sullivan sounds shrill on the topic these days, it’s because so many other supporters of the War on Terror have chosen to sound blasé.

The Newsweek Libel

My latest Tech Central Station column is on the right-wing hysteria over the Newsweek story:

As usual, the Bush administration and the rest of the right have plausible deniability, here. They can say they’re only calling for journalists to be more responsible. They can say they’re not calling for any restrictions on the press. They can say they’re strong supporters of the First Amendment.

But how long can they keep stoking the fires of American jingoism, how long can they insinuate that the American press is unpatriotic, how long can they portray all critics of administration policy as tools of the enemy before real damage is done to our civic culture?

Once they’ve bludgeoned our press freedoms in service to respecting our enemies’ delicate religious sensibilities, it is they who will have ink on their hands.

The behavior on the right with regard to this story has been nothing less than atrocious. I’m honestly surprised with the nonsense coming from the likes of Glenn Reynolds and most of those over at The Corner.

Once we start asking the American press to self-censor based on the sensitivities of Arab rednecks, then we’ve really given some serious ground in the War on Terror.

To all of you on the right blaming Newsweek and calling for scalps: Really, grow the hell up.

Unions: Let the Kids Rot

New York’s teachers unions are still trying to screw poor kids in Niagara County, New York, and the spineless Board of Regents is still helping the teachers unions.

My latest column in The Post is an update on my favorite Niagara charter school (which doesn’t yet exist):

As the state Board of Regents meets today, it looks like the body is going to tell black and Hispanic parents up in Niagara County — desperate to get their kids out of the district’s failing public schools — what it’s been telling them for months: Keep waiting.

In fact, wait another full year.

The Regents can’t kill this school, but they don’t have the guts to approve it.

Pathetic.

Palmer

Read Tom Palmer on how anti-Semitism is the same as anti-Americanism.

In fact, just read Tom Palmer generally.

When Politics Is Corruption

Jonathan Rauch has a great idea for campaign-finance reform: “Stop. Just Stop.”

Under the reformists’ agenda, he says:

The problem is not corruption, at least not as traditionally understood; the problem is influence. In yet other words, influence is corruption. And in yet other words, because politics is all about influence, politics is corruption—at least until all contributions to political causes are so small that politicians won’t feel particularly grateful to anybody.

Read the whole thing.

The Future of Speech

This is a fantastic article by John Samples about just where regulation of political speech, particularly on the Internet, is headed. It’s written in the form of a fictional letter (from the year 2008) from the FEC to a certain prominent blogger:

In your last letter to the Commission, you stated that “my alleged blogging about Senators McCain and Clinton is protected from government regulation by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” You conclude: “The Constitution says ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging freedom of speech.’ No law means no law.”

This is incorrect. The Supreme Court has long recognized that Congress may restrict the financing of campaigns to prevent corruption or the appearance of corruption. The Court has also stated that Congress may close loopholes in campaign finance law by regulating speech that influences federal elections.

In 2008, Senators Clinton and McCain were the major party candidates in a federal election for the presidency. The Commission has ruled that messages that reach over 100,000 voters nationally (or 25,000 voters in an electioneering area) may be assumed to influence a federal election. The complaint against you alleges that your statements received well over 200,000 hits on the dates in question.

You also state that you received no payments to blog about the election from any candidate, candidate’s committee, or political party. That is irrelevant. Congress and the Commission, with the blessing of the Supreme Court, have decided that your influence on federal elections justifies regulation of your activities. If your attempts to influence federal elections were not regulated, the entire structure of campaign finance regulation (and hence, the very integrity of our democracy) would be threatened.

Frankly, we are surprised that a law professor would make such absurd claims based on the outmoded “Congress shall make no law” view of the First Amendment.

Anyone who tells you that this is absurd is not simply not paying attention — he or she is lying to you.

Repeal of McCain-Feingold and a reverse of the Supreme Court’s current position are the only things that can save free speech.

Or, there’s my proposed constitutional amendment:

[appended to the First Amendment]

– AND WE MEAN IT!!!

What Are the Non-Profits Up To?

William A. Schambra of the Hudson Institute has this, on how blogs are affecting the coverage of liberal non-profit groups that try to influence public policy (like Pew, the Ford Foundation, etc.). I’m biased, because Schambra credits my reporting on Pewgate with changing how foundations are looked at “forever,” but I think he makes a lot of good points about how blogs will prevent these people from pulling the same crap again:

Any foundation interested in public-policy activism can now expect its implicit political inclinations to be vetted far more thoroughly and publicly than before. It will be much more difficult for donors to operate beneath the radar, justifying their low profile by saying that they are simply objective servants of the public interest. After all, the new networks were born of a reaction against precisely that claim by mainstream news media, and so are inclined to suspect hypocrisy whenever it is made. All foundations — not just those on the right — that want to shape public policy will now be treated as political actors.

Pew discovered what that means, when its response to the allegations by Mr. Treglia came out this way on Fox News: Pew said “it did nothing wrong and is proud of the $40-million it spent to get other people’s money out of politics.” Unfair? Of course. That’s politics; be sure to wear a helmet.

As for the conservative network, I hope it will pay more attention to philanthropy, studying and reporting on its trends, fancies, procedures, and technologies.

He’s right that things have changed. And he’s right that conservatives have to keep on these people like stink on a monkey, because the mainstream media won’t do it. Philanthropy reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post were quite aware of the scam I uncovered when I wrote about Pewgate, but they never followed up — not even to try to discredit me or my reporting (because they couldn’t).

They just ignored it. And they’ll continue to.

Party of Bloat

My latest from The Post, on the GOP’s ongoing sellout of its small-government principles:

The Republican promise of smaller, less-intrusive government is getting harder and harder to believe. Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to pursue a political strategy based on big spending.

It’s not always easy to see how radically Bush has transformed the GOP — from Reagan’s admonition that “government is the problem” to Dubya’s own assertion that “when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” But it’s a real transformation — and an expensive one.

Average Americans will eventually feel it in the taxes that will have to be raised to fund Bush’s massive federal expansion.

Republicans who have stuck by the party’s leadership mainly because of the War on Terror will begin to feel it in 2006 and 2008, when they realize that Big Government Conservatism is not a strategy or a philosophy — but a sellout.

Much thanks to Andrew Sullivan, I should add, for publicizing that “government has got to move” line. Precious.

Dems Catch On

Here’s my latest column from Tech Central Station. It’s about Democrats catching on to the fact that Republicans now have the ability — because of campaign-finance reform — to go after independent liberal groups:

Something remarkable is happening as a Republican Congress and president move to crackdown on 527 groups like the MoveOn.org Voter Fund and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth: Liberals are realizing that something’s fishy.

Three years after the passage of McCain-Feingold (a.k.a. the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, a.k.a. the End of Free Speech As We Know It), a smattering of Democrats and liberal activists are slowly coming to the conclusion that maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to let the government decide who can and cannot engage in political speech.

After all, what would prevent incumbents in Congress from passing laws to secure their jobs by making it harder for their opponents to criticize them? And what would prevent a political party — holding, say, power in both houses of Congress and the White House — from using election laws to try to smother the opposition?

Right: Nothing.

Tom Daschle’s involved.

‘barbaric animals known as Mexicans’

This lovely comment was left in my comments about immigration:

Since NAFTA was instituted, the rise of immigration, legal and illegal, has swept this once great country like a plague,and our goverment not only allows it to happen, but hastens it. I am not wealthy, and I am forced to live and work among these barbaric animals known as Mexicans. Our despicable goverment, which I would have at one time died for, has betrayed all American citizens by allowing this to happen. Jorge Bush, be ashamed!

Remember, beneath most talk about “upholding the law” on immigration is sentiment like this.

I left the spelling as I found it.

Scalia: Funny Guy

Humor in Supreme Court decisions is being collected over at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Needless to say, Scalia figures big.

Big Government Corruption

The fine feathered folks over at the Cato Institute chronicle the rise of Big Government Conservatism:

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn’t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either. The GOP was once effective at controlling nondefense spending.

The icing? How far Congress has fallen since the Gingrich Revolution:

The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.

This isn’t conservatism. It’s corruption.

(via Andrew Sullivan)

The Outside Scoop

I’ve been a bad blogger recently, due to work on what Andrew Sullivan might call a “long-term project.” But I’ll be trying to blog much more regularly this month.

Next on the agenda is responding to Sullivan’s essay on the future of conservatism. It’s an issue I’ve been giving a lot of thought to recently, so I’m trying to craft something more than a few sentences long.

I got a few hundred words in and then looked at the time, so I won’t be finishing that tonight… My mind’s far too hazy at this hour from a day of proofreading and editing.

Did you catch that runaway bride story? Does that woman have to pay Julia Roberts royalties?

And what’s with Tom Cruise and that Olsen twin he’s dating? I thought he was… whoops, no time for lawsuits!

See you on the outside!

Rachel Corrie

Terrorist handmaiden Rachel Corrie — accidentally bulldozed (what a pity) while trying to protect a terrorist weapons-running tunnel in the “Palestinian” territories — has, of course, been made into a saint by anti-Semites around the world.

Now, there’s a play in London glamorizing her life. Tom Gross, in The Jerusalem Post, puts things in perspective:

My Name Is Rachel Thaler is not the title of a play likely to be produced anytime soon in London. Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following the February 16, 2002 attack when a suicide bomber approached a crowd of teenagers and blew himself up.

She was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live. Yet I doubt that anyone at London’s Royal Court Theatre, or most people in the British media, have heard of her. “Not a single British journalist has ever interviewed me or mentioned her death,” her mother, Ginette, told me last week.

Thaler’s parents donated her organs for transplant (helping to save the life of a young Russian man), and grieved quietly. After the accidental killing of Rachel Corrie, by contrast, her parents embarked on a major publicity campaign. They traveled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter.

Well, that’s two less terrorists than we had in 2003.

Bragging

From CNN, a story that should remind you not to make threats you can’t follow through on — it makes you look silly:

Schuth retreated into his house and when SWAT teams arrived, he told negotiators he had “more than 10 but less than 100″ bombs and 16 firearms, and that it would be “high noon” when he surrendered, according to court documents.

He surrendered early Saturday without incident.

It should be noted that he had 15 bombs. Technically, that’s “more than 10 but less than 100,” but it’s still a little embarrassing for him, I’d say. As for the guns, he was telling the truth — 16 on the nose.

Imitation

From Ben Smith’s (OK, The New York Observer’s) Politicker blog:

We stopped by Ann Lewis’s speech to the women of the Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Committee last night, where she made a strong case that the Democrats are winning the two crucial national debates, one over social security and the other over “Republican arrogance.”

She was particularly pleased by the growing liberal foundations, think tanks, and Internet-based organizations to match the conservative media “echo chamber.”

We did have to wince a little at this line:

“We’re building our own echo chamber,” she said. “It will be more of an e-echo chamber, if you will, but we’re moving in the right direction.”

As I told Ben: Imitation is the sincerest form of idiocy.

I think this left-wing attempt to imitate every successful thing the right has done in the last 50 years is fascinating. Despite my dismissive tone, I can’t say for sure it won’t work — though, from early indications, I’d say things like Air America really don’t help the left’s cause very much. More likely, they just give the right more chances to expose how extremist a lot of their rhetoric is (that Air America joking about killing the president thing last week, for instance).

As many conservatives (especially of the libertarian variety) do, I sincerely wish them well — we need all the counterbalance to Rove’s God-and-government coalition we can get. But fighting the last war seldom works.

A side note: Check out the Politicker’s adorable baby.




 

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