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Tweed's Ghosts
October 31st, 2007

Reporters who cover the public school system have long wondered what the many well-paid people in the Department of Education’s public information office do all. Now we know. They help ghost write op-ed articles.

That might be an exaggeration but Elizabeth Green’s report in today’s Sun makes one wonder.

Yesterday’s Post featured a scathing attack by Kathryn Wylde on Diane Ravitch. Wylde is president of the New York City Partnership and an enthusiastic supporter – and sometime funder — of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s education policies. Ravitch, a leading education historian, professor at NYU and former Bush administration official, has emerged as one of Bloomberg’s leading critics.

In the op-ed, Wylde cited alleged flip-flops by Ravitch on key education issues. Speculating that Ravitch’s position “seem more tied to her unhappiness with the personalities in the Bloomberg administration than its policies,” Wyle said, “It isn’t clear why Diane Ravitch is so intent on discrediting the policies she once championed. What is clear is that, when it comes to public education in New York City, she’s no longer a source we can rely on for fair-minded commentary.”

Pretty harsh. But Wylde did not do it all on her own. She had help — and it came from the Department of Education.
According to Green, Wylde said the idea for the article was hers “but that she wrote it with the help of a research file composed by the Education Department that chronicles Ms. Ravitch’s policy positions over the years.” A “seven page research file titled ‘Diane Ravitch: Then and Now,’…. comparing comments she made in the 1990s to statements in recent years.”

In an interview with Green, department spokesman David Cantor, defended the decision to compile dossiers on administration critics. Calling Ravitch “the most influential educational commentator probably in the United States,” Cantor said, “If she is typically either distorting what we’re doing, or if she is reversing long-held opinions in order to attack us — that’s an indication that there’s something more there than fair-minded observation.”

Some agreed. “It’s about time somebody pointed out that the empress has no clothes. Diane Ravitch has an obvious personal vendetta against Bloomberg and Klein’s education reforms in NYC,” said Whitney Tilson’s School Reform Blog.

But others expressed concerns about the administration’s tactics.

Manhattan Institute fellow Sol Stern, another Bloomberg critic, said, “It’s been clear for a while that City Hall and the [department] want to cut off all serious debate about their education policies. But they’ve never stooped so low as to try to delegitimize the country’s leading historian of education.”

“Wylde’s op-ed brings the politics of personal attack and personal destruction that has been so corrosive in our nation’s political culture to New York City’s educational policy circles,” wrote Leo Casey on Edwize, the teacher’s union blog. “The revelation… that Wylde acted as a surrogate for educational policy makers…. makes the whole episode all that more sordid.”

Noting Wylde’s op-ed was “concocted at tax-payer expense at the Tweed Courthouse,” Daniel Millstone wrote on the Daily Gotham, “Either the people at Tweed and City Hall are out of their minds to engage in these clumsy smears, or they have too little to do. Perhaps they could teach school instead of engaging in these nutty hijinks.”

The whole contretemps seems to have bolstered at least one of Ravitch’s points. She told Green her biggest concern about the Bloomberg administration has been the way it responds to dissent: “The legislature eliminated the independent board; they eliminated the community boards, and now the mayor and the chancellor are trying to shut down all independent critics.”

By Gail Robinson on October 31, 2007, 9:25 pm
In category: Education, Gotham City | 2 Comments »

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2 Responses to “Tweed's Ghosts”

  1. John Elfrank-Dana Says:
    November 1st, 2007 at 11:47 am

    Shutting down dissent doesn’t surprise me. Because, not only am I a NYC teacher, but also one of the 1200 arrested (and falsely so) during the Republican National Convention in 2004 at the order of Mayor Mike. For that, I am suing city. The city funding of personal attacks on critics of mayoral policy is deplorable. This city administration, which looks more and more like the one in the White House, should be held accountable.

  2. Gotham Gazette - The Wonkster » Blog Archive » C for Controversy Says:
    November 4th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

    [...] on NYC Public School Parents, Diane Ravitch said, “The whole scheme is simplistic and misleading. It humiliates people who are doing a good, [...]

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