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Monday, August 29, 2011

NYC Educator: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Everything but the Truth

NYC Educator: The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Everything but the Truth:

The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Everything but the Truth

Mike Winerip's column today gives us a pretty forceful rebuttal to Steven Brill's latest adventure in teacher-bashing. Specifically, he finds a pretty bald-faced falsehood. Did Brill even bother to check this stuff before publication? Hasn't he got an editor?

He notes that charters are criticized for having fewer children with learning challenges, but “none of the actual data supports this.”

Actually, it does. According to the city, in 2010 P.S. 149 had more children poor enough to receive free lunch (76 percent vs. 67 percent for the charter); more children for whom English was a second language (13 percent vs. 1.5 for the charter); and more children with disabilities (22 percent vs. 16).

This, in my view, is typical of what gets written about public schools--unchallenged nonsense presented as