Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Education President?

In today's NY Sun there's an article on the controversy surrounding Dianne Ravitch's reignation from the board of the magazine Education Next. The mag had written a piece that urged Mayor Mike to run for president because of his educational achievements in New York, something that Ravitch finds hard to acknowledge: "She said she was also protesting inaccuracies in the story, which she said is "based on ideology, not evidence." Math scores have risen, she said, but only among fourth-graders. A respected national test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, last year concluded that New York City eighth-graders had made no significant progress on math and English since Mr. Bloomberg took control of the schools."

That any one would advance the national ambitions of the mayor based on his educatiional reforms is simply inane. All of the management legerdemain hasn't really accomplished much; something that the author of the article points out: In an interview, the author of the main article, Peter Meyer, said he agrees with Ms. Ravitch that the city's education results during the Bloomberg administration have been minute. "It is pretty amazing that, six, seven years into this, we barely see a blip," he said."

As Chico Marx once said, as he used a sheet to cover the wife from a cuckolded husband; "Who're gonna believe, me or you own lyin' eyes?" All of this palaver over Bloomberg's educational reforms can't conceal the meager achievements that the Tweedle De-ers have accomplished.