ImPosters

On the day after Bill Thompson gives a major policy speech on education, the NY Post resumes its role as a Bloomberg campaign surrogate with the following headlined article-Bloomberg attacks Thompson on education. Instead of reporting on the comptroller's critique of the DOE's suspicious tests-test that even the Post was forced to guffaw at-the paper prints a chart (only in the print edition) that purports to compare the current school regime to the one that Thompson oversaw in the nineties.

So where did the chart come from? Why from the independent folks over at the DOE-helpful, aren't they? And what benchmark do they use to compare? It's called, "meeting state standards." Do they mean the sane state standards that have allowed 97% of all city schools-even some threatened with closure-to receive either an, "A" or a "B?"

Now we know that Dave Seifman is an excellent reporter, so we have to think he is being shackled by the editors riding around in the Bloomberg tank. Do they have any sense of decency? Doesn't Mike Bloomberg have enough shekels to get his jaundiced message across all by his lonesome? Come out of the Bloomberg amen chorus and do some real reporting.

As the NY Daily News is trying to do. And lookie see what it finds-a shrunken wizard behind the curtain in the DOE land of Oz: "Large numbers of city high school graduates aren't ready for college, a former City University dean charges in a report to be released on Thursday. Only 7.5% of grads take all the high school courses necessary for college preparation, he found. "Although New York City's public schools are graduating more students and more of them are going on to college, high rates of remedial course-taking and low graduation rates indicate a need to improve academic preparation," writes John Garvey, former Teacher Academy and Collaborative Programs dean."

So, message to the Post: Get off the Bloomberg caboose and let the readers in on a dirty secret. The success of the mayoral control regime is very much like Gertrude Stein's Oakland: "There's not much there there."