Houston Chronicle editorial urging defeat of school bond is straight out of Jonestown
Houston Chronicle editorial urging defeat of school bond is straight out of Jonestown
Newspaper says Houston should spite its own children to keep the teachers' unions happy.
Jonestown dead, by United States military employee
An absolutely appalling editorial in The Houston Chronicle urges Houston voters to defeat a $4.4 billion bond to rebuild crumbling public schools. It’s sickening.
The editorial is based entirely on whining from teachers’ unions and some parents who say the current school reform regime in Houston requires teachers and kids to work too hard. It makes almost no mention of stunning advances in student achievement that even the newspaper’s own editorial board has recently recognized.
The editorial is urging what I can only read as communal self-destruction reminiscent of the 1978 mass suicide at Jonestown, Guyana. Over the top maybe, but think about it: Let’s condemn our own children to attend school all day in disintegrating buildings without proper air conditioning or toilets as a way of thumbing our noses at these people who are telling us to work harder.
Because that’s what this is about. Working harder. Grinding it out. Getting the job done. Actually teaching the kids, and, yes, gosh almighty, teaching them stuff you can test them on later to see if they know it. You know, like they do for doctors and air traffic controllers – people who really have to know things? What a concept.
I am an ancient ink-stained wretch from the bowels of time, the crabby curmudgeon everybody hopes won’t show up for Thanksgiving dinner. I know. Be that as it may and based on my own long experience in the biz, I can only read this awful editorial as a crass and desperate bid for readership, sucking up to what somebody thinks is popular opinion in a bid to keep plywood out of the newspaper’s windows.
The editorial comes a week after a wonderful piece in Houston Landing, an online publication, written by Asher Lehrer-Small, based on his spending two days in one of the schools that chalked up amazing records of improvement in just one year under reform superintendent Mike Miles. I urge you to read Lehrer-Small’s piece because it captures in real time a phenomenon that people may not even believe when they hear it described in the abstract.
The Houston Landing piece illustrates that when kids and teachers are working really hard, concentrating on it, chalking up records of improvement proven by real tests, they all feel better about what they’re doing. What may have seemed like incurable discipline problems melt away. Deportment improves overnight.
Teachers may feel ragged out at the end of some of those days, but it’s a good ragged out. It’s getting the job done, and this job saves the lives of children. What could any of us do with a workday more important than that?
The Houston Chronicle editorial is a callow surrender to exactly the thing that inspired me to write this blog in the first place – the relentless negativism, selfishness and sabotage practiced by the teachers’ unions and the unions’ ability over time to poison the well of public opinion. I saw it ten years ago here in Dallas where I live, when Miles was our own highly successful but controversial superintendent of schools. I knew they’d try it again in Houston when the state sent Miles there a year ago to straighten out the city’s failed public school system.
It's a national playbook. The unions fight school reform wherever it rears its handsome head, and they do it this same way. They never debate the core education issues, because they know they can’t win on those. So they launch fusillades of sleazy conspiracy theory that make Q-Anon look almost sane.
I’m an old retired newspaper guy in Dallas. Why would I poke my nose into Houston’s business, where I know my nose cannot be welcome? I think it’s the newspaper part that bothers me even more. The role of local media.
It was my great privilege to work for daily newspapers when they were strong. It has been my sad fate to work for them when they are dying. I know this about that: when the wolf is at the door, everything is for sale.
The thing that goes out the newspaper’s front door first is its integrity. I can’t read this terrible editorial in the Chronicle in any other way.
A race to the bottom between a failing newspaper and a morally bankrupt union. Which will turn out to be the worst?
I understand that opposing a teachers union means that you are racist. I expect you to bring your dues with you to the meeting, Jim.