Here we go again. The New York Times has seen fit to publish yet another opinion piece advocating larger class sizes, this time by one Sara Mosle. And surprise! Ms. Mosle turns out to be a hypocrite.
In her piece, she claims there is only one study showing that class size matters, which sounds like the NYT fact checker must have been on vacation. Beyond that, she argues that teachers should compromise and allow larger class sizes in exchange for more money blah blah blah reformer blather here.
A quick check on Ms. Mosle reveals a few things. First, she received $850,000 dollars for a book proposal some years back. She is a Princeton grad so one can assume that she most likely did not attend an overcrowded public school herself. She is also one of the original members of TFA. These facts do not bode well for her objectivity on class size.
Most damning of all, as it turns out, Ms. Mosle, in addition to her writing ability, is also a teacher. That seems great, until you learn that she is teaching at the Philips Academy, a charter school. While there's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, it turns out that this particular charter caps its class sizes at 21.
I don't even know why I'm blogging about this. It's pretty typical, when you think about it. A privileged, Ivy Leage TFA alum makes a bundle and teaches in a plum school while advocating worse conditions for the rest of us. It's pretty much par for the course for the Times and ed deformers.
What's troubling to me is the gullibility of the Times and other news outlets. They spew this garbage as gospel and it eventually becomes the truth. I've never heard a single teacher with a class size of 35 in a disadvantaged school advocate for larger class sizes. Yet if the media is to be believed, most of us are clamoring to have even more children stuffed into our classrooms in exchange for a few bucks. It's a disgrace, and I'm sick of it.
Ms. Mosle should be ashamed, but as long as the Times posts her garbage and publishing houses write her exorbitant checks, there's nothing to stop her.
1 comment:
Best part is the reference to "Diverse figures including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Bill Gates."
Post a Comment